I clicked back to the general obituaries.
There was one missing.
I felt something in the small of my back. A trickle of ice water in reverse — it began crawling up my spine.
I went back and clicked each entry again. I reread everything. Nothing. Not one mention.
I logged on to the Daily News Web page. I typed in “Fairfax Hotel.”
Thirty-two articles.
I started with the one written on the day of the explosion. There was a picture of the bomb site. An old woman crying on a corner curb, firemen standing in the middle of the street with their heads down. I scanned the entire article. I went on to the next one.
Pretty much the same stuff I’d read elsewhere, except in chronological order. The bombing, the dead, the heroes, the villain, the investigation, the funerals.
It took me two hours. Still nothing.
I was beginning to think I was wrong. I’d misinterpreted an offhand comment, that’s all. The kind of thing that happened all the time.
I would look at one more week — the week of the last article, four weeks after the actual bombing. That’s it.
Then I would log off and go and kiss my sleeping children good night. I would crawl into bed with Kim and mold myself against her warm body. I would fall asleep and know that everything was okay.
I started with Monday. I went on to Tuesday.
I almost missed it.
It was a small item — buried in an avalanche of the Middle East war, a triple murder committed in Detroit, a marital scandal involving the New York City mayor.
HEROIC SURVIVOR NOT SO HEROIC, it said.
I clicked on it, held my breath, and read.
It was kind of a human-interest story, the kind they start running when they run out of stories about heroes and victims, a story meant to make you shake your head at the sad ironies of life.
Body pulled from wreckage . . . no identification . . . in a coma for several weeks . . . brain surgery . . . fingerprints revealed him to be . . . previously identified as dead . . . his car in hotel parking garage . . . hadn’t shown for sentencing . . . police spokesperson . . . prison infirmary . . .
I read it slowly, from beginning to the end. Then once more, making sure.
Anna’s insulin.
It was made from a pig’s pancreatic cells, which is the way all insulin used to be made. Until they figured out a way to make it synthetically in the laboratory. This was a fairly recent development; Anna had been using pig insulin since she’d gotten diabetes. When she’d tried the synthetic stuff, her numbers had strayed high and stayed there.
That happened sometimes, Dr. Baron had said. Some people responded better to the real stuff. So he’d kept her on it.
Even though they’d begun phasing it out — even though it was becoming very hard to get hold of. But there was no need to worry. There would always be some drugstores that carried it, he said.
I was talking to Jameel Farraday, a guidance counselor, in the school lunchroom.
Once a year, Jameel brought convicts from state prison into the school auditorium in an effort to scare George Washington Carver’s students straight. The convicts, some of whom had even grown up in the neighborhood, would talk about drugs, about the wrong choices they’d made, about life behind bars.
Then they’d take questions from the audience.
Ever kill anyone? one student asked an ex-junkie who had a scar running the entire length of his jawbone.
He said no, and the student body groaned.
“I’m thinking about having my class write letters to men in prison,” I said to Farraday. He was eating milky mashed potatoes and greasy chicken fingers.
“For what purpose?” he asked me.
“Well, kind of like the thing you do — but in writing. My kids can practice their penmanship, and these men can provide some life lessons, maybe.”
“Okay,” he said.
“I was wondering . . .”
“Yes?”
“I knew someone who ended up going to prison — from my old neighborhood. I thought I might start with him.”
“What did he do?”
“I don’t know, exactly. Drugs, I heard.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You have any idea how I could find out where he is?”
“You mean which prison?”
“Yes.”
Farraday shrugged. “I don’t know. I can ask my contact in Chicago Corrections, I guess.”
“Would you?”
“Sure. If I remember. Where’s he from?”
“New York.”
“Uh-huh. What’s his name?”
“Vasquez.”
“Vasquez?”
“Yes. Raul. Raul Vasquez.”
FIFTY-TWO
He knew where I was.
They’d pulled him half-dead from the rubble, but only half.
He was in a coma for weeks. They didn’t know who he was.
His car had been parked in the hotel lot. He hadn’t shown up at work. He was listed as dead.
They ran his fingerprints in a last-ditch effort to find out his name. Raul Vasquez. He had a “did not show” for sentencing for two counts of assault and battery and one for pandering.
He was transferred to a prison infirmary until he recovered sufficiently enough to be brought into Bronx Superior Court for sentencing.
This I knew from the article. The rest of it I imagined.
He’d sat there in prison. He’d thought and he’d remembered.
What Didi had told him. About my daughter. About the special pig insulin she needed to survive. Why pig insulin? She had asked me, remember? Like a concerned lover, instead of an extortionist wheedling the details out of me.
Vasquez sat there in prison and fumed. I was hiding from him. I was gone. But then he understood there was something I would have to do. No matter how carefully I was hiding, I would have to do this thing.
This is Mr. Widdoes. Is my insulin in?
How many drugstores must have said no. Must’ve said, Widdoes who?
But he kept going. He kept calling. He had all the time in the world. He had all the motivation necessary.
