I parked my take-out coffee next to a vacant computer terminal and sat down, back to the window. We had a cinder-brick air shaft view: the quality of light made it seem like the asshole of February, year-round.
Yong Sun was running the credit-card batch while Yumiko and Karen typed away with phones to their ears.
I booted up my PC and took a sip of coffee, waiting for the third line to ring. The cool part of the job was talking to customers. We had a direct hookup with Baker & Taylor’s warehouses in New Jersey and Illinois—wholesalers with instant access to virtually any book in print.
People called from Tucson, Fargo, Bakersfield, Anchorage. They faxed orders from Buenos Aires and Paris and Guam. They sought lost favorite volumes to share with their children. They yearned for obscure absurdist novels, slender poetry collections, meaty anthologies. They thirsted for noir and space opera and Zane Grey, Aeschylus and
Kipling and Hollywood Babylon. They wanted to tie knots and grow roses and build wooden dinghies, to mend fences and marriages and classic muscle cars.
The phone rang at last. I punched the blinking button for line
three and picked up. “Good morning, this is the Catalog, how may I help you?”
At the end of my shift a few hours later, I found Pagan lying sideways on the front-office carpet. She was surrounded by leaning towers of paper trays, her head and arms shoved into the guts of our Xerox machine.
“Fucking jammed again,” she said, pushing herself back out. “Not like it matters, since we’re out of fucking toner.”
The only indication that it was probably ninety degrees and muggy out on West Fifty-seventh by now was the dark tan of Pague’s legs, unbroken from her flip-flops to the hem of her raggedy shorts.
You want people to wear stockings and shit, you’ve gotta pay way more than six bucks an hour.
Pagan slotted all the trays back into the machine and tried to push its door closed, but the catch was blown so it took two slams with the side of her fist to make it stay shut.
“Espece de merde,” she muttered. “Ma che cazzo fai.”
I leaned against the edge of the reception desk. “So get Tracy to make the Granta Bitches let us use theirs.”
“She’s stuck in Geoffrey’s office with Betty, going over edits for the Fall Bulletin.”
“O joy, O rapture.”
Betty was the ex-wife of Julian, the owner, and had retained enough post-divorce cred to march down from the Review and slap us around whenever she felt like it. On bad days that was pretty much hourly.
A door crashed open against Sheetrock, down the short hallway toward Editorial.
I could hear Betty doing her usual screech-ranting-banshee number: all “congenital idiocy” and “how- dare-you-fuck-with-me-like-this,” and blah blah psycho-bipolar-hosebeast blah.
Pague and I flinched at the noise of a sudden crack-splash explosion: Crockery v. Wall.
“Fucking Betty,” said my sister. “She made me bring her that coffee. In my mug from home.”
“Bitch throws like a champ, though. Especially considering she’s missing an arm.”
“Don’t be evil,” said Pagan.
“Compared to Betty?”
“You want to be like her when you grow up?”
She narrowed her eyes at me, hands on her hips. No one can shame me like Pagan. Especially when she’s right.
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
“Go tell the Granta Bitches I need to make copies. I don’t want to extend Betty’s psychotic break du jour.”
I checked my watch. “Can’t. Late for the cemetery.”
“Chickenshit.”
“What if I interrupt some Granta-Bitch Kill-Toddlers-for-Satan fest?” I asked. “They’ll go for my throat like a pack of Dobermans.”
She rolled her eyes. “I can’t believe I’m related to you.”
“Them’s the breaks. Gotta run.”
5
I’d never thought of Jamaica as an actual place.
It had always been more transition than geography. Three stops out of Penn Station and you alighted briefly at this celestial concrete expanse carpeted all Jackson Pollock with discarded Kool butts and soda-can tabs and matte-black ovals of chewing gum—a stretch of nowhere to be raced across when exchanging your sleek city train for the big-shouldered cars of the Oyster Bay Line.
I had nothing against Queens, per se, it was just that if you were raised in the milieu I had been, you were reminded of the borough beneath this platform maybe once a year, if that often.
It might happen on your way to the airport, or when a member of your party dismissively remarked upon the “bridge-and-tunnel crowd” still pressed up hopeful against the velvet ropes while a nightclub’s bouncer ushered all of you inside that particular season’s haute meat-market Nirvana (and please understand that such inclusion had always made me feel slightly ashamed and unworthy—whether I’d been granted entrée to Studio or Regine’s aged fifteen, Area or Pyramid at twenty—since I can’t dance for shit and besides which never had the price of so much as a draft domestic beer in my pocket, even if I was on somebody’s guest list and didn’t have to pay the cover).
With all of the above in mind on this particular September afternoon, I ventured down Jamaica Station’s cast-iron staircases to street level for the very first time.
I consulted my rough sketch of map every few blocks, walking on through a crowded terra incognita of bodegas and boombox stores, newsstands and fruit vendors, feeling very much like the only white chick for miles.
The day had grown hot: air rank with diesel fumes and curry, melting asphalt and the chicken-soup funk of humanity, not to mention the occasional sweet-sour belt of Dumpster leakage wafting out from restaurant alleyways.
