by Barry, Mike
After four or five days, he got sick of reading the papers and found himself ready to forage on the streets again. Nothing would ever change, that was for sure. Williams, the Williams of the beginning, before he had been knifed outside the methadone clinic, had been telling him the truth after all. The system was not about to change, it was going to go on the way that it always had; all that you could try to do was to hang loose and get your own. Give up any idea that you could make a difference. Go for the split-level or the two-family house in St. Albans, build your walls around yourself, go for the good twenty and pension at half-pay, and get the hell out, Williams had said. Well, maybe he was right.
Still, he wasn’t quite ready to give up yet. Close to it but not just yet. Wulff had a few last ideas of his own; you couldn’t start at the beginning, no way, but maybe you could get back to the roots just to see if you had done a thorough job, to do a little extra trimming and weeding around before standing back and admiring the finished construction. That was about what he was after now. There was no way to repeat his odyssey. But he could check back, take a craftsman’s view of his work.
He went back to Harlem. First cruising the streets casually in a cab, saying nothing to the puzzled, nervous cabbie, just looking over the blocks as he had remembered them: Lenox, St. Nicholas, 125th Street, Lexington, Park. And then when he had decided that the terrain looked pretty much the same, he decided to dig in a little bit deeper.
Just to see how close he could get to the heart of the flame and still feel his own breath.
II
Animal said, “Get that white motherfucker.”
The Dude followed Animal’s point, looked down the street to see the guy coming toward them slowly, looking from right to left, shrugging his way toward them in a curiously graceful series of leaps, really good moves for a white man, and said, “The hell with it. You want him? You get him.” He tapped his devil-head ring on the steering wheel.
“Fuck that shit, man,” Animal said, almost pleading already. “I can’t do it myself, you know that. Anyway, it’s your turn. You get him.”
They were sitting in the front seat of the Dude’s 1971 Electra 225, custom kit, snow-white tires, rising fist for a hood ornament, trading a pint bottle of Thunderbird, just sipping a little, sliding with the wine, not so much trying to get drunk as just cement the good high that they had gotten from the Animal’s very good stash about three-quarters of an hour ago in the building right across from them, which from the front appeared to be abandoned. The Dude got a laugh out of that, the patrol cars coming through five, six times a day, looking at that boarded-up storefront and checking it off as just another ruined piece of Harlem. Actually the joint was jumping. There was more action behind those fake boards than there was in the Apollo Theater at midnight; in back of those fake boards was a hidden entrance and another entrance over to the side that most of those in the know used. On the ground floor they were selling it outright; there was a nice, clean, dark basement for shooting, and on the upper levels there were even supposed to be women if you had the ambition after a veinful of that good stuff to go up and get yourself laid. The Dude had heard that that was about the best there was, fucking a woman on a horse-high, but it sure as hell wasn’t for him. He could barely get up the energy after a horse high to sit behind the wheel of the Electra, tap the wheel and dream. Animal, on the other hand, became manic, wanted to get started right away on all those plans that he was dreaming up by the minute, giggling away. The stupid fuck. Still, what the hell, live and let live. It took all kinds to get along, took all ways to enjoy a horse-high, too, and if Animal wanted to react this way, the hell with him. He, the Dude, would just tap the wheel and dream, sing to the teddy bears dangling from chains in the custom kit, and get along. The trouble was that Animal was hustling him. He didn’t have that old give-and-get-dead philosophy; he crawled up and down your ass. Insect-like. Someday, the Dude thought, someday soon, like maybe right after the down, he would have to straighten out Animal. Dragging. Dragass.
“Get the motherfucker,” Animal said again and shifted position in the car, holding himself easily, nudging the Dude in the ribs with an elbow, and all of a sudden Dude felt himself build into a real sweat and rage, sitting right there in the car with Animal, listening to the guy rapping on him, some game of the soul that Animal was playing with him. “Shit, man,” the Dude said, “you get him,” looking at the tall white guy poking his way down the street easy as you please, quick glance at the trash cans, peek into an alley, finger rubbing behind his ear, free hand jammed in his pocket. Looked like he was just rambling through the territory, that was how he looked. “Son of a bitch,” the Dude said, trying to get his point across, “what’s this wasting him? The guy might be a narc, for one thing.” Or one of the special attack force on drugs, the governor’s shit, he thought. Hell, they were in enough trouble anyway.
“Waste him?” the Dude said, coming to a point of decision right then, feeling everything clicking into place like little wheels and tumblers getting together in his mind, “I’m not going to waste him, I’m going to get the fuck out of here.” He jiggled the keys in the ignition lock of the Electra, trying to get them through the ignition point. Everything moved much more slowly when you were high, seemed to be taking place under water. He could not, somehow, get the keys out of the lock position. He wrenched at the wheel, bringing his right knee up to brace against the shock, trying to tear the thing into gear.
