by Norman Green
“You think men are dogs?”
“I know it.” I looked over at her. “Guys will do or say almost anything to get into your drawers.”
“You didn’t,” she said. “You had the perfect chance and you didn’t take it.”
“You can’t go by that, it was just a moment of weakness.”
She stood up, and so did I. She watched me count bills out of my wallet. I handed them to her. “Thank you,” she said, “for not, you know . . .”
I looked at her, remembering. God, I couldn’t help it. “Don’t mention it. You love him that much?”
Her face wrinkled, she took three steps across the space between us and wrapped her arms around me. It was a chaste hug, though, all arms and shoulders, not the full-body squirm you get when they really want you. “Come on,” I said, patting her back. “Don’t start up again.”
“All right.” She separated herself from me. “I really should do it, right? Go away to school, I mean.”
“It’s your call.”
“I know it would be stupid not to. I just hate being alone again.”
“I know what you mean. You can take it for a semester, though. So can your father. I gotta go, Eddie, I want to make it to Boston tonight. You gonna be okay?”
She nodded, put the money in her pocket. “See you.”
I called Bookman’s house from my cell phone. Bookman wasn’t home, but his wife answered and I talked to her for a while. She told me how much she liked having Nicky, even if it was only for a few days, and how much Franklin enjoyed having him there. I could hear that mixture of joy and sadness in her voice, her happiness that Franklin had someone to play with, her sorrow at being reminded of her son’s limitations. She put Nicky on the phone, and he bellowed in my ear about the yellow perch he’d caught, and how you couldn’t eat yellow perch, either, how they tried to stick you with their fins when all you wanted to do was take them off the hook and let them go, and Franklin had caught a bass, a great big one, but they let him go, too. “You have to use worms, Poppy. You have to stick them right on the hook. Do you think it hurts them?”
“I don’t think so, Nicky. I don’t think worms can feel anything.” He talked to me a while longer, but then he ran out of steam. I made him promise to be good, and I listened to him hang up the phone. I had to remind myself again why I needed to do this, leave Nicky with someone and drive away.
Information gave me Thomas Hopkins’s telephone number and placed the call for me. His answering machine was on. I listened to Hop’s voice say, “You know what to do,” then I heard the beep. I thought about the bullshit story he’d told Eddie Gevier, but I couldn’t think of any useful message to leave the son of a bitch, so I hung up. I needed to talk to him, though, because there were too many things going on for me to waste time thinking about Hop and his stupid schoolyard shit.
I started falling asleep behind the wheel just north of Portland. The second or third time it happened I got off at the next exit and bought a couple cups of coffee. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t bring myself to stop there for the night.
The coffee wore off before I reached Massachusetts. Maybe it was coincidental, or maybe it was just because I knew where the fucking place was, but whatever the reason, I wound up back at the same motel Nicky and I had stayed in that first night, on our way north. Different room, at least. I wondered how Nicky was, what he’d had for supper, if he was asleep, all of that. For a guy who always thought he had it together, I had to admit that my shit was spread out all over the place. My money was in New Jersey, my kid was in Maine, and my ass was in Massachusetts. I was beginning to feel like I was losing control. I wanted to call Nicky again but I didn’t. What could I tell him that I hadn’t already, just a couple of hours earlier? Nicky, I promise to do better than this. . . . He wouldn’t understand, and anyhow, it was myself I needed to make that promise to.
I’ve never been much for praying. Like Huck Finn, I always got either the hooks or the string, so I gave up on it. I used to think I had a lot of this shit figured out, you know, why people do certain things, why it was all right for me to be what I was, and all that, but you add a couple more pieces to your equation and suddenly the answers start coming out all different. I could see houses up on the hill behind the motel, just ordinary places with trees around them, places where regular people lived. I tried to picture Nicky and me up there inside one of them, the minivan parked in the driveway, Nicky going to school, me cutting the grass. . . .
What a thought, man, what a life. What a fucking world.
