Authors: Owen King
Sam left feeling pretty good. He had made his point and, in the process, enriched Young Jenks’s sense of the cinema.
But Peter had tattled.
The next day Sam’s sister demanded he meet her at the Union Square dog run. Mina was livid. First she called Sam an asshole. Then she said, “You can’t control everything, Sam. You can’t control me.”
“What am I trying to control? I just wanted to get to know him,” said Sam.
Mina was in charge of a pair of corgis from Sandra’s dogwalking business. Her hair was dyed silver. In the midmorning sun, the rest of her was as inky as a fingerprint. She wore black tights and a black cloak tied with a red rope, and the mauve slathered beneath her eyes was cracking in the heat. How it was that he scared Peter Jenks and she didn’t, Sam wanted to know.
“Whatever you can’t control, you kill. At least my mother is mentally ill. You just don’t want to deal with anything that’s real. If you actually talked to Peter instead of torturing him with foreign films and threatening him, you’d love him. But you don’t want to get your hands dirty. Now he hates me.”
“I did like him, Mina. Honestly. I mean, I’m not sure about the tie thing, but overall, Peter seems like a smart guy. And he needed to see that movie. It’s an important movie. If you want to understand twenty-first-century film, you’ve got see it. I’m not going to apologize for broadening someone’s horizons.”
His sister gave him the finger. She kicked some dust at him. “Choke, asshole.”
Sam sidestepped, maintaining his cool. “Has it occurred to you that maybe Peter decided on his own that things weren’t working out? Maybe he even thought, Hey, she’s a little young, and I’m a little old, and it’s a little creepy.”
“He’s eighteen and I’m seventeen! You’re as bad as my mother, and you’re way, way worse than Dad. If someone isn’t exactly what you want them to be, you put them down.”
“Mina. Hold up. I am not worse than Booth.”
“You went through my phone, Sam. You invaded my privacy. Dad would never do that.”
Sam knew for a fact that this was not true. Not so many years ago, after all, Booth had gone fishing in Sam’s laptop bag and read his screenplay. (Though, it had to be said, this was a radically different set of circumstances. What Booth had done was a case of artistic meddling; what Sam had done was to rescue his kid sister from a hard-on in a skinny tie.)
“You don’t know him like I know him,” said Sam.
“Fuck you. Fuck. You.”
Implicit was Mina’s claim that Booth had become Father of the Year material—just because he had taken something resembling an active interest in her life and managed to make his child-support payments on time for a few years. Semi-retired in Hasbrouck, their father was able to get by on a patchwork of voice-over work and a film class or two at the local community college. What had led him to settle down so abruptly, it was reported, was something Booth referred to as an “Awakening” without being forthcoming about any of the details. That was fine for Mina, Sam supposed. His own eye read a trite euphemism for a pang of mortality-related conscience—a bad cholesterol test, maybe.
These days Sam’s relations with his father were actually cordial enough. They talked two or three times a year. They had talked last spring, hadn’t they? He thought so. There was a history, though, and it wasn’t helpful of his sister to cloud the issue by bringing it in. For instance, it had been a long time since Sam had thought about Booth’s stealing the screenplay for
Who We Are
out of his laptop bag, and how incredibly annoying that had been, and how it spoke volumes about his father’s high-handedness, his outrageous self-importance.
“Remember when he promised to take you to Paris?” Sam asked.
“Only because you remind me! I would have forgotten by now if you didn’t always bring it up.” Mina kicked more dirt at him, as well as a small chunk of grass that her boot tip dug up.
“Please stop kicking dirt at me, Mina.” The grass chunk had hit the ankle of his jeans. “And how’d that go? Was the Louvre nice?”
“Who’s to say that he won’t take me eventually?” Mina reached down and grabbed up another small chunk of dislodged grass.
“No one, but you’re a high school girl in a cape, and I’m a grown man with credit-card debt, so we’re going to give me the edge in life experience here. It’s not going to happen. Mina, you really, really don’t know him like I know him. Don’t throw grass at me, please, I told you.”
She threw the grass at him, but it missed.
“At least Dad listens to me,” said Mina. “You just haunt me. You act like that stupid movie killed you, and now you’re a ghost. If you’re going to haunt me, I wish you’d at least kill yourself.”
