by Mark Helprin
“There are many footpaths, Constable. And I have many cars. The smallest,” Freddy said, thinking of the miniatures in the dollhouse at Windsor, “is this big.” He held his thumb and forefinger three inches apart. “It’s real, and it really goes. The largest is cavernous. And I have carriages, too, and railway wagons, and many other modes of conveyance, including a yacht as big as an ocean liner. Though all technically Mummy’s,” which Mancuso heard as mummies, “they are as good as mine. These things I find sometimes comforting and sometimes a curse. When you inquire about them so blindly it shows me that you and I exist in different worlds.”
“Yes, it does, and you’re under arrest.”
“It’s over,” Fredericka cried. “So soon after it began. We didn’t last a day.”
“Damn!” said Freddy.
Mancuso turned to his men. “Cuff them and read them their rights.” He said to his prisoners, “I’m arresting you for making false statements in a banking transaction, attempted extortion, disturbing the peace, and public endangerment.” As Freddy and Fredericka were handcuffed and their rights were read to them in a sort of low Gregorian chant, Mancuso turned to Mr Guthwin. “I was a cop in Philly for twenty-five years,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything close.”
“I know,” Guthwin told him sympathetically. “They thought I was George Gershwin.”
A CROWD HAD FORMED in front of the bank. Freddy and Fredericka were used to walking between police lines and seeing the ropes and barricades groan with the weight of masses of their admirers, though not quite this way. “I am the Prince of Wales, heir to the throne of Great Britain,” he said, at wit’s end, “and I demand that you remove these manacles.”
The response was derisive laughter, as if he and Fredericka were being brought through London in a cart on their way to the headsman. Many ancestral memories welled up. Stress, odd diet, and lack of sleep all took their toll. But things rolled on, and they were put into a police car at the end of the barricaded corridor, heads pushed down so that they would not be able to bump them deliberately and sue the city of Cherry Hill.
As the door closed after Freddy, his trail of parachute cloth was caught up in it. Pulling hard, he undid the lock, leaving the door slightly ajar. “Fredericka,” he whispered. “The door is open. We may have an opportunity to flee.”
“I see,” she whispered back. “I’m ready.”
Two patrolmen got in the car and, without belting themselves or looking at their prisoners, drove. After all, Freddy and Fredericka, handcuffed, were locked in the holding compartment. The glass was kickproof, the doors dead-bolted.
“I haven’t had a doughnut in what, an hour?” one patrolman said to another.
“Stop at the White Hen.”
A few minutes later, they did. Turning to the prisoners, they asked, “Would you guys like something to eat?”
“That’s sweet of you,” Fredericka said. “I’d love some Bovril and a crumpet.”
“How about a doughnut?” one of them asked. “That’s what we eat on Earth.”
“Thank you.”
“What about you?” they asked Freddy.
Freddy asked for haggis. They promised him a doughnut and disappeared into the White Hen. As soon as they did, the Prince and Princess of Wales escaped into Cherry Hill.
“Do they see, Freddy?”
“I don’t think so. Just run.”
Running at full speed, they turned a few corners and soon were lost in a forlorn district of threadbare stores. But the streets were vital and packed with people. “Everyone here seems African,” Freddy said. After eight or ten more blocks, stopping for breath, they heard sirens in the distance. “Look,” said Freddy, pointing down a side street, “Reggae Style—the Commonwealth.”
A woman who unlocked the door said, “Ella don’t sell no ganja to no more professors since last year.”
“Do you take sterling?” Freddy asked.
“I tol’ you,” she said, “I’m tru.” Her Jamaican speech with its pickled English and Celtic under-rhythms was a delight to Freddy’s and Fredericka’s ears.
“Not for ganja,” Fredericka said, “for clothing.”
“Oh! Of course I would, darlin’,” Ella said. “I goin’ to London next week to visit my sister.”
“And do you have a hacksaw?” Freddy asked, holding up his hands.
Ella closed her shop and quickly made an arrangement with Freddy that would see Freddy and Fredericka completely reattired, their manacles removed, and their hunger sated. To help, she summoned her nephew, Desmond.
