Black Fridays (17 page)

The train was held at Forty-second Street, waiting for a local to arrive. I walked out and waited on the platform. I felt the younger of the two watching me whenever my back was to him.

The local arrived. I stepped in and turned to stare at the two, daring them to follow. They ignored me. The doors closed and both trains headed uptown.

By the time the local pulled into the Lincoln Center stop, I was laughing at my own paranoid fantasies. The two guys in caps had no interest in me. It was another New York City coincidence, in a city that regularly defied all odds.

But when I got to the express stop at Seventy-second, I dashed out and darted up the stairs. Then I stopped at the top to see if anyone followed me. Then I cursed myself for being an idiot and went home.

—

THERE WAS STILL
almost an hour before the Kid was due home. I dumped everything out of Sanders’ gym bag, spreading it all out on my bed, before succumbing to another attack of paranoia. I couldn’t afford to have any of this mess traced to me. I needed gloves, so there would be no incriminating prints.

Serious criminals always seemed to possess a ready supply of latex gloves, the kind the guards used for cavity checks up at Ray Brook. I didn’t even have a pair of rubber gloves for cleaning the bathroom. I pulled out drawers and searched through the bottom of the boxes Angie had left me, now hidden away at the back of the single closet. I found an old pair of Oleg Cassini rabbit-fur-lined leather gloves. They were not designed for delicate criminal enterprise, but they would have to do.

I packed all the dirty laundry back into the bag and tossed it by the front door. The laptop I set aside for later examination. Then I began to sort the chips into colored piles. The black pile of hundred-dollar chips was the largest. One thousand five hundred twenty. One hundred fifty-eight purple chips at five hundred apiece.

One hundred thirty-two ten-dollar blue chips. Thirty-four yellows—twenties. I did the math without thinking about it. An even two hundred thirty-three thousand dollars. 233. A prime number—an irregular prime. The twelfth integer in a standard Fibonacci series. A Markov number.

Why would Brian Sanders hang on to the chips? Why had he not converted them into cash? To avoid reporting them as winnings for tax purposes? That would only have put the problem off to another day. If he had been trying to remain inconspicuous, for any reason, he would remain so only up until he tried to cash in ten or twenty thousand dollars’ worth of chips. He would have done better to have passed them in small amounts. Unless he wasn’t interested in the cash, only the chips.

I scooped the chips into a plastic bag and hid them at the bottom of the kitchen garbage pail. It wasn’t foolproof, but it would do until I figured out a way to cash them. Then I packed all the workout clothes, sneakers, and towels back into the gym bag and carried it down the hall to the incinerator chute.

Which is how I came to be standing in the hall on a warm September night, wearing fur-lined leather gloves, when my father and son stepped out of the elevator together.

The Kid paid me no attention. He acknowledged my presence only by stepping around me as he dashed down the hall. My father, however, stopped and gave me a questioning look.

“I was doing some cleaning,” I said. “They were the only gloves I could find.”

“Well, then, I know what to get you for your birthday.”

“How was the Kid today?”

“The Kid had a great day. He touched a pig. And if he’s anywhere near as exhausted as I am, you’ll have him in bed within the hour.”

“Did he eat?”

“Two hot dogs.”

“How did you get him to eat a hot dog?” The Kid had a healthy aversion to food cooked by street vendors. More like a phobia.

“From across the street. Gray’s Papaya. They grill ’em. Best in New York.”

I could see the store from my front window. There were times when the line went out the door and down the block. Cabbies triple-parked out front in the middle of the night while they ran in and grabbed a quick dinner.

“I didn’t know the Kid would eat them.”

“What do I always tell you? Get to know your son when he’s young.”

“Right.” I couldn’t remember his ever having said that to me before.

“I got him a new car. The ’61 Jaguar.”

“Cool,” I said.

He gave me a brief, awkward hug. “Take care, son.”

THE JAGUAR E-TYPE
is considered by many car enthusiasts to be the most beautiful automobile ever built. It was first introduced in 1961 in the format that later came to be called the Series I, with a 3.8 liter, 6-cylinder engine, producing 265 hp. By modern standards, its 6.9 seconds zero to sixty
may seem a bit sluggish, but at the time the XKE was quick enough to immediately enter the realm of legend.

“The 1961 Corvette did zero to sixty in eight-point-four seconds. It had eight cylinders.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. “Shall I keep reading?”

He nodded. The Kid was wrapped up in his sheet, mummy-style. Pop had been right, he was exhausted. His head was already listing sideways.

The first 500 cars off the assembly line featured external hood latches and a non-sculpted floor, resulting in truncated leg room. These earliest models are especially prized by collectors, though subsequent models were much more comfortable to drive.

