It was unusual for Matty to wake first. The typical morning scene, which Micah had come to detest, involved her and Talmadge navigating their way around Matty’s sprawled snoresome body on the floor. Half a day might pass that way. Micah had found her banjo to be an effective alarm, prodding Matty to lift himself onto his elbows and with a groggy scowl mutter, “Fuck,” or, “Jesus fucking Christmas,” or some variation thereof. She’d begged Talmadge to evict him, over and over again she’d pleaded, nagged, threatened—but he was so timid with Matty, as though fearing him (though she couldn’t see why) or bound to him by some confidential and unpayable debt. Talmadge acted different around Matty, too: harder, caustic, with a shriveled sense of purpose or self. On prickly occasions she was reminded of the Lusk boys, flopped on the couch in their trailer, stretching out a single dirty joke for hours, pulling it like taffy, while empty beer cans gathered at their feet and cigarette smoke left a yellow film on their faces. As recently as Monday Talmadge had been promising Matty would be gone by week’s end. They’d been talking about it, he’d said, and while Matty didn’t know the reason for it, the urgency was clear. But here it was Saturday, with no signs of packing or of the celebratory send-off she knew Talmadge would arrange. She didn’t think she could face Matty today, imagining her grief smashing onto the rocks of his glib cluelessness, the violence of an overdue reckoning.
But that reckoning would never come. Only from the police, a day and a half later, would she learn the skeletal facts about why Matty had risen so early that morning, and where he’d gone.
His first stop had been a Starbucks down on Broadway, just across Bleecker Street from his ultimate destination: the Best Buy store down the block. Matty wanted to be there when it opened; he’d concocted a muddled rationale for this, thinking the store managers would be preoccupied with opening checklists and the cashiers still too foggyheaded and undercaffeinated to pay much attention to IDs and such, but his truer motivation was simpleminded excitement. Matty was going shopping, and he couldn’t wait. For more than an hour he charged his cellphone while disagreeably nursing the double espresso he’d bought to earn him access to the electrical outlet and, more important, to the bathroom. He despised the bathroom in the squat, with its Superfund-level cockroach colony stationed beneath the iron tub, and couldn’t bear to take a shit in there except on those regular occasions when Micah’s dumpster cuisine sparked medical emergencies in his combustible bowels. Of course, he also hated the espresso at Starbucks, having been schooled and spoiled by the coffeeshops of Portland, but in exchange for a roach-free potty he would’ve suckled a gasoline pump. At 10 A.M., when the Best Buy opened, Matty was already positioned outside the store, on the sidewalk beneath the six-story cast-iron-fronted building that housed it, smoking a cigarette while watching a street vendor array kebabs atop a dirty-looking brazier. Then he went in.
He got sidetracked almost immediately. On his shopping list was a single item: a laptop computer, which he’d been wanting for months. With a laptop, he thought, life would be different. He could watch movies instead of captively listening to Micah wank that goddamn banjo or, worse, in the evenings, listening to her and Tal read aloud from a trove of ancient letters they’d scrounged from that nursing-home dumpster. His insides would go flopping when he’d see one of them tweezing a letter from that foot-long wooden box on the sidetable. Half of them were written on gray Red Cross stationery that was so thin you could almost see through it. Tal liked to stress that they were from World War II—“combat letters,” he’d say—as if the minor balls of that fact outweighed the extraordinary pussy-ness of the letters’ content. To Matty it was awful beyond compare: “‘Does she comprehend the mad depth of my devotion?’” Talmadge would read, in character, as the Leo to Micah’s Doris. “‘Does she think of me as I think of my Doris, restlessly, hungrily, so constantly that even sleep and combat are no’—I can’t . . . is it, repair? No, reprieve—‘are no reprieve? When she thinks of the future does she see only me, as I see only her? Not only me versus other men, no no no, but me versus everything. Me only, the way the moon covers the sun in an eclipse.’” And then would come Micah, fifty times worse: “‘In my eyes there is only Leo Vakolyuk.’” (“Leer Vac-you-luck,” in her hillbilly pronunciation.) “‘I breathe you, I hear you, I am more closely attached to you than I am to God (you will object to this but I can only speak heart’s truth). You say I am brave. I am not! It’s just that my fears are all concentrated. Facing a day without a letter from you, facing the thought of losing you—this and only this is what produces genuine terror.’” Because Micah objected to Matty sticking his finger down his throat to pantomime retching, he’d taken to plugging in his earbuds to drown the readings with scads of Russian death-metal. But you could only endure so much of chainsmoking while watching human beings—one of them, for fuck’s sake, your old ace boon coon, your best friend—melting themselves down to pathetic candlelit puddles via their self-enacted dumpster soap opera. With his new laptop, Matty figured, he’d be able to download a gazillion movies from filesharing sites. (He’d scored the wifi password from the bar down the street, whose signal was intermittently hijackable in one corner of the living room.) And it’d be good to have porn back in his life—by now he’d exhausted his mental fantasy reel of Asian chicks polishing his knob.
