The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

“Well, he’s not feeling well,” the voice told him. “He had a headache. He went to bed early. Not that it’s early anymore.”

  How could he help but feel deserted? He thought about mentioning that he was the guy Chris had wanted to have over for a threeway sometime, but decided not to. No telling what Chris had really told his doctor friend.

  “Do you want to leave a message?” the voice asked.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “It’s nothing too urgent.”

  “Well,” the voice said. “Next time don’t call so late. Jesus. I was sound asleep. Made me jump out of my skin.”

  “Sorry,” Noah said again. He knew it wasn’t Chris’s fault, but he felt a sudden spike of annoyance. Despite his bravado, he secretly wished he hadn’t gotten that tattoo, that he hadn’t let Chris sweep him along. Chris didn’t do gym; he didn’t have a roommate or shower with the others; he didn’t have to remember to put a Band-Aid over the tattoo so Tim or Gary or Kevin wouldn’t ask inconvenient questions. Mostly Noah was just pissed at himself for not having thought all that stuff through beforehand, and now he was stuck with it, the story of his life. But he was pissed with Tracy Parker as well.

  They could have been so great together, the two of them. “Let’s get out of here,” Tracy had said that bright winter’s morning, and just like that they’d gone, driving off into the great unknown like the adventurers they really were. It had seemed, in fact, there was nothing in the whole country that could stop them, sea to shining sea. And then that little town, the motel, the feeling that finally what he’d dreamed had come true after all: he really did have Tracy Parker all to himself. What fun that had been, what a long fantastic joyride with another warm, breathing, hugely responsive human body. And in the midst of all that, was it possible, just once or twice or so, that their souls had touched as well?

  Then why, all of a sudden, had Tracy gone weird on him? I can keep a secret, he thought angrily. I keep lots of secrets if that’s what you’re so worried about. But he knew, with a squeamish feeling that settled around his heart, that keeping a secret wasn’t anything like the real problem, because the real problem was the same problem that had been there all along. Nobody was strong enough or brave enough or smart enough. They had all these amazing chances in front of them and they just let them go. One night at Tracy’s they’d stood out on the front lawn and gazed at the stars. Why they’d done that, he couldn’t remember. But the night had been so cold and clear, and the stars so icy and and perfect, and Tracy had said, “There’s no end to it. That’s the thing I just can’t get my mind around. It goes on forever and then some more. Think about it.” And he did think about it, though it was spooky to contemplate. Space and space and space. And there they were, standing there, just about as infinitesmal as the universe was infinite, and why the fuck should you care about anything when your insignificance was so incredible, but the thing was you did care, in spite of it all, and that was the thing, he thought, that could really fucking break your heart.

  Maybe it was just the cold, but his eyes stung as if tears had forced their way out. He wiped the back of his hand across his face and realized that, in the oblivious fury of his thinking, he and Betsy had wandered all the way to Central Park. They stood at the busy corner where the Plaza Hotel blazed its lights amid the flags of the world, each flag—this was what his dad had told him once—representing the nationality of someone who was staying at the hotel that night.

  So many times he’d stood on his dad’s balcony and gazed out over the mysterious park at night, but never had he ventured into its wilderness so late. A cold wind seemed to blow down from Harlem, though it was warmer here in the city than in Middle Forge, and the snow, still a foot high up there, had disappeared entirely from the city’s streets. Crossing Fifty-ninth, he and Betsy entered the park’s shadows. Alert, excited, she led him. He wondered, Was she was as cold as he was? Was she thirsty or hungry? Was he tormenting her, or was this all a great adventure?

  He knelt for a moment to cup her wet, frigid nose in his hands. “I’m sorry, girl,” he told her. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. And I need a friend.” In the air before him his breath coalesced like the balloons in comic strips that hold the words. Betsy stared at him soulfully; she wagged her tail. In a comic book, she would have a question mark above her head. How he wished he could take back that impulse that had sent him fleeing into the night—but Tracy had turned his back on him, and he had his pride, that stupid potent Lathrop pride no amount of betrayal could wash his system clean of.