Animal’s hand was suddenly on his, the fingers almost caressing the back of his own hand, a curious intimacy in the gesture that made the Dude realize something: he had never liked Animal. They had taken highs together, they had swung a little bit, but that didn’t mean that he had to like the man. And to tell the truth of it, he did not; the Animal was crazy in a dark way, some fascination with death in the man, here he was looking at this white fucker dragging ass down the street and thinking about wasting him and that was not just sensible, no sense to it at all, hard high or not you just did not go around thinking about wasting people on sight. “Let’s go,” the Dude said, talking less to the Animal than to his fingers, “let’s go, let’s go,” shouting, the keys finally driving through, and the starter of the Electra ground alive, but stupidly the weight of Animal’s elbow pressing on his right knee drove his foot all the way down into the accelerator, mashing it into the floorboards, and the car started with an enormous, surprised bellow, like a lion caught sleeping by gunfire, and then promptly stalled, the cylinders screaming as raw gas flooded them. Still, Animal would not release his elbow from the Dude’s knee, the Dude could not pull his leg off the damned gas pedal, and this position somehow struck the Animal as funny. He was very high, spitting, coughing, wrenching into laughter, and the Dude felt himself turning toward panic.
Horse-high always did it; you were supersensitive to lights, sounds, noise, heat, one minute floating easily, painlessly, above the whole motherfucking, gangbusting world, the next minute you were ditched, brought low, something in the air, some sound for which you had not accounted driving a nail through the pane of consciousness, and you were brought down again, plunged into the stinking, sinuous bowels of the earth itself where the real fucking was going on. This was where the Dude now found himself, some collaboration between the white man still walking, walking toward them and Animal’s crazed laughter bucked him all the way down. The car was an intestine; red, white, and black it writhed around him. Animal was some crazed devil of the bowels trapped within. And even as the Dude was telling himself to keep it down, keep quiet, lay low, it will pass, he was scrambling out of the car, wrenching himself away from the wheel and out into the street, standing, weaving dangerously, struck by some aspect of the sunlight. He had the feeling that he was being observed, that they were pouring out of the shooting gallery to watch him, that Animal himself was pulling himself along the seat hand-over-hand to get behind the wheel of the Electra, but his attention had narrowed to the white man himself, still walking, coming toward them, a
nd insight broke upon the Dude: the man was coming to get them. He had tracked them from 125th to the lot where the Electra was tucked, uptown to the shooting gallery, and now that they were happy and high with a few grains for extras still on them, he was going to bust them for possession. He was a narc. He had watched them for days, probably years, waiting, just waiting for the new drug laws to go into effect so that he could hook them in, and now he had them. Real shitfit, the Dude thought, I’m having a real shitfit … but there was no place to hide.
No place at all to go: he was naked, exposed upon the street, under observation from a hundred, two hundred people, and then, as if this were happening on some other street, a street with which he had no connection whatsoever, there was a roar, gunfire, the Dude thought, son of a bitch, that’s gunfire, and looking in that direction, leaning toward the right, he saw Animal holding out a low-caliber pistol, already into the second shot: where the hell had he gotten the pistol from? Well this did not matter, nothing mattered, the Dude urged his legs to run, get out of there, work it all out later, but his legs were gelatinous, nothing was happening there at all, and so he could only stay rooted in posture, then, locked in position. The gun Animal was holding went off for the third time, but the big white motherfucker, untouched by any of the shots, seemingly invulnerable, possibly immortal, suddenly went inside of himself for a gun of his own, and then as the Dude watched, unable to move, unable to locate that heart of desire that would enable him to confront the situation at all, the white motherfucker fired off his own pistol, and the Dude did not have to verify, did not have to look, did not have to swing his attention to the right to know the truth that had burst within his brain, the final inescapable truth of it, that the shot had hit Animal dead on, and that the Animal was croaking, choking, smoking, singing out his life on this damned street, his body suspended against the cushions of the Electra, and there was nothing whatsoever for him to do then but to watch this as the white man lifted his gun yet again and pumped the second, unnecessary shot into the corpse, staining and ribboning with blood the interior of the car.
They were everywhere. There was nothing you could do to stop them. They would follow you and follow you and then they would kill you off. Overcome by a spasm of weeping, the Dude fell into the sidewalk, then, screaming into the stones while everything went on outside him, and for all the impression that it made on him, he might have been on another world, and all these creatures were aliens.
Horse-high.
Teach him to fuck around with it.
III
“No,” Gianelli said, “don’t tell me I can’t do it. I want to get him.”
“Too risky,” Miller said. He was trying to be reasonable about this, trying to maintain his sense of balance, but fifteen minutes with Gianelli was half an hour in the ring with the heavyweight champion. He did not know if he could take the constant battering any more. “No, you can’t do it.”