But a display stack of new cellphones by the entrance brought him to a sudden standstill. He dug his own phone from his pocket for comparison. It was stupidly outdated; was the same phone, in fact, they’d returned to him after his nine-month vacation at the Oregon State Penitentiary, and the phone had been obsolete even before his arrest. (You could play Tetris on it, but that was it for games.) He browsed the new phones, which were tethered to the display by a plastic-coated metal wire, but after a while a look of befuddlement darkened his face; he needed a prepayable phone, with no calling plan, and he couldn’t tell which models qualified. The last thing he wanted was employee attention—his goal was to get in and out quick, because until now he’d stuck to petty shit, shoes and skateboard gear and Yankees tickets, and he suspected he was promoting himself to felony level today; plus he was really flouting Monya’s rules now, though, the way he saw it, Monya didn’t understand the situation he had on his hands, didn’t know Matty had lucked into a Supercard that wanted to give and give and give—but without knowing which phones were available with the prepay option he was screwed. He submitted to a salesman’s offer of assistance.
With his spectacularly round shape and blue shirt and matching blue pants, the salesman resembled a globe on which the continents had been erased, or, as Micah would probably put it, a globe representing the apocalyptic future when warmed risen seas would swamp the earth. His cheeks were the size and color of pink grapefruits. He steered Matty toward a Nokia phone he called an “excellent convergence device,” confusing Matty with an appended chuckle. Matty felt compelled to ask, “Is that a real thing—a convergence device?” The salesman chuckled again and said, “You know what movie that’s from.” Matty didn’t, because nine months in prison followed by nine months in an unelectrified squat had left him culturally bankrupt, but he pretended to anyway. Real or not, he liked the sound of a convergence device, and the phone’s price was a mid-range $149. “Sold,” he told the salesman, who wiggled his hands in the air and exclaimed “all riiiight!” in what Matty understood to be another movie quotation. Dude was kind of funny; Matty liked him.
He admitted he’d come for a new laptop when the salesman asked if there was anything else. “Walk this way,” the salesman said, and with a goofily hunched back led Matty deeper into the store. Matty was pleased, this time, to get the reference: that was from Young Frankenstein, an oldie his Grandma Boone used to shove into the VCR when she’d babysit him. Matty’s plan was to keep the purchase under a grand, which was the line he’d drawn in his head between grand and petit larceny, based on a guess. Just a bare-bones laptop; nothing ostentatious. But as the salesman pointed out, the $799 model Matty was eyein
g didn’t have anywhere near the hard-drive capacity for storing movies, and when Matty said battery life was an issue the salesman snorted and claimed the battery would die long before he’d get to “see any bad guys killed.” Plus, he added, could you really enjoy a movie on a fourteen-inch “peephole” screen? One by one they dismissed their way through the laptops until they came to an HP model called the “Dragon,” with a twenty-inch high-def display and four gigabytes of RAM plus this bad-assed adjustable screen-hinge with which you could move the screen closer or farther from you, depending on—on something, Matty wasn’t sure what, but it was cool. He kept moving it back and forth, test-driving the hinge, while the salesman disclosed bonus details about a new filesharing site with hyperspeed servers where he claimed you could find every movie ever made, probably even White on Rice III or The Girls of the Whore-ient Express, Matty thought to himself, reserving this tip for future investigation. But the price was crazy: batshit crazy. He couldn’t even bear to look at it. The salesman had a point, however, even if he wasn’t aware it was his point: Why take the risk Matty was taking on a machine that wasn’t worth it? He played with the hinge some more, watching his own reflection in the glossy black screen receding and returning as he wormed his way into the idea. This would be the last time, he promised himself. He’d chop that life-giving Supercard into little plastic shards the moment he got home.
