Shoot the Moon (16 page)

“I’ll be okay,” Goodman says, aware of his own heartbeat. He notices a second man standing behind the first, a bit to one side. He’s also black, though lighter-skinned. He’s almost as tall as the first one, but not as broad. Neither of them is Russell; in addition to being bigger, they look much older, more sure of themselves.

“I told Russell we gonna try to help you out,” says the first man. He’s clearly the one in charge, no doubt Russell’s “man.”

“Right,” Goodman says.

“You alone?”

Goodman nods.

“No
po
-leece hidin’ in the bushes?”

“No,” Goodman says.

“You got the thing?”

Goodman knows better than to say yes. Instead, he asks, “You got the money?”

Russell’s man smiles in a friendly way and reaches into his pocket. He comes out with a wad of money that reminds Goodman of Manny’s wad at the Bronx Tire Exchange. Only this one is twice as fat. And while Manny’s wad was made up of twenties and smaller bills, this one seems to be all hundreds, if the outer bills are any indication.

“Is it all there?” Goodman asks, feeling surprisingly in control of things.

The man smiles again. “All twenny-five large ones,” he says, offering it to Goodman. “Count it if you like.”

Goodman decides this would be an unprofessional sign of distrust on his part. “That’s okay,” he says. He reaches down into his pants and retrieves the package. He extends it toward the man, along with his other empty hand, palm up. A simultaneous exchange, he figures - cash and carry, just like Russell said.

Only something goes wrong. The next thing Goodman knows, he’s sitting on the walkway, both hands empty. He’s aware of a throbbing ache on the left side of his head. Then he’s lying on his back, the rain falling onto his face. Someone’s pulling at his feet. He fights to catch his breath, is unable to speak. His first thought is that he’s being dragged by his ankles to be thrown into the river or dumped into the bushes. He feels his shoes come loose, then realizes his
pants
are being pulled off, as well.

“Lissen good, my man,” comes a voice directly over him. Goodman squints to see, but, looking up into the sleet, he can only make out the silhouette of a large body straddling his own.

“Here’s the story, Mr. Drug Dealer. You gonna lie right here for one hour. One hour from now, we gonna come back an’ check on you, make sure you still here. We takin’ your pants for
insurance,”
he’s told. “You come afta us, won’t be like this again. Won’t be about
clothes
nex time.”

Big Red and Hammer sit in the Bentley on 125th Street, the heat turned up high. Big Red examines the package in his lap.

“Lookin’ good,” he says. He fishes the wad of money from his pocket and counts off ten $100 bills, which he folds and hands to Hammer. The remainder of the bills are mostly singles, with a few fives and tens mixed in.

“Thanks for the help,” he tells Hammer.

“Anytime,” Hammer says, letting himself out of the Bentley.

“Later, man,” says Big Red.

“Later.”

Big Red picks up a soggy pair of pants and shoes from the floor of the car. The shoes are cheap loafers with a Thom McAn label; he pushes a button that rolls down his window, then throws the shoes out onto the street. He’s about to do the same with the pants when he feels a lump in the back pocket. He reaches in and removes a wallet made of imitation leather. He unfolds it and checks the contents: two twenties and three singles, which he pockets; a Social Security card; a telephone calling card, which he ignores; a photograph of a little girl; and a driver’s license with a new address inked in.

Big Red smiles. He reaches for his car phone and punches in some numbers. He waits until a male voice says hello.

“Wake up, No Neck,” he says. “It’s me.”

“Shit. What time is it?” the voice asks him.

“Never you mind what time it is,” Big Red tells him. “Just write down this name an’ address.”

“Wait a sec,” the voice says. “Okay, go ahead.”

Big Red reads the name and new address from the driver’s license.

“What’s the story?” the voice asks him.

“Guy deals kilos,” Big Red says. “Kilos of pure shit. But you better move quick on this one. I hear he’s had a bad experience and may be goin’ outa bizness real soon. And No Neck?”

“Yeah?”

“You do some good on this one, don’t you be forgettin’ who your friends are.” Then he clicks off. He throws the pants out the window and is about to do the same with the wallet. But at the last moment, he decides against that. Instead, he takes it and, reaching under the front passenger seat, places it in a compartment he’s had specially hollowed out among the springs.

