She was a working girl. Stalked the area around the Plaza Hotel, along 59th and Central Park South to Sixth Avenue and 58th, approached parked cars and leaned through the windows, tossed her beret onto the man’s lap and trotted around to the passenger side, the car disappearing around a corner while the Snake observed. He’d waited until last night, when the light rain had driven her under the awnings, had snuck up close enough to hear the Midwestern accent she’d perfected, the face still recognizable despite what appeared to be some carefully done plastic surgery—a raising of the cheekbones, a drawing-up of the heart-shaped face—her expression as he approached assuring him of all he’d suspected all along. She knew that he knew, and she knew that he knew that she knew that he knew. She’d pulled out a can of mace and aimed it wildly in his direction, calling him a freak and a perv. He’d stumbled blindly toward her and lifted her on his shoulder, groping in the dark tunnel of her screams, the fists that beat down upon him—the screams and fists of a Midwest girl trapped in an eastern city, in over her head, kicking with stiletto heels that broke against his forehead, loose change and little plastic-wrapped candy canes falling from the pockets of her imitation leopard-skin coat, all of it resulting in a black eye he wore this Monday morning in early September. He’d tried to reassure her, had tried to whisper that he just wanted to talk, to tell her that the Feds knew she was back in town and had recruited him to watch over her, to see what she was up to, whom she was working for, and that he had no intentions of bringing her in, of making her face the nightmare they’d faced together all those years ago.
To this end he’d lugged her across the street toward the entrance to the park, though he heard the sounds of the police siren approaching, heard them calling at him to put her down, to let the girl go and put his hands over his head and spread his legs, had heard their approach over the damp pavement, felt the shock of a gun butt against the back of his neck, the cold metal of the handcuffs on his wrists while the girl—clearly not the one he was looking for, he saw now, not even a lookalike—got to her feet and spit in his face, the police (Police? Then why were they wearing headsets?) pushing him onto his belly on the sidewalk and reading him his rights and carting him off to Rikers for a night of piss-and-shit smell because this was the new New York City, where everyone was safe, even working girls out walking the streets through a steady rain after midnight, even these folks riding the bus through a bright Monday morning, everybody in the whole wide city except for the few that really knew what was going on, the few that comprehended what all of it meant.
It was in the midst of the traffic jam on the Grand Central Parkway—the Middle Eastern bus driver with the sad eyes continually watching his movements in the rearview, the group of kindergarten students growing restless, their singing having ceased in favor of complaints of Are we there yet?—that the Snake first understood they were being followed. He watched the man behind the wheel of a black Lincoln and felt his certainty grow until it was pulsing inside his head. It was a trap. All along it had been. They’d been using him to track her down, and now that the job was done …
“Let me off here,” the Snake said, moving toward the door, the driver regarding him nonchalantly until the Snake pulled out his weapon, the shank he’d planted months ago near the unmarked bridge to Rikers, just in case. “Now!”
Horns blared as he raced across four lanes of traffic toward the exit ramp to 111th Street, dove over the concrete wall and the angled footers to street level, a Sunoco station in the shadows of the overpass and, beyond, a dozen blocks leading down to the flats above Flushing Bay, where he crouched breathless an hour later in the swamp grass beneath the sulfur trails of LaGuardia Airport, listening to his own heart beating and thinking it sounded like gunshots, or footsteps—the steady approach of those he’d always known would come for him eventually.
GB HILL POPPED THE TRUNK, scratched the dog’s scabby neck and stood looking in at the knapsack and the baseball bat bag.