The total with phone and taxes came to $4,654.30. Matty gulped, declining the service protection program. This was so much more—obscenely more—than he’d intended to spend, and for a frenzied blood-pounding moment he heard a voice which might well have been Daniel Boone’s saying: Get the fuck outta here, dude. Do a facepalm, say you forgot your wallet, and walk right out the door. But like a big blue stray puppy the salesman had followed Matty all the way up to the register, where the female cashier turned out to be (fuck!) a first-day trainee, and because the salesman wouldn’t shut up about how cool Spider-Man 3 was going to look on that dual-lamp screen (Matty didn’t even like Spider-Man), his pinched and quotation-larded voice adding a scrambled top layer to the fierce argument Matty was conducting inside his head, wise old Daniel Boone squaring off against the desire for that techno-wicked hinge thing, Matty wasn’t fully aware as he handed his credit card and fake ID to the cashier. Not until scrunching her face and rotating the card swipe machine sideways she asked: “What does this mean?” When the salesman leaned in with a squint, Matty noticed his nametag, in particular the words ASSISTANT MANAGER: whoops. “Oh that,” the salesman-turned-manager said. “That just means call for authorization.” This was Matty’s whistle to make a fast but smooth beeline for the doors, a whistle he obeyed. The giant black security guard nodded as Matty passed, smiling, “Have a nice day.”
Which he might’ve had, if not for the fake ID he’d left on the counter. The one Monya had supplied him, courtesy of a mole inside the Brighton Beach DMV office, with Elwin Cross’s name printed beside his own unmistakably fat-bearded face which even the most rudimentary face-recognition software (he’d seen this shit on TV) would link instantly back to his Oregon State Penitentiary file photos, or that any downtown beat cop (oh why the fuck hadn’t he gone uptown?) could put to quick spotting use. With his hands gripping the bar of the door Matty froze. He needed that back. After a quick and energizing inhalation, he spun around and dashed back to the counter, snatching his ID just as the manager threw some kind of signal to the guard. His two-handed, index-fingers-pointed-inward motion was weird, and probably a physical movie quote, but regardless of its origins it still transmitted the same message to Matty: He was fucked. The guard was on him like a three-hundred-pound land octopus. “I’m clean, dude, check me,” Matty protested, “my girlfriend just texted me—she got hit—by a bus,” but the guard wasn’t listening. Matty heard the manager tell the cashier to dial the police. He also heard her ask how.
Snared within the hulk arms of the security guard, Matty gauged the distance to the glass doors—eight or nine yards, max. A five-second sprint. He thrashed, trying to twist himself out of the guard’s tentacled grip. When that didn’t work he threw a loose and panicked haymaker punch that caught the guard smackdab in the jaw. It was like hitting a cinder block. “You try that again,” the guard seethed, “and I’ll shit down yo throat.” Matty looked again to the doors. By now passersby had stopped to watch, their faces cupped to the glass: bad, meet worse. If he didn’t try it again, however, he knew someone else would be shitting down his throat, and not just metaphorically: whatever comrades of Monya’s were stocked inside Rikers Island. He swung at the guard again, who grabbed his arm in mid-swing and with sumo grace wrenched it behind Matty’s back. Matty watched the polished floor rise up to meet him as he was dumped face down, and felt it cold and grainy against his cheek as the guard bound his wrists with zip-ties and announced, “It’s shit time.”
