Way Past Legal

by Norman Green

  “How’s the bike coming?” Louis asked.

  Gevier glanced in the direction his daughter and my son had taken. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll show it to you.” He looked nervously in Edna’s direction again.

  “She give you a hahd time about it?” Louis asked him.

  “A hahd time? A hahd time? She’s making my life a living hell.” He looked at me. “When I got out of Thomaston Tech, nine yeahs and some ago, one condition of my parole was no motorcycles. I get done with probation in eight moah months. I told Edwina, eight moah months and I’m bohn again, my scoot will be ready befo-ah that and I’m going. She ought to be off in college by then, if she’s as smaht as they all say she is.” He puffed a little. “Couple of schools offered her a full scholarship, all’s she has to do is quit bitching and say yes to one of them.”

  “She don’t wanna go?”

  He shook his head. “Sweahs she ain’t going. Says she’ll stay right here and stahve to death when I leave. Trouble is, she’s just about stubborn enough to do it. C’mon, let me show you the bike.”

  It was in a workroom at the end of the building. I’ve never been into bikes, there’s enough ways to get killed in Brooklyn without looking for another one. Besides that, most of the bikes I’d seen were fancy, shiny, chromed fashion statements, usually owned by some orthodontist or lawyer doing the midlife crisis thing. Go get a bike, a tattoo, a leather vest, and a goatee. Give me a fucking break.

  Gevier surprised me again. It was an old Triumph, not a Harley. The frame was black, no chrome on it anywhere, the front end was raked out about a foot farther than normal, no front fender, no front brake that I could see. The carbs were over on a bench in pieces, and there was no exhaust.

  “You got the engine in her,” Louis said. “What comes next, the tank?”

  “I guess. I’m trying to stretch the job out, Louis. I could have her done in a weekend, but I’m afraid to.” He looked back down the hallway toward the main part of the building. He shook his head. “I got to get Edwina settled before I can go.”

  You never know what guys are going to get hooked on. “Would you really chuck everything and take off on that?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said, lowering his voice. “But don’t tell Edwina that or she’ll stay right heah until she’s a dried-out old prune. I don’t know what’s wrong with her. I suppose I never did understand her.” He shook his head. “Anyhow, I thought I might take a ride down to Daytona one time, though, and maybe out to Sturgis, though I hear they’re both getting pussified. Just to see if any of the guys I used to run with are still alive.”

  “Why don’t you just look for them on the Net?”

  “I ain’t on any goddam Net. I been trying to get less connected, not moah. Besides, it ain’t like I know any of their Christian names.” He grinned. “You were looking for a guy named Dog-Eating Duane, you ain’t gonna find him in the phone book.”

  “Dog-eating Duane?”

  “Hungry and broke will make you a desperate man.”

  “No doubt. What year is this thing?”

  “Engine’s a sixty-three. Frame is original, modified by me. Front end is a Hahley springah, unknown vintage. Rest of it come from heah and theyah.”

  “You really think you can get this thing to run?”

  “Had her running already, bettah than new.” He launched into a long speech about the virtues of English engineering and the shortcomings of English manufacturing. After a while he must have noticed my eyes rolling back in my head, and he stopped. “Well, Louis,” he said, “how are we gonna get yoah truck up to the garage? I could ride my bicycle up theyah and bring down the tow truck. . . .”

  Louis shook his head. “Don’t know that she’d survive a tow,” he said. “I was hoping you could bring your buzz box down heah and patch her together with some angle iron.”

  “Still have to ride the bicycle up to get the truck,” Gevier said.

  I took Hobart’s keys out of my pocket and tossed them to Louis. “Take the Subaru,” I told him.

  “Well, then,” Gevier said. “Let’s go take a look, see what we need.”

  “How come he calls you Edwina?”

  She was watching Nicky, who was sitting on the floor by her chair, paging through a picture book. “He’s trying to get me mad,” she said. She looked at me without expression. “He thinks if I get mad enough I’ll go off to school and leave him alone.”

  “Would that be a bad thing?”

