City on Fire (61 page)

“What’s what?” C.L. was tucking a revolver into the back of his jeans. When he reached under the pallet again, he came up with a roll of currency.

“Is that a gun?”

“You got to learn to take care of yourself, Merce. It’s a red-assed world.”

THE POT CAME FROM PRINCEVILLE, an all-black community on the far side of the county line. And, more proximately, from a quadriplegic dealer named “Boot.” C.L. was welcomed like a dear friend. Meanwhile, as a stranger, Mercer was forbidden to enter the guy’s dumpy house, and had to sit out front with the chained-up dog who shared his owner’s distinctly malevolent cast of eye. Their own dog, Sally, had died last summer. Had C.L. been released in time to bury her? Mercer wondered, even as he girded himself for the sound of gunplay. Stereo equipment indeed.

But then again, smoked out the window of his room under the eaves that afternoon, the stuff restored Mercer’s appetite for dinner. This was worth the price of admission, which was having to sit through the meal without looking too intently at Mama or Pop, lest they see his incompletely Visined irises, or at C.L., whose own empinkened gaze might make him crack up. Nor did his parents look too intently at him, for to notice a thing is to become responsible for it. What Mama did notice was that he was looking sturdier already. “Must be this home cooking.” And in his mellow frame of mind, Mercer almost agreed. You couldn’t get food like this in New York: pork shoulder and butter beans and cornbread. Instead you got what? Let these salt and pepper shakers stand for the Garden and the Coliseum. Let that tall candlestick be the Hamilton-Sweeney Building. Somewhere beyond that, near the floral arrangement, a young woman lay dying in a hospital bed. It was all Mercer’s students could talk about last week; she’d turned out to be an alumna of a rival prep school, and the hallways buzzed with intimations of a “Kneesocks Killer.” A serial killer would, by definition, require at least two victims, yet the rumors had made him even more afraid for William, roaming those streets alone. But that was all behind him now, right? The pot made it easier to think so. It was rhubarb season, and little berries were starting to come up in quantity, and he took seconds, thirds, of Mama’s pie.

With sleep, too, the drug helped. Aping C.L., Mercer had pinched out his afternoon j., saved the end bit, the roach, for later. He’d thought he might try writing some, here in his room where it all had started, but instead he just lolled on the bed. One or the other of his parents was now a snorer; he could hear it a floor below. How many years of wire-to-wire labor, of worries, of pains in the neck and ass their boys gave them had they gone through just to get to the point in life where it was acceptable to fall asleep halfway through The Jeffersons? It wouldn’t have been fair to them to dwell in the lonesomeness welling again inside him, and now he had an alternative. Which was to relight the joint. In the springtime dark with the windows open and the smell of leaves drifting in, he again grew casual, expansive, unraveling like an old sweater. He devised a little game wherein he gripped the business end of the joint with his lips and breathed in and out, feeling the temperature near his face rise with each breath. The trick was to pluck the joint away just before it burned him. And soon after it either did or didn’t, he would feel the world begin to slope away underneath him, the surface of a gathering wave.

ONLY ONE THING CONTINUED TO GNAW AT HIM, he thought: that Saturday Night Special C.L. kept stashed in the barn. Out pulling weeds from Mama’s vegetable patch the next morning, he ran through the reasons not to worry. First: They’d both been handling firearms since childhood, when Pop had issued standing orders to kill on sight any crow that came within a country mile of the corn. Second: After two tours in Vietnam, maybe C.L. just felt safer with a weapon nearby. Third: These days, C.L. seemed at least as compos mentis as his brother. On the other hand, Mercer now knew himself to be a kind of catechist of rationalizations. Had his experience with William taught him nothing? Had Chekhov? And if that thing went off and killed anyone, it was liable to be C.L. And so, that last night before he was to fly back to the city, he resisted the pull of sleep. He waited for the domestic creak and shuffle to subside. Then he slipped down the back stairs and out the screen door, which he was careful not to let slam. The crickets were louder here, and a full moon threw the house’s shadow over half the yard; beyond, trees took over, and he stole from one to the other, a shadow himself. Only upon reaching the shell drive did he look back. The house was dark, except for one window flickering on the second floor. He hadn’t been aware C.L. had a TV in his room. Clearly, he hadn’t been aware of a lot of things.