I trudged onward, the sidewalk crowds thinning, the stores fewer and farther between, until I finally turned into a cratered dead-end block in the shadow of some elevated subway tracks. A wall of vines ran down one side of this lane, the occasional snatch of ornate rusted fence peeking out from beneath the leaves.
I spotted a gate sagging open next to a small Romanesque building of golden stone. Its low roof-pitch was more suggestive of synagogue than chapel, and its rose windows were shattered.
I looked across maybe a quarter-acre of cleared lawn inside the gate. There were crooked gravestones poking forth from the hacked weed stubble and a dozen brush-filled black garbage bags lined up at the head of a trail leading into the lot’s still-riotous green interior.
I followed the narrow path into a jungle of nettles and vines, towering three times my height in some places.
“Cate?” I called. “It’s Madeline….”
I heard soft laughter ahead.
“Cate?”
I found her around the first bend of trail through the brush, with a gaggle of chattering teenaged kids bearing hedge clippers and
machetes.
My newfound cousin swiped an arm across her forehead, then spotted me and waved.
“This is Madeline,” she said, rattling off the names of her crew.
It was cooler in the shade, but my face had started pouring sweat now that I’d stopped moving. I took a bandanna out of my pocket and folded it narrow to tie around my forehead, Deadhead style.
“There’s a big jug of ice water in the chapel,” Cate said. “Let’s grab some before I put you to work.”
I blinked when we came back out into the glare, following her past an enclosed rectangle of headstones, its shin-high rails held aloft by a squat granite obelisk at each corner.
“Was everything that overgrown when you started?” I asked, looking back at the cool wall of green behind us.
“Solid vegetable matter,” she said. “It’s taken us the whole summer to get this much cleared. The final burial was in nineteen fifty-four—I suspect that’s the last time anyone tried weeding.”
At the chapel door Cate fished a big wad of keys from her pocket and started sorting through them.
I l
ooked above the iron fence as an elevated train screeched by along its Great-Wall course of tired concrete.
Kate fitted a key into the padlock, popping it open with a rough twist.
“It must have been beautiful. The whole city,” I said, “before there was any city.”
“You’d have been able to see all the way down to the water from here. The old villagers picked a magnificent place in which to honor their dead.”
Impossible to picture: no buildings or asphalt, just foot trails winding through beach plum and shadbush beneath Long Island’s great green canopy, connecting sparkling ponds and white beaches, cornfields and oyster beds, wildflower meadows and beaver dams.
We entered the shade inside the chapel, our steps echoing back from its stone walls and floor. Cate poured out two Dixie cups of cold water and handed one to me.
“We just found a headstone the kids are excited about,” said Cate. “One of the slave graves.”
I told her I’d like to see it too, and we put our cups in a trash bag and headed back outside.
Cate started walking toward the thicker growth and I followed, Indian file, behind her.
Stones peeked out of thinner brush near the trail, markers for loads of people to whom Cate and I were related: Townsends and Ludlams, Seamans and Underhills.
Beyond that were old New York names I knew only from street signs and arboretums: Lefferts, Wyckoffs, Boerums.
I paused next at the grave of one Elias Baylis:
For his love of liberty he fell a victim to British cruelty and tho’ blind was imprisoned in New York in Sep. 1776 and was released only in time to breathe his last in the arms of his daughter while crossing the Brooklyn ferry. During his confinement he was accustomed to sing the 142nd Psalm.
Near that was a smaller, cruder stone, on which was written, Our Babie. The two words were so uneven and faint that I pictured a young father incising each letter with his own tools, unable to afford the local gravesmith.
Cate was a few yards ahead. I caught up and we stepped over a pile of vines and a tree’s knuckled roots.
She pointed to a white marble headstone centered in the dell beyond, its surface jaded with moss:
Jane Lyons, a colored woman, who upwards of 65 years was a faithful and devoted domestic in the family of James Hariman, Sr. of this village, died Dec. 19, 1858. Age 75 years
I touched the numerals commemorating her year of death.
“When was slavery abolished in New York, anyway?” I asked.
“Eighteen twenty-seven,” answered Cate.
“So they owned her first, and then she stayed on.”
“Where else could she have gone?”
I knew better than to think all slave-holding guilt fell on my southern brethren—that our racial history was a sweet Underground-
Railroad rosebed of “Kumbaya” singalongs with Harriet Tubman waving the conductor’s baton—but I hadn’t realized it was a mere three decades before Lincoln that Abolition prevailed in my home state.
“At least they had the decency to record her name,” I said. “The ones in our cemetery just have blank leaves of slate shoved into the grass—head and foot. Like all that mattered was making sure you didn’t dig up a slave by accident.”
It made me want to walk up to random black people on the street and apologize.
“Let me get to work,” I said.
Cate led me back up the trail and gave me clippers and a machete.
“There are definitely a few homeless people camping at night in the densest parts,” she said, handing me a pair of work gloves, “so look out for that. We try to leave their stuff where we find it.”
“Okay.”
We started hacking away in separate directions. The dense air around me was soon astringent with the green perfume of sliced grass and the sharp tang of nettle sap.