Maybe he started in New York. Then on to Pennsylvania. And so on.
One day, he’d reached Illinois.
Roxman’s Drugs.
And this time when he asked if his insulin was in, the druggist’s assistant didn’t say no.
He said not yet.
But it’ll be in Monday.
Two weeks after I’d talked to Jameel, he found me after class and handed me a sheet of paper.
“What’s this?” I said.
“Your guy,” he said. “But there’s three of them.”
“Three?”
“Yeah — three Raul Vasquezes. But if he’s from New York, I’d imagine he’s this one.” He pointed to the first name on the sheet. “I’d imagine he’s here.”
I lay upstairs in bed. I couldn’t sleep.
Kim was attuned to my nightly rhythms and knew without even looking that I was lying there wide awake and staring at the ceiling.
“What’s the matter, honey?” she said. “What’s wrong?”
I couldn’t tell her yet. I didn’t have the heart. We’d escaped from catastrophe once; we’d made a new life. We were happy. I couldn’t tell her that we hadn’t escaped after all. That the past was reaching out for us with icy fingers.
“Nothing,” I said.
I was thinking.
What was parole for a twelve-year sentence?
When would he be getting out?
He would come for me then — I knew that. For my family. And then he would do what he’d done to Winston and Sam Griffen and the man he’d pushed off the train in Lynbrook, Long Island, and God knows how many others.
That day he came to our home as a chimney cleaner.
I heard about a family that went to sleep and never woke up.
Yes, he would be coming for me.
Unless —
I whispered it like a fervent prayer.
Unless I get to him first.
He didn’t know that I knew he was alive. He didn’t know that I knew he’d found me.
But what did that matter?
He was in prison. He was locked up.
To get to him, I would have to get inside Attica.
Now — how could I do that?
ATTICA
It was my last class.
I’d circled it in my calendar. I’d rehearsed it in dreams.
When I walked through the metal detector, a CO named Stewey said, “Last day, huh,” and I thought he looked almost despondent. Maybe people get used to the people they belittle, and who knows if they’ll ever find anyone as good again?
Before I went to my classroom, I stopped off in the COs lounge.
It was just a room with folding chairs and tables and a thirteen-inch TV usually tuned to Dukes of Hazzard reruns. The COs evidently had a thing for Daisy Duke — those high-cut shorts of hers, probably — because an old poster of her still hung on the wall. Someone had penciled in nipples on her white blouse.
I poured myself some coffee. I put powdered milk into my cup and stirred it with a plastic swizzle stick.
I casually walked over to the COs museum situated in the left corner of the room.
“You got your twelve oh-one, brother,” Fat Tommy said. He was spread across two metal chairs with a Jenny Craig TV dinner on the table in front of him.
It’s only natural that employees pick up the lingo of the workplace; Attica guards often talked like Attica prisoners. And 12:01 meant gaining your freedom — getting your walking papers.
Maybe, I thought. We'll see.
I sipped my coffee, I perused the collection of gats and burners, as Fat Tommy chomped away on a meal he could only find ultimately dissatisfying. He was the only other person in the lounge.
When I finally turned and left, Fat Tommy looked up but didn’t say good-bye.
From the lounge to the classroom, I first had to go through a black locked door — knocking twice and waiting for another CO to clear me. Then I walked down the “bowling alley,” what they call the prison’s main walkway. It’s dissected down the middle by a broken yellow line, like a state highway. One side is for prisoners. The other side is for COs. Or for people who fall somewhere in between.
I passed a CO called Hank.
“Hey, Yobwoc,” he said. “I’m gonna miss you. You were my best boon coon.”
Translation: best friend.
“Thank you,” I said, but I knew he hadn’t meant it.
When the class settled in, I told them it was the last time I’d be seeing them. That it had been fun teaching them. That I hoped they’d keep reading and writing on their own. I told them that in the best classes, the teacher becomes the student and the students the teachers, and that that’s what had happened here — I’d learned from them. No one looked particularly moved; but when I finished, one or two of them nodded at me as if they might even miss me.
Malik wasn’t one of them. He’d passed me a note last time. Where the writer would be waiting for me.
I told the class we might as well use this last class for creative reflection. I wanted each of them to write an essay on what the class had meant to them. This time, I told them, they could even put their names to them.
Then I excused myself to go to the bathroom.
I passed the black CO who was supposed to be stationed outside the door and who, this time, actually was. I said I’d be back in ten minutes, and he said, “I’ll alert the media.”
He’d be waiting for me near the prison pharmacy, the note said.
He worked there.
A pharmacy job gave you shine, a student had explained to me, since it gave you access to drugs.
It also gave you access to something else, I knew. Drug manufacturers. You could call them up to find out things if you wanted to. Like maybe where a certain rare insulin was being distributed.
It probably hadn’t taken him years to track me down after all.
I walked back down the bowling alley. I followed the signs.