Goodman lies helpless on his back in the cold, wet darkness, waiting for the two black men to deliver whatever threat or punch or kick or other humiliation is next. But nothing happens. He lets a few minutes go by before he pulls himself up into a sitting position. The whole left side of his face, from his hairline to his chin is numb. His pants and shoes are nowhere to be found. His undershorts are twisted halfway between his knees and his ankles. He rises to a crouch, straightening them and pulling them into place, so that at least he’s covered there.

He looks around, hoping that they’ve thrown his missing clothing somewhere nearby, but his vision is blurred, either from the rain or from some blow to his head that the numbness tells him he must have sustained. He feels as if his left ear is bleeding, but at least he can hear out of it.

He gropes around for a minute before giving up hope of finding his pants and shoes. His socks make a squishing sound with every step he takes, and his feet quickly become numb from the cold. His undershorts are soaked through and stick to his skin. He strips off his jacket and ties it around his waist, Boy Scout-style, so that it covers his butt. He begins the long walk home, freezing, wet, tired, and totally humiliated. He’s sorry he ever pried open the spare tire of the Camry, sorry he ever met Russell. He promises himself that first thing tomorrow morning he’ll take the rest of the packages from his storage locker and dump them into the river he’s just come from.

But it turns out that tomorrow morning will have to wait: This night is not yet over for Michael Goodman. As soon as he enters his block, drenched and shivering, but grateful to have made it home without further incident, he sees half a dozen cars double-parked not far from the stoop. One of them is a blue-and-white NYPD car; several of the others have long radio antennas and red lights mounted atop their dashboards. Goodman wonders which building they’ve responded to, and what the problem is.

He recalls how once, as a child, he was lying in his bed waiting for sleep to come. From far away, he heard the wail of a siren and the telltale horn of a fire truck. He listened as the sounds grew louder and louder, until they came right by his house. He waited for them to speed by on their way to some fire, but instead they slowed and stopped right there, right downstairs. By then, he could smell smoke and hear voices out on the street. He remembers his father coming into the room, telling him to stay in bed, assuring him that everything was all right. But as he lay there, covers pulled up tightly to his chin, the faint odor of smoke reaching his nostrils, he absolutely knew that at any second flames would burst through his door and swallow him up.

Now he has the sensation that he’s somehow reliving the experience, only this time it’s in reverse. As he draws closer and closer, he begins to realize it’s his own building that the police have been drawn to. And as he looks up, using his hand to shield the falling rain from his eyes, he can see that the lights are on in his apartment, lights he knows he turned off on his way out.

A sickening feeling spreads through him. He’s considering walking on, pretending he’s just passing by, when he hears a man’s voice.

“You live in there, pal?”

He looks around but sees nobody. Then he hears a car door open, sees a man approaching him.

“I asked if you live there,” the man says.

“Yes,” Goodman says, too cold and too exhausted to lie.

“Which apartment?” the man asks. He holds a folded newspaper across his face as protection from the rain, and Goodman can’t see his eyes.

Goodman points to his window. “That one,” he says.

The man waves his newspaper at Goodman’s legs. “Wanna tell me whyyou’re walking around dressed like a half-wit?” he asks.

Goodman can only shrug.

The man pulls what looks like a walkie-talkie out of his back pocket and holds it up to his mouth. “Ray?” he says into it.

He’s answered by a staticky “Yeah.”

“Looks like Mr. Mole has come back to his burrow. Want me to bring him up?”

Another “Yeah.”

Before they even reach the fifth floor, Goodman sees his door has been broken open. Police officers - some in uniform, others in street clothes - are milling about the hallway. Inside, he counts eight of them before losing track. They’ve set up floodlights, running electric cords across his living room floor. His belongings have been trashed: It’s like the burglary, only far worse. The officer who’s walked him upstairs takes him over to the one he calls Ray.

“Whadda we got here?” Ray asks.

Goodman squints into the floodlights, speechless.

“Gotta be an EDP,” the first officer says. An EDP is an emotionally disturbed person, the NYPD’s terminology for a head case. “He just kinda wandered up. I don’t think the fucker even noticed it was raining.”

“Great,” Ray says, shaking his head back and forth slowly. It’s clear he’s tired.

“Anything here?” the first one asks, looking around the room.

“Nothing but a kitten from hell that ambushed me from the top of the refrigerator.” He displays the side of his neck, which bears two rows of tiny teeth marks and dried blood where the skin’s been broken. He turns to Goodman. “You live here?”

