Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) (40 page)

He drank some of his beer. The barkeep moved back behind the bar and keyed open the register.

“Just the bills, now. No change.”

He watched him drop the bills into the Bloomie’s bag. Bob had had a pretty good night tonight. From where he sat it looked like well over a thousand. He’d read in the paper today that business was down in the City about $357 million since September 11th. Bars and restaurants particularly. You wouldn’t know it from where he was sitting.

“Tell you what, Bob. Let’s play a little game for your tip bucket. I’m sure you got a couple hundred in there. I’m sure you’d like to keep it. So. I lose, it’s yours. I win, it goes in the bag.”

“No, that’s okay, you can just . . .”

He started reaching for the bucket above the register.

“Hey! It’s
not
okay, Bob!”

He lurched to his feet and leaned over and shoved the barrel of the gun against the barkeep’s pale high forehead. He could feel the guy trembling right down though to the handle of the gun. Saw his glasses slip half an inch down his sweaty nose.

“Get this right, Robert. I say we play a little game, then we play a little game. Let me tell you something you don’t know about me, Bob. I don’t like people. In fact it’s fair to say that I fucking hate people. Not just you,
Bob
, you spikey-haired little midwest shit-for-brains—though I do hate you, for sure. But see, I hate
everybody
. I’m a completely equal-opportunity hater—Jews, Arabs, Asians, blacks, WASPS, you name it. Some people think that’s a problem. You know how many people have tried to help me with this little problem, Bob? Have tried to
reform
me? Dozens! I’m not kidding you. But you know, it never takes. Never. You know why? Because my one real kick in life, the one thing that really gets me off, is to reform all those people who want to reform me. And it is my honestly held belief that the only way to reform people is to hurt ’em or kill ’em or both. Period.”

He sat back down again, rested the gun on the bar, his hand spread out on top of it.

Bob was visibly twitching now, mouth gulping air like a fish.

“Jesus, calm down, Robert, or this isn’t gonna work. Hand me the bag. And your keys. That’s good. Thanks very much. Now slide over that cutting board there and that little knife you use on the lemons.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Just do it. And dump the lemons.”

The kid glanced at his hand on the gun and then turned and did as he was told, set the knife and the board down in front of him.

“Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do. You’re right-handed, right? Thought so. So you’re gonna put your right hand down,
palm-side up
—that’s important, palm up—and spread your fingers. Then I’m gonna take this knife here, which I notice you keep nice and sharp—very good Robert—and jab around between your fingers. Slow at first, then maybe a little faster. Not too fast, don’t worry. Believe me, I’m good at this. I really am. But if I miss, even the slightest little cut, the slightest nick, you get to keep the bucket. I don’t miss, bucket goes with me. Fair enough? Sure it is. All you got to do is hold very still for me now.”

“Oh Jesus.”

“Stop with the
oh Jesus
, Robert. Try to be a fucking man for a change. Or you can just remember that I got the gun here, whichever works for you. Okay. Spread your fingers.”

The kid pushed his glasses up on his nose. They slid back down again. Then he took a deep breath and held it and put his hand down flat on the board.

He took the knife between his thumb on one side and forefinger and middle finger on the other and as promised, he started off slow.
Thump
, beat.
Thump
, beat.
Thump
. Then he picked up tempo and the thumps got louder because the force got greater and he really was good at this, damn he was good,
thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump
and the kid kept saying
oh Jesus, oh Jesus
, Bob a Christian through and through now and he knew that for poor Bob this was going on forever, this was an eternity and when he finally got tired of scaring the shit out of the kid pinned the web of his thumb to the cutting board so that the kid gasped and said
aahhhh!!
and he said
don’t you yell, Bob, whatever you do, don’t you dare fucking yell
.

And Bob didn’t. Bob was toughing it out as expected. He just stood there breathing hard, his left elbow propping him up on the bar against the pain and probably against a pair of pretty shaky legs and looked down at the spreading pool of blood between his fingers. He reached into his pocket and took out the envelope and opened it. Tore it
down one side and blew a tablespoon of Johnson’s talcum powder directly into his face.

Bob looked startled. Blinking at him, confused.

“
Anthrax, Bob
,” he said. “It’s the real thing, I promise.”

He picked up the bag of money. Took four pair of rolled-up socks out of his jacket pockets and unrolled them and spread them out over the money.

Like he’d just done his laundry.

“You try not to breathe now for a while Bob, go wash your face. That shit’ll get right down into your lungs. And you know what happens then. Bucket’s yours. You won it fair and square. You take care now. And if you think I’ve treated you badly which I really hope you don’t, well hell, you should just see what I do to the ladies.”

Whether the kid believed him or not about the anthrax didn’t matter but he was betting he’d have a bad moment at least, the City being what it was nowadays.

He keyed the lock, looked right and left, threw the keys in the gutter and slipped off the gloves as he walked on out the door.

SIX

It had taken Claire a while to do this, to work up the will and the courage finally and Barbara had felt the same way. So they’d decided to do it together and that helped.

They stood in front of the Chambers Street subway exit on an unseasonably warm sunny day along with thirty or so other people scattered across the block staring south from behind the police barricades at the distant sliver of sky where only a month and a half ago the Twin Towers had been.

The smell was invasive, raw, born on a northerly breeze. It clawed at her throat.
Superheated metal, melting plastic and something else. Something she didn’t like to think about
.

She had never much liked the Trade Center. It had always
seemed overbearing, soulless, a huge smug temple to money and power.

