by George Foy
But the lust, for once, was small. To fly well took energy, and he had none left.
‘Ela,’ he said.
‘Yeah?’
‘I’m sorry you never made that marching squad.’
‘It’s OK,’ she told him. ‘Maybe it was for the best.’
‘I’ll see ya,’ he said quickly while his throat would let him.
‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘take care of yerself.’ She stood quickly on tiptoe to brush his lips with hers. Then she walked over to Rocketman and threw her arms around him.
‘Goodbye, Tin Man,’ she said.
‘Aaah,’ the big man replied. He hesitated a little. Then he hugged her so hard she came off the ground.
‘You be careful now,’ he told her. ‘And if you get to Chitral—’
‘I’ll look out for her.’
Rocketman nodded. He put her down. She looked at the pilot once, briefly. She walked fast around the corner and into the steam and rain and funny colors all smushed and smeared into the New York night. A small bar of music wafted behind her – something hummed, something out of Cole Porter – and was gone.
A long black limo that had been parked a little way up 14th Street ever since the taxi dropped them took off silently from the curb and accelerated in their direction.
Rocketman sees the rear window slide open, the shiny snout of a big semiautomatic shotgun stick out, a Benelli. He jumps on the pilot and drags him to the ground behind a parked car as the street-sweeper opens up, huge ‘booms’ of mixed twelve-gauge, blowing shop windows and neon and car doors and streetlights all to hell but missing the two men rolling on the ground entirely.
‘You got that, pilot?’ a voice shrieks, dopplering down amid the whine of the limo’s tires as it accelerates down 14th toward the FDR, but the voice is still audible as it finishes. ‘You nevah welsh on me again, Gwailo moth’fuck!’
Korean voices spring from windows and fruit stands; nervous, uninvolved.
Thin men and women dressed in tattered blankets climb out of the Nipponese wreck, out of the pothole, to peer with dull eyes at the unquiet city.
When there was no more sound of tires and engine, Rocketman sat up and brushed shattered safety glass off PC’s camel’s hair coat. He stared down the lights toward the highway.
‘What the fuck was that?’ he asked wonderingly.
‘Fat Chico Fong,’ the pilot said. ‘No one else calls me “Gwailo moth’fuck.”’ He started to laugh. It was the laughter of control-lost, of total absurdity, of situations where everything was possible and therefore nothing was on the cards. It was more than halfway to crying.
Rocketman looked at him uncomfortably.
‘I forgot about Chico,’ the pilot whispered, when he had got his breath back. ‘He must have staked out Bellevue, because of Carmelita, and when you started hanging there—’ He nodded to himself, as the bits of data supported each other in his mind. ‘It was him at PC’s, not BON.’
The pilot wiped moisture from his eyes. Suddenly he did not feel like laughing anymore. His stomach felt bad. Ela was gone and that made a big hole in which the sourness of being shot at washed like lye.
He shook his head.
‘I’m getting sick of all this, Rocketman,’ he said. ‘Really sick of this. You know somewhere we can go, ’n’ hide, ’n’ just rest for a while?’
Rocketman thought for a couple of seconds. He smiled, gently at first, then harder as the thought nestled home.
‘Aaaah,’ he growled. ‘I got an idea.’
Chapter Thirty-Five
‘If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet,
Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street.
Them that ask no questions isn’t told a lie.
Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!’
Rudyard Kipling
A Smuggler’s Song
Two days before Thanksgiving. A wind blew out of the northwest at fifteen to twenty knots, bringing with it occasional flurries of sleet.
The wind shook the spruces, already brightly lit for the holidays, running down the spine of Park Avenue. It swung the fifty-foot-wide turkey of yellow bulbs dangerously suspended over the intersection of 57th and Fifth. It stiffened the fingers of trumpeters playing Olde Romanov ballads outside the Warner Brothers/Imperial Russia Superstore at 58th and Park. It burned the ears of vendors selling the hard-copy Post (Midtown Mystery Shootout, the Post’s subhead read, under sixty-point type that spelled US INVADES CHIHUAHUA); made them stamp their feet and fumble as they swiped UCCs through credit-checkers. It stole the smell of roasting chestnuts and charring pretzels from street vendors and whipped it around the noses of Salvation Army bands three blocks to the south. It hurt the sales of Hoffa disciples selling ‘Holy Lottery’ tickets on the corner. It did little to deter the thousands of multicolored shoppers as they panted and hustled in the lust of acquisition and the comfort of fur-lined Argentinian gaucho boots through the gleaming shops and restaurants and hotels.
