Dead I Well May Be (9 page)

If it were me and I was cut off from Darkey and the boys and I couldn’t get home and I had to be on the streets (a recurring fantasy/nightmare of mine, incidentally), my plan is to buy a hammock and attach it to a rope and throw it up over a tree limb, hoist myself up, and sleep up there in the canopy. In the summer you could probably get away with it. In the winter you’d freeze to death. North Central Park is where I’d go, big and anonymous and reasonably safe. For some reason, every time I think of this plan it gives me a great sense of comfort. If all else fails, I can live in the trees of Central Park. It’s a bit silly, but that’s the best I can come up with.

Down to 125th.

Past the bodega and the impressively armored Chinky with its steel walls and buzzer to get in and thicker-than-thick Plexiglas counter and vandalproof reinforced iron chairs. When Klaatu and the other aliens finally show up and nuke the world, Mr. Han’s Chinky will, I’m sure, be the only thing left standing amidst the rubble. His food is probably nukeproof too, for it leaves your body about three hours after it enters virtually unchanged by digestive juices. I wave to Simon, who, of course, is up already, but out here in the early light and through that five-inch glass he fails to recognize me.

McDonald’s is just opening, and there’s me and a line of homeless guys. I order the pancake breakfast and a nasty cup of coffee and sit at the window.

My “hotcakes” come and they forget the syrup and there’s a whole ta-do while they find it, and suddenly I’m the pushy white guy making a fuss. I’m not the only one, though. Danny the Drunk is here and he’s already plastered. I don’t know how he does it. The man has dedication. He’s getting a milk shake for breakfast and paying in pennies and nickels. There’s word in the building that there’s more to Danny than meets the eye, but frankly I don’t much care. I don’t believe in the homeless sage who has attained wisdom by years of hard knocks and
brutal experience. Danny has nothing to teach me. He’s a hopeless purple-faced alcoholic, of which I’ve seen plenty in Ireland, and I’m really not bothered if he was the president of some company or one of the Apollo astronauts or a bigwig at MIT. He wasn’t, in any case. He worked for the subways in a ticket booth, but that’s a fact getting in the way of the myth and Ratko, in particular, is always ready to emphasize the mysterious nature of his fall.

Since we live in the same building, I suppose he feels a kinship. I can smell him getting closer, and then he comes and sits down opposite, the bastard.

Morning? he says, as if unsure of his bearings.

Aye, I say, head down, shoveling in pancakes with whipped butter and corn syrup.

Cold, he says. Whether this is about the air temperature, his milkshake, or my demeanor, I’m not sure, but I say again:

Aye.

They have the story about the body on 135th?

What?

Your newspaper, do they have that story?

Uhhh, yes, they do, I mumble reluctantly.

It was the story I was reading. They found a body on the campus of City College. Black guy, he’d been shot, and maybe that would have gotten it onto page 23 or something because of the college connection but for the fact that his heart had been removed and straw placed in the cavity where the heart had been. It would grip the city for about a day until the next grisly murder came along, which it would—tomorrow. The police spokesman in the
Daily News
said that in the Jamaican gangs this is what they did with a stool pigeon. It shows that the man had no heart, no loyalty, that he wasn’t a real man at all. A dummy.

Stuffed him with straw, Danny said and took a bit of his shake. I suppose liquids are the only thing he can stomach now. I suddenly felt a bit more charitable to the poor bastard, there but for the grace of God, et cetera.

I’m surprised they don’t call it the
Wizard of Oz
killing, you know, because the straw man wanted a heart, I said.

That was the tin man, Danny said.

Oh, I said.

More like the Emperor Valerian, Danny said. Heard of him?

Rings a bell, I said, truthfully.

They stuffed him.

Who?

The Persians.

Why?

To mock Rome.

What?

He was taken prisoner and they used him as a footstool and stuffed him when he died.

