“Mickey, huh?” the prostitute lamented. “And he was so nice too, gentle as a lamb.”
“ When he wasn’t on a job,” Lemon added. “I hear that he was enforcement on some pretty big ones.”
“Man can’t help what he has to do for his family,” Charlene said. I was sure she said those words often.
“ Well, he’s dead now. His cousin Willoughby caught it last week in Jersey City. Seems to be goin’ around.”
“Uh-huh,” Charlene said. She was looking off to her right, where a chubby man in a faded gray business suit was stopping to drink from a bottle of Coke Zero.
“Excuse me?” Charlene said as she drifted toward the halfhearted dieter.
“She’s a real trooper,” Lemon said as we watched her go.
The police still had eyes on us.
“ What you up to, Lemon?” I asked. The fever was just beginning to abate. For the moment I was enjoying standing there among my fellows.
“Poetry,” the con man replied.
“Say what?”
“I’m studying poetry.”
“Reading it?”
“No . . . I mean, yeah, but writing it too.”
“You’re a poet now?”
“Not exactly.”
“ What’s that supposed to mean, not exactly?”
“I’m what my teacher calls a literary conduit.”
“Am I supposed to understand that?”
“It’s not too complex. You see my auntie, Lenore Goodwoman, raised me along with twelve other children in a shack next to a tobacco plantation down South Carolina. Every word she ever spoke seemed like it came from on high. She believed in God and nature and what she called the bottomless wells of the earth. She’d sit us kids down and lecture us on the deep meanings of every cloud and breeze, scent and tragedy.
“All I do is remember what she said or the way she said things and write it down and bring it to my poetry workshop. They eat that shit up like it was tapioca puddin’.”
“So it’s some kinda scam?” I asked, my strength returning.
“Life is a scam, LT. From the president to the prisoner, they all got the wool to pull over our eyes.”
I saw Charlene and the chubby businessman headed for the up escalator, probably going to the janitor’s hopper room, and thought that Lemon might be making sense.
“I got poems published in three different literary quarterlies,” Lemon was saying, “and a twenty-nine-year-old girlfriend that keeps me writing and even got me doin’ public readings here and there.”
“No shit?”
“I think I done found my callin’, man.”
“ Well, good for you, Mr. Charles. I wish you the best.”
I was ready to leave. The fever was on its way down, my mind clearing with the cooler head. I was still guilty but maybe an inch or so closer to the light.
“Hold up, Leonid,” Lemon said then.
“ What?”
“I heard from Luke Nye that you lookin’ for a dude name of William Williams.”
I became as still as a Mohawk scout who hears a branch crack in the woods after midnight.
“Is that true?” Lemon asked.
“You better have something to say, Lemon. This is not a joke with me.”
“Shit. I know better than to fool with Leonid Trotter McGill. You a serious mothahfuckah—we all know that. It’s just that Luke mentioned Williams, and I was talkin’ to somebody about it, and Morgan said that there was a famous twentieth-century poet named William Carlos Williams. So I figure that if Willy is usin’ that particular fake name, maybe he’s into poetry or sumpin’, and I could look around to see if somebody on the poetry circuit fits the bill, so to speak.”
“So what are you tellin’ me, man? Did you find somebody?”
The fever was coming back. Lemon became very aware that I was leaning toward him.
“No, no, no, LT. I just heard it from Luke when I was by there droppin’ off these books he wanted. Then when I seen you I remembered what he told me. I’m just askin’ if you want me to ask around.”
“Sure.” I said the word as if it were a threat.
“How old is he?”
“Old.”
“And if I find him does he know you?”
“Oh yeah.” Tolstoy knew me all right.
5
TOLSTOY MCGILL. In my life he had been God, gone for good, and then seemingly resurrected. He didn’t enroll my brother Nikita and me in public school, electing to educate us at home. He took that job seriously. Instead of Dick and Jane we learned about the Paris Commune. Georg Hegel and Karl Marx replaced Lincoln and Washington. Goldman and Bakunin were the heroes we were to pattern ourselves after.
My father was an anarchist who thought himself a Communist; a fool no matter what way you looked at it. He would have been number one on the hit list if the Revolution he worked for was ever successful.
As it was, he left our family to go off and fight in the Revolution when I was twelve. My mother died of a broken heart, and Nikita and I were separated by the so-called child welfare system. Word came to me that my father was dead when I was sixteen, but I already knew . . . And then one day, within the last year, it turned out that he was alive, that he survived the South American guerrilla wars and had returned to New York decades ago without ever telling his sons.
Nikita was in prison for robbing an armored car, and I was so bad that the law hadn’t caught up with me—yet.
