“Right! The police! Of course! We’ll call the police!”
Maggie pulled herself together and got back on the horn at once. With all the spiffy new computerized directory assistance programs, it took a quarter of an hour to get the number for the Hartford police; this number directed her to another computerized labyrinth of menu choices operated by the police themselves, which routed her ultimately to the limbo of perpetual hold, a virtual place of no return that was audially wallpapered with festive salsa Muzak in the manner of the late Tito Puente.
“I can’t believe this country of ours,” Maggie moaned and slammed the phone down.
“Just dial 911.”
She did, and she was soon speaking to a real, live Westport policeman.
“Hello!” Maggie said. “God, I’m so grateful to have a live human being on the line.”
“What can we do for you?”
“A friend of mine, a close friend … well, I got a call a little while ago … she’s … I think she’s stuck in a crack house in Hartford.”
“Stuck?”
“Unable to leave.”
“Is that what she said?”
“In so many words.”
“Have you called the Hartford police?”
“I got lost in their phone system. It’s a computer.”
“Hartford is not our jurisdiction, ma’am.”
“Sure. But I thought you might know how to get through to them. Don’t you have two-way radios?”
“And what was it you wanted us to ask them to do?”
“To help my friend.”
“Do you know where this alleged crack house is?”
“Not exactly. No.”
“No address?”
“It used to be a Masonic temple, we’re told. There’s a green roof … a park.”
“Is there a street and a number?”
“Well, no.”
“Do you know how many crack houses there are in the city of Hartford?”
“Could there be more than a couple?”
The policeman laughed out loud.
Maggie’s spirits flagged again. She wanted to smash the phone against her own head.
“Can’t you help us?”
“I can’t call Hartford and tell them that somebody from Fairfield County is patronizing one of their fine crack houses.”
“No, of course not.”
“And you don’t have an address?”
“No.”
“Ma’am,” the policeman said. “We’ve got kind of a situation here and I’ve got to keep these lines open—”
“Did that storm do a lot of damage in Westport?”
“What storm?”
“We had a terrible storm in West Rumford. A tornado, we think.”
“You don’t say.”
“Oh, it was frightful.”
“Well, alls we had was some thunder ’n’ lightning. Right now, we’ve got a gunman pinned down off the Merritt Parkway at Hoyt Swamp.”
“The sniper!”
“We don’t know if it’s the same guy. I’m going to hang up now, ma’am. Whatever you do, I advise you to stay off the Merritt today. Looks like this bird is dug in with plenty of ammo. Bye now.”
“Bye …”
Maggie indulged in no more than a minute of pure despair, savoring its hollow contours and jagged surfaces. Then she looked up and locked eyes fiercely with Walter, and the two of them spoke the same words simultaneously, with the same grim determination.
“I guess we’ll have to do it ourselves,” they said, scouring each other’s faces and marveling at the revealed synchronicity of their intentions.
7
The Searchers
Maggie slapped together two pâté and sourdough bread sandwiches, and they left directly in the Toyota Land Cruiser. Her head still throbbed so Walter drove. Everything about the afternoon seemed several degrees out of kilter. The fractious weather produced a strange ponderous light that seemed to weigh down upon the landscape like a bad destiny. The landscape itself sprawled awkwardly along the enormous highway in a panorama of doom, a wilderness of gigantic discount stores, free parking, and screaming signs that left the mind wounded and exhausted. The Connecticut of the old New Yorker cartoons and the Bing Crosby movies had been displaced by a diseased, surreal terrain of glowering plastic and heat-trapping asphalt, an endless, hopeless, futureless automobile slum.
Soon, they reached the ragged edge of Hartford and passed the famous blue Islamic-style dome of the abandoned Colt firearms factory along the elevated freeway near the river. American history looked like it had been carjacked, beaten up, and left for dead here. From a mile away, a cluster of the city’s late-twentieth-century glass office towers gleamed with false promise. At that distance the mirrored slabs might be regarded by the simpleminded as interesting monumental sculptures of an exuberant age. One could not so easily perceive the downtown office vacancy rate of over 75 percent, the foreclosed commercial mortgages held by banks teetering on the brink of insolvency and run by anxious fiduciaries contemplating one-way plane tickets to obscure Caribbean pseudonations—as opposed, say, to arrest, trial, and five years in the federal slammer at Lewisburg.
