“I want you to keep that for something you need,” Hal said. “Not candy and comic books and stuff. And stay out of the video arcade … Get a jacket or a sweater, or shoes when you need them. Shoes are important. You hear me, boy?”
“I’m getting me a houseboat,” Benny said, “cabin cruiser. I’ll live on it and just drive around.”
“It won’t buy you that,” Hal said. “Not enough there.”
“Guess I’ll get more.”
“Okay, you do that.” Hal could feel his smile shrinking and drying on his jaws. “Well, come on, I guess you better head back.”
They paused on the porch, just out of line of the shelter’s main doorway. Hal took out the bread sack and handed it over.
“Hide that under your sweatshirt,” he said. “That’s the way. Can’t you fix your hair a little better? What happened to your comb?”
“Lost it,” Benny said grumpily.
“Use your fingers, then.”
Benny screwed up his face, then raked both hands along his head, slightly flattening the clumps of hair.
“All right, Benbro,” Hal said. “You take it easy.”
“See you tomorrow?” For the first time that day the boy seemed a little ill at ease.
“I’ll be here,” Hal said.
He shifted position slightly to watch the boy slip in the doorway and through the metal detector. If the guard remarked his passage, he gave no sign of it. Hal turned away and went back through the playground to Catherine Street and walked down to the river. On either side of him the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges vectored off to different points on the opposite shore. The South Street traffic drowned whatever noise cars and trains on the bridges were making, and a pleasure boat churning upriver moved in the same queerly disconnected silence. Benny had been told that Judith was dead but Hal had no idea what the information meant to him. Sometimes he thought the boy didn’t know the meaning of death, and at others he suspected that Benny might understand better than he did himself. But certainly he didn’t seem to miss her much—maybe there wasn’t much to miss. Judith was drunk a lot and she took drugs and even before they tore down the hotel she’d had the habit of dropping completely out of sight. She’d leave Benny alone for days on end, return to scream at him for no good reason or smother him in her equally irrational affection. In all ways she’d taught him not to trust her.
It was a tabled issue now. Hal turned under the Manhattan Bridge ramp and walked up to the mouth of Eldridge Street and on and on, uptown again. He was beginning to feel it a little in his legs, not an ache, not fatigue exactly, just a rather pleasant sense of strain responding to the forces of inertia that drove him interminably forward. At Forty-third Street he turned west and started for Grand Central Station. The afternoon sun was bringing out a clammy sweat across his chest, and he loosened his jacket and various shirts.
Sunny was sitting on her standpipe by the mouth of the Grand Central arcade, reading a coverless copy of Princess Daisy and smoking a long Newport. The sheet of cardboard that she and Thompson slept under at night was propped between the pipe and the wall.
“What’s the word?” she said when she saw him coming.
“I don’t know,” Hal said. “No news is … no news. Where’s Thompson?”
Sunny shrugged. “Out scrounging. He’ll show back by sundown. You need him?”
“Not especially,” Hal said. “Hey, do you know where Hart Island is?”
“That’s the potter’s field, everybody knows that.”
“I know what it is,” Hal said. “I’m talking about where.”
Sunny swept her hand indefinitely north up Lexington, then slapped it back over her book before it toppled from her knee.
“Up the bay, somewhere, I wouldn’t know exactly. It’s a long way.”
“Can somebody get over there?”
“Not while you’re alive you can’t.” Sunny leaned back against the cardboard and stared at Hal with her flat black eyes. Her crinkly hair was cinched tight to the base of her head with a rubber band, bringing out the cat shape of her skull. “Still tracking Judy, aren’t you?” she said. “Give it up, man, you won’t find her there.”
“Why won’t I?” Hal said.
“‘Cause they don’t mark nothing up there, man.” Sunny snorted. “That’s where they bury people with a bulldozer, hadn’t you ever heard of that?”
“I heard it,” Hal said.
“Believe it, then.” Sunny laughed and shook her head. “It’s like what momma say about food, you know.”
“Don’t believe I know what momma say.”