Cape swirling, boot heels cracking on the packed dirt, she stalked
over to the corgis. They were sprawled under a bench, tongues lolling, admiring the undercarriage of a nearby Great Dane. She roughly snapped the dual leash to their collars and dragged them, plus-four legs scrabbling, to the gate.
“You’re taking this too personally,” Sam said, who was thinking how wildly, absolutely dissimilar the two instances were, Booth’s sticking his hand in the laptop bag and his own thumbing around in Mina’s phone. They couldn’t be more unlike, really. A laptop bag had a zipper. To get into it, you had to unzip it. If you left an iPhone out, you were practically begging someone to play with it.
“Die.” His sister shoved past him onto the paved path heading north, trailed by the hurrying little dogs. “Don’t you even care that I’m not in school?” she asked without turning back.
While Sam thought about that, squinting up at the midmorning sun in the trees and trying to calculate the date, his sister receded. By the time he had it—September 14—Mina was almost gone, yanking the dogs off the path, crossing the street, and heading west. “If I didn’t care about you, I wouldn’t try so hard to keep you from making the kinds of mistakes I’ve made,” he yelled after her, but if she had heard him, she gave no sign.
■ ■ ■
To Sam’s relief, the poet had rolled onto his back. His sister might have hated him, he might be craven, but he was not a killer.
The sinister toilet water had pooled around the poet, transforming him into a human reef. An ugly red gash marked the old man’s chin where he had struck the floor as Sam pushed off. His arms were crossed, and a silver flask rested on his chest.
Sam crouched at the open window. “Sir?”
The old man’s eyes were open. “Yes?”
“I just wanted to make sure you were okay. I’ll go for real now, if that’s all right.”
The poet unscrewed the cap of his flask and trickled some liquid into his mouth. His eyes stayed on Sam. The edges of his gown curled in the shitty water. He appeared at ease.
The combination of directness and serenity in the man’s gaze felt like an invitation. “Actually, do you mind if I ask you a question? There’s something I’d like to ask you.”
“Is there,” said the poet. He screwed the cap back on the flask and returned it to its place on his chest. “Is there.”
Sam wiped sweat from his eyes. The atmosphere in the alley was similar to a locker room, muggy like a shower and fishy-smelling. “‘The ruthless furnace of this world.’ What does that mean to you?”
This elicited a quavering sigh from the man below.
“I feel like”—Sam thought of his panic earlier; he thought of Mina walking away from him; and he thought of Tess waiting for him to appear—“I feel like I’ve already burned up. And you know, I’m not sure how much more I can contend with. Or am I the furnace? It’s not like I mean anyone any harm. I just want to keep my options open.”
“Yes.” The poet stared at Sam and petted the brushed steel body of his flask. The selvage of gown, lilting gently around him, gave him a holy appearance. Sprawled on the floor, he resembled a picture on a towering vault. “That is an interesting interpretation. But,” the poet said, “for my own part, I feel that I have helped you quite enough. Quite enough.”
■ ■ ■
The glow from the first-floor windows helped Sam pick his way along the rear alley through a litter of shredded cardboard and swollen garbage bags.
At the foot of the passage, he paused to make sure Tess hadn’t come outside. He pressed into the shadows of the far wall and watched the street.
Forty or fifty feet away, the rental was parked at the curb on the riverside edge of the restaurant. A short, bearded man in an overcoat was inspecting the car—the vagrant, the one he had seen through the window at the City Bakery that afternoon with Polly.
By the fizzy light of the streetlamps, Sam made note of the discolored whorls on the coat, the mismatched buttons, the flapping sole of the right boot. The man’s beard matched his hair, bushy and brushy, and obscured his face save for a bandit’s mask of skin. This patch of flesh was the color of cottage cheese, and the eyes within were very small.
The vagrant had appeared harmless enough outside the City Bakery, but Sam discerned an excellent reason for caution: a long knife hung from his belt. As the vagrant passed around the hood of the car, the knife twisted from a piece of twine tied to the man’s pants, and the blade tip glinted, reflecting some blue light that Sam couldn’t see the source
of from his angle. The vagrant’s overcoat hung to the pavement and shushed with his movements.
