A Ship Made of Paper (10 page)

on his way north to Leyden, for his next appointment.The mountains on the west side of the river are obscured by mist. A stiff wind comes from the northwest; the trees barely sway, they just bend and stay that way.

Daniel is on his way to his office, where he needs to gather some papers before going to his next appointment. He stops at a gas station a couple miles outside of Leyden. It’s an Exxon station that used to be run by the father of one of Daniel’s boyhood friends and is now owned by a couple of Egyptian brothers. He pumps a tank of gas into his car and then goes in to get a cup of coffee and a shrink-wrapped bagel.The rain lashes the windows of the station. There is a display of heavily scented carved wooden red roses, drenched in some artificial, vaguely roselike scent; the smell mingles with the smells of the coffee machine, the wax on the linoleum floor, and the residual aroma of gasoline. Both of the brothers are behind the counter, heavy men in their thirties, with rough skin, dark, wavy hair, and short-sleeved shirts.

Even when his friend’s father owned this station, it was one of the few spots in the area where boys and men could find pornographic magazines.

In the past, the magazines had names like
Chic,
and
Cheri
. Now, the magazines are not only more numerous, but their names are more overt, even a little nutty.
Juggs,
and
Beaver,
are next to
Ass Time
and
Pink and Tight.
And though there are precious few black people who live in Leyden, this store stocks a wide range of African-American porn magazines.

Daniel has been eyeing the black porn covers for quite some time, though he has yet to muster the courage to even browse through what’s inside. But today, after getting his coffee and choosing his bagel, he saun-ters over to the magazine rack. He imagines the Egyptians will be watching him, but it’s something he can live with.

Big Black Butt, Brown Sugar, Black Booty
. . . There is something about the stridency of these titles that strikes a reluctantly responsive chord in Daniel. He picks up one of the more benign titles—
Sugar Mama
—and opens it up.

He has never slept with a black woman, never seen a black woman undressed. In high school in the hills of New Hampshire, he had a crush

[ 63 ]

on a black girl named Carol Johns. They kissed, she pressed her hand against the fly of his jeans. But when he tried to touch her breasts, she moved away and said, “Uh-uh,” and then the next day her brother, an am-bitious, bespectacled kid in a blazer, hit Daniel full force in the back of the head with his algebra book.

The women inside the magazine have
noms de porn,
like Afreaka, Su-premacy, Kenya, and Downtown Sugar Brown. Afreaka is photographed pulling herself open like someone showing an empty wallet. Downtown Sugar Brown has shaved, moist armpit skin that looks like cracked leather, long aqua fingernails, and a barbered crotch greased along the labia. She has hardworking hands, with dark, bunched skin at the knuckles, a faded butterfly tattoo on her shoulder, long, pendulous breasts, with lusterless coronas. The stretch marks around her hips are like fork marks in brown butter. Daniel feels vaguely sick, reduced, helpless, yet in communion with some reptile self that has been waiting for him. He turns the page and Downtown Sugar Brown is joined by another woman—Cydney.They are on their hands and knees on an unmade bed, their long tongues touching.

Suddenly, a hand grabs his shoulder; he feels the scrape of chin whiskers against his ear, and his head fills with the hoarse, aggressive whisper of his assailant. “Whatcha got there, you horny sonofabitch?

Going for the dark side?”

It’s Derek Pabst, one of the four cops on the Leyden Police Department. Derek and Daniel have been friends since the first grade. Derek was a sturdy kid with an oversized head and the defiant, wayward grin of a boy with a great many siblings and overworked parents. He never did his homework, he rarely passed a test, yet the teachers quietly promoted him at the end of every year, with the tacit understanding that his life was hard and that school was finally so unimportant to him that they should all be grateful he was attending at all. He had a wild streak that mes-merized Daniel. Through the course of their boyhood, through school days and summers, they were each other’s constant companions. They climbed trees, forded rivers, shot guns, kissed girls. As far as Derek was a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

concerned, they were to this day best friends, though the persistence of their friendship has largely been Derek’s doing.When Daniel was sent off to boarding school, Derek wrote him letters and hitchhiked the hundred miles to sleep on the floor of Daniel’s dormitory room.When Daniel finally moved back to Leyden, Derek was there to meet the van, with a picnic cooler full of beer, another filled with sandwiches, and three of his own children to help unpack the truck.