  She gave me a little head bob and an openmouthed look of complete disbelief, like, How could you be such an ignorant jackass? “You saw him,” she said. “Can you imagine him living on his own?”

  “Looked way past twenty-one to me.”

  She had her mouth agape. “The man believes in astrology,” she said, staring at me. “He plants his garden at night, under a full moon. Next thing you know he’s going to be channeling Peter Fonda. I can’t just go off and leave him.”

  I noticed that she had almost no trace of a down east accent. “Fonda’s not dead yet.”

  “You think that matters?”

  “I think your father has every right to hide out in the woods and do his hermit routine if that’s what he wants, but it’s stupid for you to do it with him.”

  “Oh, what do you know about it? Who the hell asked you, anyway? Besides, what would you do if it was your father?”

  I looked down at Nicky, who looked lost in his book. I had no idea what he knew about where he came from, I didn’t know what the Bitch might have told him, and I didn’t know if he was listening, anyway. “I don’t know. I never met the man.”

  “Oh,” she said, surprised. She went on in a softer tone. “Your mother, then.”

  You think you’ve been through it all, felt everything there was to feel, you think you’re done with it, but I suppose you never are. All I could do was shake my head.

  “You didn’t know her, either? You’re an orphan?”

  I watched Nicky for a minute before I answered. He was looking at pictures of desert landscapes, fiery sunsets over sand and cactus. His mouth was open, and he was touching the pictures with a finger, almost caressing them. “I, ah, I don’t know who they were. Someone found me on the street, on a curb in Brooklyn. That’s all I know.”

  “That must be so hard,” she said. “You’re the first person I’ve met who had it worse than I did. Were you adopted?”

  It was safe for me to look at her by then. “No. I never caught on anyplace. I don’t know why.” I tried to laugh. “I thought I was over it. You know what I mean? I thought I was done with wondering where I belonged, and all that shit. How did we get into this, anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She gestured at Nicky. “He’s your whole family.”

  I just nodded. “Did you know your mother? Tell me about her.”

  She smiled then, but with only half of her face. “My mom,” she said.

  “It’s all right if you don’t want to talk about it.”

  She shrugged. “It’s okay. I guess I don’t mind. No one up here ever asked me about her.” It was her turn to watch Nicky for a minute, to see if he was preoccupied. “I lived with her until I was ten. Down in Connecticut. She was nice, sometimes, but she drank a lot, and she had . . .” She sighed. “I guess she was manic depressive. You never knew, when you got home from school, if she would be winging dishes at you or trying to hug you and stuff. Then, when I was ten years old, she drove her car into the river. I never knew if she had an accident or if she did it on purpose. . . . Anyway, my dad had gotten out of jail about a year previous, he was living up here, so I came up.” She looked at me, and some of her fierceness came back. “That’s when it started, that’s when they first wanted to send me away. When I transferred to the school up here, I brought a transcript with me from the school in Connecticut. I had been a pretty rotten student. Ds and Fs, but it wasn’t my fault! What nobody understood was, I never had any time to study. My mom didn’t do the laundry, sh
e didn’t clean the house, she didn’t cook, she was either in bed with the covers pulled over her head or she was out spending money she didn’t have.” She stopped for a minute. “I guess it wasn’t her fault, either. She was sick. But when I got up here, I had to take a test before they’d let me in school. IQ and all that stuff. Anyway, I’ve always tested well. I probably should have sandbagged a little, I guess, but I got interested in it, and I did better than I intended to. The guy who had given me the test, the vice principal, he came storming out of his office with the test in one hand and my transcript in the other, he was almost purple.” She widened her eyes and screwed her face into an exaggerated scowling imitation of the man. “‘You don’t deserve the God-given gift you’ve been given. . . .’” She was shaking her head. “They’ve been trying to send me away someplace ever since. Well, I’m not going.”

  I looked around. “Well, I can see why you wouldn’t want to leave. . . .”

  “Oh, listen, buddy—”

  “I’m only kidding. Who wanted you?”

  “BU, Columbia, Seton Hall.”