  Up ahead was the little zoo, where he sometimes came on dull afternoons to watch the shy arctic fox caged with—and seemingly terrified of—the great sea lions who sent frothing waves up onto the gravel shore where the little fox waited forlornly, day after day—for what? Or the solitary monkey who regularly sat exiled from his brothers on the farthest stone in a series of stones that trailed into the pond that surrounded monkey island. From his childhood a schoolyard litany long forgotten came back to him: The freaks come out at night. In the fifth grade he and his classmates had repeated that line to one another, sniggering as if they knew what it meant, and they had known what it meant. It had been a warning they voiced to one another: stay away from that shit. Stay away from lonely streets. Don’t go into the park after dark. Once a freak puts his hands on you you’ll never stop. It was the same litany he heard in his dorm room night after night as Tim and Kevin and especially Gary Marks tried to keep the Fatwa inside themselves at bay.

  Here and there a figure, bandaged from head to toe in filthy blankets or folded cardboard, lay on a bench, sometimes under a bench, those zombie creatures that seemed to wash up on New York sidewalks from out of nowhere. He picked his way among them carefully, the homeless, remembering how he’d thought, when he slipped into bed with Tracy New Year’s Eve—Finally! As if he really had arrived somewhere at last, a home, a refuge. But there was no finally—that’s what he was finding out; you got to a place you really wanted to be, and no sooner were you there than you had to move on.

  So he was moving on, even if he had no idea where he was going.

  Like gray whales, huge boulders broke the undulating lawn. On this stone or that, if not here then elsewhere, some other woods, he had lain in the warm sun waiting for someone to come. For Liam to put his hands inside him. For a man like Tracy Parker to love him.

  It hadn’t happened. Not even after all those years it hadn’t happened. The Tracy Parker he’d thought would fold him close and hold him tight turned out to be as skittish as those bright blue dragonflies that had danced around him as he lay waiting.

  In all the low places of the park, water gathered into frozen lakes and ponds. Past the shuttered boathouse, its boats in storage for the winter, he entered wilder terrain. Here brush had been allowed to grow up, fallen trees had not been removed. From the asphalt path that climbed steeply up a hill, worn dirt trails led off in every direction. Lampposts grew scarcer; on all sides a tangle of shadows thronged. It was wilderness untouched, the secret heart of the city that the wall of bright towers to the south and east and west was meant to contain.

  Out of the shadows a man approached. He stopped several paces away and stood looking hungrily at Noah, as if not quite trusting his eyes. All he sees is a boy, Noah told himself. That’s all I am to him, a boy. And he felt the cruel, merciless power of that simple fact.

  I don’t have to do any more than look at you and you’re mine, he thought exultantly. Had he known that about Tracy Parker from the beginning? Had he merely been flexing his muscles when he brought his teacher to his knees?

  But no, he cried to himself, it had been love. Tracy Parker had been his first and only love ever since he walked into English II that sweltering day in September and flashed his melting smile—for Noah alone, or so it had seemed, incredibly, at the time.

  The man’s tone was edgy, sarcastic. “So what’s a sweet twink like you doing, wandering around a place like this? And what’s with the beagle? Or am I ju
st way off the mark here?”

  “I don’t know about the dog,” Noah mumbled, hating now that he’d been spoken to. He felt stupid, trailing Betsy on her leash.

  The man looked him up and down. He wasn’t that old—only a little older, probably, than Tracy Parker. Underneath his black wool overcoat he wore a business suit, but he seemed at the same time disheveled, hectic, as if he’d been crying, or drunk. His face was chiseled and, in its way, handsome, a face that could sell clothes or liquor in a magazine. “Don’t tell me you trained her to sniff the Johns out,” the man said, seeming to find it very funny. “Don’t tell me you bring your sex-sniffing dog to the Ramble. That beats all. That’s just fucking great.”

  “Forget about the dog,” Noah said.

  It sent the man off into another prolonged fit of laughing.

  “Hey, I’m serious,” Noah told him.

  “About what?”