Pushing deeper into the farm, the blue land swollen under all those stars, he felt like a figure in a dream. The heavy barn door screamed like an alarm, but then came the old, sure thunder of the wood rolling back. As he groped around in the hollowed-out place beneath the shipping pallet, he tried not to think of the snakes C.L. had warned about, of wriggling millipedes, of eyeless soft insects. At first he felt only the Mason jars of grass. They no longer seemed quite so valueless, but to steal from C.L. would have compromised the purity of his dream-mission. He thrust his hand deeper, holding his breath. It came upon a solidity of metal. Carefully, he oriented the barrel away from himself and dragged the gun out.

Black irregularities in the moonlit pasture outside betrayed his mower’s oversights like ink on an exam book. If his girls could see him now … He felt a sudden kinship with them, their feigned composure, their inability to imagine the repercussions of choices they were presently making. With his hands, he dug up a patch of damp earth, maybe eight inches deep. The land of his upbringing was under his nails and in his nose, as Pop always meant it to be. It seemed a shame to let it dirty up a good gun, so he used the shirt off his back as a wrapper. He was a priest now, pagan, half-naked in the night, performing obscure rites of interment. Or he was the lead player in his own novel, or in one of those new arcade games William loved, compelled to repeat some totemic motion until he got it right. Only once did he feel, as he had on New Year’s Eve, that someone was standing among the trees, watching. Well, let him watch, damn it. Something was being enacted here, as if it had been this deeper mission calling Mercer home all along. And now that he’d completed it, maybe he would be allowed to advance through to the next level, to a world where no one got shot.

51

REGARDLESS OF WHATEVER HE’D SAID TO HIS SISTER in the heat of his outrage, William was finding it hard to husband his dough. If he took twenty, or thirty, or forty bucks out of the bank, he’d burn through it in a single day. On the other hand, some recent lost weekends in the war zones of the outer boroughs had him too spooked to carry more. Several times on lonely streets late at night, he’d had the sensation of being followed. This had started when he’d still been living with Mercer, actually; you’d sense yourself being watched and then turn around and there’d be no one there. And then once, in a flyblown Bed-Stuy shooting gallery, too zonked to move, he’d felt a friend of a friend of a friend lift his graven head, heard him whisper to someone else, Shit, man, do you know who this cat is? as if there might be enough cash in the wallet of Billy Three-Sticks to take them all on the Permanent Nod. Which just went to show you had to be careful of other people.

The rule applied to domestic life, too. The first few weeks after moving out, he’d been crashing in Bruno’s guestroom in Chelsea. He’d assumed his old benefactor would be pleased to see him free again, but some inkling of the circumstances seemed to lurk behind Bruno’s Austrian restraint. Failure to ask what had happened read not as tact, but as evaluation, as disappointment, and perhaps even as a subtle pressure to get clean.

So William had said sayonara and moved the few things he had to his studio in the Bronx. Sure, he was the only white guy for blocks, but he felt sometimes that being raised by Doonie made him an honorary brother. Anyway, color wasn’t the source of his agita up here. It was the half-finished canvases gaping from the wall. Evidence, his magnum opus was called. The title had come before almost anything else. He’d planned to finish before telling Mercer much beyond that. Perhaps at first he envied Mercer’s sanity about his own work, his refusal to boast about his productivity, which must have been considerable, for all the hours he put in. Later, though, after he realized he himself was procrastinating, William had kept quiet out of shame. And now not having spoken about Evidence made it seem even less real. He still forced himself at least once a week, out of a kind of spite, to mix up his pigments. But the daily discipline of brush and canvas had long since deserted him.

Indeed, by April, his main discipline was forestalling until early evening, or at least late afternoon, an experience infinitely more beautiful: the leisurely walk over the Grand Concourse or the long plunge down to the Deuce to cop. As a surfer reads waves, he’d learned how to predict the intervals when the government tightened the supply, and how to ride out dry spells. (If they weren’t only temporary, cops would have been out of jobs.) And he’d learned to appreciate rush hour, the scoring time, when he flowed out to be with the world for a few minutes before diving back into himself—it had the form of anxiety, only drained of the content—and to relish the pellucid air of five o’clock, the colors of the medium he was moving through.

