Short Ride to Nowhere (5 page)

There seemed to be some kind of synchronicity happening.
 
Whatever happened from this point on, it was destined to occur.
 
He wasn’t fighting fate anymore but letting the current take him along.
 
It made him feel like he was a part of a greater whole, as if he wasn’t being ignored anymore by the machinery of the world.
 

He bought the knife and slipped it into his pocket with no idea what he might do with it afterwards.
 
Could he really kill someone?
 
Was that what Jenks had been waiting to do all this time?

He sipped from his mug and played with the blade and thought about it some more.
 
He could’ve just as easily bought a gun off the street.
 
It probably would’ve been the smarter move to make.
 
Anyone could pull a trigger.
 
But stick a man with the point of a knife?
 
Ram it in there with blood spurting all over you?
 
The guy screaming, still reaching for your throat?
 
Jenks wondered if it was ever actually going to happen.
 

The beer went down smooth.
 
He had another and then another and then he quit counting.
 
The bartender kept checking him out, trying to see just how hammered Jenks was getting.
 
He’d give a long deep look in Jenks’ eyes and then pour another.
 
Jenks kept putting them away and never got drunk, not even when he started in on the whiskey.
 
His eyes were clear.
 
The bartender kept pouring.
 
Jenks kept drinking.
 
He didn’t have much anymore but he did have patience.
 
Plenty of that.
 
He had nothing else to do with the rest of his life.
 
He had all the time it would take.

It took a day and a half before Jenks found Hale’s little cubby hole in Central Park.
 
He followed homeless men around to their little tent shanties hidden beside natural rock formations or part of old revolutionary war forts.
 
He asked them about Hale, described him, talked about books.
 
He was surprised that so many men wanted to discuss literature and art and women.
 
He no longer enjoyed conversation.
 
He looked around the park and saw himself living here the way Hale had and it didn’t look so bad, at least in the summer.
 
In the winter you’d have to hole up in the subways or shelters or clinics, but you could make it if you wanted to.
 
The trouble was wanting to.

There was still a small amount of scattered books around, torn mostly to shreds, the pages bloated from rain.
 
He knelt and collected some of the novels, recognizing passages and titles and authors, thinking about the days when books used to matter to him.

He kept asking questions.
 
The rummies, addicts, and the newly impoverished seemed scared of him at first.
 
But it didn’t take long for them to recognize one of their own. He asked about the little girl.
 
Too much time had apparently passed.
 
These were a new batch of transients.
 
They told Jenks to try the nearest shelter.
 
Hale probably would’ve stopped in there on occasion for food or a dry place to sleep on particularly cold, wet nights.
 

They told him how to get there.
 
They told him the food was good on Monday nights and to stay away next Thursday.
 
Next Thursday was a full moon.
 
The lunatics crammed into the shelter on nights of the full moon.
 
Most of them were loud and harmless but a few were dangerous.
 
Make sure you got your bed early in the day and that you held it until at least the following morning.
 
If you wandered in too late the muggers would be waiting for the chance to roll you.
 
Ask for Angela.

Jenks found the shelter and gave it a go.
 
It was Angela’s day off.
 
He got Mike instead.
 
Mike was an NYU student who was volunteering at the shelter to fatten out his college records for when he started filling out resumes in the summer.
 
It would look good that he did such altruistic extracurricular activities.
 
He had a smug air of superiority, as if he would always be on the right side of the desk.
 
Maybe he would.
 

Jenks asked Mike about Hale and got a song and dance about how employees of the shelter couldn’t give out personal information on their patrons.
 
Hell of a word that, patrons.
 
Like these folks with nowhere to go are just afternoon shoppers waiting for the aisle six sales.
 
Jenks figured he could rattle Mike pretty badly if he got a little rough, but there was no reason to go down that road so soon.
 

Men and women had already set up in the wards, entire families, children, even pets.
 
You wouldn’t be surprised to see somebody holding a goldfish tank in his lap.
 
People wanted to save what they could.
 

A little girl was crying that she was hungry and her mother shushed her and hummed a lullaby.
 
He wondered which of these people might go mad on the night of the full moon.

“Okay,” Jenks said.
 
“Can I get a bed?”

Mike looked perplexed.
 
“What?
 
Now?”

“Yeah, now.”

“I thought you were just asking about your friend.”

“I was.”

“Are you homeless as well?”

“I am.”

“You don’t look it.”

“What’s a homeless person look like you little fucker?”

Mike took umbrage.
 
