Blood Acre

by Peter Landesman

  His jaw cradled in the crook of his arm, Santos eyes the fallen eaves across the street, the buckled doorways, thinking law school then the academy, then five years on the street, then five out of uniform, coming up on six now, and still he wanders like an alien through streets on which he was a child. He passes his hand over his face, closing his eyes, as though to erase what he has seen, his legs twitching, his lips moving against the tacky cold of the car seat, in his feet somewhere far below he can feel the subway, distant like surf, breaking upon him, and Santos wakes-has he fallen asleep?-his eyes searching the ceiling of the car. Following the train's guts sweep'ng by overhead. The shower of sparks like birthday flares burn piss-holes in the snow. Barbados, awake now, brings the lighter to his face. Up the street a man has stopped at the phone booth as before a confessional. Pusher and his buy shuffle hands in a kind of two-fisted shake. Santos watches Barbados watch the business, his deep black, even innocent, eyes like the eyes of a young girl; like himself, once a child of promise.

  The radio under the dashboard emits a fart of murmured static. The buy at the booth straightens and cocks his head, as an animal will at a sign of danger. From above, a whistle, as for a dog. The silence around them all, suddenly, sinister. Dark faces fill the doorways. The buy skids away, running the way he came. A bottle whistles overhead and powders against a wall to the car's left. A child's shriek fills the canyon. "Fuck," Barbados mutters, and takes them quickly around a corner and down a street ending at the boardwalk and sky. Santos reaches for his inhaler.

  The thousand marquee bulbs above Famous's blink off, on.

  "Look," Santos says, rubbing a porthole in the glass.

  Barbados leans over. Inside Famous's, at the window bar, stands a man, short, pear-shaped, his breaths hanging before him in yarnlike balls of vapor, pushed rapidly forward like a smoker's trick by the next, and the next. He dabs his glistening forehead and neck with a handkerchief. Looking down at his watch, his chins multiply. Krivit.

  "You call him?" Barbados asks.

  Santos shakes his head. "Wait here a minute."

  Outside on his feet he inhales the briny cold, drops his cigarette in the snow, and walks a long diagonal to the door. The plexiglass flaps behind him. A family stands at the counter, joylessly chewing. In the rear a black man labors over a clatter of steaming fry-o-matics while a well-groomed Pakistan' gazes at a mute TV. An out-of-town game, 49ers and Seahawks, Santos thinks, the away team in their white uniforms veiled as ghosts, the home jerseys tackling bodiless helmets and a floating leather oval.

  "My guess, you weren't expecting me today.”

  Krivit sets down his cup of coffee with a click. "Am I expecting anyone?"

  "You come all this way for the hot dogs."

  "Everybody does." Smiling a gummy smile, Krivit dabs at his forehead with the back of his hand.

  Outside, in the street, Barbados has pulled the car alongside a baby blue police cruiser.

  "A little early for you, isn't it?" Santos says. "You're making office hours in the daylight now?"

  "I like to keep my nights free for other business."

  "I remember."

  Barbados is leaning on the horn. The cruiser's passenger window drops. Bleary-eyed, a teenage cop pats his cheeks while his partner sleeps openmouthed behind the wheel. Barbados makes a gun with his hand, fires.

  So, Santos says, "what do you have?"

  "Nothing for you."

  "Something for someone."

  Krivit shifts his coffee cup forward then back. "Having a slow day, Detective?"

  "Slow, fast, it's a day. You've never been at a loss."

  "I'm generous. There's plenty to go around without repeating myself. Doubling back is bad for business. But maybe later. Yes, later, probably." Krivit lifts his hand, limp-wristed, and wriggles his fingers. "For now, hasta la vista, Tino." Santos blinks at this bottom-feeder, swallowing the metallic taste of contempt. Though who it's for he can't say. Fat rat, yes- but who's asking what from whom?

  He shoves at the door with his shoulder, hands in his pockets.

  A stop sign shivers in the wind. A ship brays offshore, a foghorn if there were fog, calling to-what?

  He starts for the car but a figure, his chin in the collar of his cashmere coat, brushes past him toward the door. The face is instantly known to him.

  "Cold enough for you?" Santos says.

  "What-? No, not interested."

  "Nathan, it's Errol. Errol Santos."

  Nathan Stein looks back at him, his eyes blinking, focusing with recognition. "You haven't changed."

  Stein looks to Santos made up for an older part, a better one, hair thinner and streaked with chalk, but his face taut and his body slim. "We've both changed. But you look good, Nathan. Isabel told me you looked good."

  "She's your sister. She has to tell you that."

  "Well, terrific for you anyway."

  Nathan lifts a hand. "Not really." He points vaguely to his watch.

  "Look, I don't want to keep you."

  "Maybe a beer sometime," Nathan says, taking a step away.

  "We'll catch some tunes downtown."

  "Maybe Bradley's. Like the old days."

  Nathan cocks his head. "Bradley's is gone, Errol."