Since I found that Tolstoy was alive, going by the name William Williams, I’d sent out a few feelers but my attempts had been halfhearted at best. I didn’t know if I wanted to kiss or kill my father; find or forget him.
For a long moment I was off in the ether of passionate ambivalence. Tolstoy was the joker in the deck stacked against me. I hated him for existing. Hated him.
AND THEN I was back in the Port Authority again, with Sweet Lemon looking at me, waiting for an answer.
“ Who’s this Morgan guy?” I asked as if I were standing there with him rather than reliving an entire life of spite.
“That’s my girlfriend, Morgan Lefevre. She’s from this rich Boston family. They been here since before the Revolution.”
“So have our families, most probably,” I said, ever a good student of my father’s rants.
“But these folks got the papers to prove it.”
“You meet ’em?”
“Stayed at her aunt’s house up in Concord, Mass.”
“They know about you?”
“ What’s there to know?”
“Three felony convictions that I know of, more misdemeanors than a savant could count, and twelve years’ hard time. And then there’s the things that you were never caught for.”
“I’m straight now, LT.”
“You still talkin’ to Luke,” I suggested.
“That’s just information. I don’t get involved no more.”
I had to hand it to him, as much pressure as I brought to bear, he was still smiling and nonchalant.
But the proof was there, in the fact that our language had taken on the quality of the street. That’s how close we both were to dropping the pretense to a straight life.
“ What about you bein’ here?” I asked.
“ Where?”
“Here. Port Authority.” I waved around indicating the impossibly high ceilings of the main hall.
“ What about it?”
“Ain’t this where you did that bag switch con for so many years? Ain’t that why the cops watchin’ us right now?”
“They watchin’ you, Mr. McGill. They know the only reason I’m here is to push the NYLT.”
“The what?”
Lemon reached into his jacket and came out with a professional-looking, triple-folded brochure. The image on the front was a daytime scene on Broadway around Times Square. Famous writers were superimposed here and there among the crowd. I recognized Mark Twain and Langston Hughes. There were others, though, mostly in black and white, among the four-co
lor mob of tourists.
Hollowed-out letters over the pictures said THE NEW YORK LITERARY TOUR.
“ We go from Djuna Barnes’s old place on Patchin Place down in the Village to Langston’s brownstone up in Harlem. We cover the whole city, talkin’ about poets, essayists, playwrights, and novelists. You know, it takes three full days just to show everybody everything. We hit all five boroughs. It’s not just literary; we give a full account of New York—past and present.”
“You do all this?” I asked, finally impressed.
“No, not me alone, LT,” Lemon said with his patented grin. “Morgan, along with her exes, Lucian and Cindy, they lead the tours. I drive the van on Tuesday through Thursday and hand out these brochures on the days I get off. I also advertise readings that they put on.”
“Lucian and Cindy?”
“Morgan’s what you call a, a, a bisexual. You know. She loves who she loves no mattah who or what.”
“Damn, Lemon. How long have you been out of prison?”
“I haven’t even been arrested in three years. You know Morgan was teachin’ a prison class in poetry and I took it ’cause they said how pretty she was. I already knew how to read and she the one figured out my conduit thing. I come to see her the day I got out and we been together since that night. She put it right out there that if I wanted to keep on gettin’ that sweet sugar that I had to give up my criminal ways.
“Now, what man in his right mind gonna argue with that?”
I was grinning broadly. Lemon Charles was like a magic trick that enchanted me with its unexpected transformation. The hapless crook had disappeared and a new man stood in his place. The prestidigitation made sense but was impossible, still and all.
“Mr. McGill?” someone said.
I turned to see that the police had performed a magic trick of their own—they had multiplied from two to three uniformed officers.
“You can go,” the new cop, Asian and female, told Lemon.
For the first time Lemon’s smile faded; it didn’t evaporate, just weakened as the light waning at day’s end.
“You go on, Mr. Charles,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to be the reason you got that sugar knocked off your rind.”
He looked me directly in the eye and nodded, took in the cops as if to say that he saw what had happened here, and then backed away.
As I watched him go I saw Charlene coming down the escalator. She had in her hand a bottle of what looked like Coke Zero.
“ What are you doing here?” a tall milk chocolate–colored cop was asking.
“Came to meet the nine forty-seven bus in from Albion. It didn’t get in till almost ten though.”
“ What for?” his partner asked. That cop was white, a bit shorter, and broad of shoulders and chest.
“Somebody told me that women coming in from the prison are open to persuasion . . . if you know what I mean.”
