by George Foy
‘I’ll do it,’ he shouted, ‘for expenses. Ten grand.’
‘Five,’ Chico said, automatically.
‘Seven and a half,’ the pilot countered.
At another signal, the goons dropped him back on the platform.
‘Don’t fuck up this time.’ The tall man spoke at a regular pitch. It was hard to make out the words. His face was back to normal again. Not enough features for expression. It was almost as if he could turn the crazed anger on and off at will. It crossed the pilot’s mind that he’d been had.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ the pilot said. His hands were trembling and he jammed them in his pockets. ‘Gimme a ride back?’
‘What the subway for,’ Fat Chico commented through a mouthful of chewing gum.
Chapter Eleven
‘Among those living constellations, how many windows shut, how many stars burned out, how many men asleep?’
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Terre des Hommes
When the pilot left the factory he found the sun was up and the day had started without him.
He found no subway. People pointed the way to the ‘D’ train but he got lost time and time again. His body was cold, his stomach empty, his head congested. His tired mind kept taking paths of its own. He bought a hard-copy of the News and a bag of Pepperidge Farm Double-Dark-Chocolate Milanos and munched the cookies as he walked. The newspaper headlines read ‘prez says, we’ll hit mex!’ leading a story about a possible US incursion into Chihuahua province to destroy cocaine depots and Paquito Munoz bases. A Polish resistance group had blown up a bus in EC-occupied Stettin, killing eight Saxon soldiers. He dumped the paper in a trash can. Eventually he ran into Prospect Park.
The trees made curious intricate shapes of the long morning light. Joggers bounced and produced small feathers of steam from their mouths. A Neta courier on motorized rollerblades zipped, fast as ectoplasm, down a walk. A patrol of Safety Volunteers biked after the courier, waving summons forms for helmet violations.
Dogs traced frantic spirals around a leash radius while their owners held firm in the circle center. After the embrace of the White Angel and the locks of Bellevue and the serried vats of the Chinese food factory and the tight brick ranks of Brooklyn row houses, the feel of open space tugged at the pilot, the way magnets pull at iron filings.
He entered the park. His shadow stretched ahead and to the right. He followed it, around the confines of a lake, roughly south and west. Eventually he would hit the river this way.
Squirrels screeched and chased each other in committed fury. Mockingbirds simulated the sound of car alarms. ‘Whoop, whoop, whoop,’ they called. ‘Eeyah, ee-yah. Wahr, wahr.’ Junkie raccoons tried to open crack vials discarded in the depths of the wild kudzu groves. They fumbled and experimented; the ones who succeeded grew more confident, more aggressive; their heirs, carefully coached, would get closer to tool-making. The pilot remembered the face of the Organizatsni man. It did not feel good to be threatened, and played around with, and fooled.
‘You love nature in all its forms.’
A couple walked by arm in arm, the same long scarf wrapped around both their necks. ‘God, I smell Chinese food!’ the girl said, right after she’d passed him.
‘You’re right, so do I,’ her companion replied. ‘Egg foo yung, I think?’
‘No, it’s got meat.’
‘Ginger duck?’
‘Garlic chicken . . .’
Their voices faded. The pilot wiped his face with one hand, and smelled the hand.
Number 45.
But he would put off Chico’s run. First he had to make another run, a real profit-maker, to go toward another plane and extra back-me-up for Carmelita. She had no health insurance, he knew, and even Bellevue cost bucks these days. Cost bucks to stay; cost even more to leave, what with the referrals, the therapists, the outpatient services, all the other guarantees they demanded.
His fault.
Carmelita’s hair, sullen and lifeless as the ashes of suttee.
Roberto’s face, what – shot up, torn, bloody? Or drowned, like that pier in the painting at Evangeline’s, with his eyes full of small purple fish, and fiddler crabs walking in and out of the penny arcade of his mouth forever open in that involuntary smile he always had when his sister’s boyfriend was teaching him how to fly . . .