9
The pain in my shoulder got me up early. I felt hungover from the night before, but it was unearned because I hadn’t had anything to drink. I guess I woke up feeling sorry for myself, but going around wishing things were different than they are is a loser’s game. Shit will always be shit, no matter how you try to dress it up.
I got out of that motel and hit the road. I stopped for a truly abysmal breakfast on the Mass Pike. I just had a couple hours to go. First thing I noticed when I got close to New York was the traffic. I picked up on it when I was still about an hour away from Manhattan. It wasn’t like I expected people to wave at me the way Mainers do, but Jesus. There must be a certain ratio of cars to asphalt beyond which people lose their minds. A lady in a big red Ford Excursion on the Connecticut Turnpike must have missed her stop, so she bet her life and the lives of the children she had riding with her that I would be quick enough to miss her when she went flying across two lanes and cut me off to make the exit ramp. She won her bet, that time, anyhow, but I couldn’t help seeing a munched SUV full of dead kids somewhere in her future. Funny thing was, that was nothing compared to the sick shit I have seen people do with their cars, and have done myself, but when I lived here, I never thought about it twice. I used to think everyone was like that.
The other thing that struck me was that I didn’t know anybody. Didn’t recognize anybody in the other cars, didn’t know the woman in the toll booth at the Triborough Bridge. I would go on my way and none of them would have any reason to think of me ever again, unless I managed to make the six o’clock news. I used to like that feeling, but this time I wasn’t so sure. I could get back into it, though, if I stayed long enough, I could feel that, too.
I went across the Triborough and took the FDR southbound down the East Side of Manhattan. The FDR is a great road, it hugs the water all the way down to Manhattan’s southern tip, and it’s a terrific place to kill yourself. You’ve got to hit it at the right time, though. During rush hour, which isn’t an hour anymore, it’s more like three hours in the morning and at least that much during the evening, it’s too choked with cars to be much fun, you wind up spending most of your time sitting and waiting. But catch it right and it can be beautiful, an adrenaline junkie’s dream, you can crank it up and really wail, like the world is butter and you’re the hot knife. I’m not saying you should do this, okay, but it’s better if you do it in somebody else’s car, because once you get beyond a certain speed there’s zero tolerance for error. I remember once I was in someone’s Camaro, seriously hauling ass, and I hit this one section where the road curves to the right just as it rises up on legs and goes elevated for a while. I cut into the right lane to get around a commuter van just in time to round that curve and find some putz broken down in the lane right in front of me. It was too late to stop, too late to duck back behind the van, too late to do anything except stand on the gas and go for it. I missed them both, I don’t know how, all I can remember is that the guy who’d been standing out behind his car suddenly had to run for his life. I have this image frozen in my memory, him going over the fence. Man, what a rush. I lived on it for months. Only recently have I begun to wonder if the guy was all right, because it’s a long way to the ground, right in that spot.
Too many cars for that now, plus, I wouldn’t try it in the van. Well, I would have once, but no more. You get too much riot serum in your bloodstream when you’re young, and not enough when you’re old
. I don’t know whose idea that was. I do know that you can feel yourself changing as you get older, if you pay attention. That’s assuming you survive the insanity years, the years when your blood runs too high and too hot and you can’t hold back. When you feel yourself start to grow up, do you mourn the passing of that craziness or do you thank God that you survived it? And was I different now because of the time that had passed by or was it because of Nicky and Bookman and Louis and Eleanor and all the rest of them? I didn’t have to worry too much about my driving this time, though, I stayed in the left lane behind a gypsy cab. He would move twenty feet up and stop, and I would move twenty feet up behind him and stop, and so would the guy behind me, the guy behind him, and so on.