It was rush hour again, and high up on the silver platforms of the GW Bridge the traffic crept west, away from the city. It felt good to be out of the car. For so much of this day they’d been surrounded by the deafening rush of expressways that the quiet crunch of his spikes on asphalt seemed hallucinatory. He had found this place by accident. His confused intentions had taken him down detours, had led him eventually, inevitably, to Yankee Stadium … and it was afterwards, as he’d crept along the growling trench of the Cross Bronx with the vague notion of going back, of climbing the crumbling ramps and heading back the way he’d come—that he had seen instead an unmarked exit ramp, had descended steeply through shade and emerged onto this forgotten shelf of land twenty feet above the river, a dilapidated lot for some long-ago razed building, an oasis of macadam heaving with cracks and neglect. No one would notice him here. He’d flipped the ignition, had dug the leash from beneath the passenger seat and stalked the relative calm while the dog squatted, wandered some more, squatted again.
The city had changed, had acquired in the interval of his absence the excess clutter of twenty years of bright ideas, the memory of the last time he’d been here—the only time—so distorted by scrutiny that he could now barely summon it. He had blacked out. He had no memory of the previous night’s arrival save a damp discomfort, no recollection of the transition from rain and mist to sun and high skies but for the funk and chafe of the soaked leather, the drowned look of the dog, and his own hypothermic tremble. The day had begun amnesically amidst a procession of taillights, a mechanically ventilated purgatory far beneath the bedrock of the Hudson River, coming above ground then into shine and chaos and a complex rotary clogged by orange-and-white detour barrels. Stop-and-go traffic. Had he slept? Or had those hours simply vanished? The parched and burning feeling in his throat and chest told him he’d been sick, though he didn’t know where or when—a quick check of the sodden floorboards had revealed no evidence—the pain of his hangover unrelenting in the slow go of the financial district, turning debilitating against the lattice-work of light and shadow slung from the three bridges to Brooklyn.
He was killing time. He had decided that he could not do it, that he could not go through with this plan of theirs. It had been crazy of them to ever think that he could, insane to believe that in his current condition this trek of the previous day could ever result in anything other than what it had resulted in. So when the pounding behind his eyes had at last forced him off East River Drive in search of gas and aspirin (only to end up gridlocked at First and 59th), when he’d broken his fast and the dog’s with a pretzel in a wax paper sleeve and then meandered back out into the early morning traffic, which had relented just enough to make it possible, somewhat, to maneuver along the crowded narrow streets of double-parked garbage trucks and taxis—he had gone and done something he seldom did.
He found a bar.
He’d always been one to drink alone, holed up in the darkest, most sorrow-intensifying settings he could find, his own cruel form of self-punishment. Yet something about the morning spent circumnavigating the city had made him desperate to speak. Something about the dim light coming through the frosted front windows of the neighborhood dive on the Upper East Side where he’d killed an hour and then two more at a tall stool drinking kamikazes and southern blues had made him feel the need to hear the sound of his own voice—scratchy and deep after months of rare use, months of talking only to himself or to the dog. The barkeep was in his seventies: white hair and gin blossoms, flannel sleeves rolled up past his elbows, a slightly outdated prototype who’d seemed reluctant at first, a pause and a sigh before he’d ambled over, polishing a glass and playing a role. “What’ll it be, fella?” A half hour and three drinks later he’d ventured to ask what was with the uniform, and from there it had been easy for GB to wade out into it like a confessional, easy enough to begin with how he’d driven up here from Florida the previous day, twelve hundred miles in just under eighteen hours, alone but for an eleven-year-old chocolate lab in the passenger seat of
his ’73 Stingray convertible whose roof he’d left back in Miami, the dog now leashed to a fire hydrant out front while he sat here beneath this stained-glass billiard lamp trying to figure out what was next.
And why had he done all this? Well, that was the complicated part. That was the part that would take some explaining. Was there any way (GB had wondered, his voice already slurred, eyes glossing over as he gazed up through the empty glass tumbler)—was there any way he could make the next drink just a tad bit stronger?