Feeling exposed and ridiculous, Daniel puts the magazine back in the rack and goes to the counter to pay for the gasoline, the coffee, and the bagel. “Will zat be ull?” the Egyptian asks, as if challenging Daniel to purchase one of the magazines.

“That’s it for me,” says Daniel, forcing his voice to sound cheerful.

“How are you, Eddie?” Derek asks. He slaps a five-dollar bill onto the counter. “Let me have a pack of Camel Lights.” He accepts the pack of cigarettes, the few pieces of change. Eddie acts frightened of Derek, displaying the almost ritualized respect of a man who has been warned.

Derek eagerly tears the pack open, lights up. “Since Stephanie got the new furniture delivered, she won’t let me smoke in the house,” he says, smoke streaming out of his large, dark nostrils.

Daniel and Derek stand beneath the eaves of the gas station and watch the pelting rain.

“How’s Stephanie doing?” Daniel asks.

“She’s okay. She says she’s going to give Kate a call, put together a dinner or something.”

Daniel’s heart sinks. He knows Kate will decline Stephanie’s invitation, he only hopes she does it without being too blunt. Hurting Stephanie’s feelings will only hurt Derek’s.

“The kids could play, too,” Derek adds. He takes another long drag of his cigarette. “How’s Kate doing?”

“Hanging in there.”

“You really scored on that one,” Derek says. “She’s a great lady. She’s so pretty, and so fucking smart. You know what I like about her? Her laugh. She’s got a great laugh. I look for that, you know. It’s a sign.”

[ 65 ]

Daniel raises his to-go cup, shrugs. “I’m sort of running late.” It sounds too abrupt to Daniel, and so he extends the excuse. “I’m going over to Eight Chimneys, finally getting to wet my beak in some of that river gentry cash-o-rama.” He grins, rubs his thumb against his first two fingers.

But Derek, fully aware that money doesn’t mean very much to Daniel, acts as if Daniel hasn’t said a thing. “I had a runaway kid this morning,” Derek says. “At large and dangerous. I picked him up at the train station.”

“Whose kid?”

“One of the boys from Star of Bethlehem. I swear, the people running that place don’t have the slightest fucking idea what they’re doing.

They keep trying to
respect
those boys, or
rehabilitate
them, and meanwhile it’s a fucking jungle, with some of the worst juvenile offenders in the state, with nothing to keep them in but a couple of counselors and an electric fence.” He looks at Daniel, trying to gauge the level of agreement or disagreement. “These are the ‘boys’ that made you decide to get your white liberal ass out of the city and come back home. The kid I picked up? First of all, his mother, who was probably twelve or something when she had him, names him Bruce, probably after some Bruce Lee movie, and then, just to be Ebonic and make sure he never learns how to spell, she spells it B-r-e-w-s-e.”

“Since when do you care so much about spelling?”

“I learned how to spell. You used to cram it into my head before spelling tests.”

“I don’t remember it doing all that much good. Anyhow, spelling’s just custom. African-Americans are making their own customs.”

“Yeah, well this kid makes a
lot
of his own customs. Like the custom of capping the first motherfucker who stands between him and a new pair of Nikes.”

There’s a sourness in Derek’s voice, a disdain, which Daniel believes is an occupational hazard for cops, like squinting for a jeweler, or grisly jokes for a surgeon, but there’s an element of racial scorn that Daniel can’t recall ever having heard from Derek before. Is it because he caught a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

Daniel looking at the African-American porn magazines? Or does Derek somehow sense that Daniel has fallen in love with a black woman? Did Daniel ever, in some swoon of nostalgia for their old boyhood closeness, talk to Derek about Iris?

Derek draws on his cigarette and pulls the smoke deep into his lungs—he smoked marijuana before cigarettes and it shows.When he finally exhales, very little of the smoke comes back out.

“What about tonight?” he asks Daniel. “Want to get a bite to eat or something?”

“I don’t know, Derek. It’s really hard to get Kate to go out, you know that.” And, for all Daniel knows, Derek may sense that Kate finds him dull company and that Stephanie is a sort of paradigm for suburban fu-tility, with her mall bangs and turquoise spandex tights, her exhausting cheerfulness—Kate calls her the last of the Stepford Wives.

