6
John G. is standing outside the Bedford Avenue homeless shelter in Brooklyn, a huge medieval-looking fortress in a neighborhood full of churches and auto body shops.
A hard rain is starting to fall and a line of angry, confused men stretches out before him. But somehow his heart is full of hope. He checks the back pocket of his jeans and makes sure he still has the card Ms. Schiff gave him. He studies the curved zeros and soft twos in her writing, and wonders how long it’s been since he touched something made by a woman. He savors the moment when he stood next to her in the doorway. Tomorrow he will seize control of his destiny and reapply for his benefits. It’s time to live again.
The line moves and he nearly runs into the young man ahead of him, who wears a black sweatshirt with the hood up.
“Next time you say, ‘Excuse me,’ a-right?” The young guy barely bothers to turn around. The threat in his voice doesn’t need a look to back it up.
John glances down and sees the kid has a knife in his back pocket. Not a little Swiss Army number with a can opener, but a big hungry serrated blade with a wood-grain handle.
As the young guy walks through the metal detector, there’s a high-pitched beep. John takes a bite out of the bologna sandwich he got at the assessment center and braces himself for the inevitable
hassle with the security guards. It’s a good thing he gave away that box cutter he was carrying.
But instead of stopping the kid, the guard, who looks about fourteen, laughs and waves him through.
“My man Larry Loud’s in the house,” he says, slapping hands with the young guy.
“G-Love, ‘sup?”
“Yo, yo, that shit was fly, man. That shit was phat. I’m goin’ have a talk with you. Five dollah you owe me.”
Larry Loud screws up the right side of his face, as if to say such matters are beneath him. John G. starts to walk through the metal detector.
“I’m sorry, sir, you can’t bring that in here,” the guard says.
“What?”
“That sandwich. You’re not allowed to bring food in.”
John G. looks startled. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“Those is the rules. You don’t like them, get the hell on out.”
“I just saw you let in a guy with a knife,” John says.
He’s suddenly aware that people have stopped talking in the line behind him. Then he turns and sees Larry Loud with his hood still up, waiting for him on the other side of the metal detector.
“You a troublemaker, man?” says Larry, leaning against the metal detector’s wooden frame and ignoring the beeping it sets off.
“I just want to finish my sandwich,” John G. steps up to the threshold and faces him.
He knows he should be backing down. But something won’t let him. Maybe it’s Ms. Schiff’s card in his back pocket.
Larry Loud’s face goes slack and his hands drop to his sides. No knife. “You want a piece of me, white boy?”
White boy? John G.’s never thought of himself as particularly white. He’s been around black people most of his life. Grew up and went to school with them in the Bronx. Worked with them at the TA. Learned to walk like them, talk like them, even do the same drugs as them.
So why are so many of them staring at him now? The guard. Larry Loud. The other homeless guys in line behind him. All
waiting to see if he’ll hand over the sandwich and succumb to the Rikers Island laws of survival: give up your shit once and assume permanent punk status.
He looks at Larry and tries to gauge the risk of standing his ground. All he sees is a scared kid. This is not the day he will die, he decides. After all, if he could handle that wolf pack in the park, he can handle one punk.
He walks through the metal detector with his chin held high and steps right up to Larry. The security guard stands a yard away, shaking his head.
“You and me later, we’ve got a date,” Larry mumbles. But he doesn’t sound like he means it.
“Excuse me.” John G. moves past him. “I’d like to find my bed. I’ve had a very long day.”
A half hour later, he is sitting on a cot in the middle of a vast concrete drill floor, surrounded by three hundred other beds. A thick hazy scrim of funk hangs about twenty feet off the floor, like an atmospheric condition created by the dozens of aimless men wandering around. John can almost hear the distant admonition in their murmuring voices: this is where you go if you go wrong.
“Say, man, you might want to hide those shoes you’re wearing,” says a heavyset black man on his right who has Asian eyes and a beatific smile that immediately makes John think he’s out of his mind. He smells from urine and old Chinese food.
“Where?”
The fat man points to his own battle-scarred Adidas, impaled under two steel legs of his cot.
“That way you’ll feel it if anybody tries to steal ‘em,” the fat man explains.
