The Intruder (38 page)

“Once this hearing is done, I could be in a lot of trouble. There’s going to be a lot of talk about filing motions and revoking bail and making sacrifices to pay for lawyers’ bills.”

Alex rolls his eyes a little, as if to say, Tell me something I don’t already know.

Jake puts a hand on his son’s leg and then takes it away as if spikes had just shot out of it. “I suppose where this is all leading is ...” He pauses to put his thoughts in order. “Is to talk about the possibility that I might be going to jail.”

The air doesn’t just seem heavy anymore; it feels leaden. Alex’s mouth goes tight. Nirvana’s music grows quieter on the headphones. Jake’s stomach feels as if it’s just filled up with cold water.

“You’ve thought about that, I’m sure.”

“Yeah,” the boy says, sounding tentative and surly.

“Well, I just wanted to tell you—I’m sorry.”

Nirvana’s music explodes again into raging guitars and feedback. Jake realizes he had it backwards before. Alex isn’t so much listening to Kurt Cobain; it’s more like the earphones are somehow broadcasting the angry soundtrack in his mind.

“Is there something you want to say to me about that?” Jake asks.

His son’s mouth stays closed and defiant. At least he’s not wearing that nose ring anymore.

“If my dad was going to jail, I know I’d have something to say about it.”

Still no response from Alex.

“I would’ve said: ‘Bout time.”

Not even a half smile. The black Nike on Alex’s left foot jiggles, keeping time with the frantic music.

“I hope I’ve been a better father to you than that,” Jake says, doleful but still striving for connection. “Remember about the bananas?”

“What?” Caught off-guard, the boy seems mildly interested and then irritated.

“I was just thinking how when you were little you wouldn’t eat a banana until I came over and took all those little fibers off the side. You used to call them the strings. Remember?”

“Sort of.” Alex sits up, just a little. The headphones slip and the music shrieks into his neck instead of his ears.

Jake moves a little and sees he was sitting on an empty packet of Bambu rolling papers.

“So?” says Alex, trying to distract his father from the discovery.

“I was just thinking about all the things we used to do together,
just you and me when your mother wasn’t around. Like the first time I took you to a baseball game. Remember? You were all nervous because you didn’t think you’d be able to follow what was going on.”

Alex’s eyes get far away. “There was a fight.”

“Yeah, I think Gooden threw at somebody’s head or something and they all came piling out of the dugouts.” Jake shakes his head. “Baseball players trying to punch each other. It’s like ballet dancers trying to drink beer.”

“No, I meant in the stands,” Alex says. “There was a fight in the stands. Two guys in the next section started hitting each other and coming up the aisle toward us. You grabbed me and pulled me out to the hotdog stand.”

“I was probably just trying to protect you.”

“Yeah, but I wanted to watch.”

“I buy you a hotdog at least?”

“And a Mets cap.”

“Well, that’s not bad for an afternoon, is it?”

“I guess you were trying to look out for me,” Alex says grudgingly.

“I feel bad I didn’t do more of that,” Jake says. “Spend time, I mean. Just you and me.”

“It was all right.”

Jake can’t tell if Alex means that he was a good father or that the time they spent together seemed quite sufficient to him.

He picks up his son’s Bambú packet. “You know, back in the nineteen sixties, people thought you could get high smoking banana peels.”

“That’s stupid.”

Jake raises his left eyebrow. “It is, isn’t it.”

The Nirvana song ends and Alex rolls onto his side.

“Your mother thinks you’re smoking too much pot and that’s why you’re having trouble in school.”

The boy looks up at the ceiling and his whole body tenses with rage.

“It’s not fair,” he says. “It’s not even true.”

Jake cocks his head to one side more indulgently than he would
with a client telling a similar lie. “The truth is, most people would understand it if you started getting into bad habits. Oh, no wonder he dropped out and started doing drugs, his father went to jail.’ ”

“Fuck you.”

Jake looks at his son for a long time.

Alex casts his eyes down, not quite ready to deal with the consequences of what he’s said. “I just don’t like it when you try to psychoanalyze me,” he says in a low, sullen voice. “No one else knows what’s going on in my head. You can’t tell me how to feel.”

“That’s true. But I’m asking if you want to put yourself into a position where you’re relying on other people’s pity.”