“Desmond what?” Freddy asked as soon as Desmond arrived, looking just like Jimmy Cliff.
“What?”
“What is your last name?”
“Moffat.”
“That’s my name,” Freddy said, amazed.
“You in luck, mon,” said Desmond. “Here.” He held up a handcuff key on a key chain anchored by a miniature plastic car in the shape of a hot dog in a roll.
“Marvellous,” said Freddy. “Why do you carry that?”
“I got tousands of them, mon. I drive the Weeny Car. I give them away.”
“Keys for manacles?”
“Oh, that. Every brother who drive on the road have to have it.”
“Why?” Freddy asked as he and Fredericka freed themselves.
“Because, mon, if you don’t look at the police when they pass, they tink you hidin’ someting. If you smile at them, they tink you mock them about. If you look at them an’ not smile, they sure it’s a challenge. The only time they don’t stop you is if you driving a company truck.”
“What is the Weeny Car?”
“You ain’t seen the Weeny Car?” Desmond asked, holding up the key chain. “It look just like this. A whole lot of fibreglass, pink-an’-bread-coloured. On the East Coast, a mustard stripe, an’ on de West, ketchup.”
“How many does it seat?”
“Four. It can’t get past fifty even if the wind is at the back. Great soun’ system.”
“Will you take us to Washington?”
“I can’t, I can’t drive in Delaware no more.”
“For a thousand pounds? We could go through Pennsylvania.”
“I not insured in Pennsylvania.”
“Who would know if we just drove through?” Freddy asked.
Desmond held up the key chain. “Everyone. I can take you to the Delaware Memorial Bridge, an’ you don’t have to pay.” He lowered his voice and said, “You been in this country long, mon?”
“Not even a day,” Freddy answered, “and I’m ready for the insane asylum.”
“I know,” said Desmond. “Tings happen here you can’t explain to a normal person. Sometimes, we switch Weeny Cars, an’ all the West Coast drivers move to the East, an’ all the East Coast drivers move to the West. The only sane time is on the great migration. I like it out there. It’s quiet.”
“Tell me,” said Freddy, “when that occurs, does the East Coast get a ketchup stripe and the West a mustard?”
“No,” Desmond said. Fredericka had a look of daft wonder.
“How is that avoided?” Freddy asked. “You don’t trade vehicles, do you?”
“We meet in Salina, Kansas, all hundred of us, at a old drive-in theatre. There, we switch the mustard an’ ketchup stripes. They plastic, and they snap on an’ off. It take a few hours in the middle of the night, an’ by dawn we back on the road again.”
“Isn’t it astounding?” Freddy asked Fredericka. “All our lives, we have been unaware of that.”
“Freddy, we need a dentist. Let’s go while it’s light.”
Freddy agreed. Ella asked, “What you want to eat? Desmond will get it while I fit you wit’ the clothes.”
“I would like,” Freddy said to Desmond, “some smoked salmon, caviar, capers, and truffles en potage to begin, with a glass of Laphroaig. Then some roast lamb, haricots verts, and a mixed salad with goat cheese and walnut oil dressing, with a good claret and some Ramlosa. For dessert, some
thing like a bûche de noël, but en travine, with expresso and a glass of ’28 Pol Roger, super-chilled, thank you. Fredericka, what would you like?”
“I don’t want to be demanding,” Fredericka said, “I’ll have the same.”
Desmond blinked. “Okay, barbecue chicken! I have a big iron shovel outside I foun’ in the dump, an’ I put Ella’s oven rack over it. Chicken do not fall tru like hot dogs.”
“That sounds lovely,” Fredericka told him. “Do you have Red Stripe?”
“Plenty,” Desmond said, and left to make the fire.
As Desmond cooked, Ella buzzed about in service of their wardrobe. First she cut them out of their parachutes, exclaiming, “Nice underwear, mon!” when she spied their hracneets. Freddy and Fredericka had always been aware, being who they were, of the power and magic of vestments and drapings. They were not surprised at their transformation as Freddy donned cheap denim and calico patched with red velvet velour and zebra trim at the hips, a banana-yellow shirt, ox-blood high-heel spats, a lime-green chiffon cravat, and a huge hat, big enough for six heads, with a tiny crescent brim. Fredericka was willing to be less conservative. Her body shone in spirals of gold lamé, and she let Ella put a two-foot-high dollar-green turban on her head.