“All gets mixed up in the end just the same. In your belly. Or in the grave.” She gave the same dry laugh again.
“Not an idea I really go for,” Hal said.
“Give it up, then, give yourself a rest,” she said. “Think about something else for a while. Here, you want a cigarette?” She took a pack of Newports from her pocket.
“That’s all right,” Hal said. “I quit.”
“What, you worried about your health?”
“Don’t like to have a thing I can’t do without,” Hal said. “Thanks the same, though. We’ll see you later.”
He hitched up the bag and went into the mouth of the tunnel and on toward the main waiting room of the station. Heavy streams of commuters parted around him; it was already the first little end of rush hour, though he couldn’t think just where the time had gone. He walked across the booming floor and climbed the stairs at the west end and made a buttonhook to the right toward the high blank wall where the pay phones were.
In the breast pocket of his second shirt there was a piece of paper going black along its folds with numbers faintly penciled on it. He shook it loose and squinted at it, then lined up all his quarters on the pay phone shelf and began to punch up calls to different departments of the Human Resources Administration. As on the day before, he found himself forwarded from one number to the next, in circles and spirals that repeated one another. The least of the bored bureaucrats at the other end of the line had the knack of reflecting Hal’s own questions back at him. When they began to inquire into the nature of his relationship with the deceased, he spoke haltingly, lied without conviction. He was put on hold. At eye level next to the phone booth was taped a poster of a monkey with its head sliced open and its wet brain wired to some apparatus. The monkey screamed below its wound and farther down, line after line of frantic small print claimed that there was no good reason for the monkey to suffer so.
In the phone’s earpiece there was nothing now but an intermittent sprocketing sound. Hal looked dully into the monkey’s inked eyes and considered the nature of his relationship to Judith, from its roots to its peculiar fruit … I grew up in West Virginia, strip mine country. Moved over to Pennsylvania to work in steel and got laid off. Came up here to try and get in the merchant marine but they wouldn’t have me. Worked in warehouses, here and around, worked on the docks a little, any kind of labor. I had a room in an SRO in Hell’s Kitchen, go look for it now and a hole in the ground is what you’ll find. Don’t know what they’re building there, don’t want to know. That’s how I got there, and Judith and Benny moved in across the hall those last few months before they came with the wrecking ball, I don’t know where they’d been before. That was the nature of our relationship right there. Got along with the kid pretty well, looked after him some when she wasn’t around. I called her Judith when everybody else said Judy, she got some kind of a kick out of that, though I couldn’t say why. Maybe we slept together a time or two but if we did she treated me like a trick and I hated that. She had a nice way about her sometimes when she was straight but you never saw a whole lot of it at a stretch. I took her to detox more than one time. Don’t know why I kept doing it. Most of the time you might say I downright disliked her. Still, she might be alive right now if they hadn’t of invented crack. But if that didn’t kill her, something else did, and I want to find out just what happened, because. Because. Because nobody els
e wants to.
For some time the telephone had been exhorting him to please hang up and dial again if he would like to make a call. He put down the receiver and gathered up the couple of quarters that were left and went to the banister and stood there, shaking the coins in his hand and watching the people moiling below. There’s your human resources, he thought, some of them at least, whatever’s not piled up on Hart Island like a mineral deposit.
He left the station by Forty-second Street. Outside, the light was already dimming to gray; the sun had dropped behind the canyon walls. He went down Park as far as Union Square and then began to follow Broadway east. The wind had sprung up harshly again and he refastened his shirts and his jacket and ducked his head down into it. Below Canal he cut to the left and picked his way through the construction sites around the Tombs and so came again to Columbus Park.
Loman was sitting on one of the benches, eating noodle soup out of a cardboard canister from the little take-out up Chrystie Street. When Hal came up and halted, he offered the soup and the plastic spoon. Hal shook his head.
“Go on, take it,” Loman said. “I can’t finish it anyway, how much they give you for a dollar.”
“Best deal in town,” Hal said.
