The Intruder (16 page)

The shifting molecules. She waves to him from across the street. The light turns red.

Her last words were, “I love you, Daddy.”

He shuts his eyes and covers his face with his hands.

“You all right?”

A wiry old white man in a black Speedo bathing suit is staring at him.

“Yeah. No. Yeah.”

“You sure? You don’t look all right.”

John G. blinks three times, trying to pull reality together. “You know what time it is?”

“ ‘Bout quarter after three,” the old man says, shaking his head and going back to his tai chi exercises.

Five more hours until evening. John G. doesn’t trust himself to be outside anymore. He’s done too much damage already.

He goes to the railing and looks out at the river. He feels sick at heart. An oil-black duck swims amid the driftwood. John G. wishes he could at least be around someone or something from the old days. But all he sees when he looks ahead is New Jersey.

Another homeless guy comes trundling along in a battered straw hat, pulling a shopping cart full of soda cans.

“Say, bro,” John G. calls out. “There any safe place to sleep around here?”

The guy turns; his face is like an eroded beach and his beard is like a piece of seaweed stuck to his chin. “I been staying in the tunnels.”

A train’s horn blares in the background and John G. starts to vaguely remember something one of the guys said at the shelter. The one with the big belly, who smelled from Chinese food and urine. He said he’d rather be back in the tunnels under the park.

“It’s all right down there?” John G. asks.

“It ain’t the Hilton.” The man in the straw hat moves on, as if pushed by a strong breeze.

The horn blows again in the distance. Big train heading south. Probably the Amtrak Albany-to-Washington line. It gets John thinking about how he once had a train of his own. Eight hundred thousand pounds of flesh and steel harnessed by the handle in his hand.

The memory brings him to his feet and he begins to follow the sound through the park, all the way to the Seventy-second Street entrance. He sees another homeless guy in a big gray coat disappearing through an opening in the iron fence under the West Side Highway. The entrance to the tunnel. He goes over and sticks his head between the bars. There’s just a yawning void ahead.

Part of him doesn’t have the heart for this. But the other part remembers the screaming brakes and Larry Loud’s breath on the back of his neck. It can’t hurt to look.

He squeezes the rest of his body through the fence and starts to edge along a jagged concrete ledge to the left. But then some of the stone crumbles and he falls six feet straight down.

His body screams from all the outrages he’s perpetrated on it the last few months, but then the pain subsides. Slowly his eyes begin to adjust to the darkness. What he sees is a long gray tunnel, stretching out for miles and miles to the north. Only a stark shaft of light slanting through an overhead grating hints that there might still be a world outside.

On the right, some twenty-five yards away, a stubby white man missing an arm stomps Rumpelstiltskin-style around an oil drum full of fire, daring John G. to pass.

The frightened part of his mind is telling him to turn back. But the other part is going Doris Day on him.
Que sera, sera.
Whatever will be, will be. Maybe he does belong here. He’s either reached the end of something or the beginning.

To the left, there’s a kind of underground man’s neighborhood behind a low stone wall. Five identical cardboard boxes, side by side, like homes in the suburbs. He comes over and looks inside one of them. In the darkness, he can make out a GE toaster oven, an old Zenith black-and-white TV with rabbit-ears antenna, a Waring blender, pots and pans. Just like Aunt Rose’s place. Except all the electric equipment is hooked up by extension cords to the streetlights through the grating twenty feet overhead.

A hoarse voice calls out. “ ‘Scuse me, mister, you lose something?”

Lose something? It’s like a question he’d ask himself. Only now somebody else is asking it. He takes his head out of the cardboard home and backs away.

Rumpelstiltskin. The one-armed man who’d been stomping around the fire is staring at him. From a distance of ten feet, his reddish brown hair looks like it’s been scalped back off his forehead, and ugly purple blotches are visible all over his face.

“No,” John G. says, patting his pockets and feeling discombobulated. “I didn’t lose anything here.”

“Then get the fuck out!”

The one-armed man picks up a black cast-iron skillet and throws it at John G.’s head. “WHHAAAAAAA!!!”

It crashes into a wall a full foot away and snaps him into a new state of alertness.

“Get the fuck out of here!!”