*
There was a restaurant called Verdicchio’s, somewhere in Bay Ridge, not too far from this cemetery, the pilot remembered.
They’d thrown Roberto a dinner there.
It was to celebrate getting his private pilot’s license, only ten months after the first Halifax flight.
In a more roundabout way they were also celebrating how the feeling between the pilot and Carmelita was starting to mellow, like grappa, gaining in strength what it lost in raw energy.
That night had been in a lot of ways the central light of his whole time with Carmelita, a sort of beacon to mark the little shipwrecks that occurred thereafter. It was a near-perfect event set amid plastic raffia-covered bottles of Chianti, in which Carmelita at last seemed to have grown clear of the spiderwebs guarding her brain.
He wanted to remember her as she was in that restaurant, equal parts spunk, and a jewel-like acceptance. Her hands, white as the hair was black, flew like nervous egrets as she talked fast to keep Roberto from cracking Italian Air Force jokes. She thought the waiters would get upset; in fact the waiters were all Macedonian. But there was contentment growing in her at the same time and it shone in pools from the vortex of her eyes when she looked at the pilot.
The nights of despair, when she’d lain in his arms, so cold that all the blankets in his lounge would not suffice to warm her – talking half English, half Spanish about the pre-dawn creatures that ate at her with mothers’ teeth – that time seemed far away. Her capacity for utter hopelessness and total silence, the same capacity that sent her in untenanted flight for the cloying orange breath of Bellevue and Nurse Linda, seemed to have been sheathed forever in their huge appetite for the other’s moves and feelings. In the restaurant she’d put a hand on his jeans and leaned closer, her mouth rich with garlic and oils. ‘Skid,’ she’d begun, in the middle of an untrue story about a Westbury air traffic controller who’d gone down mid-watch and begun flying the entire La Guardia traffic pattern in strafing formation toward Fort Lee. ‘For the first time, I think I really believe things don’t have to go bad . . .’ And he’d looked at her, and her brother, and felt all the displaced affection that had never been allowed to come out in his house, in his childhood, wheeling through the cathedrals of his chest till the candles of the room seemed to burn dim and fuzzy by comparison . . .
After that, of course, Roberto had gone the usual flyboy route, working two ground jobs, building up his time, getting a passenger license, picking up flying work when and where he could.
And eventually, whipsawed between starvation wages and skyhunger, he had lost the great energy required to stay straight against the odds. He did what the pilot had done, what a lot of young men with more skill than experience ended up doing.
He went to someone he knew in the Trade and asked for work as copilot, or even shotgun.
The pilot knew what Carmelita would say if he bought Roberto a ticket on that particular roller coaster, so he took the easy way out. Forget it, he told Roberto, not through me.
But Roberto did not have to go through him. By then he’d spent enough hours hanging around with the pilot to suss out who was straight and who was checking the state of the moon before forgetting to file a flight plan.
Roberto did his first run with Big Maxie in a Beech 18 to Abaco and back, just like the pilot before him.
Not the pilot’s fault.
Except that it was the pilot’s fault; because he was there, because the Trade was there, ready, available as a woman with a past to anyone willing to take a chance or two.
The park ended. The cookies were all gone. He upended the package and shook the last broken
chips into his open mouth. He kept following his shadow. He found an elevated subway line. Giant orange cranes hung over it and a sign announced that it was closed indefinitely for ‘emergency’ repairs. Another stretch of trees and fence loomed ahead, but this area was thick with gray right angles, the complex branching of icons, the crosses, and crosses recrossed, that drew out man’s most ancient need to fill with Xs the zero he sensed lay at the heart of things. The granite crucifixes traced an atavistic tic-tac-toe, symbols of first fear.
The pilot walked into the cemetery, still fleeing the sun.
He was guilty in Roberto’s destruction, to the same extent the Trade was guilty – to the extent kids got killed and people hurt and lives spun to nothing in BON detention camps or shot down in red flames over some lousy patch of coral no one had even bothered to name; all because men ran cargoes over borders for the likes of Fat Chico Fong.