At 3:17 in the afternoon two men stopped outside the brightly lit windows of a famous jewelry store. Shoppers and sightseers from New Jersey and Venezuela and Austria crowded outside the windows, staring through transparent, bomb-resistant screens at the sensitively decorated displays inside. The displays all entered around the theme ‘A St Petersburg Harvest’; they featured lovely little automated figures that drank spiced wine, were blown up by Anarchists, went on sleigh rides in blizzards, ran sweatshops, ate mountains of colorful foods, wore lots of expensive jewelry, and beat the recalcitrant mujik.
One of the two men was large, coffee-colored, and in his late forties. He was dressed in gaucho boots, and a camel’s hair coat. The other was fairly short, and freckled, and very young-looking. He wore a faded denim jacket, a jumpsuit, and work boots.
The two men looked at each other. The younger man smiled vaguely. The older one nodded, and they both started to strip off their clothes.
The crowds parted around them like dishwater around a squirt of detergent. Women screamed. A pretzel vendor chuckled. A man dressed in Pilgrim clothes – a tall black hat, tight collar, shoes with buckles – shook his bell furiously as if to call down the vengeance of a Puritan heaven. The younger of the two men went up to the prettiest woman he could see.
‘Let’s communicate?’ he suggested.
The woman backed away, giggling nervously. ‘Oh my God,’ she kept saying, between giggles. ‘Oh my God!’
The older of the two men sat under one of the St Petersburg windows and sucked his thumb.
A squad car full of City cops drove by. The cops laughed and pointed and went on their way.
A homeless man scooped up the loose clothes and bore them off before anyone noticed.
Two Swedish station wagons pulled up in a squeal of hot tires. The words ‘MANHATTAN SAFETY VOLUNTEERS’ were stenciled on the side. A troupe of vigilantes piled out. It looked like the cars were vomiting button-downs, and Maine hunting boots. They subdued the naked men with kicks and nightsticks and dragged them into the wagons. They drove their catch, pink lights flashing, to the vigilante post.
The two men were booked, covered in blankets, and sent downtown in a paddywagon full of shoplifters to be charged. After four hours they were brought up before Judge Lawrence I. Levine of the New York County Court, known to friends and associates everywhere as Lil.
‘What were you doing on Fifth and 57th, naked?’ Lil asked the older, taller of the two.
‘Waiting for my daddy, your honor,’ Rocketman replied. ‘He told me to wait till he got back.’
‘You wan’ I should take this down?’ the stenographer said.
‘Take it down,’ Lil said.
Rocketman obediently dropped his blanket. The courtroom applauded, politely.
‘No, not you,’ Lil said, tiredly. ‘Put the blanket back on, we got clerks here who this is news to. Get his name, Brenda.’
‘George Armstrong Custer,’ Rocketman said.
‘You�
��re makin’ that up,’ Brenda said suspiciously.
‘So Sioux me.’
‘Oh, lord,’ Lil sighed, thinking it was going to be one of those days. ‘What were you doing?’ he asked the younger man.
‘Just tryin’ to communicate,’ the pilot told the judge.
Lil looked at his booking sheet. ‘He was harassing women,’ the liaison man from the Safety Volunteers said, ‘in an unsanitary way. No clothes, no underwear, who knows what kind of aerosol contagion? We got witnesses,’ he added, nodding to himself.
‘I was tryin’ to communicate with ’em, your honor,’ the pilot insisted.
‘You’re outta your mind,’ the judge told him. ‘You think you’re gonna communicate any better with no clothes on?’
‘I was only tryin’ to reduce the barriers between us.’
Lil leaned forward to stare at the pilot’s face. The kid was serious, he thought. There wasn’t a trace of a smile in the mouth or eyes. He thought for a brief instant of his own wife, with whom he had last communicated around the time their second girl was born, about seventeen years ago. Lil shuddered. He remembered the thousand murderers, ATM-kidnappers, rapists, smack dealers, and child molesters waiting to be processed through his court, and leaned over toward Brenda.
‘They got UCC-cards?’
Brenda lifted her chin toward the pilot. ‘He does.’