Goodman nods absently.

“What’s your name?”

“Michael. Michael Goodman.”

The one named Ray nods, as if he already knew that and was just testing.

“Got your keys on you?”

Goodman looks at him. Can this mean they’ve already discovered the duffel bag with the rest of the kilos?

“Hell-
o
,” Ray says, waving a hand in front of Goodman’s face to get his attention. “Your keys?”

It dawns on Goodman that it’s keys - not kilos - he’s being asked about. After considerable effort, he manages to find the pocket of his jacket. He fishes out his keys and displays them.

“That’s it?” Ray asks. “Three keys, is all you got?”

“I guess so,” Goodman says.

“Whatta they go to?”

Goodman fingers each key in turn. “This is the downstairs door. This is - was - my door. And this is my mailbox downstairs.”

“No car?”

“No.”

“No office keys? No safe-deposit box?”

“No.”

Ray takes the keys, tosses them to one of the uniformed officers. “Check his mailbox downstairs,” he says. “Then we’re outa here. Fuckin’ lunatic.”

Goodman says a silent prayer of thanks to whoever invented the combination lock.

Ray looks down at Goodman’s skinny legs and wet socks, then up at the stupid grin on his face. “Fuckin’ psycho,” he mutters. Then, to the other officers, he shouts, “That’s a wrap, fellas! Let’s go home.”

Goodman watches as they turn off the floodlights and break down the tripods that held them. Within five minutes, they’re gone. He inspects the lock on his door, finds it’s broken, and the security chain snapped. He knows he should make a trip to the all-night grocery store and buy a lock of some sort, but he’s simply too exhausted. He walks to his couch and sits down. From nowhere, his attack cat appears in his lap and looks up at him. One of its eyes is swollen shut, and there’s dried blood around its nose. Goodman strokes the kitten’s back.

“Good Pop-Tart, good Pop-Tart, good Pop-Tart,” he says over and over again.

By Sunday, the rain and sleet have stopped, and a warming sun has begun to dry things out.

Goodman spends most of the morning cleaning up his apartment and helping Tony the Super repair his broken door. The new locks cost him $35.76. He tips Tony $10, and can tell from the look on Tony’s face that he’d hoped for more. But Goodman’s down to his last few dollars, which he needs: Today’s the day he gets to spend with his daughter.

He picks Kelly up shortly before noon, early as usual. She seems to be in good spirits and, according to his mother-in-law, hasn’t complained about her head since Friday night. Still, as soon as they get outside, he notices that she winces, as though the sudden sunlight seems to bother her.

They walk to the park. Not Carl Schurz Park - Goodman has vowed never to set foot in it again - but Central Park. They visit a little playground that has always been one of Kelly’s favorites, but she doesn’t want to go on the swings. He doesn’t ask her why, but he finds himself watching her constantly for signs of pain. At one point, he thinks he sees her cocking her head back and forth, as though something’s interfering with her view. He wonders if it could be the spot Dr. Gendel saw in her eye. But again, he doesn’t want to say anything.

They walk onto the Sheep Meadow, but the grass is wet, and the dirt muddy from all the rain, and Goodman carries his daughter so she won’t ruin her shoes. She puts her head against his neck, and as he feels the softness of her hair, he asks nothing more than to be able to carry his little girl always, to be able to protect her from spots in her eye and tumors in her brain for as long as his arms can hold her.

They sit in the sun on the rocks and watch children running and nannies pushing carriages and dogs chasing balls and Frisbees. They talk about Kelly’s school, but she’s missed so many days lately that she doesn’t have much to tell him. He asks her if she wants lunch, but she says she’d like a pretzel from the pretzel man instead. He spends $2.50 buying them two pretzels, ends up finishing all of his and half of hers when she says she’s full. Then she looks up at him expectantly, as if to say he’s put it off long enough.

The Ballerina Princess (Continued)

Now, because of her headaches, it became necessary for the Ballerina Princess to visit some doctors and have some tests. And I must tell you, these tests were no fun! Some of the doctors would put the Ballerina Princess into a big machine that could take magical pictures of her head; and other doctors would hit her little knees with rubber hammers and stick her little toes with safety pins; still other doctors would shine magic flashlights into her little eyes.