He ate standing, a hip propped on the back of the bench, revolving his head from side to side to work out a slight stiffness in his neck. During the day, the park had a veneer of civilized life; there would be women with strollers, children who played games, old people on the benches spreading themselves to the weak light of the sun. At dusk it emptied out very quickly. A Chinese man came wheezing through, supported by his wife on one side and a cane on the other. The woman’s off arm was anchored by a heavy shopping bag stretched to within an inch of the pavement. They didn’t stop. At the top of the park a lone crack dealer paced up and down inside the iron railing, making whip-stroke gestures to the people passing on Bayard Street. Two teenage Chinese gangsters in black leather jackets stopped and parlayed with him, then came to the steps of the park shelter and sat down to smoke.
“Would you look at those son of a bitches?” Loman muttered. “They blocking the way to my bedroom.”
“They’ll go,” Hal said. “Give them a minute …” He watched the boys fuss with the little glass pipe. They had long glossy black hair and beautiful tattoos, and in their near-identical getups they looked alike as twins.
“I just want to know one thing. What happened to the law enforcement around here?” Loman said. “Here we sit on the steps of the freaking jail and watch these kind of people come and go.”
“They could be saying the same about us.”
Hal tipped up the container and swallowed the last of the soup and dropped the spoon in the bottom of it. The Chinese gangsters pocketed their pipe and pranced out of the park; the dealer hailed them again as they passed but this time they didn’t stop. All around the air was thickening with darkness and the cold was tightening back down. Hal watched the dealer pacing, silhouetted against the lit shop windows on the far side of the street. He was tall and lanky, basketball player-sized, with a smallish head at the end of a bony attenuated neck. The jerky set of moves he had made Hal think he’d been sampling his own supply.
“Got any use for this spoon?” Hal said, rattling it in the soup container.
“Nah, they’re not good for much once the food’s gone,” Loman said.
Hal pushed himself away from the bench and walked toward the garbage can padlocked to the railing behind where the dealer stood and twitched. His legs had stiffened from standing still and they creaked as he began to move. The soup container went into the can with a slight whispering sound that seemed to make the dealer turn.
“Trash, get on away from here,” he said. “Yo smell drive away my business.”
“Stand where you are,” Hal said as the dealer took a step toward him.
“Who you talking to, mofo?”
The dealer took another step and Hal turned his back and walked away at his normal pace, his right hand stroking the spearheads of the railing. Behind him, the dealer said something he didn’t quite make out, and the touch he thought he felt on his shoulder might just have been imagined. The loose rail shifted under his hand and he snatched it out and came around swinging it in a high lateral plane. He didn’t see just where it hit, but there was a bruising shock against the butt of his palms that ached all the way back to his shoulders.
“Sweet Jesus, what you do that for?” Loman was crouching over the dealer, lengthily outstretched parallel to the fence. “This man not giving out any sign of life at all …”
“He came in my place,” Hal said.
He picked up the rail from where he had dropped it and fit it back into its slot. His hands had gone numb, whether from the blow or just the cold he wasn’t sure.
“Place, what place?”
Loman’s eyes tracked up and down the street. There were people passing on the sidewalk within a hand’s reach of them, but it appeared that their invisibility had so far been preserved.
“Anywhere I’m standing.” Hal rubbed his thumb along his jaw, considering. “It’s like my house.”
Loman stood up. “You don’t got a house.”
“No,” Hal said. “But I got a place to be.”
“That’s good,” Loman said. “’Cause what I’m telling you, you better not stay here.”
He left the park by the east side and walked up Baxter Street and continued his way. He pounded his hands against his thighs until they warmed and then he sank them in his pockets. Dark ribbons of sidewalk fell away behind him; he told off the names and numbers of the passing streets like beads of some long rosary. Because he had no destination he didn’t know how long it took to get there, but it was later, much, much later, when he turned on Forty-third Street and bore down on the west entrance to Grand Central. From the corner back toward him a long line of men and women of his kind stood shuffling and waiting to enter the vans that would take them away to the armory or elsewhere. Hal stopped on the upper side of the street and looked. From out of the black cavity of the nearest van a voice came booming, “Move on up.” The line went staggering forward, then halted again. “Move on up,” the voice cried, and Hal began to walk, turning the corner onto Vanderbilt Avenue, going up toward the wall at Forty-seventh Street.