  But he didn’t know. He shrugged. He hadn’t come here to meet some stranger. He’d come here because—well, he had no reason except the panic he felt at the thought that he was, at the moment, totally alone, and if this man, who just might be crazy, decided to kill him he’d vanish off the face of the earth. It happened in New York all the time, kids sawed up, their body parts dumped in the East River or kept in freezers in the apartments of lonely lunatic men.

  But what if this stranger with the brittle laugh wasn’t crazy? What if he was just another Tracy Parker who had the good luck to live in a great anonymous city where nobody scrutinized your every move, where nobody cared what you did?

  “Want to see something?” Noah said to the man who, even in his overcoat, looked like he was freezing. “I got something to show you.”

  With a peremptory nod, he motioned for the man to follow him. He walked toward a street lamp that cast its circle of light on the path, but when he looked back his catch had not moved. The man shook his head. He pointed toward the bushes, the shadows. Noah stood firm. “Sit,” he commanded Betsy, and she sat, loyally looking up at him, content like no one else in the world to be by his side. Noah took off his jacket and laid it on the bench. Then he pushed up the sleeve of his shirt as far as it would go.

  “Come here,” he coaxed. “Take a look.”

  Curiosity had gotten the better of his prey. The man joined him, squinting at the arm he offered for inspection.

  “There,” Noah said, pointing to the tattoo.

  The man reached out to steady Noah’s arm for a better look. “So?” he said at last, holding his arm in an icy grip. “Do you think I care? I’m a wolf. I’ll do anything. I’ll fuck your brains out if that’s what you want. I’ll come inside you if that’s what turns you on. How about it?”

  He hadn’t seen the wolf, but now he glimpsed the grinning teeth, the hunger rooted deep in the bone. This wasn’t Tracy Parker. It wasn’t even his dad.

  “No,” Noah cried out, twisting his arm free of the man’s death grip. “Leave me alone.”

  The man laughed and laughed. Noah ran. Icy air tore at his throat, his lungs. His eyes stung. The pavement was hard and unyielding beneath the cold soles of his feet. He ran, and Betsy should have been running too, running by his side, her leash trailing her, but she wasn’t; she was running but in another direction, set free in this forest in the middle of the city, wild with her own excitement or fear. He stopped, breathing hard, and looked around. She was nowhere. “Betsy!” he shouted, firm and commanding, but there was nothing. “Betsy!” he cried again, and then again, his voice rising in panic.

  “Hey!” the man shouted. He had not moved; he stood, no longer terrible, a small, lit figure where the path curved into the dark. “Your dog went that way,” he shouted and pointed.

  Forsaking the path, Noah cut through the bushes. Bare branches whipped at his face. The thick rope of a root caught his foot. “Betsy!” he cried. “Here, Betsy! Come here. Please.”

  But by now he himself was lost, and she could be anywhere. Occasionally, at the Forge, he’d let her off the leash so she could run, and she’d taken off like a shot. The first time it happened—that first weekend he’d house-sat for Tracy—he’d spent several anxious minutes before she came loping back with a silly, satisfied grin on her beagly face. She was good about coming back. If he hadn’t lost his head, if he’d just stayed where he was, she’d be at his side by now, panting excitedly, nuzzling his calves with her nose. But he’d made a bad situation even worse. Now there was nowhere to come back to. He doubled back as best he could, reemerging onto a path, but was it the same one? He couldn’t tell. He hadn’t noticed that figure sleeping in the cardboard box before. And the man with the laugh, the wolf who wanted him, had either walked on or simply vanished.

  His coat lay where he had left it on the bench. So this was the place. Wrapping himself in its meager warmth, he sat down to wait. It seemed impossible, what had just happened, but there was always, he’d learned, that sense of disbelief, as if you could return to an instant before the fire leaped out of control or you lost your footing and began to fall. He’d spent a life trying desperately to burrow into those moments, to avert the consequences, but always it was already too late for that, already the accident had begun to happen and he was inescapably inside it.

  How long did he sit there? From Manhattan’s upper reaches came the steady, echoing roar of traffic, hardly diminished even now. New York was never, ever quiet. He hated that; loved the stillness of the Forge’s night where only legitimate creatures stirred in the forest. He could barely feel his toes inside his boots, the tip of his nose, his cheeks. He was so cold the breath from his lungs no longer condensed in the air before him. Slowly he was turning to ice. They would find him frozen solid. With a pickax they’d shatter him to bits, disperse his body at random. They, whoever they were.

