Khalid jumps when a man, black with wide eyes and wide cheekbones, breaks through a bush only a few feet from us. Another thud and another young man, bigger, but white and with red hair, jumps out and stands next to him. They stare at us. Their shirts, billowing and large, are ripped. Their jeans frayed. Their shoes barely holding on to their soles.
The young men stare at us, trying to access whether we’re a threat or not. I wonder what they’ve done. I hear dogs barking, bloodhounds perhaps, and the young men startle and run. They run with the ferocity of a last chance. They run with the speed of athletes.
I high crawl my way through the bushes, making certain to keep away from any piece of sky. The sound of the dogs grows louder. Then, just when I half expect them to burst through the bushes, they fade away. The helicopter moves too. I can hear the loudspeaker yelling. I crawl faster.
I peer through to the vast open field of Van Cortland park’s soccer and baseball fields. The two young men are halfway across. But helicopters are too fast. This one swirls above them before hovering a few hundred feet in front of them. The young men split, making to go around it. But there’s a cop with a rifle in the helicopter. He fires. The young black man jumps as the ground beneath him puffs up and spits out grass and dirt. Then I see spray come out of one side. But he’s still running, full speed. Another spot of red appears on his kidney and he lurches forward, looks like he’ll make it, before he tumbles, all arms and legs flopping. Then a mass, breathing. Then still.
The young red haired man is getting smaller when a shot rings out. I don’t see where it hits, but he stumbles, then falls.
Surprisingly, a police car is on the field, driving towards the black man’s carcass. The car cuts off my view, but I hear another shot.
Then a thumbs up from the car and the helicopter flies off. Soon there’s only a quiet gasp of the neighborhood.
I stare as an ambulance comes through to pick up the bodies. Another NYPD van comes by and it sprays the areas with what seems like water.
Khalid taps my shoulder. I turn, annoyed.
“What?” I hiss.
He points towards the lake. Two cops are walking up the side of the lake. They appear to be looking for something.
I freeze. My hand darts out to Khalid when he tries to move. I shake my head. The cops leave soon after that.
I make my way, Khalid in tow, to the lake. Vargas is there. Fishing. Though alone this time.
He jerks his head, and smiles when he sees us.
“Hi,” I say.
He gives a sharp nod. I’m sure I saw something in that, but I don’t completely react. I like his smile, and now that I see his line in the water, I’m close to asking him for some fish.
“What did the cops want?” I ask.
He shakes his head.
“Did you see what happened to those boys?” I ask, when he doesn’t prove to be talkative.
He scrunches up his lower face and shakes his head. “Bad.”
“What did they do?”
“Who knows.”
“Did you know them?” I ask.
He gives me as odd look and flicks the fishing line with his wrist.
The sun is setting again. I look to where the cops had walked off. Will they come back? Were they talking to Vargas?
Khalid taps my shoulder.
I turn.
“We can go,” he whispers.
“What?”
“The subway. We can go.”
A focused anger rises up inside me. We are in no shape to go all the way back down again. Or even to take a subway from here. We need food. Even that crawling, and the walk here to Vargas has left me winded, and tightened my brain. I can sense my thoughts flying to nothingness with more ferocity than normal. I don’t say any of this, though. I just stare at Khalid until he looks down.
“The subways are fine,” says Vargas.
“No cops?” I ask.
“None today.”
“What about the news?”
“You know how it is. White folks is pissed about a broken building. Of theirs.” Vargas flashes us a grin. “Now some brown folk gonna pay.”
I’m not sure what to make of what he’s just said. On one hand it could be deeply erudite. Or perhaps he’s saying what I’ve heard over and over, in way or another, in the form of daily mundane complaints from my fellow Bronx residents, the pain of living beneath all others, beneath the foot of someone else, and these complaints or points where things pretend to be erudite are just complaints whereby one can see the original meme (intelligent parsing of history) being watered down into a ‘woe is me’ attitude mixed with a hate for the racism that is prevalent in the country, in the police departments everywhere.