“ ‘You’re the little man in the house now, Timmy, it’s up to you to look after your ma,’ “ Alex says, imitating some virtuous square-jawed family man from prime time TV.” ‘I’m not gonna be around much anymore.’ ”

“So I can’t kick your ass if you fuck up,” his father interrupts. “I have to rely on you to do the right thing.”

“And what do you know about that, Dad?” His son looks up, his brown eyes challenging him. “You’re the one who’s going to jail. Right? I haven’t killed anybody.”

“And neither have I. Jesus Christ! You’d think I could get a little understanding out of my own family.”

His throat aches and his voice sounds harsh. Somehow he’d assumed this would be easier. But why should it be? Everything in his life’s experience tells him that nothing ever comes easily between fathers and sons.

“Look,” he says, trying to sound conciliatory. “I know this has probably been tough on you. I don’t know if people talk about it at school ...”

“They do.”

Silence like a wound opens up between them. A mournful cello sighs through the headphones, replacing the abrasive guitars.

“All my friends know what’s going on,” Alex says after a few seconds. “They’re all like, ‘Man, I’m really glad it’s not my father.’ And I start to laugh along and then I think: Wait, it
is
my father. So now I’m different from them. And it’s not the way I want to be different. I mean, there are ways I
want to be different, but this isn’t one of them. It’s not fair.”

“I know.”

“So why’d you kill him? That’s what everyone wants to know. They ask me if you talk about what it’s like to kill somebody when you’re home.”

“It wasn’t like that.” Jake stares at his son, wishing he could reach over and touch the boy. “Now is not the time to get into all of it. Maybe one day when it’s over.”

“Yeah, right.”

The cello in the headphones fades, as the guitar and drums launch one final desperate volley. Kurt Cobain stares down from a poster across the room that says
I HATE MYSELF AND WANT TO DIE.

“All I can say is I tried to do what I thought was right for you and your mother.”

“Gimme a break.”

The boy hoists the headphones back over his ears. Jake wonders if he’ll have another chance at making things right between them. The thought that he won’t moves the ache from his throat down into his chest.

“I love you,” he tells his son.

But Alex is lost in his own private universe and the words can’t penetrate the cyclone of sound in his ears.

Jake goes back to his office downstairs to look at his papers and law books, headachy and as frayed inside as Kurt Cobain’s voice, hoping against hope to find something other than the words of a deranged man that will help him stay out of prison for the rest of his days.

77

Hey, c’mere a second!”

When John G. comes out of his Brooklyn work shelter on Wednesday morning, two days before he’s supposed to testify, there’s a red Dodge van parked across the street.

“I wanna ask you something.” The driver waves him over.

John doesn’t recognize the man until he comes right up to the driver’s side window. Then he sees a brand-new aluminum baseball bat lying flat across the passenger seat.

“How’s your memory?” says Philip Cardi.

John G. is still trying to process the threat in his mind when he shows up at the employment office an hour and a half later. His interviewer, Mrs. D’Alessandro, sits behind her worn battleship of a desk, eating an egg salad sandwich on wax paper.

“I’m sorry I kept you waiting,” she says, half rising to shake his hand. “But I’ve hardly had a chance for lunch today.”

Her fingers feel moist and soggy.

“It’s all right,” says John, sitting down and trying to find a way to get comfortable. “I wasn’t going anywhere.”

His left arm starts to itch. He doesn’t want to be here today, but Ted Shakur insisted it was part of his Lifesmanship Training Course. He has to learn how to reintegrate himself into society by working on the “fun-da-mentals,” as Ted calls them. Going
to job interviews, opening bank accounts, getting himself a telephone.

But the whole time, he keeps hearing the words: Jesus fucking Christ I’m not ready for this. His mind’s been in an uproar since he agreed to testify for Mr. Schiff. And now he has this threat to contend with. How’s your memory? Jesus fucking Christ.

“So what kinda work are you looking for?” asks Mrs. D’Alessandro, glancing down at the resume John’s given her.

“Anything.”

“Anything?”

She looks up, alarmed. Is he sounding too desperate? Be relaxed, Ted told him. Wear a clean shirt. Shave. Be yourself. But what if the real you isn’t a clean shirt and a close shave? What if the real you is a bum going through garbage cans for crack money?