The pharmacy consisted of one long counter protected by steel mesh. There are prisons within prisons, I noted, an axiom also true of life. The kind of insight I might’ve pointed out in my class, if I still had one.
I continued past the pharmacy, striding down an empty hallway that veered sharply left and seemed to lead to no place in particular. But it did.
Malik had told me where he’d be waiting for me, and I’d gone and scouted it.
An alcove in the middle of the hall.
A kind of blind. In an older institution like Attica, there were lots of them, hidden little corners where the prisoners conducted business, where they sold drugs and got down on their knees. Where they evened scores. A blind. An appropriate description, except I was walking in with my eyes wide open.
I walked into the alcove where it was quiet and still and stopped.
“Hello?”
I could hear him breathing in there.
“Hello,” I whispered again.
He stepped out of the shadows.
He looked different — that’s the first thing I thought. That he looked different from the way I remembered him.
His head. It seemed smaller, reshapen, as if it had been squeezed in a vise. He had a scar running down from his forehead. That was one thing. And he had a tat on his right shoulder. A prison blue clock face without hands — doing time. And farther down on his arm a tombstone with numbers — twelve — his prison sentence.
“Surprise,” he said.
No. But that’s what I wanted him to think.
“How you doin’, Chuck?” he said. He smiled, the way he’d smiled at my front door the day he’d come to my house and put his hands on my daughter.
“Larry,” I said.
“Larry. Yeah, I’m down. That was some cool shit you pulled off—playing dead like that. Had everyone fooled, huh, Larry? ”
“Not everyone. No.”
“No, not everyone. You’re right. You shouldn’t have let my girl see your wallet, Larry. Bad move. Stupid.”
The hostess in the Crystal Night Club. Widdoes . . . what kind of name is that? she’d said.
“I thought you were dead.”
“You wish.”
Yes, I thought. I wish. But there comes a time when you have to stop wishing.
“I’ve been looking for you, Larry. Like all over. You took something of mine, you know. I want it back. So I’ve been looking for you. And I found you, too. I found you twice.”
“Twice?”
“Once in Chicago. Oh yeah . . . that’s right. Surprised by that, huh? Yeah, I knew exactly where you were. Oakdale, Illinois. Then you moved on me.”
“Yes.”
“Bennington. Right down the fucking road. How’s that for lucky?”
“That’s lucky.”
“Uh-huh. You know how I found you?”
“No.”
“Your kid. Through the drugstores. First Chicago. Then Bennington. And then the next thing I know, the very next thing I know, you’re waltzing in through the fucking front door.”
“Yes.”
“I said to myself, Here’s your twelve oh-one, nigger. Here it is on a platter.”
“Why didn’t you say hello?”
“I did. I did say hello. I got my boy to write up my hello for me.”
“Your boy? He can’t even read.”
“Not Malik. My boon. A Jew literary professor who eighty-sixed his wife. Writes all the pleas for parole here. And very cool jerk-off stuff. ‘Charley Schine Gets Fucked’ — his latest. He thinks I made it up in my head. He thinks I’m creative.”
“Yes — it was very effective.”
“I thought you might run. Seeing your life story and all.”
No, I thought. If I was going to run, I would have done it back in Oakdale. It’s what Deanna said to do — Let’s run, and I said, Okay, but if we run, we will
have to keep running. For all time. So maybe we shouldn’t. So I’d taken a leave of absence and we’d come here.
“You have something of mine, Larry, ” he said.
“Some of it was mine first.”
Vasquez smiled. “You think this is a fucking negotiation? You think I’m bargaining with you? You’re fucked. It’s your role in life. Accept it. Get down on your knees and open your mouth and say please, Daddy. I want my money. ”
Someone was shouting in the pharmacy: “The doc says I need this shit, understand?”
“You’re in prison,” I said.
“So are you. You’re locked up. You’re doing time. You think you’re safe out there? Think again, motherfucker. I can turn you in—I can tell them, Here's Charley . If you’re lucky I could. ’Cause I might send someone to your house to fuck your wife instead. I might. How old’s your daughter now — ready to get stuck with something else now, huh?”
I went for him.
Reflex simply took over my body and said: Listen up — we’re going to stop this man, we’re going to shut this man up forever. We are. But when I lunged at him, when I went for his throat, his knee came up and caught me in the stomach. I went down to my knees. He stepped behind me and slipped his arm around my neck and squeezed. He whispered in my ear.
“That’s it, Charley. That’s right. Got you mad, huh? Here’s the thing. How lucky was it that you showed up in Bennington? Forty miles from here. In my own fucking backyard? And then, if that isn’t lucky enough, you walk in the goddamn door and start teaching here. How lucky is that? Is that lucky or what? Or is that like, too lucky? What do you think, Charley? You think that’s too lucky? I don’t know. You got something for me, Charley, do you?” He reached his hand down and patted my right pocket. He felt it there — the gat, the one I’d taken from the COs museum. “You got something you want to stick me with? Huh, Charley?” He took it out of my pocket — he showed it to me.
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