And now both she and Barbara were quietly crying.

All those people lost
.

She was crying so much these days.

She knew nobody who had died here.

Somehow she seemed to know everybody who had died here.

She stared up into a bright blue sky tarnished with plumes of pale blonde smoke and after a while she turned around.

She had never seen so many stricken faces.

Old people and young people and even little kids—kids so small she thought they shouldn’t even know about this let alone be standing here, they shouldn’t have to grow up in the wake of it either. It wasn’t right. A woman wearing jeans and an
I LOVE NY—EVEN MORE
teeshirt was wiping back a steady stream of tears. A man with a briefcase didn’t bother.

She didn’t see a single smile.

“Let’s walk,” she said.

It was a whisper, really. As though they were standing in a church. And that was the other uncanny thing about this—the silence. New York City heavy and thick with silence broken only by the occasional truck rolling by filled with debris and once, the wail of a fire engine hurtling through the streets to ground zero. She had only one memory of the City to compare it with—a midnight stroll a few years back after a record snowfall, a snowfall big enough so that it had closed all the airports and bridges and tunnels. It had paralyzed the City. She remembered standing alone in the middle of the northbound lane at Broadway and 68th Street in pristine untracked snow for over twenty minutes until finally a pair of headlights appeared far in the distance. She could have been in Vermont or New Hampshire. Instead she was standing in one of the busiest streets in the busiest city in the world. She remembered
being delighted with the sheer novelty of it, of all that peace and silence.

This was not the same thing.

They walked south down Broadway past shop after shop selling posters or framed photos of the Towers, their eyes inevitably drawn to them. And they didn’t strike her as crass or even commercial particularly, though of course they were—New York would always recover first through commerce—they stuck her as valid reminders of what had been. And there was nothing wrong with that.

They stopped in front of a boarded-up Chase Bank filthy with dust, the entire broad surface of its window covered with ID photos of cops and firemen dead, all those young faces staring out at them frozen in time forever. The thick brown-white dust lay everywhere. On the sidewalks, the streets, the surfaces of shops and highrises—canopies and even whole skyscrapers were being hosed down to try to get rid of it.

It was a losing battle. The site was still burning.

She stared at the faces moving past her. She guessed that not one in thirty was smiling.

They passed police barricades strewn with flowers.

Windows filled with appeals for information on the missing.
The dead
.

Their photos.

They passed children’s bright crayon drawings—hearts, firemen, cops, flowers, words of grief and thanks.

It had been a while since either of them had said a thing. She’d always been perfectly comfortable with Barbara ever since their days bartending together at the Village Cafe but this was different. Each of them, she thought, was really alone here. Everybody was.

The wind shifted. The stench died down. But her mouth still tasted like steel and dust and plastic. She was hungry. She hadn’t eaten. Yet it was impossible to think of eating here. She wondered how the sub shops and sidewalk
stands stayed open. Even a Coke or a bottled water here would taste . . . wrong.

They’d stop at each corner and gaze into the empty sky.

Approaching Liberty Street the sidewalks became more crowded and then very crowded and before long they were trapped in the midst of a slow-moving mass of people that was almost frightening, what felt like hundreds of people, tourists and New Yorkers all crowding together at the barricades and straining for what was supposedly the best view of what was no longer there. And here you
did
see smiles and laughter, too damn much laughter for her liking. Almost a carnival atmosphere, fueled by morbid curiosity. And packed too tight together, far too tight, seven or eight deep—so that what if something happened? what if somebody panicked? You could be crushed, trampled. And when a father snapped a photo of his smiling little girl against the horizon and then a teenage boy with his girlfriend did the same she said,
let’s get the hell out of here
.

“We can’t,” said Barbara.

“I don’t like this.”

“Neither do I.”

She was shaking with a mix of fear and fury.

“This way.”

It was easier than she’d thought. As they stepped slowly through from the center to the rear of the crowd people were happy to take their place so they could get nearer to the site. Finally they stood at the edge of this crawling human tide, their back nearly scraping the filthy storefronts and climbing over steps leading into other storefronts and soon they found themselves on Park Row leading east so that it was silent again finally and they laughed and shook their heads almost dizzy with relief and that was when they heard it, a small soft mewling sound.

“Is that. . . . ?”

“Shhhh,” she said. “Yes.”

She listened. In a moment she heard it again. There was a long green dumpster on blocks and packed with rubble,
mostly chunks of cement, across the street to her left. The sound was coming from there. They walked over and peered beneath the dumpster, Claire working one way, Barbara the other.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Nothing here either.”

She looked behind it. A dirty empty sidewalk and the wall of a building.

“We didn’t imagine that,” Barbara said. “That was a kitten.”

“I know. Hold on a minute.”

She put her foot down on one of the blocks and hauled herself up to the lip of the dumpster and scanned the rubble. And there it was, far over to her right, a tiny tabby walking unsteadily across a narrow jagged cement-shard tightrope, back and forth, gazing down at something beyond her sightlines to the far side of the dumpster. They heard it cry again. She hopped down.

“Over here,” she said.

They walked over to where she judged the cat had been but there weren’t any blocks there, nothing for her to step up on. She looked around for a milk crate or a bucket or garbage can. Something.

“Cradle your fingers.”

“Gotcha.”

Barbara did and her first try failed miserably and Claire fell back to the street again practically into her and they both started laughing and then she tried again.

“Okay. I got it. Hold on.”