“I’m going to do it,” Gianelli said. He squeezed his hands into, then against one another. “I want to and I know I can do it. I’m going to.” He showed Miller the .45 again. “With this,” he said, “I can handle anything: the heavy stuff, the light stuff, but this is right. I’m going to do it.”
Miller shook his head, stood, walked to the window. Hilton Hotel, seventeen stories up. There was a good view of Central Park from certain rooms here, he understood, but he wasn’t in that class. Transient trade; no credentials. “I don’t want you to do it,” he said. “In the first place, no one’s sure of where he is, and in the second—”
“He’s in New York,” Gianelli said. He was a pale, squat man in his sixties who claimed to have known the late Nicholas Calabrese from way back and to have once sworn a blood oath with him: if either was murdered, the other one would avenge that death. Of course, that had been a long time ago; Calabrese had gone one way, Miller another, Gianelli still a third. And Gianelli was in the worst position of all because Miller, who figured he knew everyone, did not know Gianelli. Hired muscle, he supposed, or on the fringes acting as a runner, but at sixty how much muscle, how much running, could a man do? Still, there was Gianelli back from the dead or from Kansas City, which was practically the same thing, swearing he could locate Burton Wulff and avenge the death of his old, great friend, Nicholas Calabrese. What was Miller supposed to do? It isn’t worth it, he thought: Calabrese’s death, what he left behind him, was sloppy enough; there was no reason why he should have to deal with loose ends like Gianelli as well. Still, the man was here: what was he supposed to do with him?
“How do you know he’s in New York,” he said.
“He’s got to be in New York,” Gianelli said, “I’ve figured this out, there’s nowhere else he could be. This is what he knows best, this is where his contacts all are, this is where he figures is the absolutely last place that anyone would be looking for him. He wouldn’t be anywhere else. And I know I can find him.”
“No one’s found him yet,” Miller said. “There are a thousand men looking for him.”
“That’s all right,” said Gianelli. He cocked and uncocked the .45, giving Miller the uneasy feeling that he was going to discharge it at any moment, then in a spasmodic gesture put it back in his pocket. “Listen,” Gianelli said, “I’m not asking for very much. Am I asking for a hell of a lot? Let me go out on my own, that’s all.”
“With a couple of men,” Miller said. “Don’t forget that; you’re asking for a couple of men. Otherwise you’re not asking for anything.” Except the impossible, he thought. He looked down the airshaft, seventeen stinking levels down into the polluted hole that New York had become. Sixth Avenue, Broadway, it was all garbage. They had torn the great city apart. “And what’s to say he’s in New York at all?”
“He’s in New York. I know he’s here. I know how that man thinks; I spent weeks just thinking about him, reading up, familiarizing myself. He’s uptown, probably around Harlem, and I can get him,” Gianelli said. “I want to get him very badly.”
“We all want to get him very badly.”
“I’ll do it. I’ll put him out of business.”
“It’s too late,” Miller said. “It’s too late to worry about that. I’m not in New York to deal with him, I know that. I’m trying to put this thing together again.”
“That’s right,” Gianelli said standing, going over to the window, standing shoulder-to-shoulder then with Miller, “you’re trying to put the whole thing together because he’s hurt all of you bad, he’s changed the whole setup, you’ve got to get reorganized straight from the top, find new routes, get hold of new supplies. You think I’m a fool? I know all that.”
“So don’t say it. Say nothing.”
“You’re afraid to send me out,” Miller said, “because you know that I can get him and I’ll show the rest of you up. I’ll show up your fifty-million-dollar organization for the fools and shits they are. One man, just one man with a gun and a couple behind him is going to deliver him in ribbons to your door. You wouldn’t like that, would you? It would make all of you look like shit. So you’ll send me back to the provinces, won’t you? That’s what I figure.”
Miller could not take that. There were certain things that you could take, were bound to, others that you could not if you were trying to run or as in this case, desperately hold together, an organization. He slapped Gianelli flatly across the mouth, a dull, hollow, single impact.
Gianelli took it, his face broadening under the impact, his eyes springing involuntary tears. Otherwise, he remained impassive.
“Don’t say that,” Miller said, “don’t you ever say that again.”
“I’m not here to talk,” Gianelli said, cautiously rubbing his cheek as if it were someone else’s; this is not happening to me, his eyes said, someone else, some phantom Gianelli stands in this room being slapped around, the real Gianelli is merely observing this from a far distance. He wouldn’t be any part of it. The real Gianelli would not undergo such humiliation. “I’m not here to talk,” he said agai
n, “I don’t want to talk. Are you going to let me go after him?”
“I don’t know,” Miller said, “it depends. Why don’t you give me your information and let us go after him?”