But all the time, the Ballerina Princess was very good. Even when she got tired of all the tests - even when some of the things they did to her seemed scary and downright mean - she kept being good, because she knew the doctors were only trying to help her, trying to figure out a way to make the headaches go away.

And her grandma kept taking good care of her, even if she didn’t know any good stories, and the brave and loyal Prince Larus never left her side. And her daddy who loved her more than anything in the kingdom - more than all the castles and the banners and the unicorns and the winged horses - her daddy promised her that he would work as hard as he could at his magic numbers, so that he, too, could do his part in making the headaches go away forever.

By two o’clock, Kelly can barely stay awake and, though the day seems warm to Goodman, her fingers and the tip of her nose are cold to the touch. He picks her up once again, and they head for her grandmother’s.

* * *

Later that afternoon, Goodman meets up with his navy buddies at Krulewich’s apartment. There’s no baseball game on - the World Series has apparently ended, unbeknownst to Goodman - and the Giants aren’t playing till tomorrow night, on
Monday Night Football.
So Lehigh Valley makes good on his promise to teach them how to play hearts.

They sit around Krulewich’s card table, a pretty close relative of Goodman’s. Lehigh deals the cards. Krulewich holds his up to his thick glasses. The Whale gets as close to the table as his girth will permit. Goodman, whose facility with numbers makes him a pretty good card player (he and Shirley used to play bridge with her parents), listens as Lehigh explains the rules.

“Everybody gets thirteen cards,” he begins. “Whoever gets the two of clubs lays it down. It goes around the table. You got a club, you gotta follow suit. You don’t, you can play anything you want. Each heart is worth a point. Only” - and here Lehigh shakes a finger of warning at them - “points are
bad.
There’re twenty-six points altogether - thirteen hearts, plus the queen of spades, which is worth another thirteen points.”

“All by herself?” Goodman asks.

“All by herself,” Krulewich says. “So the winner is the one who gets stuck with the least points.”

“So all you gotta do is dump your hearts every chance you get,” the Whale decides. “Pretty fuckin’ borin’, if you ask me.”

“Well,” Lehigh says, “it would be, except for one thing.”

“What’s that?” Goodman asks.

“Shooting the moon.”

“Hey!” the Whale protests. “I ain’t flashin’ my butt for a buncha guys!”

“You don’t hafta flash your butt to shoot the moon,” Lehigh explains. “You gotta get all the points.”

“All twenty-six?” someone asks.

“All twenty-six.” Lehigh nods. “Do that, everybody else gets stuck with fifty points.”

“Suppose you don’t make it?” Goodman asks. “Suppose you come close but you only end up with, say, twenty-three or twenty-four?”

“Tough luck,” Lehigh says. “You don’t get ‘em all, they count
against
you. Which is why you better be damn sure you can make it before you try to shoot the moon.”

They try a few hands. At first, there’s a lot of grumbling. Krulewich has trouble seeing the cards that have been played, and they have to call out each card to him. The Whale wants to bet on the final score. Goodman, who’s able to keep track of every card that’s been played, is soon winning. After four hands, he’s comfortably ahead.

They decide to play one more hand before calling out for burgers.

Goodman picks up his cards and studies them. Only three hearts - the two, the four, and the nine. No queen of spades, and no spade higher than the queen. He knows he’s home free - all he has to do is to discard his hearts every opportunity he gets.

As play begins, it’s clear that everyone else has the same game plan. Krulewich and the Whale dump their hearts, too, but Goodman’s so far ahead of them on points that he knows they can’t catch him. As for Lehigh, he runs into a streak of bad luck and is soon groaning as he gets stuck with hearts he’s unable to underplay.

“Tough luck, sucker!” laughs the Whale, playing his last heart, the jack, on Lehigh’s king.

It’s not until the final few tricks that they realize what’s been going on. By then, it’s too late to stop Lehigh from winning all thirteen hearts and the queen of spades. Final score:

That night, secure behind his repaired door and new locks, as Michael Goodman prays for his daughter to be all right, he remembers he was supposed to meet Russell back in Carl Schurz Park earlier in the day. He feels guilty for a moment for not having showed up. Then he tells himself that, for all he knows, Russell was in on the plan to steal the drugs from him. He realizes how stupid he’s been to trust someone who only days ago was trying to mug him. He guesses he’s lucky to be alive still. He vows to throw away the rest of the drugs first chance he gets. He’ll do it tomorrow.