Red on Red Page 6

  “There was a dollar on the table. Did you leave one?”

  “Maybe, Da … it’s not yours?”

  “I don’t think so. I empty my pockets in here, but I just leave the keys. Still …”

  “Tell you what, why don’t we split it.”

  “That’s the lad.” The old man pocketed the dollar and counted out five dimes, sliding them across the table. “Coffee?”

  “Yes, but not instant.”

  A look of mild distress crossed his face. Nick had introduced a note of disorder into the little room.

  “I had mine already…. It seems a waste to make the whole pot.”

  “Make half, then.”

  “Aha!”

  He smiled and turned to the percolator on the counter, measuring out careful spoons of coffee. From the sink, the water flowed brown a moment, then clear.

  “You had a long day at work?”

  “All through the night.”

  “That is a long day. Someone died?”

  “A couple of people. Three.”

  “All murdered? God bless us.”

  “One murder, one suicide, and one … accident, I guess.”

  The old man paused from his task a moment, and his tone was cautious. “Black people?”

  “Two out of three. Not the suicide.”

  “Ah. They have their troubles, don’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “Drugs, is it? They’re mad for them, aren’t they?”

  “Some of them, I guess. But look at Jamie Barry. The other day, I saw him nodding off in the lobby. He’s on the needle.”

  “Is it the drugs, then? Hadn’t he a good job, with the computers? I thought he’d too much to drink.”

  The old man shook his head, not so much to disagree as to dislodge the thought from his mind. Jamie Barry was the superintendent’s son, and Ms. Barry was also from the other side. Jamie and Nick had known each other for the entirety of their lives, which was an indifferent matter to both of them. Nick had tried to avoid him at each phase of his life, from the mousy, cosseted, and complaining child to the hard-drinking, hard-talking, hard-puking young man. He was an only child as well, and his mother had died when he was in his late teens, which had sped him into dopeland. After a few lost years, he’d cleaned up, moved to Long Island and Christianity, which was not how he referred to the religion of their fathers. Still, Jamie had been doing well, Nick had heard—his father was right, it had been something high-tech—until somewhat recently, when something had slipped. He’d returned home not long before Nick had, and when Nick had run into him, the bleary look of kinship Jamie had offered, the bond of brotherly failure, had made Nick want to kick his teeth down his throat.

  As the coffeepot gave up its last sputter and gurgle, his father’s thoughts continued to meander.

  “Still, it seems it’s the black ones who are just mad for the drugs. Not all of them, of course. Look at Mr. Williams, from the third floor—what a nice man! A bus driver, like I was, married. Two children, very polite, both of them in Good Shepherd. I wonder what he thinks of all of this…. I might ask him one day.”

  That was a little too much for Nick before coffee, but he didn’t say anything. His father was fully capable of asking Mr. Williams what he thought about the Negro Question; for all Nick knew, Mr. Williams had the Negro Answer. Nick was afraid sometimes he would end up like his father, without even an acquaintance to share his benignly boorish small talk across the breakfast table. As the coffeepot emitted a final hiss, Nick shifted the topic to an old favorite.

  “How is Mrs. O’Beirne feeling? Did they find out what was wrong with her?”

  “Ahh,” Nick’s father replied, standing and turning to fill the cup, then looking back, as if to check if there were listeners in the room. “She’s not well at all. It was … the cancer.” He said it in a hissed whisper not unlike the sound from the coffeepot. He sat back down and slid the coffee across the table, anxious to begin.

  The brokerage of bits of bad news was the great pastime of the neighborhood and one of the few pleasures that his father did not deny himself. There was a comfort in misfortune that fell elsewhere, as if there were then a little less left to go around. Three years ago, he had considered joining a parish trip to Lourdes; Allison and Nick had both urged him to go, had offered to pay. A dozen men and women had signed on, mostly his age, mostly out of a sense of devotion, a hope to witness the miraculous rather than any particular need for a miracle. He’d decided to stay home, alluding to various inconveniences. When the tour bus had collided with a milk truck, and the pilgrims who had left in robust health had then returned with crutches and neck braces, his father had felt not merely spared but somehow vindicated. He’d visited the injured at every opportunity.

  “She has months left, at most, poor woman. Did you know her nephew, her brother’s boy, Mannion the name was, and what happened to him? It was on his honeymoon. He went rock climbing, of all things. He broke his neck. Now he’s a paraplegic, God bless him. On his honeymoon! Who would ever go to a place where you could get hurt on your honeymoon?”

  “People used to go to Niagara Falls.”

  “Not to jump, though. I’m sure Niagara Falls has had its share of jumpers and honeymooners both, but they were rarely the same crowd.” He let out a small, satisfied breath, looking ahead and slightly upward, as if to picture the separate lines of lovers and leapers, each in their rightful place. “I’m not the type to say they were asking for it, but God knows what put it in his mind to climb a cliff when he had a woman at the bottom waiting for him.”