But before John can move, a red brick catches him flat on the chest and sends him staggering back against the wall. Booosshhh. The air goes out of him. His lungs feel bruised and his head feels light. He can’t seem to catch his breath.

Rumpelstiltskin is advancing on him with a rusty tire iron and an avid look, as if he can’t quite believe he’s finally found someone he can dominate.

“I SAID GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE!”

John G. can’t stand. Now he’s going to die. He’s sure of it. In a way, it’s a relief. This is what he’s deserved all along. He hears traffic shifting the heavy steel road plates above and he closes his eyes, awaiting the final blow. He smells wood smoke and tries to come up with a mental picture of his wife and child to hold on to at the end.

But the picture doesn’t come and neither does the blow.

After a few seconds, he opens his eyes and sees a husky black man with dreadlocks talking to the one-armed man and poking him in the chest with a sharp index finger.

“He was a spy,” Rumpelstiltskin is arguing meekly.

“Don’t you be trippin’ on me, James. You hear? We don’t need no Amtrak police down here. My God is the God of Abraham and I am the head nigger in charge. So you gonna bug out, go do it somewhere else.”

The one-armed man drops the tire iron and slinks away, his jeans drooping off his ass in discouragement. The man with dreadlocks turns to John G.

“The hell you look at, man? Get the fuck up. What are you? A animal lying there?”

John G. rubs his eyes, not sure whether the whole incident has been another hallucination.

As if to answer the question, the big guy comes over and gives him a hand standing up. His grip is strong and sure, and his eyes
are calm. But a long scar runs from the right side of his nose over to his ear. It’s impossible to tell how old he is.

“You looking for a place to hide out awhile?” he asks.

“What makes you think I’m hiding?”

“Ain’t nobody comes down here after they won the lottery, man.”

He goes over to a shopping cart full of aerosol cans and old Jergens bottles and starts pushing it up the tracks, as if he just expects John G. to follow.

“I’m Abraham,” he says, barely glancing back.

John G. jogs alongside him and introduces himself, but Abraham doesn’t shake his hand.

“Man, you gotta get yourself situated,” he says. “Look at you. You a mess. You got those drugs running rampant in your system. They wreaking havoc on you, man.”

“How do you know?”

“Man, I been there. I put shit in my veins that would peel the paint off your car.”

John G. stands there, trying to figure out how he got from where he was to where he is now.

“Well, come on, chief. You coming or what?”

He leads John G. around a slight bend toward a small white abandoned construction trailer. Two pit bulls tied to the front steps bark furiously. John G. notices that the shack next door has been burned to the ground. Charred pieces of wood and clothing fragments are strewn in the gravel.

“Get on in here a second, man,” says Abraham, going up the steps. “We gotta get you orientated.”

He fiddles with the padlock on the front door. “Fuckin’ white people,” he mutters. “You all ain’t used to living like niggers. You hit the street and you all lose your fuckin’ minds.”

A stout brown rat runs across John G.’s path and he gives out a little yelp of panic.

“Yeah, I used to hate rats too,” Abraham says, smiling and stepping into the trailer. “But I got over it.”

John G. goes in after him. He smells incense and sees a small room lit by hundreds of Hanukkah candles in dozens of ragtag
brass menorahs. Margo had a Jewish friend once. Mindy Feirstein, from City College. She used to tell Margo, “Don’t marry that guy John, he’ll never amount to anything.” She never knew how right she was.

A mattress sits in the corner with hunks of foam spilling out. In the other corner, there’s a burgeoning mountain of empty Sprite and Diet Coke cans in clear plastic bags and a bunch of old car parts.

“See, I had an unusual experience with a rat when I was over in Vietnam,” Abraham says, pointing to a U.S. Army helmet at the foot of the mattress. “A rat saved my life.”

“Yeah, how was that?”

“We was sleeping in a graveyard right outside of Mytho, when this huge, tremendous rat bit me right on the tip of the nose. So I jumped up screaming and this mortar shell came in and hit right on the tombstone where I’d been.”

John G. laughs. “If you ever have a son, you oughta name him after that rat.”