  A policeman—could it be?—was walking his way. He found that very surprising. Almost ludicrous, in fact. A policeman in the middle of the night.

  He spoke first, before the officer was even upon him.

  “Have you seen my dog?” he said. “I lost my dog.”

  The policeman frowned. In the dark, his uniform looked pitch black. He was a husky young man with a mustache. Like any carpenter or telephone repairman, he wore the tools of his trade heavily on his belt. One hand clasped the I nob of his nightstick, the other a radio.

  “It’s awfully late for you to be out like this, don’t you think?”

  “My dog ran away,” Noah said.

  “You got some ID on you?”

  Noah nodded. He pulled his wallet from his pocket and found his Forge School student ID. While the policeman studied the ID, Noah picked up the scrap of paper that had fluttered from his wallet: the Fatwa’s phone number. If only, he thought. But there were too many if-onlys. If only he had never met Tracy Parker, if only he’d never come to the Forge in the first place, if only he’d never been born.

  “Where are you supposed to be right now, Noah? It’s three o’clock in the morning, you know.”

  He hadn’t known, and somehow felt disappointed it wasn’t later. He’d figured it should be near dawn. His vigil, far from being nearly over, was only beginning.

  “I live right up on Fifth. In the seventies. My dad’s Noah Lathrop, if that means anything to you.”

  “Actually,” said the policeman, “it doesn’t. Now tell me again what you’re doing here.”

  “I came down here to walk my dog and she ran away. Like I told you. I’m waiting for her to come back.” Noah hated policemen; he hated everything they stood for—everything that had scared Tracy off from him.

  “What kind of dog?” the policeman asked.

  “Just a beagle. A little beagle.”

  “And how long you been waiting here?”

  “I don’t know. A while.”

  The policeman made a grimace. He wrote in his notebook. “I don’t like the looks of this,” he ventured. “I don’t see any evidence of a dog around here. Was she on a leash?”

  Noah nodded bleakly. “She ra
n off with the leash still on.”

  “Does she have a collar? Any ID?”

  Again Noah nodded, though he wasn’t one hundred percent sure about the ID. There had been a couple of metal tags jingling from Betsy’s collar but he’d never looked at them; just one more thing he should have done. Like a sharp pain the fact that she was lost because of him bore in on him.

  “This is not a good place for you to be at this hour,” said the policeman as he handed back Noah’s ID card. “I’m going to have to ask you to go on home. Your parents must be worried. But I’ll tell you what. I’ll keep an eye out. Then, first thing tomorrow, come back and put some signs up. A beagle. That shouldn’t be too hard to find. She’ll turn up. Why don’t you tell your doorman to be on the lookout? Dogs’re smarter than you might think. Sometimes they know to head back to their owner’s building. We’ll call you if we find anything. Okay? I just don’t want you sitting here any longer. You look like you’re freezing.”

  “I’m going to sit here just a little longer and wait,” Noah said.

  “No,” the policeman told him, “no, you’re not. You’re going to get yourself home. Now I don’t want to see you out here again. Understand? You’ll be in trouble if I find you still out here.”

  What could he do? Certainly not curl up on the bench in resistance. That trick wouldn’t work out here. He thought about telling the cop he’d set a fire in the woods. On purpose. Arson. That he’d tried to burn his dad’s house down. Or had he? Did he only wish he had had the courage to have done that? It sure would have made Noah Senior sit up and take note.

  “Please find my dog,” he said. “Her name’s Betsy.” Saying her name made hot tears stream from his eyes.

  With a heavy, heavy heart he stepped uneasily from the elevator into the apartment. Dawn’s bleary light illuminated the aftermath of a long evening. Half-empty wineglasses and overflowing ashtrays decorated various flat surfaces. The big mirror had been taken down and laid across the coffee table. Catching his reflection through smears of white powder, he was shocked by how tired and red-eyed he looked.