“I was thinking just you and me, Danny,” Derek says. His face colors and Daniel realizes with a helpless lurch that his old friend feels embarrassed asking him to sit down and share a meal. But the embarrassment, rather than make Derek shrink back, somehow propels him forward. He has nothing more to lose. “I really would like that,” he says. “We—”

“No, that would be great,” Daniel says, not being able to bear the awkwardness a moment longer. “I’ll just make sure nothing’s pending at home.

I’ll call you around six, six-thirty.” Who knows? They might go to a restaurant and end up accidentally seeing Iris.Wouldn’t that be something?

Derek flicks his Camel Light into the rain. “How cool is it that you moved back here?” he says, grinning, shaking his head. His cruiser is parked next to Daniel’s car, blue lights slowly revolving, and every car that passes on the highway slows down at the sight of it. He has left the window open and the sound of his radio can be heard. The dispatcher’s voice, static moving through it like whitewater. Daniel cannot understand a word, and Derek seems not even to hear it.

“How’s Mercy Crane working out?” he asks.

“She’s great. Thanks for putting us in touch with her.”

[ 67 ]

“She used to baby-sit for Chelsea.” He clasps his hands behind his back and stretches extravagantly. “She’s really something.”

“Mercy?”

“Real strict parents, though. Especially Jeff. He’s nuts, you gotta watch out for him. He’s the kind of cop that gives cops a bad name.”

“She likes movies. I always try and rent something interesting for her to watch.”

“Oh yeah, she likes movies. And music, and just laughing her ass off.

She’s an amazing girl.And sexy, don’t you think? Not that I would ever do anything, but God, she is so fucking hot, those big eyes and those little spindly wrists and always wearing just enough perfume to let you know she knows exactly what you’re thinking.” He claps Daniel on the back.

“All right, buddy, go back in there and do your business, I’m out of here.”

“Me, too.”

“Yeah? What about your magazines?”

“Just looking.”

“I didn’t mean to bust you, Danny. Feel free. Our age, a nice jerk-off helps keep the lid on. Though I could never, not with a black lady. It just doesn’t do it for me.”

“I’ll call you tonight, then,” Daniel says.

“Okay, good. I really need to talk to you.”

“Is everything okay, Derek?”

Derek looks at him as if he were insane. “Of course not,” he says, and then laughs. Daniel stands there and watches Derek get into his cruiser and drive away. He gets into his own car and drives into Leyden, through the rain that is now just beginning to include a few intermittent streaks of snow, loose skeins of white woven into the gray of the day.

Daniel arrives at his office building, swings around back, where there is parking for tenants and clients only. The first thing he sees is a green Volvo station wagon, with the license plate WDC785.

Iris.

What’s she doing here?
It’s unlikely she is doing business at Software a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

Solutions, and the financial planner is in Austria for the month. She must be here to see the child psychologist, Warren Maltby, an exceptionally small man, with tar-black hair.The thought of Iris up there, with Nelson or without him, strikes Daniel with sudden force.What could the trouble be? Were they taking him to a shrink because he supposedly hit a kid at day care? Daniel sensed that Nelson is one of the teachers’ favorites—

with his clean cubby, princely table manners, perfect diction, and startling beauty. Ruby has actually enjoyed a rise in status since becoming Nelson’s best friend. Like the homecoming queen on the arm of the school’s football hero.

By now he has wandered over to Iris’s Volvo and peers into it. The baby seat is strapped into an otherwise empty and immaculate backseat.

The family dog, an elderly Australian shepherd named Scarecrow, sleeps deeply in the way back, her eyelids trembling while she dreams. Daniel raps a knuckle against the side window and Scarecrow opens one reddened eye. “Hi, Crow,” he says, currying the dog’s favor. Then he looks into the front of the car. In the passenger seat is a stack of books with library markings on their spines. On top of the books is a spiral notebook, opened to a page of her handwriting, black flowing letters, old-fashioned in their shapeliness.Through the glare and his reflection, he reads,
Harlem
Ren. economic engine B. intell. repudiate Marx 19% unem. extend. fam “A safety
net made not of government giveaways and fashioned by would-be social engineers, but consisting of a weave of family structure, rural communalism and Christianity.”
And then he opens the door and picks up the notebook. He riffles through the pages like a spy, and then, miraculously, and terribly, he sees, on an otherwise blank page, his initials.
DE,
written small, in the center of the page, the exact center, with a circle drawn around them. His heart accelerates as if he has suddenly sprouted wings and begun to fly.