The 9th Precinct station was on Avenue C at East 8th Street, really just sneaker distance from the squat. Matty had walked or skated by that gray fortress a thousand times—did his laundry at the coin-op across the street from it, in fact, and had spent a multitude of nights with Tal picking through the trash of the Associated Supermarket cater-cornered from it across Avenue C. He and Tal had even bullshitted with some cops who’d been smoking outside the precinct one night, watching them scavenge. “You find any donuts?” one of the cops joked, and when Talmadge replied, “Naw, but we’ll keep an eye out next time,” the other cop noted the accent and asked where they were from. When Tal answered Mississippi they laughed as if he’d made it up, like he’d said Narnia or something. “But me, I’m from Mahwah,” Matty added, without quite knowing why, because he couldn’t possibly care what random cops thought—except maybe he didn’t like being laughed at, or wanted to insert some distance between Talmadge’s current Oscar the Grouch incarnation and himself. But the cops hadn’t cared, they’d just gone on laughing about Mississippi.
No cops were laughing now. This was just the slightest indicator that, as of this morning, everything was different, everything had changed. He’d fucked it up. Rocking back and forth on the bench in his holding cell, Matty was overcome with a strange nostalgia for those early days, him and Tal sneaking off to the roof to get high, or reminiscing about college while poking through trash bags, all those free afternoons he’d filled with solo longboard circuits through the city, even for the dangerous semi-satisfactions of Micah’s dumpster cooking—for those few months before he’d developed an angle. Tracking back through his memory he was able to pinpoint the very moment it went sour: that night after he’d escaped death in the compactor, when Micah snubbed his miraculous delivery of scavenged ribeyes. With that realization a scorching anger burned out the nostalgia. He thought: If that vegan bitch had just said thank you. If she’d said, thanks for almost dying for our fucked-up little eco-movement. If she’d said, thanks for abiding by one of the fifty commandments of our sick-ass, made-up, Amish-y religion. If she’d said, hey, thanks for letting me pussywhip your best friend into an unrecognizable garbage fairy.
A homeless guy with bughouse eyes and scabs all over his face took a seat beside Matty and asked, nonsensically, if he knew where they kept the insulin around here. Matty ignored him, mouth-breathing to avoid the guy’s poisonous odor cloud. He pressed his back to the wall and closed his eyes, listening to the holding cell’s six other inhabitants moaning amongst themselves; turned out everyone had been arrested on the same all-purpose charge, that being “some bullshit.” This was Micah’s fault, he decided. All of it; everything. Him sitting here right now even, inhaling ass. Maybe not all her fault, because leaving his ID on the counter was his fucktard move—but a lot of it. Most of it. In his imagination he stabbed her like a voodoo doll.
A middle-aged detective named Meyer oversaw Matty’s transfer to an interview room. The detective skimmed the report, and then, with what sounded like a mystified grunt, dropped it onto the table and said, “What the hell happened at Best Buy, Mr. Cross?”
Matt
y dunked his forehead toward the table. I’m not a Cross, he wanted to say. I’m a Boone. As in Daniel Motherfucking Boone, the King of the Wild-Thing Frontier, Slayer of Panther, Bear, and Injun, Capper of Coonskin, the MVP of American History, His Royal Fringe-Coated Badness: that’s who. What he said instead—nimbly, but in a quaking voice—was: “I don’t wanna go back to prison, okay? I got some shit for a deal. Shit you’ll like.” The detective’s eyebrow curved upward as he leaned back in his chair, preparing himself to be curious. Six hours later, after an assistant district attorney had passed through, followed by an assistant U.S. attorney (peeved to have been called in on a Saturday, barking at the detective, “You told me he was Russian”), plus a lackey from the Public Defender’s Office whose sole apparent duty was to conduct a pattern analysis of his necktie, the detective came storming back in, and, as before, dropped the now-thickened report onto the table. This time, however, Meyer was pissed. “If you’re gonna lie to us, this is a waste of time for everyone involved,” he said. The attorneys glanced up in mild alarm. Matty was expressionless. “I just got off the phone with your folks in Mahwah,” the detective said. “The ones you said you been living with? Your mom wants to know when you got back from Oregon.” Matty felt his nostrils flaring, watching the assistant U.S. attorney, his face long and steeled like a garden spade, begin to stack his notepad and file folders. I tried, Matty consoled himself. Tal, dude, I tried. But you’ll be better off this way, man. I swear to fucking God you will. Spreading his fingers on the tabletop, Matty stared up at the detective whose anger wasn’t really anger, he saw, just as the salesman’s helpful cheer hadn’t really been cheer; everyone was just doing his job. So Matty did what he thought was his. He gave up the squat.
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