Vargas gives me a curious look, then glances over to Khalid. “Your boy always like this?”
Khalid, for some reason, rolls his eyes. “Don’t get me to start. This man thinks much too much. Always he’s like this.”
“You okay?” Vargas asks me.
“I’m fine. Lots of shit going on.”
“Well, no shit. But don’t have yourself adding to the matter. You look like you could spend years staring off like that.” Vargas gives a flick of his wrist and the line flies out. “We were talking about you back in the,” he says and stops to jerk his thumb towards the southern edge of the park.
“What did you talk about?” I say.
“You.” Vargas points at me, his finger not wavering. “Anyone caught with any information on you needs to turn you in. That’s what they’re pushing out there.”
“What’s the reward?” I ask, my mouth drying. I can sense Khalid stepping away. Alertness tightens my head.
“One million,” he says.
I chuckle. For a second it doesn’t hit me, but it soon does. My stomach churns. I think on a fact: that there was study done and most people think that, on average, their life is worth one million dollars.
“Again,” Vargas says, shaking his head.
Khalid rolls his eyes even farther up his eyes.
“What did everyone say?” I ask.
“One million is good,” Khalid says and pats me on the back.
I chuckle. “Thanks,” I say.
“But my boys,” Vargas says. “They’re very proud of you.”
“Do they know about me?” I ask, perhaps too suddenly because Vargas is immediately raising his hands and shaking his head.
“No, no no. I ain’t no nark.”
I nod. “I know,” I say. He doesn’t look like a nark to me.
“Most think you didn’t do it,” says Vargas. “None of us do.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I didn’t.”
“But they said they had you arrested for some other charges and you got away?”
That instills a fear into my heart, and I freeze up thinking that it’s out of the bag, what I did before, but there’s no reaction in all reality, but then I realize that there’s a chopper in the air, near too. And I run under brush, surprised to see that Khalid is already there. The air around us is moving, and I crawl further into the bush. Then just like that, the noise is gone. All that’s left is a whining in my ear. I rub my eyes. My stomach growls.
We walk out to see that Vargas has managed to catch some fish.
“How do you catch them with all that noise?” I ask.
“Oh,” he says, waving his hand. “They’re used to it... You, are not.” He leans his head back and laughs. Some pedestrians, an old Eastern European couple it sounds like, smile at us.
“They’re not looking for you here, man,” Vargas says. “They stopped doing the checkpoints going out of Manhattan, I told you that, right?”
“They don’t think we’re in Manhattan?”
“No man.”
“Did they say where they were looking?”
“Naw man. They’re just bombing the shit out of some villages in wherever for retaliation.”
I feel my insides curdle. My body can sense the vibrations of the earth shaking from the bombs
, the sounds of screams and crackling fire fill my ears. I remember the car bombing that managed to release me. It’s all the same, isn’t it?
“Is that a fact?” Khalid says. I see some fire returning to his eyes.
“Yeah,” Vargas says and shakes his head. “You hungry?”
“Uh huh,” I say.
Vargas laughs as he pulls in his fishing line. “Let’s go man. I ain’t gonna let no convicts starve.”
We follow Vargas down a winding path that runs by the golf course. A few bikers whizz by us. Some bugs, small and stealth like, fly into my eyes, which in turn water and I rub them furiously. The fish are attracting a few flies. We are near where I once lived. Where I was flushed out like an animal. My thoughts drift to my wife and I feel an immense sadness. Vargas whistles a Reggaeton tune. Khalid is swearing, and muttering. That too adds to my tsuris. I try to focus on the song Vargas is singing.
The man, wrinkled, hunched, with surprisingly smooth brown skin in between, stares at me for a few seconds. I sense something martial about him. I could be wrong. We’re in the basement of a house with a minimal front lawn, somewhere near Riverdale. Vargas is upstairs with his younger sister cooking us up some fish. He refused all help. Except that we keep this old man—relation not given—company.