“Hey, there’s no reason to use that kind of language!”

“Right.
 
Sorry.”

“Where have you been staying?”

“In my car.”

“Where is your car located?”

“In a parking garage off Times Square.”

“You have enough money to pay parking lot fees in Manhattan?”

It wasn’t enough that you had no house or woman or kids or dog anymore.
 
It wasn’t enough you were practically out of the game.
 
They wanted to know exactly what you had in your wallet.
 
They needed to rub your face down in the vomit on the floor.
 
They had to take your last bit of umbrage.

“Get me a bed,” Jenks said.

“You have to fill out paperwork.”

“Fine. Give it to me.”

The questions were in-depth, mostly financial.
 
These people, they asked for reasons.
 
The reason for your need to use the facility.
 
Financial?
 
Medical?
 
Pertaining to addiction?
 
Jenks stared a the questions and looked back at the kids roaming around, little girls in the eye of the storm, a couple of crackheads watching like wolves, and he thought again of the child who had died with Hale.
 

Jenks filled out the forms, mostly writing in “N/A” where he figured the information wasn’t anybody’s business, even for a free bed.
 
As if you had no right to privacy anymore because you were down on your luck.
 
He finished the paperwork quickly and returned to the front desk and handed the clipboard back to Mike.
 

“What’s N/A?” Mike asked.

“You really don’t know what N/A is?” Jenks said.

“No.”

“‘Not applicable.’”

“That’s how you responded to most of the questions.”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t think you can do that.”

“What time does Angela get in tomorrow?”

“What?”

“What time does her shift start?”

“Eight a.m.”

Mike went through the paperwork and typed it into the system.
 
Then he showed Jenks to a room that was like a hospital ward, a mental ward, a prison, full of beds already filled with other people.
 
All of us stacked up like cordwood, like the dead.
 
Mike walked him all the way to the back corner and did a little ta-da wave of the hand, preeee-senting your bed.
 
Jenks laid down wearing all of his clothes, even his shoes.

He kept one hand in his jacket pocket toying with the butterfly blade.
 
It took him an hour to realize he was almost hoping that someone who try to jump him, rob him, start some kind of shit.
 
The American dream was dead but the American nightmare was still on the roll.
 

A bloodletting was bound to be next.
 
It had happened to Hale.
 
Most of what happened to Hale had or would soon happen to Jenks.
 
So this is probably what would go down next.
 

And so he flipped the blade open and then snapped it shut, again and again.
 
He fell asleep to the sound of children whimpering.

Hours had passed.
 
There was grit in his eyes.
 
He came awake in the dim light to somebody trying to go through his pocket.
 

Instead of nabbing his wallet they’d cut themselves on the knife and had let out a hiss of pain.
 

Jenks rolled aside fully aware.
 
He wasn’t fat and lazy with a head full of classic literature anymore.
 
He was a constantly vibrating wire.

A bald guy with a bristly horseshoe 70s porn mustache, his forearms thick, his breath dank as methane at the bottom of a crypt, sucked on his index finger.
 
The point of the blade had barely touched him, but it was sharp enough to prick him.
 

Jenks’s hand shot out and he gripped Baldy’s wrist tightly.
 
That mustache, Jesus.
 
You had to have balls to walk around with that thing crawling across your face.
 
Baldy was an individualist.
 
Baldy was a trend-setter, not a trend-follower.

As Baldy tried to yank free, Jenks shifted his body weight and levered himself to his feet in one fluid motion.
 
They stood facing each other in the dark, in the silence.
 
Jenks waited to see if the guy would pull a weapon, if he’d have to now draw the butterfly blade, if this was the moment, finally, when something like this went down.
 

But instead Baldy just pulled away again, but he couldn’t break Jenks’s grip.

The mustache, it had its own life, its own history.
 
It had fucked a lot of women and presented itself in porno theaters across the country.
 
It had signed autographs.
  
Your daddy used to sit in theaters and play pocket pool to the mustache’s exploits.

“There’s nothing you can do to me that hasn’t already been done,” Baldy said.

“You’re probably right, but you still shouldn’t steal from one of your own kind.”

“You aren’t my kind.”

“I’m you, brother.”

That got nothing but the sound of scoffing, maybe from the man, maybe from the mustache.
 
Jenks looked at Baldy’s pockets, which were so overstuffed with items that shit was hanging out and falling to the floor.
 
Candy, coins, a few dollar bills, a toy car, a dog biscuit, some string.