City on Fire (83 page)

IN THE MORNING, though, she drowsed as long as she could, and then found a million things to do in her room. What if Dad had been down to the workshop at dawn and discovered the theft? But when she finally went out to face him, he was still in his undershirt, watching some Fourth of July festivities from the early ’70s on videotape. The volume was low. From the hi-fi came late Sinatra. And maybe he really had forgotten she was coming, because he asked if she could go pick up a turkey for dinner. “You mean because you’re so busy.” A dryness bordering on sarcasm was one of their shared idioms, but the joke had teeth; she was getting the impression that his work these days largely involved rehashing old glories for that never-ending magazine profile.

On her way back from the grocery, she killed an hour or more cruising somnolent sidestreets, while the turkey thawed on the passenger’s seat beside her. She had half a mind to go see Charlie Weisbarger but didn’t know where his house was. She returned to her own to find Dad still in his lounge chair in front of the TV, now in one of those fuzzy, faintly sulfurous wool overshirts that were what the word “home” made her think of. Had he made it farther than his not-so-secret beer cooler on the patio? Was he onto her? Impossible to say. When she told him she’d found a good bird, his grunt might have signified pensiveness, or absentmindedness, or stifled rage.

She moved around the kitchen sick with nerves, which was no way to cook, and then bounced back and forth between there and her room, but the turkey that emerged from the oven three hours later, impaled on its plastic thermometer, looked credibly brown. Dad sat across from her at the little table in the kitchen, staring at it, his fork and knife clutched Neolithically in his hands. “Let me ask you something, Sammy.”

Oh fuck, she thought. So he’d been out there after all. “Fire away.”

“When you got home yesterday, did you notice anything out of the ordinary?”

“Uh-uh.” She had to take a gulp of water before she could ask why he asked, when the real question was: Had he called the cops? But of course he hadn’t. Generations of Cicciaros would have risen shrieking from the ground, come after him with pitchforks and torches.

He muttered something to himself.

“What?”

“I said, they’re not going to stop until they’ve taken every last thing I have.”

“What’s going on, Dad? What are you talking about?”

He was talking about the competition, he said. These little acts of industrial espionage. They obviously wanted to send him a message. But then it was as if the outward form of the meal, the proximity of the mashed potatoes to the Platonic ideal on the box, called him back to the present. “Listen to me running off at the mouth, when you came all this way. Forget I mentioned it.” His hand, scrubbed pink with lava soap, took hers. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re thankful.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, baby. What are we celebrating here?” It was a thing Mom used to make them do. Gratitudes, she called it. But what was Sam supposed to be grateful for? Keith would just be sitting down with his wife and kids. Nicky was probably at this moment in the throes with Sewer Girl, who’d been servicing him behind Sol’s back since at least October. Poor Charlie was still grounded. And Dad, only two feet away, remained remote, cut off by the vials in her backpack. Stealing, dishonor, disobedience, two or three sins in a single stroke. Or did she have it backward: was it the remoteness that caused the sin? The candles she’d found under the laundry-room sink glimmered. A single, hot tear slinked down her cheek.

“You all right?” he said, as if she’d stubbed her toe.

The tear reached her mouth, salty. She sniffed. “Yeah. I’m all right.”

The fatty smell of the bird filled her nostrils, making it hard not to think Nicky had a point, at least so far as animals were concerned. But to notice that she barely touched her dinner would have been to have to speak about it—so Dad tucked in, and then so did she, wondering all the while, who am I?

THE NEXT DAY, her dad drove into the city to talk to Benny Blum. The best revenge, he’d decided, was to get his contracts back. As soon as he was gone, she walked over to the tattoo parlor on Main. The place reeked of cheap incense, and sheets of blue cellophane affixed to the windows gave the light a morgue-like tint. The tattooist was thirtyish, limp as a noodle, with a few discrete bristles of moustache. On the plus side, he didn’t ask for proof of age, and the prices started at fifteen bucks. She’d sold her semester’s meal card to another student back in October. Much of the cash had gone to pay for movie tickets and cigarettes, but enough remained for a design the size of a fifty-cent piece. On a prescription pad that was for some reason lying on the display case, she sketched what she wanted. “Right there,” she said, and put her finger to the spot, just below the occiput.