“You don’t seem to have that sort of company,” the lady policeman commented.
“I was misinformed.”
“ What are you doing here?” the black cop asked.
“Talking to you, my friend.”
“I’m not your friend.”
“No,” I agreed.
“ What do you have in your pockets?” the white cop bid.
“ Whatever the Constitution says I can carry.”
“This isn’t a game.” The white cop had brown hair and eyes the same hue but a little darker. He had a stripe on his shoulder and three freckles over his left cheek.
I turned to my left and walked away. That was the only option I had outside of assault.
They could have come after me.
They didn’t though.
I wondered why.
6
I WAS USED to being stopped by the police. My face and name were well known among the law enforcement crowd. They suspected me of everything from contract murder to armed robbery, from kidnapping to white slavery. I had been rousted, arrested, and thrown before more courts than Sweet Lemon Charles knew existed.
Before last year I had my own private cop—Carson Kitteridge. He dropped in on me once a month or so and made sly innuendos. If anyone would ever cause my downfall, it was Carson. But he had stopped contacting me, and police all over the city, even though they still gave me a hard time, seemed to be holding back.
I didn’t know what had happened or why, but I had decided to accept it as a temporary gift from the Patron Saint of Thieves, whoever he or she was.
MORE IMPORTANT to me, as I ambled up Tenth Avenue, was Lemon Charles. He had taken the life of a habitual criminal and turned it around, if only for a brief span of time. He wrote poetry, dealt in it, slept with a poet at night, and was asked politely to leave by cops that saw him as a tourist guide rather than a petty con.
This was cause for hope.
I wondered if I could just drop the role I carried like a mantle of a dethroned prince. Maybe I could become a poet or a fifth-grade math teacher . . . This notion tickled me. The humor caught me by surprise and I laughed so hard that two young women, who were walking in the opposite direction, actually veered out into the street to avoid me. I felt bad about it. I wanted to apologize to them for the outburst. But just the idea of apologizing for my humor sent me on another jag of hilarity.
Finally I went out into the street myself and hailed a yellow cab. The avenues were not safe for young women and poets—not while a laughing hyena like me was on the prowl.
I HAD THE CAB bring me to my building on the Upper West Side, not a block away from Riverside Drive. Parked out front was a small U-Haul truck. The man sitting in the driver’s seat was a murderer and I was his only friend.
I walked up to the street-side car window, intending to greet Hush, but he was in the middle of a sentence.
“. . . I don’t think that it matters what you do,” he was saying. “I mean, it matters, but it’s more the way you do it and your attention to detail . . .”
“Hey, man,” I said. It wouldn’t do to eavesdrop on Hush for too long. He was a stickler for his privacy.
“Leonid,” he said.
I moved around to see that he was talking to Twill, my youngest and favorite child. We might not have been related by blood, but Twilliam, at the tender age of eighteen, had committed more crimes, and more lucrative ones, than most hoodlums and thieves. I had him in tow as a detective-in-training at my offices, but it was a toss-up if I could save him from his own brilliant, if bent, ways.
“Hey, Pops,” Twill said.
He was wearing faded jeans and a graying but still white T-shirt, the appropriate attire for a young man helping his older brother move out of the house. Twill was always appropriately dressed for any occasion.
“ What’s up, boy?” I asked.
“Everybody’s up there workin’,” he said. “Bulldog and Taty, Shelly, and even Mardi dropped by. Moms ain’t too happy about it though.”
“Her baby’s moving out,” I explained.
“I think it’s more than that.”
“ What do you mean?”
“She’s drinkin’ pretty hard.”
I sighed. That had been Katrina’s MO for some time. At first it was just when she’d sneak out with one of her boyfriends—once or twice a week. She’d come home a little tipsy, happy not sloppy. But lately she’d been drinking every day.
“ Why’ont you go upstairs and help your brother, Twill? I’ll be there in a minute.”
“You got it,” the young man said. He hopped out of the passenger’s seat and headed for the front door to our building.
“That’s some kid you got there,” Hush said.
“He’ll be a helluva man if he survives his own criminal genius.”
“I wouldn’t want to be the one who stood in his way.”
Twill had called Hush to come help in the move. He had the number from an emergency list I’d given him, because, despite his criminal proclivities, he was the most trustworthy member of the family.
Hush had t
old Twill that he had to check his schedule and then called me to make sure it was okay. He knew that I might be uncomfortable having New York’s most successful assassin (albeit retired) carrying my son’s boxes from the eleventh floor to a moving van.
I would have said yes anyway. Twill’s friendliness and generosity could not be suppressed.
All I Did Was Shoot My Man Page 3