  “Damn, Columbia, you could live in Manhattan. How old are you?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Oh, shit. Oh, God, seventeen years old, beautiful, all alone and living in New York City.” I threw my head back and howled like a wolf. “Awrooooo . . .”

  Nicky looked up from his book and laughed. “Don’t mind him, Nicky,” she said. “He’s crazy.” Nicky patted me on the leg and went back to his book.

  “So now Columbia’s offering you a free ride, and you don’t want to take it? That’s like somebody putting a hundred and fifty grand in a bag and handing it to you. You can’t give it back. When someone offers you that much money, if you don’t take it, man, that’s a sin that God cannot forgive.”

  “You stole that from Zorba.”

  “I adapted it.” There’s an old salesman’s trick, they use it when the mark keeps coming up with lame excuses why she can’t buy the vacuum cleaner. I decided to give it a shot. “Tell me the real reason,” I told her. “I won’t tell a soul. Nicky won’t, either. Tell me the real reason you won’t go.”

  She stared at the floor for a full minute, then looked up at me. “How would you feel,” she said, “if you were some hick from the sticks? Suppose you lived half your life out here on the far side of the moon? I can’t even fit in with the kids up here, how the hell am I gonna make it in New York City?”

  “That’s not good enough,” I told her. “I can get you around that one in ten minutes. You gotta do better than that.”

  I heard the sound of Gevier’s tow truck pulling up next to Louis’s Jeep. “They’re back,” she said, sounding relieved. “Don’t you think you should go help out?”

  I figured Louis didn’t have any money to pay Gevier, but I owed him a couple days’ rent, so I settled up with him while Gevier patched the Jeep back together. He used some scrap steel and a shock absorber that was a long way from new, and it took him almost no time at all to get the truck fixed. He tried to get Louis to let him go further and beef up the bed where it had rusted through, but Louis, it seemed to me, preferred living on the edge of crisis. Gevier didn’t want to take Louis’s money, he said that all he’d done was weld some small pieces of scrap steel onto some larger pieces of scrap steel, which did not change the essential nature of the finished product at all. Louis pretended to be insulted. They worked it out after a while, and then Gevier drove his tow truck back to the garage, and Louis followed him in the Jeep to save him having to ride his bicycle back. Nicky went with Louis, and I headed for Eastport.

  If you hold your hand up in front of you with your fingers spread apart, Lubec is at the end of your thumb, and Eastport is at the end of your forefinger. The space in between is one small corner of Passamaquoddy Bay. Louis and Gevier lived down by your wrist somewhere. The point being, although you can see Eastport from Lubec, and vice versa, it is not a short drive from one to the other. Eastport is bigger than Lubec, too, and it doesn’t have that half-finished air that Lubec does. It’s actually on the end of Moose Island, and you drive over a long causeway to get to it. They call it a city, there’s a sign that says so on your way in. Maybe so, but you could fit the whole damn thing in the subway yards in Jamaica, Queens, and have room left over.

  They had only a couple of cells in the building where Taylor Bookman had his office, but a couple is enough. In fact, all it takes is one. Let me tell you, there is nothing on earth like the clang when that metal door slams shut on your ignorant young ass. I can hear it now, and I don’t ever want to be on the wrong side of that sound again, in fact, I don’t want to be anywhere in the neighborhood, which is why I was nervous, looking for Bookman’s office. Tell you the truth, I was shitting my pants. They had some kid in the lockup, you couldn’t hear him through the thick steel and glass door but you could see him huddled up in the corner, sweating and shaking and crying. I was following the deputy, but he wasn’t Hopkins, he was a different guy. He stopped to look through the window at the kid in the cell.

  “What happened to him?”

  “OxyContin cowboy,” he said without looking at me.

  “You guys ever heard of a detox?”

  “This is a poor county,” he said. “No money for that shit up here.” He shook his head. “This kid’s father used to be a friend of mine.”

  “Fucking drugs.” I had my own story on that topic, but I didn’t think he wanted to hear it. Actually, neither did I.