The tattooist led her to a backroom even creepier than the front—a room for porno shoots or child abduction—and pushed her face into a leather ring like a padded toilet seat, and doubtless as sanitary. She could feel his breath on her neck, but didn’t make a sound when he touched her hair, or when he cranked up the Floyd on the stereo, or even when the first needle went in, though he scolded her for tensing her muscles. It felt exactly how you’d expect a hot spike driven into your neck to feel. Still, pain sometimes could be clarifying.

WHEN THE MAGAZINE GUY CAME OUT THAT AFTERNOON in search of Dad, she had an impulse to show him what she’d done—to say, Fit this into your story. But it was only the next day on East Third with Sewer Girl that she would brush the hair back from her neck, peel off the Snoopy band-aid she’d told Dad was for a bug bite. She was hoping for an admiring whistle, or, failing that, an expletive meaning whoa. Instead, she felt hands on her shoulders, steering her into stronger light. “What’s that supposed to be?”

Sam wanted to believe that all of this—the squinting, the withholding of judgment—was a put-on, but though Sewer Girl was full of many things, guile was not among them. Anyway, one unforeseen effect of the tattoo’s placement was to make it virtually impossible for Sam to inspect it herself. The only reflecting surfaces in the house were in Nicky’s basement, and she would try, through various conjunctions of the cracked glass on the wall and the mirror he used for cocaine, to catch sight of the logo he’d shown her back in July, but all she saw was a blurriness that may have been a function of the tattooist’s clumsiness or her own shaking hand. Then a miniature Nicky, doubly reflected, appeared in her palm. “Who dragged you through the briar patch?”

“Thanks, asshole. Not everybody has a sugar daddy uptown to keep them looking fit.”

For a second, his gaze went flat. Then he recovered. “Seriously, though, did you already get into my stash? Your eyes are like rose-colored.”

“I’m in some pain.” She uncovered the tattoo.

All he said was, “Cool. Hey, did you get my shit?”

It took her a beat to remember what he was talking about, and when she did fetch the test tubes from her bag, he seemed disappointed at how puny the polverone looked, clumped there at the bottom. She promised it would be more than enough to wow a small crowd.

“There’s the rub. I don’t want to wow a small crowd.”

“You understand an explosion is geometric, right? Kilos would be, like, this to the thousandth power. Anyway, what you’re after’s not a powder burst, but a steady burn that will ignite these babies at intervals.” She showed him the stars, walked him through the handling instructions. The nitrates needed to stay dry, and though she’d taken the least volatile ones, reds and oranges and a little green, you wanted to keep them wrapped in some kind of padding, so they didn’t jostle too much. “And be super-wary of static electricity. If I’d gotten you my dad’s special formula, you’d have to worry about off-gassing, but the worst that happens with polverone is you set yourself on fire, rather than blow yourself up.”

His attention seemed to have moved on to that other powder he was cutting on the table. “Well damn, you’re the expert, I guess. Want a bump?”

She and Charlie had had a gentleman’s agreement to stay away from the hard stuff. It was supposed to save them from the fate of the scarecrows who populated this part of the city. Just an hour ago, she’d seen one half-squatting in the middle of Second Avenue, blocking traffic, entranced by the cherry-red popsicle melting in his hand. But were these arbitrary rules not another form of dependency? To hell with it, she thought, why not?

AND THIS IS HOW, as the Bicentennial year drew to a close, the loss of Keith Lamplighter sent her back into the ambit of her friends, albeit numbed somewhat to the consequences. It became second nature: the rolling of a bill, the shielding of a nostril, and then snow flying into the head, cooling everything. The alkaline drip. The white powder. The bill slackening on the mirror.

Nicky, not coincidentally, was a dynamo. Band rehearsals in the little house out back could stretch to three or four hours. The new players included D. Tremens on lead guitar and a person named Tutu on bass. Sometimes one of the Ph.D. candidates with whom Nicky liked to wax philosophical came over to manipulate tape loops. Sam couldn’t help imagining a review of these practice sessions for her ’zine. A toneless game of Telephone. All the Ex Post Facto fury with none of the sound. Then again, what was “good,” anyway? She would have liked to volunteer for the second-guitar slot herself—the Fender around Nicky’s neck seemed purely decorative—but he’d already appointed her Ministrix of Information, which mostly involved taking pictures of him striking Iggy Pop poses with his shirt off. Between songs, Sewer Girl shot Sam dirty looks. It was clear now who was the favorite.