The off-ramp dumped them onto a surface street where the dereliction of the city became palpable. In all directions the business district stood eerily empty on this weekday afternoon, an ordinary business day, as though a plague were apocalyptically burning cell by cell through the ranks of grandiose office towers.
A couple of blocks south of the old gold-domed state capitol, they entered a district of empty redbrick factories on narrow, treeless streets. Here, the industrial revolution looked like a tragic swindle, all the former riches of the empire reduced to a multitude of vacant rooms in dreary worn-out brick behemoths, the machinery long ago sold off for scrap. Here and there along the street they could see the ghosts of ordinary twentieth-century commercial life: rusted Coca-Cola signs denoting bygone lunchrooms, tavern windows boarded up with delaminating plywood. Even the few remaining trash cans in the alleys were empty. A solitary wino, superfluous here in his failure, lurched along the sidewalk emitting a lonesome wail.
“What has happened to our country?” Maggie marveled almost reverently.
“I’m fresh out of easy answers,” Walter said, and she was rather grateful for his diffidence.
The adjoining residential neighborhoods looked as though some supernatural rot, a kind of civilizational leprosy, had infected them, producing a desolation more potent than war. This was a blight from which recovery of any kind seemed unlikely, a form of demoralization that cut across the boundaries of living personalities and mere material things, rendering all hope of regeneration permanently moot—the coming attractions of a dead planet.
They methodically crisscrossed the town in the big car. A few streets showed signs of life but of a Hobbesian order: skulking figures drinking out of paper bags in decrepit doorways; a child straddling a broken bicycle, pretending to ride; a woman in red hot-pants crying against a lamppost; a young man beating a broken refrigerator with a length of chain. At one point, crossing Farmington Avenue, they came upon a familiar icon, a large, dark, Victorian house opulently decorated and in oddly good condition. A plaque posted on the sidewalk read MARK TWAIN RESIDENCE.
“My God,” Walter groaned. “Imagine what he’d think.”
“It’s too sad to imagine,” Maggie said, thinking nonetheless of that famous photo of Clemens resplendent in a sealskin coat and matching hat at the height of his fortunes, setting forth in the family sleigh with his wife, Olivia, and their three pretty little girls, Susy, Clara, and Jean, for a Yuletide sermon by the Reverend Joe Twitchell to be followed by punch and cakes (and, for the men, whiskey) at Mrs. Stowe’s house. This was the Hartford of another planet, not just of another time. “I can’t bear to think about it,” she muttered.
Remarkably, it was within five blocks of that landmark, on a street named Bovington, that Maggie experienced a jolt of recognition. For t
here, between a burnt-out wooden triple-decker and a one-story concrete block box that had most recently (seventeen years prior) functioned as a wig shop, they came upon a once proud Italianate brick heap with a green copper verdigris roof. Just under the gable could be seen the carved stone insignia of the Masonic brotherhood. Across the street lay a wretched little square, its few trees scarred and spray-painted, its pavements broken, its benches seatless and backless, and its little central oasis of grass long ago trampled and littered with glass shards, cans, and rusty supermarket carts.
“Wait,” Maggie said urgently. “This is it!”
Walter pulled up to the curb. Across the street an old Pontiac Grand Am sat on tireless hubs. The driver’s door was missing and all the remaining windows had been smashed. A man and a woman came out the front door and, after carefully glancing up and down the street, furtively scuttled away like a couple of insects.
“So,” Walter said, “you think she’s in there?”
“Yes. I do. It’s just what she described. The little park. Everything.”
“Maybe you should stay here in the car while I check it out.”
“No way,” Maggie retorted. “I’m coming with you.”