Lil looked at the pilot. ‘You responsible for your friend?’
‘Always,’ the pilot said, putting his arm around Rocketman’s neck.
The judge raised his gavel and smacked the table with it.
‘Remanded for psychiatric evaluation,’ he said, ‘Bellevue. Get ’em outta here. Next!’ Lawrence I. Levine said, in a tone that betrayed a deep suspicion that things were only going to get worse.
*
The big black nurse let Rocketman and the pilot into the ward on the 29th floor of the South Tower at Bellevue Hospital.
‘Well,’ she said, and took off her headphones. A voice crackled thinly from the wires – ‘Jesus needs a kick-back too!’
‘Look who’s here,’ the nurse continued. ‘The Rocketman! Yah!’ she screamed in his face.
‘Peace up, Linda,’ Rocketman said gently.
She looked into his chin with her large yellowed eyes. She pressed a button and pushed him down the hall. Two green-smocked attendants popped out of the staff coffee room.
‘Search him for matches,’ she ordered, looking at Rocketman’s admission form, ‘then throw this Negro’s ass in preventive. I don’ believe it,’ she added. ‘George A. Custer my ass, they don’ even know who he is! That’s the guy set fire to the roof,’ she told the attendants.
The attendants looked at him indifferently, chewing bluish gum.
Rocketman smiled. The neon in the hallway seemed to burn a little less brightly.
The nurse looked at the pilot. He looked back at her.
‘Wachoo lookin’ at, weirdo!’ she screamed.
The pilot was searched, as well. He had to sign UCC-chits in triplicate, agreeing to reimburse Omega/Health Commitment Systems Inc. for psychiatric services for both himself and Rocketman. Then he was given a green smock and assigned to a room walled in orange plastic, with a man who was unable to stop watching television and who was suspected of being pre-TDF.
His other roommates were a man who could not stop mimicking the expressions of everyone he saw, and a former meteorologist who believed he could predict the future the way he’d foreseen wind and precipitation. He had written his secret equation on the wall in green non-toxic wax crayon. HISTORY = HUMAN WEATHER, it read.
The pilot almost smiled when he saw the words. They made him think of Ela, how she would have laughed, the way she always did at pretentious statements concerning history.
After he had put on the pajamas he went straight to the toilet and carefully extracted from his asshole a latex condom, well greased with K-Y jelly, that contained: fifty matches, with striking surfaces; two sets of skeleton keys; a fake physician’s ID; a tiny emerald pendant in the shape of a dolphin; and one-and-a-half ounces of perfect lapis lazuli from the Panjshir Valley in Afghanistan.
The lapis sparkled in the yellow light of the lavatory. Its blue was the blue of macaw’s feathers, the azure of the Aegean on a perfect fall evening, the indigo hue at the rim of the world, as seen from an airplane, where the planet was turning into night.
The pilot flushed the empty condom and washed his hands. He looked at the stones for a full minute. Then he wrapped the contraband in toilet paper and hid it carefully in the rough gray underwear the attendants had given him.
He found Carmelita in the rec room, sitting by the window, staring at the TV in a personal island of space that advertised like a billboard the fact that she still was not talking.
He kneeled down in front of her and gently laced the pendant around her neck. He took one of her hands in both of his. Her fingers were cool.
‘Carmelita,’ he said. ‘It’s me. I’m back.’
Her face did not change. The lines in it were, if anything, stronger than before; they made her look both more determined, and older. Her long hair – dull, without sheen – had been trimmed and strapped back with a cheap velvet hair tie.
Her eyes, locked on the TV, danced with the flat bright images of the products currently being sold. They did not look at him, but the left hand tightened around his fingers, just a touch.
He pulled a chair over and sat next to her. He put his arm around her shoulders, his cheek next to her cheek, and hugged her for a long time.
Below him the river ran, strong and black as Dominican coffee, in a rush of broken visions to the sea.
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About the Author
George Foy is a writer and journalist. He has published five novels, including Challenge, Asia Rip and The Shift. He has worked as a commercial fisherman, a vacuum-molding machine operator, and a paralegal in New York City law firms. He has traveled into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan with an arms-smuggling caravan, acted on network television, and participated in the creation of a CD-ROM game. He lives with his wife, daughter, and cat in New York City and Cape Cod.