Once you get to about Ninty-sixth Street you can see where the Harlem and the East Rivers come together at Hell Gate. There’s a tiny island out in the middle of the water there, and then you go another ten blocks or so before you get to Roosevelt Island. Roosevelt Island is like a big battleship moored right in the middle of the river, and the northern ninety percent of it is all built up with apartment buildings and so on, but the southern tip is overgrown and wild. There’s an old stone building there, slowly falling into the weeds, looks like King Arthur’s castle but it used to be the hospital where they kept Typhoid Mary. That’s what a guy on the Circle Line told me once, anyhow, and just south of Roosevelt is a birdshit-encrusted rock known as U Thant Island. It took me almost an hour to get from Hell Gate down to U Thant, where a bunch of cormorants were standing on the rocks hanging their wings out to dry. They call them shags up in Maine, they’re dark brown, greasy, duck-looking birds, and instead of flying over the water and plunging down in when they see a fish, they sit low in the water with just their necks sticking out, and they dive under and fly around under the water after fish. It’s amazing, when you think of it, this bird can swim faster and maneuver better than a fish can, but there you go. Mainers have told me they catch them in lobster pots once in a while, the cormorant goes in there after the bait and then can’t get out. I don’t know if that’s true or not.
I started to wonder where I was going to dump the car, then I remembered, This one is mine, I can’t dump it, I have to park the fucking thing. Not only that, but now I got to worry about the stuff I’ve got inside it, too. When I was a kid, I would bust your windshield to steal a cool pair of sunglasses. Not so goddam funny when the shoe’s on the other foot.
Coming back to New York City is like going back with an old girlfriend. There are really no new places for you to go, but then, you already know your way around, and you wonder, is she the one for me after all? Twenty-eight years I lived here, except for when I was staying in the barbed-wire hotel, and I been everywhere from Rikers to Lincoln Center. Tell you the truth, I never thought I’d leave, and now here I was seeing the place different. I got off at Houston and went over to Katz’s for a pastrami sandwich. I couldn’t have been inside that place for more than ten minutes, and I got a parking ticket right out in front of the place. There it is: Welcome back, dickhead, here’s a home coming present. Sixty-five bucks.
Yeah, sure. Try and get it.
I wound up in the Holiday Inn on Fifty-seventh Street over on the West Side. It’s kind of an out-of-the-way place for Manhattan, which is a weird thing to say. How can you be out of the way when every square foot of ground has some asshole standing on it? But the place is a long way from the theater district and all the stuff that goes with that, which was okay by me. I felt a lot better when I had my bag locked in a room and the van in the garage next door. I sat in a chair in the lobby and called Buchanan.
“Mohammed,” he said, sounding all happy. “You want to come to my office or should we meet someplace?”
“Let’s meet someplace,” I said. I suddenly remembered that movie where Tommy Lee Jones was chasing Harrison Ford, and I lost my enthusiasm for going out. Those guys had followed me all the way up to Maine, chased me through the woods. “How about the Holiday Inn on Fifty-seventh Street? Over on the west side. Tell them at the desk you’re there to meet the Baker party.”
“All right,” he said. “I have to get some stuff together. Give me an hour and a half.”
I rented a conference room. The hotel went all out, they put two urns of coffee in the place, one regular and one decaf, plates of pastries and doughnuts, two long tables with paper tablecloths, nice soft chairs all around. I had a couple of cups of decaf while I waited, ate all the poppy seed Danishes out of the pastry tray. Try finding those anywhere north of Bangor.
Michael Timothy Buchanan knocked on the door, opened it a crack, and stuck his head in. “Wow,” he said when he saw me. “Very corporate. Coffee and doughnuts. That’s the only reason anyone really goes to meetings, you know.” He came the rest of the way in, locked the door behind him. “You check those other doors?”
“Yeah, I think we’re cool.”
He looked at me. “Getting cold feet?”
“No. Why?”
He sat down, put his briefcase on the table in front of him. “You and I have worked together before, but not with this kind of money. It’s not unusual, in these situations, for people to start worrying. Demanding guarantees and assurances. These transactions, by their very nature, require a certain amount of trust. I lose a certain amount of business because the parties involved get right up to the threshold and discover that they can’t muster the faith in me to go through with things.”
