Shovel Ready (9 page)

I’m paranoid about Pilot, so we skip my boat.

Hire a gypsy sloop to run us across the river.

Driver shouts over the outboard.

Destination?

Canal Street.

Canal Street? What for? Haven’t you heard? Canal Street’s dead.

I drop the conversation and we chop across the waves. Persephone hugs my arm, pressing tight against me. Then again, it’s a small boat, I tell myself.

Canal Street. East side.

What used to be called Chinatown.

Once upon a time, you walked these blocks, you were wading waist deep in a river of people. The streets stank of spoiled seafood and the sidewalks were sticky with fish oil and ice-melt, dumped at day’s end. And from sun-up to lights-out, these blocks would sing. Shouting, shuffling, haggling, hustling, vendors hawking knock-offs, shopkeepers harassing you in Cantonese as you pass like you stole something from them and they wanted it back. Fresh carp sunbathing on wood crates of packed ice. Hot dumpling soup for a dollar. Ducks, plucked and bashful, hung on hooks in a windowpane, like a warning to other outlaw ducks.

No more.

Chinatown met the same fate as the city, only more so. Last generation died off. Next generation moved to Jersey. Or upstate New York. Or the Carolinas. Or anywhere but here, downwind from a dirty bomb. Turns out no matter how deep your root system, you can always pull it up.

Have ducks, will travel.

So Chinatown withered. Went from egg-drop to pin-drop.

And the one last viable business in these parts moved indoors, out of sight, behind peepholes and passwords. And it caters to a clientele that is very, very quiet.

They call them dorms. Quasilegal tap-in flops, a hundred beds to a floor. Not the shiny kind either. Not like Lyman’s. These are jury-rigged beds, not much more than cots and wires. It’s strictly BYOFeedbag. Most people here don’t care too much about food.

Mark’s dorm of choice is a spot called Rick’s Place. Run by a guy named Rick. The name’s a
Casablanca
nod, mistranslated.

We head inside.

Rick is fortysomething, but he’s smoked himself older. He’s half-Chinese and skinny as a horsewhip. Wears silver skull rings on every finger and both thumbs. His black pompadour is coaxed to an impressively rigid sheen and he’s got four facial tattoos. Chinese characters. Forehead, cheek, cheek, chin.

In answer to your next question, I’ve never asked.

He pulls on his cigarette. Cherry flares.

Mr Garbageman. I haven’t seen you in a good long while. You decide to get back on the tap?

Hello Rick.

I tell you what. I’ll give you two-for-one for you and your—girlfriend? Daughter? Sponsor? You know what? Forget I asked.

He gives Persephone a double-take.

I see congratulations are in order. Little litter of Spademen. Tell you what? Special today. Kids ride for free.

Persephone’s perplexed.

How did you—

Hey, I’m Chinese. I can tell from the soles of your feet.

Rick’s Asian lady-friend, Mina, comes stumbling out from a back room. She’s a tool-head, like Rick, a technician, a gizmo, and likes to call herself Mina Machina. Long black
hair and a thousand-yard stare because, unlike Rick, she’s also a serious tapper.

We’ve never really gotten along.

She looks at me like she’s about to say something, points at me, forgets, then half dozes off while she’s busy forgetting. Spun around, she exits mumbling through a curtained doorway, stumbling off to look for something else she forgot to remember she forgot.

Rick shrugs.

What can I say? Soul mates.

Rick, I’m looking for Mark Ray.

He takes another drag. Looses a lanky ghost of smoke.

Sure, sure. Of course. Who isn’t looking for Mark Ray? Our little angel. And I’m going to guess this is the very first place you looked.

The dorm is dark and drop-dead quiet. A former sweatshop, now a flop-shop, laid out like a battlefield hospital. Rows and rows of cots and a couple of tired-looking Chinese nurses, checking pulses.

A few muffled yelps escape from sleepers here and there. Hard to tell if they’re cries of pleasure or fear. Or both. Two-part harmony.

Rick leans over.

You better let me do this. Mark is a heavy sleeper.

He winds through the cots. Spots Mark’s crown of golden curls.

Persephone watches the room, wide-eyed.

I whisper.

I bet you’ve never seen anything like this back in Kansas.

I’m not from Kansas.

I know. But still.

I have. I have seen this before.

Still watching the room. Doesn’t look at me.

This is what my father’s camp looks like.

What?

Paved With Gold.

Then she says something else, in a croak. Half to herself. Like a joke.

In my father’s house are many mansions
.

I whisper.

What’s that? Bible verse?

Nope. Sales pitch.

Mark Ray used to be a youth pastor at a church in Minnesota. I met him a few years ago, after someone called me to offer me a job.

So how does this work?

I just need a name.

My name?

No. I don’t need to know your name. So long as you wire me the money. I just need the other person’s name. The one on the receiving end.

And that’s it?

That’s it.

Okay.

So. The name?

Mark Ray.

The caller’s Minnesota accent hard to forget.

I tracked Mark Ray down to the Reading Room at the Public Library, the big one, in Bryant Park, with the stone lions out front.

Not much reading in the Reading Room anymore. They tore out the shelves and put in server racks. Swapped the tables out, brought in beds. A high-end pit stop, a per-hour place, mostly targeting tourists, back when there were still tourists in New York.