Most of the tombs here were old. Large hunks of granite, polished and beveled. Lichen dusted the stones, like gray-green acne. The pilot wondered whether the weight of the stones was meant, in some complicated way, to keep these people pinned down so they would never pop back up and bug everyone with their dead worries. Son, the formaldehyde don’t keep me warm. Sweetheart, it’s lonely down there. Brother, don’t piss away your life sitting in front of a VDT like I did.
The southern section of the cemetery was newer. Fresh flowers decorated some of the graves. Many of the tombstones had electricity outlets and black boxes, for the latest trend was to bury the deceased with a cable TV hookup so his or her corpse could watch reruns while it hung around, waiting for the last trump. The upscale models had timers and remote controls to program the buried television to favorite shows and channels. The truly expensive ones included a preprogrammed VCR linked to a second TV, this one mounted at ground level, sometimes with virtual reality capacity. In this way the deceased could, in a sense, talk back to the living, through the removes of time-lapse and VHS cassettes.
The dead dwelled as they always had lived, in neighborhoods defined by wealth.
The way out took him through the classier sections. The first remote clicked on two-thirds of the way down a row of comfortable Catholics.
‘Kathleen,’ a voice called from somewhere around his feet.
The pilot jerked around so hard he almost lost his footing. His lungs sucked air hard enough to hurt.
A terminal set into a pink sandstone vault flashed blue through a frieze of plastic flowers and rosary beads. The words under the screen read;
DUNCAN JAMES DONNELLY
Beloved Son of Mary and John
Husband of Kathleen
Father of Tracy, Kathleen, and Duncan Jr.
The dates of his birth and death were carved underneath.
On the screen, a forty-five-year-old man with skin as pink as his tombstone looked around in terminal frustration, holding a barbecue fork.
‘Kathleen,’ he repeated. ‘Get the kids, the steaks are done, they’re overdone.’ The man spotted the camera and grinned. The camera swayed, panned unevenly to take in a couple of sullen girls and a dumpy woman in a plastic apron.
The pilot kept walking. His heart was pounding. Duncan James Donnelly had been dead seven years, the cookout had ended on some sunny summer evening over seven years ago, the steaks he was cooking had been long ago eaten, digested, excreted; his daughters gone to college on the life insurance.
The pilot’s feet actioned a pressure switch. The next video came on only four tombs down.
‘Hi! I’m Joe Catania!’
A jowly man in a white T-shirt appeared on a weatherproofed screen on a brown slab of marble to the pilot’s left. Joe’s T-shirt had a caption. It read, ‘If life is a bowl of cherries, why am I always in the pits?’
‘Let’s all play volleyball, dammit,’ Duncan James Donnelly yelled behind him. His voice was angry. ‘Where’s Duncan Junior?’ Kathleen must have hated his guts, the pilot thought, to play that tape as a memorial.
A VR full face-sucker was locked in an armored box set in the marble. If your UCC-card matched the box’s codes, you could put on the gear and see Joe Catania in 3-D, standing beside you large as life in his cherry T-shirt.
‘I worked as chief financial officer at Burke Brothers for twenty-eight years,’ Joe Catania said. ‘My son is an engineer.’ Joe was smiling big, but he looked like he was having a hard time thinking of things to say to people who would be living when he was dead.
‘I am recording this at the studios of the William E. Hickworth and Sons Funeral Home,’ Joe continued, desperately looking down at his notes, ‘an’ I just wanna tell my sister Elise . . .’
The pilot kept walking. Left and right and behind him more voices broke into electronic life. The voices spoke of family, uttering names, cracking jokes, sometimes singing, usually talking about God or angels or heaven. But always the voices invoked one word.
The word was ‘love,’ and in every case, without exception, it was pronounced as if this were the most magical word of all, the secret name that would smooth away the lines of exhaustion and pain, of loneliness and unhappiness in the corners of the faces on the video screens – a word of such power and weight it could balance out a lifetime of big compromises and small victories, and make everything fern-green and well again.