I was annoyed. You see, this is the sort of thing that gets Danny a reputation for having sense. He really doesn’t, but Ratko or someone else in the building will hear him come off with this sort of shite and think that he’s on to something. It pissed me off. And I knew that I was going to be forced to tell Ratko this little story and it was going to reinforce all his prejudices.

Have to head, I said and got up.

You want the rest of your coffee? Danny said.

No.

I passed it over; our eyes met for a second.

Did you go to university? I asked him for some random reason.

I did. Rutgers.

Huh, well, look at you now, I wanted to say, but of course didn’t.

I dumped my plastic utensils and plate in the garbage and went out. I was dying for a fag now, but I tried unsuccessfully to kill the thought. Danny waved at me and grabbed the paper that I’d left.

Outside it was getting a wee bit hotter, but it was still ok. From 125th you can see up to the City College campus, and I shook my head. It was all a bit awful, that killing; I thought about it while I looked in my pockets for my cigarettes before remembering I’d left them in the house.

Shite.

Later, when I’d come back from the Yucatán and was thirty pounds lighter and shell-shocked and was in a bar with Ramón Hernández, I found out all about that murder and, believe me, it had nothing whatsoever to do with Jamaicans or stool pigeons. The cops couldn’t have been more wrong, in fact, unless they’d been deliberately misleading
the press. Ramón told me that it was all a Santería thing. The heart gets burned and the straw that would have been burned goes where the heart was. As long as the heart stays in your hearth or fireplace no harm can come to your house; the bigger the villain whose organ it was, the more evil is warded off. Santería is really crazy, but Ramón believes it and a lot of other Dominicans do as well; it’s what comes of sharing an island with Haitians, I suppose. But also, you have to ask yourself, how many people in New York actually have a fireplace in their apartment? Not too many I would imagine.

Anyway, at this time, I didn’t know Ramón, and after about five minutes that killing went out of my head completely. I was too annoyed with Danny showing off to care about another dead black guy in the long, vague list of horrible violence which was engulfing Upper Manhattan this year.

To walk off my urge for cigarettes, and perhaps for some other reasons, I decided to dander down to the river. It wasn’t too far, and there wouldn’t be anyone about to hassle me.

Not the nicest walk in the city. Chop shops and tough little bodegas and empty lots. On the left-hand side of the street, the relocated Cotton Club, which seems a sad reflection of the original. Next, the West Side Highway, whose elevated steel girders form themselves into a beautiful series of diminishing arches. A Columbia building, parking spaces, another chop shop, a few guys fishing, but that’s about it.

To see people fishing in the Hudson always made me unhappy. They weren’t just fishing for sport, they were eating those things or selling them. Little black ones and green ones and big ones that in another universe entirely could perhaps be trout.

Morning, I said to the boys, and I got some grunts back in reply. Didn’t want to upset their casting, so I went up about half a block and sat down on some tires. I was sweating now, some kind of hypoglycemic reaction to all that sugar at breakfast, no doubt. Probably kill me.

On the water an enormous garbage barge going up to the 135th Street depot. Farther up, coming under the George Washington Bridge, there was a yacht with its sails tied up and motor on. I sat on the railing for a while, looking at the water, thinking about cigarettes. I decided to head home. Shower, disconnect the phone, go back to bed.
I’ll set the alarm for twelve so I don’t destroy my sleep cycle too severely. Maybe call that girl later.

I looked at my watch; it was around seven. I wasn’t as tired as I should be.

Riverside Park was relatively empty, a few dog walkers, a few joggers, homeless guys, and the Columbia University women’s volleyball team, which cheered me up immensely. At the top of the many steps, I had to catch my breath for a moment or two. I went by the dreadful wreck of Grant’s Tomb and down 122nd past the music school. I got my keys and did that gun-keys-keys-gun thing I’d been doing recently and went in the building.