“Don’t you have something perhaps a little less . . . forward?” asked Freddy, who, dressed as he was, had already begun to speak differently, walk in a kind of dance, and snap his fingers while he half-closed his eyes and held his lower lip between what was left of his teeth.
“Why?” Ella asked. “It’s the best stuff. Flow.”
“Flow,” said Freddy.
“Someting is missing,” Ella told him.
“My teeth.”
“Someting else.”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” Ella said, knowing exactly. “Desmond!” Desmond appeared. “Desmond, when you get done wit’ the chicken, go to the store an’ get these people Tan Automatique, four tubes. It has to on them real heavy.”
OF THE THREE Jamaicans riding south from Cherry Hill in the late afternoon in the Weeny Car as its prodigious sound system filled the air with rock and roll, one was authentic and two were forgeries the colour of Krugerrands. Now deeply gilded, Freddy and Fredericka had been fed at last, with chicken, plantain, Red Stripe, and mango. As the Weeny Car hit fifty and stayed there, the wind blew their flowing clothes back from them until they looked like hood ornaments.
Freddy turned to Fredericka and removed his white-framed sunglasses. “We not doin’ too bad, Ricka,” he said in a passable Jamaican accent (except perhaps to a Jamaican). “We got nine tousand pouns left, we full a’ chicken, mon; we got new clothes; we runnin’ hard to Washington, DC; an’ it ain’t even four o’clock in the aftanoon.”
“Yes, Freddy,” Fredericka said, all the while waving at children who, as they passed, whipped around in their seats to stare at a car shaped like a frankfurter, “but are you sure it’s wise to have become black?”
“It not wise,” Desmond said, “an’ you not black, you gold.”
“Whatever,” Freddy said. “All in all, I think it was the correct decision.”
“Why?” Fredericka asked.
“Because the police, Fredericka, are looking for us, and we are white. Now that we are sort of black, we have no problem.”
Desmond looked heavenward.
“Freddy,” Fredericka asked, “don’t you think that the police might be looking for some black people, too?”
“My point is that we are no longer the white puffballs who resisted arrest in Cherry Hill. They might stop us, but then they would let us go.”
“I don’t think they would let us go, Freddy. I think they would hold us until they figured us out, and that might take forever.”
“Nonsense. Habeas corpus.”
“They would send us to an insane asylum, Freddy.”
“An insane asylum? Are you mad?”
“Freddy, we’re peculiar.”
“Peculiar? Why are we peculiar? We need only behave with dignity to carry ourselves effortlessly through any situation. The day is not even over,” he said, holding up his hands as if worshipping the sky, “and here we are, running along at all good speed, with quintessential American music cutting a path for us on an endless American road. I wish only that Mr Neil had allowed us enough preparation time to learn how to hot-wire an automobile.”
“We’re not criminals, Freddy.”
“I know, but automobiles are the river of life in this country. When you get one, even this one, you’re back in the game, but as soon as you lose one, you’re in trouble. Haven’t you noticed that? In America, the car is the second chance. They lift you from your troubles and set you into the heartbeat of the country.”
“And what is the heartbeat of the country?” Fredericka asked sceptically.
“Being nowhere, on the way to somewhere, with music, on the open road,” Freddy told her. “All the rest is the baggage of Europe, sometimes well developed and extended, sometimes not. But this motion, this ongoingness, this rolling, these hypnotic wheels, this particular glory, is exclusively American—their transcendence.”
“Freddy, shut up!”
“But it’s true. The pulse of the road . . . I’ve been to America many times, but never felt it until now, when we’re poor, on the run, and sort of black. By the way. . . .” He trailed off.
“Yes?”
“You look,” he said, blushing even through his Tan Automatique, “you look, in that colour. . . .”
“Yes, Freddy?”
“Very, I would say, very, well, very beautiful, Fredericka, and, and . . . numbing.”