In general, the level of jealousy in the house was higher than it had been in the summer. As a form of personalized paranoia, this was understandable—they were all smoking hellacious amounts of grass, to come down off the blow. But it had started to infect even Nicky, despite his having rapped so persuasively about the end of property, the illusion of individuality. One day, when he and Sam were getting high in the basement, he’d looked up from the mirror between them. “You realize why you returned to the fold, right?”

“What?”

The only reason she’d been spending so much time here lately, he said, was on the off-chance she might run into him again.

“Run into who?”

“What? Who?” he repeated, in a high, girly voice. His face loomed downward in the mirror and then tilted back, eyes closed. She’d read somewhere that sharks could smell a drop of blood in a million drops of water, or taste it, or whatever sharks did. “I’m talking about Loverboy. You obviously haven’t read those books I gave you. This older-man trip of yours is slave morality, Sam, pure and simple.”

She crossed the room to the stereo and knelt to flip through the stacks of LPs. Who she longed for, at present, was not Keith but good old Charlie W. No matter how much it might have hurt, he would have made at least some basic effort to understand how she felt inside, and this was maybe what she missed most about him: his utter undefendedness. That devout, almost angry look he’d given her in this very basement, just before he’d kissed her … How hard was it to pretend you were enjoying yourself, if it would make someone like Charlie happy? But even ’shroomed out of her mind, she could see how her habit of moving on would have annihilated his heart, and so had pretended that night to pass out. Now, from among those Herb Alpert records Nicky collected, she liberated a copy of Brass Tactics. She knew it would piss him off, being indisputably superior to anything he’d ever be able to create. It was her revenge for his phrase “slave morality,” which had worked itself into her flesh like a burr. He needed to know she wasn’t out to impress him, that she was choosing freely. As the opening riff of “Army Recruiter” blazed out of the speakers, she turned around. “Are we going to do this, or what?”

A few minutes later, they were in underwear. She let Nicky tap out a trail of powder onto the flat skin between her navel and the elastic of her panties. Her head was a citadel she was locked away inside, while he made free with the landscape below. When he started to twitch inside her, she produced a few moans. As if he cared. But at least she had done it. Had mastered herself. “See?” she said, when they’d been silent a while.

“See what?”

“I told you I was over him.”

“I don’t know. You think you could convince me again?”

ALL KIDDING ASIDE, this was what seemed to clinch her loyalty, for Nicky. Not the tattoo, not the theft of the three grams, not her abstention, all these months, from sticking her nose too far into exactly what the PHP aimed to achieve. It was letting him fuck her. Frozen out of their “bombing runs” since August, she now found herself back in, zooming deeper into the boroughs. She rode shotgun, though the silence from behind suggested her presence there was not universally welcomed. Before the van had even stopped, D.T. and Sol would be paratrooping out of the sliding door to infiltrate the unfamiliar streets, spraycans (she assumed) clanking in their bags. Nicky would turn on the radio and spark a joint as, behind his mirrored shades, he went on high alert. She could tell from how he stopped trying to feel her up. He even let her bring her camera—in case there was time to document the graffiti—though he still forbid her from printing the results in her ’zine. She’d mostly shoot random throw-ups she noticed while she waited, but sometimes Nicky would ask her to take a picture of something specific. “Can you get that garage over there? The one with the burn-marks?” Or he’d direct her attention to a demolition notice on the garage door, or to the razor-wired top of a construction fence, gleaming dully in the dying light. She was still going over to NYU to use the darkroom, academic standing be damned, and watching those proofs dry—train-trestle murals, charred mailboxes, knotted Chucks festooning the blighted elms—she tried to convince herself he was right. Maybe every form of vandalism had its own aesthetic. Several times recently, she’d thought they were no more than a block or two away from that church they’d doused in gasoline; she would have liked to see it again. But if she didn’t ask Nicky what had become of it, she wouldn’t have to deal with an answer. So she just handed him his copy of the photos, which he sheathed inside spare record sleeves and pinned to the wall of the war room upstairs.