It was difficult to recall, later, just when or how the idea had come to him. He was not even sure it could be called an idea or if it was little more than the momentum of desperation, the muddled distress that had trailed him throughout the remainder of the afternoon after he’d stumbled back out into the sun-drunk street, already going on one o’clock when he found the dog and located the Stingray (he’d forgotten, at first, which street he’d parked on), removed the bright ticket from beneath the wiper, and, falling into the same semi-catatonic state that had sustained him these last months (the dog looking up from the floorboards, his own haggard reflection looming red-eyed in the rearview) had improvised the side trip over the Willis Avenue Bridge into the Bronx.
A hazy intermittent layering of clouds had drifted in from the mainland through the lunch hour, a translucent quality infiltrating the light as he continued north along the Deegan past the tenement towers of Mott Haven, through a motley gray and brown landscape until at last the low-slung light standards had emerged above the rooftops, signs guiding him off the expressway. And there it was, precisely where he’d left it: blue block letters emblazoned upon the façade, a nondescript signboard right out front.
YANKEE STADIUM BOX OFFICE HRS. 9–5 TOURS DAILY!
It no longer shamed him to see it. He was no longer bitter. Despite what Tammy might have said—what she had said during countless arguments over the years, accusations and recriminations that had threatened to shake the foundation of the so-called dream home in Coral Gables—the truth was that he had done exactly what he’d promised back when they’d gotten together, that getting married and having a daughter had changed him, that a decade or more truly had passed since he’d spent a single sleepless night agonizing over the years he’d pissed away in pursuit of the promise this place had once seemed to hold for him. And yet as he’d found and then paid for his parking, as he’d made his way on foot back across the neighborhood, quiet on this Monday off-day (the Yanks just off a weekend sweep of the Red Sox, the owners of the delis along 161st Street out smoking butts on stoops while the 4 train rattled by on its elevated track), he had been powerless against the awakening of a part of his mind he’d previously been too preoccupied to focus on, nostalgia breeding a somber possibility as he’d stood looking up at that famous white frieze, handed over a ten and followed the brash tour guide and a crowd of milling Midwesterners beneath the entrance at Gate 4.
It was baseball, after all, that had proven his savior on previous occasions, had provided a void-filling fascination for the angry, confused kid who’d lost his mother at eleven and felt his world turn twenty degrees colder, yet also more focused and purposeful. Out the clattering back screen door of adolescence it had led, a tattered ball and a borrowed glove toted up the block to an abandoned warehouse in the foothills of the San Gabriels, a billion fastballs hurled against a cinder block back wall until the seams had given way, until the scuffed cowhide had peeled back to reveal the wrapped wool underskin. By high school, he’d more than gotten noticed. Letters had arrived by the dozens the summer of his senior year—the summer they walked on the moon and anything had seemed possible, even a kid from San Berdoo making it big. Pro scouts flocking into LAX, driving rental cars east along the 10 to huddle in the hard bleachers at Perris Hill Park to get a good look at him, the fireballing lefty with signature blond curls pouring from the back of his cap, cheese that topped out mid-nineties and a curve that fell off the table, his perfect game in regionals followed up by another in the city finals (which he’d also single-handedly won with a late-inning homerun) making the typically enthusiastic post-game discussions that flared up like wildfire in the dusty cut behind the dugout turn downright worshipful. (“The kid’s filthy! He’s ready for rookie ball right now. What are his plans? And where are his parents?”) A commotion of praise that had chased him home along cracked sidewalks, his shadow slung out a hundred yards ahead of him like something to be lived up to, the voices of the scouts like oracles’ in his ears making him pull the brim of his crimson-and-black San Bernardino High ball cap down low over his eyes as if it would make him invisible, as if it could give him strength.