  Nick remembered the woman in the tree. Knocked a dead body down last night, Nick had, like the special boy at a Spanish birthday party, too enthused by the piñata. He felt bad enough to resolve to put extra effort into that one, to find out who she was, where she belonged. That way, there would be fewer questions, all around. She was like his mother—immigrant, and emigrant—on the other side.

  “Where’d you go on your honeymoon?” Nick asked.

  His father looked perplexed, as if he were disappointed to see that his son was capable of such a stupid question.

  “To bed, of course.”

  Nick walked away, laughing, tramping back down the old hallway to finish getting ready for work. As his father watched him recede, he didn’t get what the joke was, but even when he did, he felt sorrier for his son for missing the larger point of it, for fixing on what might have seemed backward or out of touch. He’d gone where he’d wanted, with the one he’d wanted with him, and he didn’t think it was a bad thing at all.

  Nick walked across the aged linoleum of the lobby, down the concrete steps onto Broadway. The air was cold and lively, taking up stray leaves and old newspapers in vigorous, jerky gusts. The storm had torn down branches, with green leaves along with the yellow and brown. There was no sign of Jamie Barry, and Nick was glad to be spared his reminiscence of how Mike Diskin hid the erasers on Father Callahan in the third grade before asking for spare change. When Nick saw the bus slow down, he half-jogged toward the stop on the corner. This was a day for walking to work, but he hadn’t the time. Yes, he did. Today was for autopsies and arraignments, reports and notifications, plus whatever fresh calamity awaited, the hell of the day. Still, the prospects did not weigh on him as they might have, did not seem more than he could bear. A little sunlight, a little sleep—was that all it took to make it all seem workable, worthwhile?

  The bus stopped for him, the pneumatic brakes shifting with a whoosh, and he waved it on. Today was a day for walking. Below Dyckman Street, the west side of Broadway framed another park, Fort Tryon Park, a hillside rising up the spine of Manhattan, up and over to the Hudson. He loved this time of year, when the woods started to turn the color of lions and tigers, and the distant views were no longer hidden beneath the heedless green. The blocks of six-story prewar apartments gave way ahead to the patchy commercial strip above the George Washington Bridge, the gas stations and storage spaces near the precinct. Too short
a walk, coming down.

  When he was married to Allison, Nick would begin his walks on the Upper West Side, full of new strivers, people who came here for the money and freedom. Sunday was brunch and the Times. On Sundays, you saw white women pushing their children in strollers. During the week, you saw the same white children, pushed by black women. Following Broadway north, you came upon a ten-block stretch of no-man’s-land, of winos and bums selling old porno magazines on blankets on the street, men who stared through you, with the sour, goatish smell of schizophrenia. The fleabag hotels then gave way to Columbia University, fortress and factory, that sent a lot of strivers and a few schizophrenics to the neighborhoods below. In Harlem on Sunday mornings, you heard gospel bursting from storefront churches, and saw the women in their hallelujah hats, dressed up to meet Jesus for a date.

  As you crossed the border to Washington Heights, on 155th Street, you passed the most melancholy landmark in the city, which Nick thought of as the museum of museums. Even the graveyard across the street was less desolate, with its sign that warned, Activo Cementerio, promising at least the company of ghosts. The same couldn’t be said for the museums, which comprised an entire city block of stately old beaux arts buildings, surrounding a plaza of herringbone brick. Two of the institutions were definitely gone. The Museum of the American Indian, the American Geographical Society—these had moved elsewhere; as for the American Numismatic Society, it was hard to tell if it had been abandoned or just ignored, a penny dropped in an old pocket. The illustrious names were engraved just below the rooflines—the now-lost tribes, like the Eskimo, the Salish, the Algonquin, and the now-lost explorers, such as Livingstone and Magellan. As you read around the plaza, it had the look of old ticker tape, of data you no longer needed to know. The motto of the Geographical Society was carved above the door: Ubique, Latin for “everywhere.” Nick wasn’t sure if the word was ill chosen or the loss was in everything but the translation. How could it be everywhere if it wasn’t even here?

  The Hispanic Society shared the same air of desertion. The section of plaza before it was sunken and walled, which trapped leaves and newspapers in eddying off-river breezes; the fountain was dry and its two flagpoles were bare. But while the other places were sites of double erasure—no more Iroquois, and no more Iroquois exhibit—the Hispanic Society was in the middle of a thriving Hispanic society, which had pushed the edges of the older black neighborhood farther south. An equestrian statue of El Cid dominated the section of plaza. He was a champion of the Reconquista in the eleventh century, who helped drive the Moors from Spain. Legend had it that when he died, his wife strapped his body upright on his horse, to lead his troops in one last battle. A thousand years ago, he helped kick out the new people; now his monument stood in an immigrant neighborhood, whom half the country thought of as invaders. That was the difference between history and a joke; you could kill a joke if you repeated it.