Mark was walking among the beds, watching people dreaming. Angelic mess of curls on his head.

I walked up behind him. Figure I’d convince him that we should retire to someplace more private.

He turned.

So you’ve found me. That was fast.

Same Minnesota accent. Impossible to miss.

We sat on the front steps, watching the lions.

I don’t do suicides.

Why not?

You want to kill yourself, kill your own damn self. That’s between you and your god.

Yes, I guess it is.

He was sitting forward, elbows propped on his knees. Broad back. Young guy. Handsome as hell, if I can say so. Hard to see why he wouldn’t want to live.

He held his hands flat together, like he was about to break out in prayer.

I understand why you have that rule. But my problem is, I can’t do it myself.

Why not?

Mortal sin.

You Catholic?

No. Evangelical.

Then I don’t think you have to worry.

He turned to me.

Are you a religious man?

No.

Never?

My parents dumped me at Sunday school a few times when I was young, keep me out of their hair. As for them, they tried
to fight less on Sundays. Or at least keep their voices down. That was about the extent of it.

I see.

My father worshipped at the church of the New York Jets. Saint Namath and all that.

And you’ve never been tempted?

By religion?

Yes.

That’s not the kind of temptation I have to worry about.

I was a pastor back in Minnesota. I used to teach a lesson on temptation. Or at least that’s what I thought it was about.

So what’s the lesson?

Do you know the story of Bathsheba?

Then it happened one evening that David arose from his bed and walked on the roof of the king’s house. And from the roof he saw a woman bathing, and the woman was very beautiful to behold
.

Mark filled me in. Back in Israel, in Bible times, Bathsheba was a woman who King David spied from his rooftop while she was bathing nude. He saw her and he was gripped with lust.

Gripped with lust. Not my words. Mark’s. Or the Bible’s. Or God’s.

In any case.

Gripped with lust.

So David sent for her. He slept with her. And he impregnated her. Trouble is, Bathsheba was already married. To Uriah the Hittite. Who was not only one of David’s trusted friends, but also a soldier in King David’s army. But this
didn’t give David pause. It gave him an idea. Which he relayed to the army’s commander.

Set Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retreat from him, that he may be struck down and die
.

Mark paused the story.

So I’ve been teaching this passage a lot lately to my kids, my students. At first, I taught it the way that I learned it in Bible school. Not as a story of lust, or of corruption, but of temptation. You know, how God puts temptation in front of you. He allows you to feel your own weakness. To confront it. Just as Christ did here on Earth. Satan laid out the whole world to Christ, promised it to him, if only he’d bend a knee to Satan. And he felt it. Christ. He was tempted. But he didn’t succumb. And we feel it too. Whether it’s the apple in Eden. Or the desire to look back over your shoulder and watch Sodom crumble. Or spotting the most beautiful woman in Israel, bathing naked on a rooftop. I’m sure you have some secret temptation. Some secret shame.

I thought of a Ziploc baggie in a Sub-Zero freezer, while Mark waited for an answer that wasn’t coming.

Okay. Well, your temptations are your own. I understand. My point is, I always thought that story was a lesson about temptation. This idea that the sin is not in the being tempted, but in giving in to the temptation. That is what God cannot abide. But I was wrong.

That’s not the lesson?

No.

So what is it?

It’s a story about wrath. It’s not a parable at all.

No?

No. It’s a warning.

Mark unpaused the story.

So on the battlefront, Uriah was slain by archers firing a rain of arrows down from a city’s high walls. And the army’s commander sends word back to the king, who he assumes will be crushed at this news. Right? But King David sends this message back to the commander.

Do not let this thing displease you, for the sword devours one as well as another
.

I interject.

What were David and Bathsheba doing all this time?

They were busy fucking. Pardon my language.

Okay.

So King David’s managed to pull off the perfect crime. No one suspects him, and even if they did, they’d say nothing. Because he’s the king. He is blameless in the eyes of the world. If not in his own heart. Or in the eyes of God. And do you know what the last verse of that passage is?

No.

But the thing David had done displeased the Lord
.

Well, yeah. You would imagine.

Mark pounded his palm like a pulpit.

But the thing. David had done. Displeased. The Lord
. That is the lesson of the story. It’s not about temptation. It’s about vengeance. It’s about wrath. It is about God looking down, and seeing what you’ve done, and being displeased.

Sure.

And do you know what happens when the Lord is displeased with you?

No.

You end up in New York, outside a library, begging some stranger to put you in the ground.

Mark. Persephone. Persephone. Mark.

The three of us back on the Chinatown street corner. Mark shies from the sun, still half in the dream. Dreamy.

He holds out a hand to Persephone.

Pleased to meet you.

Four letters tattooed across his knuckles.

DAMN.

When I first met Mark, farm-fresh from Minnesota, he was not the type to show up with new tattoos. Then again, he also wasn’t the type to tap in for a week at a time. Had never been in a bed before he came to New York.

Still, I have to ask.

You didn’t have these last time I saw you.

He flips his fingers, knuckles up.

What? These? Yeah. You like them?

He makes a fist. A letter on each finger.

DAMN.

Holds up his left hand. Makes a fist.

ABLE.

Holds the two fists together.