Sam stayed rooted. He wished someone would come along, but the street was clear. His shirt was sweated to his chest. Inside the Stables, the wedding was still going on. Voices, laughter, singing, and drums filtered through the closed windows in an ambient rumble.
The vagrant abruptly spun, tearing the knife free. He slashed at the air, squawking, hacking at some unseen assault, filthy overcoat rippling, streetlights wiping his shadow across the pavement. The vagrant dropped the blade and shoved at the air. He fell to his knees. His hands made a circle above the pavement and strangled nothing and repeatedly slammed nothing against the ground. Sam, growing up, had, like any boy, scrapped with his share of imaginary monsters, and so he recognized the movements. But there was no play in the sounds of the vagrant’s grunts and wheezes, or in the stiffness of his arms as he choked the life from the unseen. It was real enough—savage enough—to make Sam feel afraid for the man.
The vagrant abruptly stopped fighting. He crawled over to the discarded knife, slipped it into a pocket of his overcoat, and stood. He walked away. Hunched slightly, he moved in the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge and soon melted into shadow.
■ ■ ■
Sam hurried to the rental car. He was somewhat concerned by the vagrant—it seemed odd that the man should have entered into Sam’s orbit at two different, widely separated places. The knife was also worrying. Once he was home at the apartment, he supposed he ought to at least check in with the police.
Tess was the current priority, though—or rather, avoiding Tess. The knife-wielding vagrant was troubling; Tess was an emergency.
He wanted to talk to her, be with her, see her, hold her, force her to admit that the perfect moment in
Dog Day Afternoon
had not been improvised. He wanted her to lay her hand against his face again. Sam liked how dogged she was. He thought she was lovely. There was something about her that he found powerfully relatable. Tess wore her depressed hope like a bad tattoo, a smeared butterfly or a shitty little rose; wore it even though she knew it was no better than a scar; and it wasn’t just because it was too expensive to get lasered off but also because it hadn’t seemed bad when she was nineteen, and she couldn’t
turn her back on nineteen, not quite, not yet. He truly wanted to know more about Tess—but it was dangerous, not only for him but for her.
Sam told himself that he already cared too much about her to expose her to what he was, that it wasn’t what he was sparing himself but what he was sparing her. A sudden sense of virtuousness got him into the driver’s seat of the rental car, got the key in the ignition, got the air-conditioning going, got the wheels turning. That was as far as false chivalry could carry him, though, and by the time he turned the corner around the front of the Stables, he was rightly ashamed again.
■ ■ ■
And there was Tess. She stood in front of the steps. With a silver shawl knotted around her shoulders and her clutch tucked under her arm, she was talking on a cell phone. Her purple dress fell to her knees, and her black heels raised her an extra half inch. She was too petite to be glamorous, too arranged to be adorable.
As he drove by, she looked right at him, eyes huge with disbelief. Even her ponytails seemed to loll at him questioningly. He could read her lips:
What the fuck?
Sam waved goodbye.
Three blocks from his building, he parked in front of a shuttered bodega. Mina was probably already at the apartment, but Wesley would let her in, and another aspect of the same impulse that had sent him fleeing from Tess was now pushing him to stop at a certain bar for a drink. Once his self-loathing began to act up, it was hard to resist.
The street faced the Red Hook shipyards and ran parallel to the BQE, which thundered continuously out of sight. Here, the air was cooler because of the water’s proximity, and there was a chemical reek.
A few fronts down from the bodega, Sam arrived at the open door of a nondescript industrial building. The entryway gave onto a nameless bar with a vaguely illegal vibe. There was a stage at the rear of the large main room where they sometimes had burlesque performances, while arrayed in a jumble across the open floor were several thrift-store couches, armchairs, and sticky-topped occasional tables.
The evening’s attractions had been chalked on a sandwich board propped against the wall:
$3 Cans of PBR
Plus: The Thursday Night Movie Special!
From where Sam stood outside, the bar’s back wall, where the film was showing on a square of whitewashed steel sheeting, was obscured by bobbing heads. The decibel level ebbed and flowed but never dropped beneath a solid rumble. At the bar, he got a beer before continuing deeper, sliding between bodies and ducking under arms.
About halfway to the screen, Sam found a clear view from a spot against a pillar. The film was already well along: Roger, Hugh, and Claire were in the parking lot, approaching Roger’s car.