He’d known for some time he would have to do something. Had listened all summer to the way those voices turned solemn when the truth was given in whispers, the story of his not-so-secret “family issues” dragged out and stared at like a dog run over and bleeding in the street. Had listened also in the cramped discomfort of the house off Wildwood as his old man—who’d never come to a single of his games, had never even asked about them, had more important things to do—would regale them all around the dinner table with the stories of his plans for them in the Great White North, an unimaginable future discussed later in the tense silence of the attic-like room he shared with his little brother Jamie, commiserations beneath the cover of their father’s snores in which GB would confide as to what he’d decided to do, how he planned to stay right here in San Berdoo because you could hardly play ball in the snow. Weren’t too many baseball diamonds on glaciers last time he’d checked. And if the old man had something to say about it, well then, he’d just have to find other ways of convincing him, wouldn’t he? (A verbal cracking of his knuckles. A whispered plea in that little lair beneath the eaves in the hopes of recruiting a sidekick, only to find his kid brother too complacent or content, too scared or brainwashed at thirteen to conspire such.)
And so as that summer had bled toward August, as the stacked boxes signifying the imminence of their move had accumulated in the front hall and the old cobwebby shed atop the driveway, as even poor confused Jamie had acquiesced and begun packing up his half of the room, GB’s long walks home from Perris Hill Park in the aftermath of his glories had become something like nervous dress rehearsals, anxious anticipations of the final face-to-face with the father who stood in the way of the future foretold by the baseball scouts, the most important pitch of his life up to that point practiced and polished and perfected until at last the time had come to deliver it: a smoldering night in late August, wild fires raging in the valleys as he ascended the driveway to find the old man stacking boxes in the boiling dark shed out back, asked for a few minutes of his time and received that rolled-lip nod for which he was famous.
He’d moved out the next day. Waved goodbye to his stepmother and the twins who’d gathered politely on the front porch, and was off, the bearer of an uncomplicated confidence incomprehensible during the half hour he’d spent roaming the lower concourses of Yankee Stadium in a solemn daze of remembrance. It had all been not nearly so simple as he’d been led to believe by the scouts and big-league representatives, by his high school coach in whose basement on a cot next to a water heater he had whiled away the remainder of that last summer of the sixties. There’d been two things a kid could do: two alternatives hashed out on the Labor Day evening he and his coach had sat in the vacant bleachers at Perris Hill, the grass infield gone brown in the hot brush of the Santa Anas. A kid could declare eligible for the pro baseball draft and, in doing so, could also make himself eligible for the other draft. A kid could risk having his name called, could go over and do his tour, could hope a season spent dodging defoliant and trying not to get turned inside-out by machine gun fire would not damage his poise or command. Or, he could go to college. And though he had said all the right things—had given his old coach a final tentative hug, had pasted a smile on his face from the moment he arrived at the party school outside Phoenix with a blonde “escort” named Pamela on his arm right up to the af
ternoon he’d stood on a crowded dais holding a diploma that went straight into a dumpster—those four years of delays and frustration at college had been characterized mostly by the reluctant certainty of a misstep, the underlying suspicion that he had traded some integral part of himself in return for a compromised ease.
Oh, he had enjoyed himself. The sixties had swung a corner toward the seventies and he had swung right along with them, had set conference records and reveled in the lazy dominance of the big man on campus, the gifted athlete given a free ride and a deferral in return for having his left arm on loan for as long as the war dragged on. And yet beneath all the glory and the acclaim, beneath the mastered pretentious coolness of the small-time superstar always looking disinterestedly at his nails while others raved of his achievements, there had been also the reality of something lost in the transformation, a dilution of the desire that had once driven him each time he summited a mound and stared down a sixty-foot, six-inch tunnel at a tight window of hope, a loss of the desperation that had compelled him on those long walks home in the solemn dusks of San Berdoo. So that by the time the war had at last ended, by the time he’d stood shell-shocked in his revelry-wrecked off-campus apartment listening to a voice on the phone telling him that none other than the New York Yankees had secured his services with their top pick in the draft, all trace of that brave, earnest boy who’d shown up for college four years before had been replaced by a vainglorious imposter with little left to lean on but arrogance, an incorrigible caricature he had wished, ever since, he could go back and talk some sense into.
The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill Page 6