  He turned and looked at me then, his face etched with anger. “We caught this dumb son of a whore headed south with two bags of OxyContins in his car. A hundred beans in each bag. This is going to tear his family apart.”

  “I guess he’ll be going away for a while.”

  The guy shook his head. “He’s just a mule. We need to get him to tell us how they’re coming across the border. If he’ll do that, he might still have a life.”

  “You think he’ll do it?”

  “Who knows,” he said. He didn’t sound optimistic. “C’mon, let’s get outta here.” We went on by, leaving the kid to suffer through on his own.

  Bookman’s office had a big window, and you could see over the tops of the few little downtown buildings in Eastport to Passamaquoddy Bay. The water never seemed calm. Every time I saw it, the currents seemed to be fiercely ripping in one direction or another, and sometimes both ways at once, downstream out in the channel, upstream near the shore, constantly worrying away at the stone that made up the islands. I don’t know anything about boats or the sea or anything like that, but I do know that it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference if the tide is in or out when you go to the beach in Brooklyn, I don’t remember noticing it one time in my entire life there. The vertical rise of the tide might be three feet or so, tide goes out, you might get twenty yards of extra beach to lie down on at Rockaway or Riis Park, should you so desire. But if you tie up your boat to the pier at high tide in Eastport, you’d better use a strong piece of rope, brother, because the son of a bitch will be hanging there like a bauble on a Christmas tree when the tide goes out. And they don’t have sand beaches up in Eastport, or any use for them, either, the water is too goddam cold to do anything but look at. They do have clam flats, though, and the water might be right up next to the road at high tide and a half a mile away at low. Twenty-three feet of rise is what I heard they get, and that’s a hell of a lot of salt water. I guess that’s why the currents always look so busy. Makes sense, given the amount of work they have to do.

  And seagulls, everywhere you look, you see seagulls. Stand out in the road anytime and look straight up, and as far up as you can focus you’ll see seagulls soaring. Mostly herring gulls and great black-backed gulls, maybe a stray laughing gull, wondering which way it is to Brooklyn. They have a lot of the other shorebirds you see in Brooklyn, too, cormorants, sea crows, ducks, and so on. The herring gulls are the most fun to watch. They are the jet fighters, acrobatic fliers, fast and beautiful, and they seem almos
t human to me, fighting, squabbling, eating, and flying with what seems to be great relish. Walking down a street, you hear a loud, hollow metallic bonk, some seagull a mile or so up in the air has taken a shit and hit a car trunk, I always picture him up there thinking, Damn, missed him again.

  Taylor Bookman was sitting behind a metal desk, his back to the window, watching me look out. “How do you get any work done?” I asked him.

  “That’s what deputies are faw,” he said, deadpan. “Have a seat.” I sat down across the desk from him, and he looked at me in that way of his. “How long you been out of prison?”

  My heart stopped. I knew it, I fucking knew it. “You got me confused with some other guy,” I told him, trying to keep my face as blank as his.

  “Manny,” he said, and he grimaced slightly, just for a fraction of a second. “We may be a long way from Noo Yok, but I don’t live in a cave.”

  “I never thought you did.” I turned my left arm over, looked at the back of my wrist where the black snake’s tail came out from under my sleeve and wrapped around the space where you would normally wear a watch. “I grew up on the street,” I told him, and it was true enough. “I got most of these as a teenager.”

  “You paht of a street gang?”

  “When I was young. The Poppy Chulos.” That last part was a lie. The Poppy Chulos that I knew ran over in Sunset Park, which is a neighborhood in Brooklyn. Their name is Spanish for “cute guys,” and I never met the admission criteria.

  “So? You didn’t stay with them? Why not?”

  I looked out the window for a couple of minutes. “Well,” I said, rehearsing some bullshit story to give him, and then I decided I didn’t need to. “There was five of us, growing up, hung out together. Time I was twenty, I was the only one left. They were the closest thing I ever had to a family, Mr. Bookman, and they were all gone.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “One overdose, one shot and killed during a robbery, two buried in a cell somewhere, doing life plus. And me.”