“I can see that. You want some coffee?”
He nodded.
“Regular or decaf?”
“Why drink decaf?” he said, sneering. “What’s the point?” I got his coffee, left it in front of him along with a small pitcher of cream.
“I checked you out a long time ago, Buchanan. Scary how easy it is to do that, don’t you think? I know where you live, I know your Social Security number, I know what you paid in income tax last year, I know how much your house out on the Island is worth. I don’t figure you’re going to run for something under two million. And I figure, you know I could find you if you did.”
He sighed. “The Internet?”
“Yeah, some of it. But people who work in banks and credit bureaus are as easy to scam as anyone else. Just a few phone calls.”
“You’ve been wasting your talents, Mohammed. So we’re on, then?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” he said, and he opened his briefcase. It took about two hours, which made it late afternoon by the time we wrapped it up. He’d set it up like I’d asked him to, half in my name and half in Rosario’s. I signed for myself with my right hand, and I signed for Rosario with my left. I got a half a smile out of the guy when I did that. We agreed to meet the next morning, out in Hackensack, New Jersey, at the storage place where I’d stashed the money. He grimaced at the idea—God, New Jersey—and then he left without saying good-bye.
I tried Hop’s number again that night, just before I went to bed. I used the hotel phone, just in case he had caller ID, though I didn’t know what difference it made. I got the same terse message, the same mechanical beep, and I sat listening to the silence until his machine disconnected me.
10
I checked out of the hotel in the morning and drove the minivan out to Jersey. I had a funny kind of awareness, I don’t know where it came from, but all of a sudden I was looking at the city like a tourist. All my life I’d been committed to the place, as if New York City were the only place in the world where I belonged, the only place where I could be myself. It changed that morning, though, and everywhere I went I looked at familiar streets and buildings through new eyes, wondering if I would ever get back that way again. When you live so long in one place you build up an intimate knowledge of where everything is and how it all really works, and it seemed to me that morning that I was kissing it all good-bye somehow. It’s like when you’re breaking up with a woman: you know you’re going to leave her, but she’s still got whatever it was that hooked you in the first place, and you watch her with a lit
tle more focus, a little more intensity, trying to fix in your memory the image of that long hair or that soft voice or that perfect ass, because you’re about to take a step that you can’t take back and you wonder if you’re ever gonna stand in that particular spot again. I got on the West Side Highway and I swear to you the Hudson River never looked so beautiful before. For the first time in my life I noticed that the tide was in. The river was high, and the early-morning sun made it look blue and warm, as pretty as the day Henry Hudson first put his boat up in there. When I went past the Seventy-ninth Street boat basin I could feel something pulling at me. I had never given sailboats a second glance before, but that morning they all looked as gorgeous as if they had come from God’s own hand. I envied those fortunate souls living aboard, surrounded by beauty and freedom and cool autumn air. It was just an illusion and I knew it, that’s what gives a dreamer that ache in the pit of his stomach, because you know the guy in the sailboat is worried about his bilge pump and his engine and what the salt air is doing to his wiring, plus the poor bastard still has to get his ass out of bed and go to work like everyone else. And you know that, right? And you know that you can’t afford to let some dream suck you under, but sometimes they look so goddam beautiful.
Traffic leaving the city was relatively light, especially when you compared it to everybody lined up trying to get in. I felt curiously unsteady, as if I were one of those sailboats in the boat basin I had just passed and someone had cut me loose. This place was all I was used to, this one little corner of the world, the one place where I knew I could survive, and here I was putting my back to it, driving away. This must be what Eddie Gevier had felt the day before, this strange sensation that things are sliding on you, that you’re about to cut yourself loose from the only safe place you’ve ever known. It’s one thing to tell yourself up in your head that safety and security are illusions, but it’s another thing altogether to let go of them only to find that, as illusions go, they were comfortable as hell.