“Well, maybe you can narrow it down for me a little,” Mrs. D’Alessandro says in a voice like honey and thumbtacks. “What kinda work are you interested in doing?”

Outside, Eighteenth Street traffic is clogged. Trucks blare their horns and foul the air with black smoke. A cop with a loudspeaker keeps telling everyone to move.

“I just meant, I was willing to do anything,” John G. says, fidgeting as the itch moves up his arm. “I could drive a van. I could do construction. I could handle rubbish removal ...”

He tries to remember the rest of what Ted told him to say, but the words won’t come. He’s aware only of the truck horns and the egg salad dribbling onto the wax paper.
How’s your memory?

“Well, how were you previously employed?” asks Mrs. D’Alessandro.

“I was with the TA. I drove a train.”

“Yeah, but what have you been doing for the past year?” She puts on a pair of black-rimmed glasses and frowns at his résumé. “The Shaker Realty Company. What’s that?”

It’s a lie. That’s what it is. Ted told him that any employer with brains would wonder what he’d been up to lately. And he hasn’t picked up references, smoking jumbos and pissing in the gutters the last few months. “Sometimes it’s necessary to just stretch the truth a little,” Ted told him.

But now John finds he can’t get right with that. The itch has moved to the center of his chest.

Mrs. D’Alessandro takes off her glasses. “I never heard of this Shaker group. What’d you do for them?”

Come on, Ted told him. Everybody lies. It’s the way of the world. It’s dog-eat-dog in the offices, just like it is on the streets.

But John still can’t adjust. Something inside him has been rigged to go off when he lies. Maybe it’s what the nuns taught him or maybe it’s the fact that telling the truth is the only thing that’s anchored him for most of his life. But right now the itching in his chest is unbearable and he begins to claw at his heart.

“You all right?” says Mrs. D’Alessandro. “You’re lookin’ kinda pale.”

He’s not all right, though. Why does everyone expect so much from him? He isn’t prepared to go back to a world of car insurance and bank accounts and having two forms of ID on you at all times. And he’s certainly in no shape to stand up to threats. It’s too much responsibility. They want him to testify in court and he can barely order a Happy Meal at McDonald’s.

“I’m sorry,” he says, getting up quickly to leave. “I think I made a mistake.”

It’s ten after six when he gets back to the Brooklyn Redevelopment and Reclamation Society. The sun is like a flickering candle, casting guttering light into dusk over the Bed-Stuy rooftops and water towers.

He walks into the community room and sits down, berating himself. What’s the matter with him? Doesn’t he want to be back in the world again?

Shaniqua, the ten-year-old daughter of an ex-junkie named Harold, is watching
It’s a Wonderful Life
on the TV. Jimmy Stewart, computer colorized against a snowdrift, unshaven and weeping. Fuck it. Fuck it. That’s not Jimmy Stewart, that’s him cursing. They’re going to throw him out of the damn program. Why does he keep fucking up?

Jimmy Stewart is imagining what the world would be like if he’d never been born. All the love and joy that would’ve been missed. John G. drums his fingers on the armrests. Maybe he doesn’t
belong back in the world. Index, pinky, ring finger, middle. Maybe if he could’ve seen his way to leaving the world a little earlier his daughter would still be alive. Thumb, forefinger, middle finger, pinky. The nervous tattoo. Louder and louder until it sounds like rain on the roof.

“I can’t hear the movie,” Harold’s daughter says, turning to look at him, her pigtails swinging.

“Okay. Okay. Okay-okay-okay-okay.”

He gets up, goes back to his room, and sits on the windowsill. Snowflakes are falling on the street outside, but they’re slower and lighter than the ones on TV. With a sudden updraft they start to fly back up toward the darkening sky. Snowing in reverse. Those flakes must be high.

How’s your memory?

Across the street, he can see a group of boys in hooded sweatshirts standing under the yellow-and-red canopy of a Yemenite bodega, like a bunch of urban monks. Maybe not sellers, but steerers for sure. They can tell him where he can see Scottie.

He gets his thin denim jacket off the back of a chair and puts it on. Then he takes it off. Then he puts it on again. Then he takes it off.

Then he balls it up and throws it across the room.

He can’t decide.