“Well, for a long time, I didn’t see it that way,” Abraham says solemnly. “See, I had to take twenty-one shots in the abdomen because of the way that rat bit me. So I had this hatred for rats. I used to put cheese down and throw gasoline on them when they came along. Light a match. Watch ‘em go, EEEEEEewwww!!”

He shakes his hands in front of him and makes a high-pitched squealing sound. John G. just stares.

“So I guess you could say I got some complicated feelings about rats,” Abraham tells him.

John takes another look around the place as Abraham reaches into a torn purple Jansport bookbag and hands him a ham-and-American-cheese sandwich on Wonder Bread wrapped in cellophane.

“It’s from the Saint Stephen’s soup kitchen,” he says, putting a hand on John’s shoulder. “Whatever I have is yours. You can sleep here if you want for a few nights. We can share some of the food. All I ask is that if you’re gonna bug out, you go do it somewhere else.”

John G. notices he’s standing next to a stack of scratched-up
old Paul Anka records and a pile of CDs by a rap group called the Wu-Tang Clan. The past is the present and the present is the past.

“What’s all this mess?”

Abraham takes a serrated steak knife out of his pocket. “I’m trying to combine the sounds of the old with the sounds of the new,” he says, pointing between the two stacks. “If I could put ‘em together, I know I could have me some hits.”

John G. nods. For some reason, this makes sense to him.

He casts his eyes over at the mountain of cans in the corner. This is not quite hitting bottom. It’s a ledge. A place to rest a while.
Que sera, sera.

“So you taking medication, man?” Abraham asks.

John G. shows him the amber Haldol bottle. About a dozen pills left.

“Well, you wanna stay with me, you start taking them again,” says Abraham. “You hear? I don’t go for no lunaticking screamin’ homicide down in my tunnel.”

“What if I don’t feel like taking them? What if I don’t see any point in taking them?”

“There’s always a point. The scriptures say the head of every man is Christ, and the head of every woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God. You got to be aware of who you are, man. God put us here for a reason. You may not get better all at once. You may not even stop falling down. You just may not fall quite as far each time.”

What the fuck, John G. thinks. It’s a place to hide out awhile. He’ll start taking the damn pills again.

A train goes rushing by. The cans and bottles clatter. The dogs howl. Even Abraham looks perplexed, though it’s a sound he must hear several times a day.

“There’s something else I gotta tell you,” says John G. “I’m gonna die.”

“Dag, man.” Abraham pulls his lips back from his teeth. “How long was you planning to stay?”

23

How’s the leg?” asks Philip Cardi, watchingjake hobble across the roof.

“It’s all right.” Jake touches his left knee gingerly. “Just feels like a charley horse. Fucking bike messengers. Guy plowed into me and started bitching he was gonna sue.”

They are up on the roof of the town house. Philip takes a fifty-pound sash weight with a long rope tied around the end and drops it down the chimney. He waits until it hits something about fifteen feet down and then hauls it up again.

“Yeah, you definitely got an obstruction,” he says, taking a break to wipe the sweat off his brow. “Something’s in the flue line.”

He lets the weight drop once more.

“You think you can just knock it out?” asks Jake.

“I’m gonna try.” Philip lets the weight crash into the obstruction before he pulls the line again, like an urban fisherman.

It’s nine-thirty on a Saturday morning. The streets below are empty and quiet, except for John G. trailing a blue plastic bag full of soda cans and talking loudly to himself.

“We still haven’t gotten rid of him, huh?” Philip asks.

“We still haven’t got rid of him.” Jake looks down over the ledge, clenching his fists in frustration. “He disappeared for a couple of days after the accident, like he was lying low or something, making sure the cops weren’t going to arrest him.”

“So why don’t they lock him up?”

“He still hasn’t broken the law technically. Alex ran out into traffic and I ran out after him. All Gates did was threaten us verbally.”

“Minchia.
“A frown wrinkles Philip’s tanned face. “It’s the lunatics running the asylum.”

“The thing is, I’m starting to think he knows the law better than I do. He keeps just coming right up to the line without actually crossing it.”

“Sneaky fuck,” Philip mumbles, peering down into the chimney with a flashlight.

“Yeah, well, pretty soon I’m going to be the one walking down the street talking to myself.”