He could still get off the street if he wanted, he thought, and flicked the hidden packet of bills. There was still enough left to buy him control of a set of walls for the night. Enough for booze or a hit of dope or three or four meat meals, but not enough to bury anybody, not as much as that. He had wanted to see Judith buried somewhere, would have put her, if he could, in the ancient cemetery below Chatham Square. But it would make little difference to her now. The city of the dead is older and more vast than the city of the living, and the dead possess the power and patience of infinity. Turning east, he saw the street open the long way across town. He watched his shoes striking down ahead of him on the mica glitter of the sidewalk, and believed that there was no stopping his progress. He had been on his feet the whole day long, but he was still not tired.
MR. POTATOHEAD
IN LOVE
… IT ISN’T REALLY so much like one, but—take the ears, for instance, they’re more like cauliflower; still, they might be little embryonic potatoes that didn’t quite manage to break free of the main lump: the mealy irregular oblong of his head. It’s mostly bald, but sprouts of chill white rubbery hair rise up from unexpected patches of his cranium, twisting and writhing, following their own dark and secret tropisms … Eyebrows like cracked brown knuckles ground with dirt; the eyes pale protuberances tipped with black. The long bumpy jaw is topologically twisted out of line from his pate, and the whole of it’s thrust forward and up at eighty-odd degrees on the permanently stiff neck. Doctors can’t fix it, the neck never moves. Mr. Potatohead!
When his hands are busy you don’t notice any of this. His hands are beautiful, Flemish; van der Weyden would have been proud of them. Mr. Potatohead nev
er has to do head fakes; his hands are so lovely they distract you from themselves. He works with his head cocked up away from them on the inflexible neck, eyes always slightly averted. A bit of juggling, a few tricks from mime, but mostly prestidigitation.
A bright clear Friday in the park, plenty of people here. It’s spring—no, summer—very warm. People wear shorts, some men are barechested. The fountain is set in a swivel pattern that now and then throws a little burst of spray on people at the back of Mr. Potatohead’s crowd. He’s always looking a little up and over them. Above the arch the sky is blue and through it Fifth Avenue goes away and away forever.
Things appear, things disappear, but Mr. Potatohead doesn’t even seem to notice. People are consuming all sorts of strange things while they watch him; it’s a good day for spending money. A good day for buskers: Tony the Fireman’s here, Charlie Barnett’s here, there’s a new a cappella group doing Dion and the Belmonts. He hasn’t seen the Dance Be-Jabbers, but then they’re never quite reliable. A lot of animals are here and about, a good day for them too. Someone with a monkey, someone with a snake. Earlier the guy with three ferrets on leashes came through, all of them ferreting in three different directions.
Right in his own front row is this lovely tall woman, big-boned, big-fleshed, generously featured, who wears on one bare shoulder a parrot that matches the iridescent green ribbon wound through the strong black braid of her hair. Mr. Potatohead plays to her a little, sidling up, sidling back, rolling his eyes to the bottom of their sockets to draw her into the field of his sight. He pulls a bluebird’s egg from her ear while keeping his fingers well clear of the parrot—they bite. When the show’s over she flashes him a marvelous smile and strolls off without giving any money. Her mouth is red from kissing, not lipstick. Mr. Potatohead doesn’t care.
His hat is a parti-colored thing with a long bill, which rides in his back pocket, never on his head. Extending the hollow crown of it, he quarters his circle, magicking the money as it falls. Coins walk across the back of his hands, great handfuls of them come corkscrewing in and out of the hat, twisted, involuted, spiraling like strands of DNA. There’s some folding money, not a whole lot. When the crowd has thinned, he fades out with it, no matter if it’s early. Got to knock off early today; it’s imperative he be drunk before five o’clock.
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