The heat of the afternoon shocked them when they stepped out of the air-conditioned Toyota. The hard surfaces of the city seemed to amplify the heat. Walter opened the back hatch and rummaged there, quickly finding an umbrella.
“What’s that for?”
“In case someone gets smart with us.”
8
The Very Maw of Evil
The interior of the place was designed like a branch bank in hell. It was a high-ceilinged vestibule of perhaps ten by ten feet. At center, a single bare bulb dangled from the end of a long frayed cord. Opposite the entrance stood a kind of teller’s station, a steel slot set into a concrete block wall that was rather sloppily constructed, as though by inept amateur masons. The wall itself was decorated with graffiti as well as black, brown, tan, yellow, and fuchsia splashes and smudges suggesting the intentional discharge of various bodily wastes against it. On an adjacent wall—also shoddy cement block—was a steel door, much dented, scratched, and scribbled on. The room stank ferociously. They were unsure how to proceed.
Just then, a customer shambled through the door behind them, a twitchy scarecrow of a man dressed in ragged sporting togs, a man with the physiognomy of youth but the physical mannerisms of old age.
“You coppin’?” he asked them.
“No,” Maggie replied. “Why don’t you go ahead of us.”
The customer regarded them askance, as if politeness was but a dimly remembered, highly suspect convention of another lifetime. When he limped up to the slot in the wall, they observed the transaction at a remove.
“Yo, gimme two blue ice rock,” the scarecrow said.
“Ain’t got no blue ice,” the slot said.
“Gimme a half-crank, den.”
“Ain’t got no half-crank.”
“What the fuck you got den, muthafucker?”
“Got moon rocks.”
“Yo, man, dat shit is cut all to shit.”
“Dat’s de shit we got.”
“You muthafuckers sellin’ shitty-ass shit.”
“You want de shit or not, muthafucker?”
“’Ite, gimme some.”
“How much.”
“Two dime.”
Scarecrow placed a tube of rolled-up bills in the slot. Seconds later, a wooden tongue rather like a pizza paddle protruded from the slot. Two vials containing crack cocaine lay inserted in a groove on it.
“Yo,” Scarecrow said into the slot, “I gotta pipe up here.”
“You go pipe up yo’ sorry ass somewheres else.”
“I ain’t got no pipe.”
“You sell dat, too?”
“No, I sat on de muthafucker.”
“You a sorry-ass nigga.”
“Yo, come on, man. Lemme in.”
“Las’ time you peed in de corner.”
“Naw, wasn’t me. Dat was Slo Mo.”
“Dey said it was you.”
“Yo, man, fuck dat shit. I seen de muthafucker do it. He inside? I kick his muthafuckin’ ass. Come on, man. Buzz me in.”
“’Ite. But soon’s you high, git de fuck out.”
“Yeah, yeah. ’Ite.”
The door buzzer went off with such startling loudness that Maggie and Walter both leaped back a step. The scarecrow man skulked into the dimness within. The heavy door slammed shut resoundingly behind him.
“We have to get in,” Maggie whispered. “Lindy’s back in there somewhere.”
“We’ll have to buy drugs.”
“I suppose so. Here.” Maggie extracted a twenty-dollar bill from her wallet.
“No, this one’s on me,” Walter said. He took a deep breath and proceeded up to the slot.
“Let me have two dimes of those moon rocks,” he said.
“Ain’t got moon rocks,” the slot said.
“Didn’t you just—?”
“We out.”
“What have you got?”
“Who the fuck you is, white boy?”
“Working man.”
“Oh yeah? Why you don’t jess make yourself a gin and tonic?” Laughter emanated from the slot, intimating more than one vendor within.
“Lookit, I need some shit,” Walter said. “Help me out.”
“Dis shit is too nasty for bridge-and-tunnel mo’fuckers.”
“We’ll take our chances,” Walter said and pushed the twenty through the slot.
“I guess a man’s gotta do what he gotta do,” the slot said. Anon, the wooden paddle emerged with two vials of crack cocaine. Walter pocketed them.
“Buzz us in,” he added.