One day, when the supply was good, he was back in Times Square. Daylight Wastings had just ended, but even this early, the neon flashed come-ons above his head, Peepland in red, Peep-o-Rama in blue and red, to match the come-ons catcalling from all around. “Reds.” “Blues, blues.” “Ten dollars, the hand; twenty, the mouth; fifty, full service!” It was a glimpse of the alternate future: not a nuclear holocaust, or a communist utopia, but a life organized completely on market principles. He wanted to stop and admire all these people living like it was the day after tomorrow. Instead he angled head-down into the crowd, trying not to be recognized. In the pocket of his old Ex Post Facto jacket, in the little hole he’d cut into the lining, was a paper envelope of heroin, like the sleeves they put stamps in at the post office.

Hard to say, then, what drew his eye up toward the marquee of a porno palace as he approached the corner of Broadway. He must have felt a disturbance just beyond the boundless world his eyes perceived. Maybe like dogs we know when we are being hunted. Anyway, in a single glance, he comprehended a body bigger than the bodies around it and somehow distinct from them. It was a white guy, a real hulk, damn familiar-looking, with whiskers and flyaway hair and a slightly fantastic or spectral gaze that raked the crowds from the shadow of a hat brim. William had seen this getup once before—from the window of the loft, he thought—and suddenly his anxiety was just anxiety again; he had been followed. This was the follower. Some kind of narc, it seemed, with that silly hat, the unconvincing length of that hair. He was waiting to bust William. But he hadn’t spotted him yet.

William’s instinct, oddly, was to do exactly nothing he hadn’t already been doing. Or not so oddly. Wasn’t this what you were supposed to do in the presence of a wild animal? Move calmly away. Running will only enrage it. William didn’t look again but resumed his businesslike pace across Broadway. His hands sweated in his pockets; he could dump the drugs, but loved them too much. Fortunately, the block between here and Sixth Avenue teemed with New Yorkers as degenerate as himself, and when he felt dissolved among them, protected by them, he looked back and saw no such person waiting on the traffic island.

Later, locked safely inside his studio, he would wonder if he was imagining things. In any case, he was going to reward himself for keeping cool with a dose large enough to make him puke. Somewhere nearby a building demolition had been in process all day, but it registered at present only as intervals of rumble in the floorboards and a felt compassion for the rats of this city, surrounded on all sides by predators, made homeless by the rubble. Of course, it was not the rats he kept seeing as he hunkered over the blackened spoon. Or as the knot inside him untied and dropped him on the dusty floor to lie in his jockey shorts and drift in and out of the portal the shifting sun drew across the wall. It was the shadowy face of that presumptive stranger. No stranger, really, than the one he’d see if he got up right now to examine the mirror. For William, too, was haunted. Hunted, maybe, for something more than his drugs. Or Billy. He’d been jumped a few months ago, and had not wished to repeat it. But he had lost the will to move, or possibly the ability. And so what, he thought now. Fuck it. Let them come.

52

YOU COULD TRACK Mr. Feratovic, the super, by the sound of his walkie-talkie in the hall. Mostly it picked up stray transmissions from vacuum cleaners and passing taxis; the only person who ever used it to contact him was his wife—or so Richard had told Jenny, during one of their late-night bull sessions. He could tune in the signal on his police scanner, hear Mrs. F. calling her better half down to dinner. Didn’t he find eavesdropping a little unfair? she’d asked. That day at the start of May, though, she had a question about some contractors’ scaffolding that had appeared outside her window—about whether renovations prefigured a rise in rent—so when she heard the telltale static approaching the door, she disabled the police lock and stuck her head out. She found the super attempting to corral Richard’s Scottish terrier, Claggart, into a corner with his big brown boots.

The poor dog, obviously traumatized, allowed her to swoop in and rescue him. As she moved toward Richard’s door, though, the super shouted, “Not home, miss.”

“Excuse me?”

Mr. Feratovic was what you might call well-preserved. He could have been as old as seventy, but wore short shorts and a starched undershirt year-round, and his arms and calves were knotty with muscles. He squinted and leaned toward her, as if into a stiff wind. The wet cigar-end in his mouth made it hard to decipher what he was telling her, except for the last bit: “You let the dog go, see what happens.”