By the time I’d filled two bags I’d cut into a private lane of tunnel, with no line of sight back to Cate.
My bandanna felt hot and wet against my forehead. I shook off Cate’s heavy gloves so I could flip it over to the dry side, then leaned down to pick up a bent tin can and several brown shards of beer bottle with my bare hands.
From that angle I could just make out the edge of another moss-green headstone through the scrim of leaves.
One machete swipe cleared enough space to crawl forward so I could read the stone’s inscription, but I shoved over hard into the wall of vines beside me when I realized I’d been about to place my hand on the belly of a bloated dead rat.
I twisted my head away from the sight of its greasy fur seething with ants.
That’s when I saw the skull.
6
For just a second I thought I was looking at an ostrich egg, a buttery off-white oval dappled with shifting spangles of green-gold light.
Not egg, bone.
Had someone dug up this forgotten grave? No. The ground was flat, the brown carpet of jungle detritus thick and even beneath the skull.
I crawled in farther, cringing when my hand plunged into something warm and wet—a pocket of rainwater trapped in the folds of a plastic grocery sack.
The rat had given off a whiff of decay but back here the air was sweet with damp earth, an autumnal top note of composting leaves.
From this new angle I could make out the skull’s sharp cheekbone and the hinge of its jaw. I dropped to my elbows, soldier-crawling beneath the thicket’s low edge until I could look at the face straight on.
Its eye sockets were huge as a Disney fawn’s, its seed-pearl teeth tiny and perfect.
A child, then.
In the gloom beneath more tangled foliage, I could make out a delicate birdcage of ribs, smashed in at the solar plexus.
I scrabbled backwards into the hot daylight, yelling for Cate.
* * *
Cate dispatched two kids to go call the police.
She and I edged a few feet away from the group so we could talk without freaking anyone out.
“You’re shaking,” she said.
“I shouldn’t have gone into the bushes that far. What if there was any trace evidence? I wasn’t thinking straight.”
Cate’s voice was gentle. “How could you have known that?”
“Well it’s a graveyard, right? I mean, if you see something that looks like a piece of bone it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility that it might actually be a piece of bone.”
“And you’re sure it was a child?”
I nodded, realizing how little else we could divine from skeletal remains in the absence of a pathologist’s sad wisdom: no name, no race, no gender.
The tiny being in whose flesh those bones once resided had been rendered invisible.
The child wouldn’t have come up higher than my hip standing on tiptoes. Two years old or three or four—entirely too small to be let out of doors alone, much less to have gotten over this spiked iron fence without help, considering Cate’s stout locks on the gate.
What toddler would have braved crawling into the depths of this place, even in the wake of an older sibling?
City kids know that any overgrown lot was guaranteed to be teeming with vermin: feral dogs, rats the size of badgers with bent yellow six-penny nails for teeth.
And any stretch of ground this big was likely to harbor equally feral people. City kids would know that, too.
So how had such tiny bones arrived at the green-black heart of this pocket wilderness?
I wanted to believe the child had been laid to rest here centuries ago, and that everything else had grown up around it the way briars snaked out of the ground to protect Sleeping Beauty and her dreaming courtiers.
But then I thought of those shattered ribs. Murder was a far more likely scenario. Had the child been killed here?
This was an ideal spot for such darkness: far enough away from the crowded local sidewalks for anyone to hear cries of pain or fear. Even those who camped in these very bushes might not hear a child’s voice against the noise of the trains ru
shing by every few minutes.
But it was also the perfect place to bring a corpse for disposal if one had committed murder elsewhere. A body that small would’ve fit in a PBS-donor tote bag.
I heard sirens in the distance, growing loud enough to drown out everything else as patrol cars pulled into the tiny dead-end road beside us, one after another.
The noise died out and I heard several car doors open, then the racket of hard-soled cop shoes on the broken asphalt.
A bunch of young guys in blue uniforms pushed through the gate, then headed straight for us.
7
One of the patrol guys came over to keep an eye on all of us sitting on the lawn. His name tag identified him as Officer Albie, but he seemed uncomfortable with the formality and told us to call him Fergus.
His compatriots, in consultation with Cate, started running yellow plastic marker tape around and through the bushes to keep anyone from stumbling into the child’s bones and corrupting their resting place any more than I had.
The kids in our group started getting restless, saying they needed to get home and do chores or schoolwork or take care of younger siblings, or even just run across the street to use the pay phone to tell their families where they were and what was taking so long. The young officer did his best to keep everybody calm and seated, asking the kids to “just simmer down, there” until the arrival of the detectives and whoever else would be needed to check out the whole burgeoning circus officially.
I was pretty out of it in the aftermath of discovering the tiny set of bones, but I still felt for the guy. He looked like he’d graduated himself about two weeks earlier, and high-school kids are about as easy to corral as a bunch of amphetamine-pumped ferrets dipped in Crisco, especially when there’s major drama in the offing.
The kids peppered him with questions and demands and objections in between shoving each other and laughing. His voice strained for increasing volume as he struggled to keep a lid on things. Ten minutes in, the guy’s hands had achieved an emphatically Sicilian range of motion.
Invisible Boy Page 3