“This is a subsequent model. See? No hood latch.” He held up the latest addition to his collection.

How did he know what “subsequent” meant? He could barely say the word without stumbling. But he was speaking in real sentences.

Heather was very encouraging about the Kid’s fascination with cars. Of course, any interest of his, beyond the often painful limits of his own mind, was reason to be encouraged. If he had been into dinosaurs, instead of cars, he would have known how many teeth each one had, what they weighed when full-grown, and how they cared for their young. He would have been able to explain—at great length—that the Spinosaurus could never have kicked T. rex’s butt because T. rex wouldn’t exist for another 35 million years after ol’ Spiney was dead, and besides, they lived on different continents.

“Want me to read through all the specs again?”

He didn’t answer. He was gone. An inaudible click and he was out, as though the power source had been suddenly turned off. I checked to see that he was breathing. I held my breath and put my face next to his to listen. He smelled of Crest and hot dog.

—

I LAY AWAKE
for a long time. Other than the hoard of chips, the trip to Brooklyn had been a bust. Sanders’ laptop held about eighty gigabytes of live jam band music—Galactic, The String Cheese Incident, and dozens of others, including, of course, a good bit of Phish. I also found a saved file containing the e-mail messages of a slowly deteriorating relationship with a girl named Cherysse, who had kept asking him to “get the fuck out of Wall Street” and join her in San Francisco. The messages ended a year before he died.

But if there was a secret file, in which our man confessed to all his worldly sins, and laid out the mechanics of a great conspiracy, I had somehow missed it.

The buzz of my phone, vibrating on the glass-topped coffee table, rescued me from the clutches of the Latin Kings, who were all leering in through the bars of my old cell at Ray Brook, as Jack Avery patiently explained that I was back in prison because I had stolen the pita chips. I had fallen asleep on the couch.

“Hello?” I checked my watch. It was close to midnight.

“Hey, Boo.” It was Angie. I did not want to talk with her, unless she was sending money.

“How did you get my number?” “How did you get my number, bitch?” was what I meant to say.

“Mamma.”

Of course. I had asked her not to give it to Angie. Unless it was an emergency.

“What’s up?”

“I need to talk to my little boy.” She was drunk. Not sloppy, but definitely beyond the point of operating a vehicle or attempting a delicate telephone conversation. I could hear it in the way she made two syllables out of the word “boy.”

“The Kid is asleep. He’s been asleep for hours. I am not going to wake him up.” The Kid would have been up half the night afterward—and so would I. It would have thrown off his schedule the whole next day as well. It also felt good to tell her “No.”

“It’s not so late.” It is always noon if you are the center of the universe.

“Angie.” I softened my voice. “The Kid needs his rest. It’s what? Eleven there? It’s midnight here. Can we do this tomorrow? After he gets home from school? Dinnertime?”

“School? You have that boy in school?”

I wanted to reach through the phone and grab her and shake her by the nape of the neck until she started talking sense. “Angie, I don’t keep him locked up. Yes, he goes to school. He goes to the park. Today he went to a petting zoo with my father and got to meet a pig.”

“I’ve been talking with TeePaul and he says it’s okay if the boy comes live with us.”

TeePaul? Tee is Cajun for
petit
. Paul means “small.” It was like calling someone Little Small.

“I don’t think that’s going to work.”

“I want my boy back, Jason.” She went from steel to tears in a heartbeat. “
Ma petit boug.
I want to hug him and just cover him with kisses.”

The Kid would scream bloody murder.

“He is my
Tout-tout
, Boo. I know he’s not right, but there is nothing a mother’s love can’t fix. We just need time. You know he can’t be happy without his Mamma. I just want him to be happy.”

Why wasn’t I surprised? It wasn’t going to happen. She would change her mind tomorrow or next week. I had him and I wasn’t letting go.

“Angie, the Kid is going to a great school here. He’s doing really well. Tell you what, you and your Mamma come visit. We’ll get her tickets for
Wicked
—she’ll be in heaven. Meantime you can catch the Avedon retrospective at MoMA or hit the Chelsea galleries. Or spend an afternoon being pampered at Bergdorf’s. Then we’ll get my Pop to meet us and take your Mamma out to Brooklyn for steaks at Luger’s. Make it a vacation. You and I can even practice being civil to each other.”

The pause was long enough that I thought she might actually be considering it. No such luck.

“I can’t,” she finally said.

“You can’t . . . ?” I was tired and out of practice at making the conversational jumps, doglegs, and cutbacks that were what passed for normalcy with Angie.

“I can’t come to New York,” she explained, with tight-lipped patience, “because I have a hairline fracture of the radius.” Implicit in her words was the evidence of my own hard-heartedness for not having already expressed my sympathy.