  In Washington Heights, on four Sunday walks, Nick saw four different fights—a cock fight in an alley; a dogfight on a roof, from which the loser was thrown, yelping, to the sidewalk ten feet from Nick; a catfight between the prettiest girls he’d ever seen, tearing each other’s shirts and screaming, “Puta! Puta, puta!”; and then a gunfight, as shooters from a passing car let loose at three guys on a corner, who emptied their own guns back at them. After the gunfight, Nick ran to Riverside Drive, where the old Jews still lived, from before the war and after, and he saw a pair of old hands close a window, muffling a piano concerto on the record player. When you crossed Dyckman Street, to Inwood, the last Irish bit of Manhattan, there were games in the park and beers in the bar, after Mass at Good Shepherd, the gray stone church where stony old monsignors gave stony sermons about what would not last, which was everything, almost.

  The monsignors were right about the neighborhood, at least, about the good times and the bad. Inwood was disappearing and had been since Nick’s childhood, as the working classes worked hardest at leaving. In the seventies, the city was a cesspool, bankrupt and flooded with heroin, but it was a golden playground for Nick and his friends. They would run across rooftops and hide in the park, Inwood Hill Park, green since the beginning of time. For a decade, the city was on the mend, until crack hit in the mid-eighties, and the Heights were narco central for the entire northeast. The Colombians brought in cocaine, and the Dominicans moved it, cut it, and cooked it into the little rocks that burnt people alive. For a time, the precinct that covered the Heights and Inwood logged a homicide every three days, and shootings, robberies, and break-ins beyond counting. But through the nineties and after, crime began to fall, and then to free-fall, so quickly it seemed like a stock market collapse—Murder is now at two thousand … fifteen hundred … twelve … closing this year at less than a thousand … eight hundred, seven. We are now approaching six…. Sell, sell, sell! Young people with money started to move to Inwood, consultant types and creative types who didn’t dress for work, and worked not at jobs but in “fields” like software and graphic design. The newcomers were in the main thoughtful, respectful, and tasteful, and a lot of the old-timers liked them even less than they’d liked the Dominicans. They baffled bartenders with requests for wine lists. There goes the neighborhood….

  And then the apocalypse downtown, on a morning that began with the bluest of skies. For hours, it seemed that history had ended, that Manhattan would join the list of ancient lost places—Babylon, Byzantium, Troy. The two towers had possessed a flat magnitude that had made them seem ageless, though they’d been no older than the men who’d destroyed them. The cataclysm felt like a natural disaster or even a supernatural one, visited as it was by demonologies of the air, but it was history, its return and not its ending. The city had been built by foreign hatreds, after all. It had taken in throngs of exiles to such extravagant benefit. And New York was never more splendid than in the grieving season that followed, abundant in dignity and decency, even as cops and firemen fought with gulls in the rubble piles for fragments of what once had been friends. There were no unknown soldiers here—wakes were held for scraps of skin, funerals for bits of bone. For a while, if you got a bad feeling, a sudden intuition of fear, you looked up instead of over your shoulder. What to make of it all? What warnings and amends? Was it a singularity, a rogue wave, or just the first to break?

  But nothing else happened; nothing like it, not here, not yet. History departed for its old hunting grounds. Shopping resumed, at first under patriotic pretense. The anniversary ritual of listed names, flowers tossed into the still-gaping pits, grew more modest and peripheral to the public mind, and it was a matter of time before the event would be marked by department store specials: dinette sets, sectional couches, and throw pillows—everything must go!

  People did keep on buying things, until the economy collapsed. Trillions of dollars disappeared, too much to contemplate, let alone count. Nick could picture his father asking, Where was the last place you left it? Though the statements from his retirement fund did not make for pleasant reading, Nick had far more troubling deficits, and he was struck by the economy’s lack of impact on him, on anyone he knew very well, even on the city as he knew it. No epidemic of boarded-up storefronts, and the men who loitered on corners were the ones who always had. Allison had prospered. She’d convinced her firm to make a big bet on a bad future, and Nick wondered whether he flattered himself to think he may have played a part in her inspiration. When Nick arrived at the precinct, he cast these thoughts from his mind like evil spirits.

  The precinct building was of recent construction, a box of cinder block three stories tall. It was built of the cheapest material by the lowest bidder, at the cost of a palace. On sconces beside the front door were two green lights, the centuries-old marker of a New York City police station; one cop in ten might have known what they meant, or noticed that they were green. Inside, a lieutenant stood before a desk that extended from one end of the room to the other, like a bar, and two cops and a prisoner stood before him, awaiting service. Nick s
lipped up a stairway beside them, half-nodding to two more cops, and walked into the squad.

  The room was long and rectangular, with a central island of desks doubled up, face-to-face. It would have taken great effort to make an impression of order here, and little effort was made. Each desk had both a computer terminal and a typewriter, and a few had electric fans; all were littered with reports. Wanted posters lined the walls of the waiting area, some yellowing with age, others covered with more recent posters of more local priority, so that the posters formed sedimentary layers of newer and nearer crimes. Inside the squad, the posters were for their own consumption, warning against corruption and sexual harassment, although money and women were both in short supply. Fluorescent lights flickered over scuffed tile floors, and the air was filled with broken phrases of cop talk, as they hustled the phones.

  “Like I said, I don’t know if it’s true. She said you hit her. I’m not here to judge, but come on in and tell me your side….”