“Think they’d steal your shoes in here?”
“Motherfuckers’ll kill you for the salt in your shaker.”
“Yeah? So this is a dangerous place?”
“The worst.” The fat man smiles and hums. “I only wish I was living back in that tunnel under Riverside Park. At least I knew I was safe there.”
When the lights go down a few minutes later, John feels as if
he’s being left overnight in a zoo cage. The knocking and grumbling noises seem louder, the odors seem more pungent. Someone gives out a loud whoop from across the drill floor and a lit match goes flying over his head.
He tries to lie back and relax on the cot, but he keeps thinking about Larry Loud and his knife. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so bold with him. What if Larry does intend to come looking for him? It’s a long shot Larry would find him among so many people in the dark, but still he wonders, Would anyone care if he got hurt?
He thinks about his wife and his daughter, feels their absence like missing limbs. Somehow he hasn’t felt complete since they’ve been gone. All the drugs in the world can’t change that. What he remembers most is the small things. Happy Meals at Mickey D.’s. Stroller rides through Van Cortlandt Park. Sunlight through the trees. The memory of love. When he dwells on it too much, he feels himself coming apart inside. So he moves on.
He begins thinking about his own childhood. Growing up in Patchogue. Crabbing at the marina. Swimming in the mill pond. The smell of vanilla and fresh-cut lumber from the old converted lace mill nearby. His mother pushing him in a shopping cart through the Bohack’s on Main Street. Happy days. The scrappy little fake carriage house on South Ocean Avenue with the horse and coach on the screen door. He remembers lying on a patch of brown grass in the backyard, watching clouds as thick and slow as cotton floating in water. Sitting on the porch next to his mother in the days before she got sick and started having her moods. Laughing Mary. That’s what everyone called her. Always laughing too loud, drinking too much, bringing home too many men. She was a lunatic: she put pizza crust in the goldfish tank and fried hamburgers in $12 olive oil. He can still smell the smoke in her hair and the patchouli on her neck where she’d let him nuzzle her. Before she started hiding in the bathroom and telling him to just let her be.
He remembers the long drive up to the Bronx where they were going to live with her old Aunt Rose from Donegal. How his mother was supposed to pick him up from P.S. 156 one day and
never showed up. He walked for blocks and blocks looking for her, passing under the shadow of the el and Yankee Stadium, until he wound up at the precinct, a frightened eight-year-old sucking his thumb while a grumpy old patrol sergeant pounded out a report on a manual typewriter.
He remembers crying for her before bed that night in Aunt Rose’s apartment in the Webster Houses. But all he got was Rose without her dentures and a warm glass of milk with hair in it. He can still see those car shadows on the ceiling and feel that yearning for the way things used to be. The memory starts to carry him away, though he wonders now whether Mary really did love him. His eyelids grow heavy and his breathing slows down. From across the drill floor he hears someone singing an old song:
“I can’t stop loving you, I’ve made up my mind, To live in memories, Of a lonesome time.”
And just as he’s finally about to fall into a restful sleep, he feels the sting of cold metal against his throat.
“Yο, excuse me, man,” whispers a voice. “Remember me?”
Hot breath forces its way into his ear. He realizes he must have rolled onto his stomach when he fell asleep. Now the serrated blade is against his larynx.
“You best just lie back, relax, and enjoy the show,” Larry Loud says in a low voice. “ ‘Cause I’m gonna cut your fuckin’ throat if you make a sound.”
He starts moving on top of John G., shifting things around. John tries to resist, but the knife tightens on his Adam’s apple.
“Come on, bitch, I ain’t gonna hurt you none.”
The knife pulls back against John G.’s carotid artery like a bit in a horse’s mouth.
“See, they think I got the virus,” Larry says softly. “You know how I’m saying? Like I might be what they call HIV-positive.”
John tells himself that the kid is lying and just trying to frighten him, but then he remembers the fear he saw in Larry’s eyes downstairs.
“So I don’t give a fuck,” Larry says, trying to pull down John’s pants and force his way in. “I’m gonna die anyway. So now I’m gonna put my virus right into you.”