She did not explain how a broken arm would keep her from traveling.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Angie. Listen, it’s late—”

“
Mais.
I got TeePaul all upset and confused. He was really sorry. He’s a sweet man, Jason, but he is not as good a driver as he thinks he is—especially when he’s been drinking and gets a bit
fout-pas-mal
.”

She was drunker than I thought. Angie was perfectly capable of having a complete conversation without once slipping into Cajun patois. Usually it was an act, another from her portfolio of poses, one that she used when flirting, or being funny—or just before she fell off the barstool.

“I get scared when he drives too fast and I know I can get bitchy when I’m frightened,
mais
, when he passed this old farm truck I let him know just what I thought about that, and that made him take his eyes off the road, just as we got to that really bad curve up by Patoutville. You know the one I mean?”

If there was one thing in this world that I was dead positive on, it was that I had never been to Patoutville in my life.

“The truck was fine, I don’t know why he was making such a fuss, and he gets all
boudé
, so I told him I was going to walk home if he was like that. And he got mad. Well, I know I shouldn’t have said that.” She burst out laughing. “
Merde
,
cher!
It was thirty miles back to Morgan City. I wasn’t about to walk. I just got down from the truck and climbed back up the bank.
Mais
, when he gets down on his side, he sinks right up to his
coullions
in that rice field and I could not help myself,
cher
.”

I tried to establish some order in her patchwork story. “He drove off the road? Into a rice field?”

“
Ain?
That’s what I said. Are you listening? I swear, you never listen to me.”

She had often commented, when we were together, that one of my most endearing qualities was the way I listened to her.

“Is that how you broke your arm?”

“No, that is not how I broke my arm.” Thoroughly exasperated. “If you would stop interrupting, I would tell you.” She paused and waited for my apology. Not getting it, she continued, “I did something unforgivable. I laughed at him. And he is not like you, he is sensitive. You can’t laugh at a sensitive man.”

Mamma had often described Angie’s father as a “sensitive man.” In my hometown, we would have just called him a mean drunk.

“And when he’s mad, he just doesn’t know his own strength. You see, he was just trying to keep me from walking home, which he explained would have gotten me killed if someone had come along driving too fast and not seen me. And he took my arm, just to stop me, and you know I am delicate . . .”

Like kudzu.

“. . . and it broke.”

I listened. And felt nothing. Was I over Angie that completely? That quickly? One night—a few hours—with Skeli and I had managed to put seven years behind me. I felt no anger at the cowboy—that’s what people like that did. I felt some disgust, revulsion at the images that came to mind, but no great outrage. I did feel some sympathy for Angie. Though she had placed herself in harm’s way, she didn’t deserve to be hurt. She had hurt me, robbed me, abandoned me, and was now intent on taking from me the person I loved most in the world—but I would not have laid an angry hand on her. And I also felt a buzz of irritation that I was being forced to hear it all and deal with it in the middle of the night. But mostly, I felt an undercurrent of dark fear. My son must not, under any circumstances, be allowed to be dragged down into that ugly swamp.

“Angie, listen. I am very sorry for your troubles.” I tried to sound sympathetic. “I am sorry your young cowboy hurt you.”

“
Ain?
I just told you! It was an accident.” Outrage.

“Okay, I’m sorry you had an accident. And I’m sorry for so many things that have come between us.” I let my voice harden. “But I cannot change them now. And there is no way in hell that I am going to let that son of a bitch near my son. You come see him whenever you want. But leave that asshole home.”

“I told you, Jason. I want my boy here with me. I will do what I need to do.” Her drunkenness had evaporated and the bayou front with it. I felt a sudden cold rush in my gut. “You think any Louisiana court is going to let some New York felon take a baby away from his mother? I’ve spoken to my lawyer down here, and he has promised to flay you to the bone. You
will
not
get away with this.”

I sat up, slammed a fist into the wall just hard enough to know I didn’t want to do it twice.

“Angie, as long as our son resides in New York, it will be a New York court that hears his case, and they will hear about your drinking and how your mother kept the boy locked in a dark room, and they will hear about your abusive partner as well.”

“Goddamnit, Jason! I want my son! Give me my baby.”

“Over my dead body.” I lost my anger as quickly as it had come. I was left with disgust for the mess of our lives—and an ugly unease.

“I will have my boy.” It was a threat. She was willing to take me up on it.

“I’m saying good night, Angie. I am going to hang up now. Maybe we can talk about this again when you sober up. Good night.”

She didn’t respond.

I hung up.

Fuck. I would have to get hold of my lawyer first thing in the morning. Despite my brave words, I did not trust the courts. Louisiana or New York. Anything could happen there. I would take the Kid and run before I let Angie take him back to Cajun country.