“I don’t think so.”
“We have to pipe up.”
“What are you, crazy, mo’fucker? Dis place is fulla crackheads.”
“That’s all right. We’re used to it.”
“Where you-all’s from?”
“Westport.”
“How come you don’t go to yo’ own white-ass country club pipe house down there?”
“Because we’re here and I need a smoke.”
“You a determined muthafucker.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“Cost you another twenty, first-time club membership fee.”
“Whatever.” Walter peeled another twenty out of his wallet and passed it through the slot.
“One more thing. No peein’ on de flo.”
“Sure thing,” Walter said.
The buzzer went off like a Klaxon. He and Maggie stole into the dimness like two innocent children entering an amusement park house of horrors.
Inside, an elaborate old oak staircase, barely lit by a small grimy glass window, corkscrewed up one flight. Mammals of different orders had been using it as a urinal for a long time. They followed the stairway to an enormous, dim room, some forty by fifty feet, the entire footprint of the building. It was the former Masonic lodge, proper, even in its heyday a spookish Gothic chamber for secret ceremonies. The wainscoting had been ripped out. The windows were boarded over. Here and there, low-wattage blue bulbs burned in old wall fixtures, casting an aura of perpetual nighttime through the huge room. Despite the high ceiling, the air was extraordinarily hot, thick, and close, more like a fluid than a gas. Faces appeared sucking on glass pipes in the flare of butane lighters. Old reeking mattresses were deployed across the floor in no particular pattern. Many were occupied singly by ragged persons who looked like shipwrecked mariners riding pieces of flotsam. Some mattresses held groups of three, four, or five individuals sharing a pipe, resembling a scene Maggie recalled from some bygone collegiate bash of the hippie years. More than one sexual performance could be glimpsed through the murk.
They made their way around the room, eliciting a few hostile glances from the still-sentient. In the farthermost corner, in a pool of darkness most remote from any light source, they came up
on a shrunken, wasted, but recognizable figure seated on a pallet of filthy foam rubber and bundled in a stinking polyester quilt.
“Oh, dear God, it’s her, it’s Lindy!” Maggie said, seizing Walter’s arm.
At the mention of her name, the wraithlike figure of her old friend and college roommate, who had been staring bug-eyed into fetid space, turned her sunken visage upward in an expression that seemed equally an appeal and an accusation.
“How’d you find me?” she asked raspily.
“You said a Mason’s lodge, a green roof, a park. Give me your hand—”
“Wait! How’d you get in here?”
“It doesn’t matter. We’re here to bring you home. Can you get up by yourself—”
“Did you cop?”
“Yes, we had to buy drugs to get in here,” Walter said.
“Who the fuck is he?” Lindy asked Maggie.
“He’s my gardener.”
“Oh, yeah? You plowing a furrow there, pal?” Lindy said, but her gallows laughter quickly degenerated into a coughing spasm. “I’m sick,” she said.
“I know. We’re here to help you.”
“Then give me some of what you copped.”
Maggie and Walter swapped a fretful glance. Walter then reached into his pocket and proffered the two little glass vials.
“All right!” Lindy exclaimed, grabbing them greedily.
“Lindy, this stuff is crack cocaine.”
“Duh, really?” Lindy said. She allowed the filthy quilt to fall from her shoulders. She was apparently naked from the waist up. Her ribs showed above two rather flattened, deflated breasts. A dark contusion spread amoebalike between her left clavicle and armpit. With trembling hands she opened one vial and tapped out the rock into the bowl of a glass pipe. Then, with a strange manic precision for someone so obviously ill, she fired up a butane lighter and lit the rock, inhaling the smoke hungrily. “Oh, yeah,” she said, exhaling a cloud of acrid chemical smoke. “All right.”
“Okay, honey. Give me your hands.”
“You got anymore?” Lindy asked, exhaling a huge volume of blue smoke.
“Yes,” Walter said.
“Can I have it?”
“No, you can have it later,” Maggie said. “For now come with us.”
Maggie Darling Page 26