“I know you,” says the man in very proper English, except that at the end of his ‘o’s I can hear the death of a Dominican accent.
I’m not sure what to say. The man is very used to getting his way, from what I can see in his stuck out chest and eyes that aren’t afraid to pierce through me, even though I’m twice his size. The basement stinks of cigar smoke, maybe weed, and air freshener—lime-like. The old man has a reclining chair, though he leans forward on his cane and peers out from his beret, black and ill-folded—at least to an ex-military man like my self it seems like that. He has a wife beater on and faded tattoos that speak to my marital theory, or jailhouse life. Khalid has seated himself across a coffee table on a sofa from the old man. But the old man doesn’t seem to notice him. He’s eyes dart about, trying to size me up.
“You deaf?” he says and points to me with the silver-handled cane. I stare at the reflection of what must be my own body. The smell of fish and coconut floats down. Vargas’ voice berates the girl.
“Are you sure about that?” I say. I look around. The old man seems immobilized, but there’s nothing here for him to do. I would expect a TV at least. And if he doesn’t have a TV, how could he possibly know me?
That reply has his eyes all over my face. He squints. Then he smiles. He lets out a cackle. “This one’s trying to play games with me,” he says, directing his voice and face towards Khalid, as if Khalid is an old friend and I’m the intruder.
Khalid gleefully nods. “Oh, that’s what he does.”
I glare at Khalid turn up my thumbs, as if to ask “what?”
“He’s a thinker, all right.” The man nods his head at this observation of sorts and smiles. It’s a smile with a few gleams of steel.
“What does that make you?” I ask. I finally sit down next to Khalid.
The old man laughs again. He leans his chin against his cane’s handle. “That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out. Have you figured it out?”
I consider bluffing, then shake my head.
We all fall silent. The clanging of dishes upstairs echoes down the stairs. The girl and Vargas are now singing.
“What do you do here?” I ask.
“Retired,” he says.
More silence. I smell fried plantains.
With the flick of his wrist, the old man whips his cane and slams it on the coffee table between us, the tip spearing a newspaper. “That’s where I know you.” He expertly flips through the pages with his cane and pushes the newspaper at me.
I pick it up to see my mug, in black and white, staring out at me. My heart seizes and my breathing picks up.
“Right?” says the old man. “And you had me thinking I was crazy. Oh, you can’t fool me.” He leans back some, and as I throw down the newspaper, he stares at me with a smile which slowly morphs into a glare. “What do you want with my grandson?”
“Vargas?” I ask.
He maintains his stare.
“N-nothing. He invited us here,” I say.
“Does he know?”
I nod.
He seems to lighten up some, but keeps his eye on me. “What’s his deal?” he asks Khalid, pointing that cane at me. I have a feeling that it’s his weapon and it’s something that he could daily disable me with. The lightness with which he moves it is amazing.
Khalid shrugs. “I only met him.”
More betrayal. “I’m right here,” I say to the old man. “You can speak to me.”
“Can I? Or will you try to run rings around me?”
I hold his stare, my heart beating, until he looks down.
“All right,” he says, tapping his cane on the cement floor. “What. Is your deal?” He looks me right in the eye as the last word rolls off his tongue. “Why all this?” He slams the tip of his cane on the table and gives me a stern look.
The look forces me to wonder how far I’ll take this. After all, he is an old man and this is his or his family’s spot.
“What do you mean?”
He slams his cane into the newspaper, ripping a hole in the page.
Now that I’m focusing on his eyes I can see ever more clearly, the deep brown that are his irises, I’m sure I can see the ridges in them. His eyes twinkle. What to make of a man like this. I’m sure his faded tattoos speak of risks taken in the past. Of the possibility of there being a time when this old man, now relegated to a chair, used to maraud. So this conversation could take two different routes: it could be friendly, where he accepts what I’ve done, or he could be hostile. And his stare tells me that he’s hostile.