John rocks from side to side, trying to throw him off. Every cell and muscle in his body is crying out, protesting what’s about to happen. Everything that he is depends on keeping himself intact. Until tonight, he’d thought he had no pride left. But just as he realizes there’s still something there, he loses it.
“Lord have mercy on the faggots,” Larry says afterward. “If I got the virus now, so do you. It’s just like that Clint Eastwood movie, man: the question you gotta ask yourself is, Do I feel lucky?”
He laughs to himself as he gets up and walks away.
And for the next few minutes, the only thing John G. hears is the sound of his own mind breaking.
Watch the closing doors. The train goes plunging down.
7
The table in the conference room of Bracken, Williams & Sayon is made from wood that’s over ten thousand years old, Todd Bracken III once told Jake. The original tree hailed from a Tasmanian mountainside, where Jake supposed a brontosaurus might have once taken a leak on it. It had survived fire, termites, atmospheric changes, and the death of most surrounding vegetation before it was shipped to the States, bleached blond, and sold by a custom retail outlet in Delaware for $50,000. Jake taps it twice waiting for Todd to come to the next point in the partners’ meeting.
“The partnership retreat,” says Todd, wiping a swatch of thinning blond hair off his broad forehead. “I was thinking Miami this year. Boca Raton was so . . .”
He draws back his lips, trying to find the right word, and slips his tongue over his tiny teeth. He crosses his legs, letting an English leather shoe sole hang lazily above the table top.
“So...”
Mike Sayon, eating walnuts with his plump fingers, and Charlie Dorian, the high-strung head of the litigation department, lean forward, ready to laugh at anything the founding partner’s son might say.
“So ...” Todd’s long, manicured hands stroke the air. “So . . . I don’t know . . . suntan oil and Judith Krantz. So Five Towns ...”
Mike Sayon and Charlie Dorian chuckle appreciatively.
“So parvenu,” Mike adds helpfully, struggling with a silver nutcracker.
Spoken like a true self-hating Jew, thinks Jake.
“Exactly,” says Todd with a bonded smile. “Exactly.”
“I was thinking we should talk about making Kelly Lager a partner,” Jake interrupts.
A silence falls over the room. It’s as if he’s just belched loudly.
Charlie Dorian, gray haired, red faced, and constantly plucking at his left eyebrow, picks up the ball.
“I thought we weren’t going to be discussing candidates for another three weeks.”
“I wanted to put him on the morning line now,” Jake insists. “The guy’s probably the best technical lawyer we have at the firm. He’s forgotten more case law than any of us will ever know. And he writes a brief so sharp you could cut your hands on it.”
Todd Bracken gets up and walks over to the window, watching the midtown Manhattan buildings glisten like glazed fingers reaching for the sun. As everyone in the room knows, Kelly Lager, a thirty-seven-year-old diabetic with psoriasis and four lovely children, has been doing most of Todd’s paperwork since Todd’s father died and left him in charge in the eighties.
“He’s been turned down three years in a row and I think he belongs in the winner’s circle,” Jake goes on. “Besides, the guy’s got a name like a beer company. What else do you want from him?”
Mike breaks open a nut, and bits of shell fall down the front of his jacket. “It’s just a matter of simple economics, Jake,” he says. “We can’t justify making more partners at our current level of growth. We’re down twenty-three percent from this quarter last year.”
Jake casts a skeptical eye at the Milton Avery painting on the wall. “That twenty-three percent was from the Wyatt-Campbell litigation last year,” he says. “That was my case. So let’s not kid ourselves. Your associates make partner every other year. Why not Kelly?”
Charlie starts tearing more furiously at his eyebrow. Mike goes
to work on breaking open another walnut and the cracking shell makes a sound like tiny firecrackers going off. And Todd Bracken remains over by the window, arms crossed like a petulant tennis star disputing a line judge’s call.
“I think,” says Todd, “what we’re talking about is a matter of style.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Jake asks.
Todd shoots a look that goes from Mike to Charlie before ending in a smirk. “I don’t think Kelly has ever been what we’d consider a Bracken, Williams lawyer.”
Of course, that never stopped Todd from signing his name on Kelly’s briefs.
“So what’s your problem with him, Todd?”
“Well, frankly. . . ” Todd glances over his shoulder, as if a window washer might be listening. “The man smells.”