“Thank you, Freddy. Even without the teeth?”
“Even without the teeth.”
They rolled south toward Delaware, which was beyond Desmond’s range, and he dropped them at an entry ramp of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, to hitch-hike. Then he drove off in the Weeny Car toward his duty station of the evening, the amber-lit and diamond-blue arteries of New York.
Fredericka wondered if perhaps they should have gone with him.
“We couldn’t have,” Freddy informed her. “On a quest, you cannot retrace your steps.”
“Who said?”
“It’s common knowledge. We must go forward, always. Don’t worry, I used to hitch-hike at school. When a car comes by, you do like this.”
Freddy threw out his arm, thumb extended, with such verve and authority that a nursery truck approaching the ramp braked to a stop. “Are you going across the bridge?” the driver asked. “There’s room in the back. I’m just going over to the other side. I can leave you at the Delaware Pike.”
“Thank you,” Freddy replied graciously as he and Fredericka began to climb into the back. As the truck engaged its gears and began the run over the bridge, they seated themselves high amidst a mountain of freshly cut evergreen branches that made as fragrant a bower as any they had ever encountered, and they had encountered quite a few. To elevate their souls, rajahs had made flowery tents for them, and had not succeeded half as well.
GYPSIES
THE WIND SWEPT OVER them as the truck crossed on the bridge’s northern span, which rises like an aircraft above the broad expanse of the Delaware. Freddy stood amid the branches and looked out upon cities, near and distant, that were like ancient walled towns with glinting spires. The spider-work of chemical plants sat upon the shore, a forest of white grid-lines through which the breeze whistled as it came off the estuary. Eight lanes of traffic flowed across the bridges, and, in the channel below, massive ships rumbled up and down: monstrous rust-and-steel constructions of a hundred thousand momentous tons moving at twenty knots. Not two or three, but a dozen gliding as smoothly as swans. The sound of their engines, and the vibrations without sound, drummed in Fredericka’s chest.
“It never stops moving, does it?” Freddy asked rhetorically, meaning the whole country.
Fredericka nodded, quite taken with their rise through summer-blue air.
/> “And this is just the smallest piece, the littlest part, of the perpetual ignition. Over three hundred and sixty degrees, engines are throbbing, ships and lorries moving, birds gliding, wind flowing. The emblem of the Americans, who have no idea where they’re going, is that they never stop.”
The entrance to the short and unimposing Delaware Turnpike was busy and dangerous, and hitch-hiking where the traffic divides was like making oneself a ten-pin. But not knowing where else to go, they stood in a triangle marked on the roadway and tried to get a ride. For five or ten minutes, cars and trucks rushed by. At one point a car was in the right lane and its driver wanted to go not toward Baltimore but to Dover. This meant transecting the triangle, cutting off two streams of traffic, and flattening the Prince and Princess of Wales. Nothing would deter the driver, even had his grandmothers in their rocking chairs been dead—or about to be—in his path. He veered against all chance, forcing Freddy and Fredericka to leap back to save their lives.
“Here comes a Bobby,” Fredericka warned, of an officer headed toward them on a motorised tricycle.
“A pig,” said Freddy. “When in Rome. . . .”
As the policeman arrived, lights flashing, Freddy smiled semi-toothlessly and cheerfully said, “Hello, pig!”
Embarrassed by his tricycle, the patrolman was ill-tempered to begin with. For a while, he tried to classify them. Finally, he asked, “Mexican or Chinese?”
“We’ve eaten, thank you,” Fredericka answered.
“That’s good, because you’re under arrest for hitch-hiking, trespassing on an interstate, and public endangerment. I’m going to circle around and come back,” he said, twisting his body to look behind him, “and stop over there with my flashers on. When I give the signal, cross and jump that rail. There’s a sidewalk on the other side. We’ll wait there for a car to take you in. If you try to get away, I’ll come after you with my gun drawn. Is that clear?”
“I suppose it is,” said Freddy, disturbed that though he had been in America for not even a single day, he had now been arrested twice.
“You be there,” the patrolman said as he remounted and rolled forward, and as he left he shot them a piercing, hateful look.