“Ah huh,” he says, wagging a finger that has a few extra joints. “You already thinking of ways to get around me? I—“
“No,” I say. “I’m merely thinking about what you mean. What you mean by your question.”
He leans back, inhaling deep, so that I can hear the air whistling past his nostrils.
“What did you do, in your past life?” I ask.
“Many things.”
“Who’s running circles now?” I say.
He leans back and emits that throat shaking laugh. Behind that raspy voice there’s something of a boom that could shake men and women to their bones and make them listen. And now, instead of thinking about a way out of this deadly predicament I’m in—another helicopter rumbles in the distance and sooner or later I will be caught and flayed when they come in with flash bangs and HK MP5s—I’m thinking about how silly it is that we as rational human beings can so easily be led by the likes of things like a booming voice.
“You’re right. I used to be in the military before I came here. I even wanted to see my son go in, though he never did.
“When did you come here?” I ask.
“Many years ago,” he says and waves his hand in the air. “It was a different town back then... Today it seems more dead.”
“Less crime,” I say.
“Maybe.” He juts out his lower lip and dances his head from side to side. “But I don’t think that’s just one thing anyone can look at.”
“Why’s that?”
“There was more hope for everyone back then. Not so today.”
Khalid grunts. I’m not sure why.
“What did you do?” I ask again. He might be right about the crime statistics. It’s something that I hold on to, but when hope is crushed, what does crime become? Nothing, really. Just opportunity.
“I hustled. Ran guns for a gang here. Then I worked as security guard after that.”
“Good retirement?”
“Not bad,” he says. “You?”
“I’m a writer,” I say and feel the air in the room get deflated.
The old man scoffs. “Why?”
My face grows red.
&nb
sp; “Food’s ready!” comes the call from Vargas.
“It’s not right to kill people for no reason,” says the old man.
Khalid tsks out loud. Is it at me or the old man?
Footsteps make their way down the stairs. The girl leads, balancing a large platter with a few fish on top. Her eyes are keen as she stares at the plate. Every waver she counterbalances with a shift of her feet the other direction. I see the old man’s eyes on her. They are filled with pride. They dart back at me, and I make sure not to stare too hard for sometimes eyes have a mind of their own.
The girl lays the plate down, then spins and heads back up the stairs. Vargas is next and he has a pitcher of water and glasses. She comes down soon after with silverware and plates. It’s all very old wares, the silverware darkened by wear. But the smell of the fish, surrounded by rice, cuts off my thoughts.
Vargas and the girl seat themselves next to the old man, on a pair of flimsy plastic chairs, with hair dangling from where they’ve been chipped.
“You want to sit here?” I ask.
Vargas shakes his head, biting his lower lip. He clasps his hands together. “We will pray. But you don’t have to,” he says giving us a nod.
“Wait!” the girl says and jumps up, pounding up the stairs rather ungracefully, especially given her beauty. For some reason this digs up a memory of my wife. I think of her on the TV, talking badly about me. I think of Goebbels and propaganda machines. My heart trips into melancholy. Again. Christ, just a second ago I was salivating for food, happy about the company. This is why I’m in the predicament I’m in.
Now, when the girl comes back with a plate of fried plantains, I hardly glance at them.
“Ready?” Vargas asks the girl. She only flashes us all a smile. The three of them bow their heads and say the Lord’s prayer.
I see that Khalid has bowed his head. He seems more complex than I originally thought. Or is this a slip? I try not to look over, but I do try to hear what he’s mumbling. It’s hard to discern. When the Amen comes, the three dive in.
I pick up my plate, old stainless steel. It’s not a surprise, I’m guessing a large amount of the convenient stores in the Bronx are owned by South Asians.
Vargas cuts up the fish, and I get a heap of rice. It’s fried, with a yellowish tinge to it. When I bite in, the fish is surprisingly savory and moist, though my mind adds a hint of industrial pollution when I remember it’s from the Bronx. The munching continues for some time. There’s a meditative quality to the sound it makes.
The Labyrinth of Souls Page 13