I made some more coffee. Showered, shaved again by mistake, brushed my teeth, put on the fan, and climbed into bed. Only about another hour and the doorbell went and it rang and rang and I almost cried out in frustration: Dear God, will no one let me sleep in this world? I got up, and when I opened the door Bridget came in without a word.

Bridget. She is almost too beautiful. Ethereal, poised, elegant. Some days, it’s as if she’s just stepped out of a poem by W. B. Yeats. Aye, you can imagine her haloed against a dewy wood, singing of Tír na nÓg, summoning you to a barrow in the earth. You would know all this and still you would bloody follow her.

Yes.

Bridget. Heart-attack red hair. A dancer’s grace, but with curves and long, long legs and a bum Rubens could have spilled a few pots of paint depicting.

She dresses well, too. Today she’s in jeans and a white T-shirt that has a daisy in the middle of it, between her breasts. She’s wearing Converse high-tops, which make her look goofy, a counterbalance to the haircut that makes her look a little older. None of this, though, is important. She could be two hundred pounds heavier and wearing a potato sack and it wouldn’t make a difference. It’s her face. The expressions that move across it like a storm on the lough. The thin nose that gives her an aristocratic bearing. The pale skin. And those eyes. I
can’t describe them. Lieutenant Narkiss and all other women are put out of your head in a second. Blue and green on different days, but those are just the names of colors. When they flash dark you want to crawl into a hole somewhere, and when they’re lit up you feel the universe is too small to contain your happiness.

Bullshit, I know, but once you’ve seen her, you’ll get it.

She was going out with Andy for a while, but Andy has enormous, complex, and ongoing problems with the INS, and apparently the buggers hassled the poor kid so much that he couldn’t really give her the time that she deserved. He had to work and he had to get down to the INS office at four in the morning (they only let in the first thousand applicants every day), so Bridget eventually dumped him. Bridget was seventeen then and Andy, who was nearly two years older, was her first boyfriend, I think. It was a very tricky situation, and I, for one, suspected that Andy was relieved not to be going out with Bridget anymore. I’m not a huge conspiracy theorist but if one was of a conspiratorial nature, one might have gotten the impression that Andy was somehow not really into Bridget at all, and in fact he was perhaps the stalking horse for another party entirely. Sure enough, Darkey started going out with her about a month later. Darkey is mid-forties, and her parents might have been more disturbed about the age gap had she not shown that she could handle men by dumping that inconsiderate eejit Andy, who was always arranging to go places with her and then pulling out at the last minute because of his difficulties with the authorities. Though now, with Andy apparently skulking around death’s door and in a coma, I’m sure all is forgiven.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that Bridget is Darkey’s girl. Whether she’s the only girl, I don’t know, but he plays it like she is. They’ve been going out over a year and there is some old-fashioned talk from Mrs. Callaghan of an engagement. Bridget is the youngest of five and the rest are scattered to the winds at university or in California or wherever, so it wouldn’t be such a huge loss for cute wee Bridget to end up with less-than-cute Darkey White. She could do worse, in fact, for although twice divorced, Darkey is sitting pretty with his building business, his glass company, and his shares in Mr. Duffy’s various coys. Both Pat and Mrs. Callaghan like Darkey too, and it’s not that they’re
afraid of him; they’re not, they really like him. They’re afraid of Sunshine (and who isn’t?), but Darkey they like and trust.

So poor Bridget, it’s all mapped out, and the only alternative would be to fly the coop, but she isn’t the type. Besides, the coop suits her fine, and if nothing dramatic happens she will, I suppose, settle down and marry him. I doubt she’s in love with him. It’s possible that she’s in love with me, but who can know their heart at that age. At my age. I am crazy about her, though, and it’s not because she’s a looker. I don’t know what it is, actually, but it’s more than that.

Within a minute of coming into the apartment the high-tops were off and the button-down blue jeans were being buttoned down.

This place is disgusting, is her opening line.

I know. I do clean it, Mouse, is my romantic response.