The southwestern end of the cemetery held a couple of relatively blue-collar neighborhoods. Here, though cable was hooked into every recent tomb, it was a one-way link and there were few above-ground screens, so the sounds of the park could reassert themselves somewhat. The bitching of crows, the calls of children, the whisper of branches, the far-off yelp of a coyote became audible again – yet even here, in the midst of the trees and kudzu that surrounded the boneyard, the primary input came on a register both deeper and higher than the tones of the living; a crackle of static, a fuzzed rattling of voices caught in the tweeter Bakelite, canned laughter, theme songs, machine guns, commercial jingles, the plastic pauses of soap operas; sound all mingled and stitched together; electronic underground tapestry that rose like vibration, muted yet deep, from beneath the clipped brown grass around the tombs, resonating with the five feet of loam that lay between the air and the TV screens bolted onto the coffin lid, the buzzing electronic images painted blue on the waxed and moldy cheeks, the dried yellow glaze of their sewn-open eyes reflecting dimly back on the TV screens that led to the wire that led to the cable that led to the junction box that marked where the dead watched TV.
The pilot walked faster. Sweat was pricking out on his forehead. The blue-collar graves already were over with, he was back in a ritzy section now, one of the ritziest, they were always more expensive at the gate, where you didn’t have to walk or drive far to visit. He could see the skyline over the top of the iron fence marking the cemetery limits.
‘—these words to my beloved son Dave—’
‘I love you all so much—’
‘Never could tell you I love you Rachel—’
‘Never found someone else I could really love—’
Every cracked decibel of strain in the taut voices; every strung tendon in the video faces; every time the word ‘love’ was mentioned; every measure of silence turned in the pilot’s ears, blew up into a vicarious despair, burst into a great twisting of minutes wasted, of wishes unfulfilled, of lives spent like two-dollar coupons at some cheap gypsy-trick carnival midway of the limbic system.
The pilot broke into a run, aiming for the cemetery gates. Images rose from the broken rhythm.
Carmelita’s eyes, as one-way, as stopped-down as these tombs.
The huge blue revolving brushes of Krazy Karl’s Kwik Kleen Wheels 5-Dollar Karwash where Roberto used to work.
Roberto’s mother at the switchboard. Eighteen years of ‘Operator 519, thank you for calling NYNEX.’
The strange burning glow of Orinoco emeralds.
The kid’s eyes when he first climbed out of the Citation. The feel of flight between night and nothing.
The voices
of the dead cried behind him. The pilot bolted through the gates of the cemetery and down 25th Street as if each one of them were personally chasing his ass.
Chapter Twelve
‘For many people smuggling is a way of life. The smuggler feels he is performing a service to his community rather than committing a crime. After all, he is supplying his friends, at a price they can afford, with goods that otherwise are either unobtainable or extremely expensive. The fact that he is breaking the law never enters his head. If he thinks about it at all, he feels that he is depriving politicians living far away of a portion of their income, and in so doing he is helping his neighbors. He may be right.’
Horace Beck
Folklore and the Sea
‘The Trade, no matter how far-out or seditious some people think it—’ this according to the Smuggler’s Bible, Chapter One ‘—is only a mirror of the Square-up world. Since the Square-up world over the last fifty years has been taken over by those institutional mind-fuckers, the humungo, squiddy-tentacled commercial and political mega-organizations – it follows this should hold true in the smuggling ’hood as well.
‘Well,’ the Smuggler’s Bible continues, answering its own hypothesis, ‘si, and no. Sure, the horse and coke game has been entirely ripped off by the big Guyanan and Santa Martan cartels with their M-16s, their red-sticks, their pet judges. And yes, you’ve got more and more of the black trade in everything else being run by the fat-ass networks, like the Black Tuna gang, the DeLisi brothers, the Triad, the Spirit Knives-Organizatsni, the South Florida Sunshine Corporation.