  "Since when?"

  "They sold the piano. Since? It doesn't matter. Years- Well,Errol." Nathan looks about him, as though for a trap door in the air. "So how are you?"

  "Like you see. How are you?"

  "Fine. Real good. So-" Nathan is grinning. "So how is Claire? "

  "Fine, Nathan. She's fine."

  "Good. Good."

  "I'm sure she'd send her regards. If she knew."

  "I'm sure."

  Santos pulls at his cigarettes and holds out the pack.

  "No thanks," Nathan says.

  "Go ahead.”

  "I don't smoke."

  “You used to."

  "That was a long time ago."

  Santos lights up and blows a thin breath toward the sky. "Not so long," he says. "It was good of you to give Isabel a job."

  "Errol, it's been, what, four years, five?"

  "Well, I never thanked you."

  "Your mother had more to do with it than I did. It was an easy handoff, a pass of the baton, mother to daughter-"

  "Still, I hope she's no trouble. And how's-" Santos peers into the air, searching. The smoke coils and fades in the low winter light.

  "We live uptown," Nathan says. "Maria. Her and her boy, Benny. What, Errol, have you been keeping tabs?"

  Santos shrugs a shoulder. "We go back in a hundred different directions. It's just information, Nathan. My mother works for your father practically before I was born. Now my sister works for you. I used to know everything about you all by myself. Now what I know they tell me, but just dribs and drabs. It's sad."

  A funny smile crosses Nathan's face.

  "But Benny, right," Santos says. "I remember now. Maria and Benny. Wow, she was something. And she was a keeper. And her kid, he was just a baby." Santos grins. "Daddy," he says. "I never would have guessed."

  "Daddy," Nathan repeats dryly. "I don't think I'd go so far as to say that."

  I have to say I can't see it."

  I wouldn't." Nathan steps back, clutching at his belt. "Sorry," he says. "She beeps me ten times a day." He peers down at the readout. "It's the only number she has."

  Santos sucks deeply on the cigarette, reflecting. "They need attention, Nathan."

  "We all need attention, but she's got her daughters."

  "Daughters? I thought it was a son."

  Nathan looks up. "Son?"

  "Yeah, Benny."

  "Oh, Maria."

  "Maria," Santos repeats. "Who are we talking about?" But he holds up his hand, his face darkening. "It's none of my business."

  Santos searches the street. The junk shops on Surf Avenue are opening. He motions toward the door. "Let me buy you a cup of coffee.

  "I'd like to Errol, but-" Nathan thumbs back through
the doors, "I have a meeting."

  Santos stares through the murky plexiglass at Krivit, who spots them and smiles the same gummy smile. Santos returns the gaze.

  "He'll always play both ways," he warns Nathan. "You never know what he's saying in the other guy's huddle."

  "He's just playing the game, Errol, keeping the clock moving, nudging things along when the rules get things stuck."

  "That's what worries me. He's not interested in outcomes. Milton never trusted him."

  "Milton? My father doesn't trust anybody-" Nathan begins, then stops. Some clock tolls the hour. An illuminated dial inset within the Wonderwheel, suspended above the barren carnival, hanging like another early moon, making the light shift. Santos blinks a stray snowflake out of his eye, thinking of Nathan's money, Nathan's clothes, Nathan's side businesses, his little ventures, his stable of Latina mistresses with whom he famously argued-Santos could have had all that. He was always smarter than Nathan, always a step ahead; already in law school Nathan was leaning on him, pawning favors for homework and crib notes.

  Nathan shifts from foot to foot. "Anyway."

  Barbados pulls up to the curb and knocks on the window, motioning to Santos, aiming his finger onward.

  "Okay. I'll tell Claire I saw you."

  "Do that."

  "You ought to come down to Brooklyn some night."

  "I'm in Brooklyn all the time." He looks about him. "Like now."

  "You know what I mean, Nathan."

  "Same apartment?"

  Santos kicks at the old snow. "That's right. She'd be thrilled. You'd be surprised."

  "I guess I would.”

  The plexiglass doors of Famous's flap closed. Santos spins in the snow and, squinting upward, heads for the car. Up and down Surf Avenue Russians are smoothing blankets over the sidewalks, laying out pairs of old boots and rusty pliers, lampshades, authentic jackets from the Red Army. There is something threatening about the open day, the light a diversion, the sun not quite what it seems, not high enough, even for winter; a shadow washing over the city.

  "Wasn't that Milton Stein's son?"

  Santos nods.

  That apple didn't fall far."

  "It's a big tree."

  "You were friends," Barbados says. "More. Compadres, no?"

  Santos waves a hand, as if to say, Where would I begin?

  As the Ferris wheel sinks from sight he slumps against the car door, his eyes locked on ten years ago. On a yellow room one summer night kneeling over his father. Reek of iodine and urine. Santos saw the skull through the old man's skin, the caved and wasted face. Everything phony slips off the dying and his father arched his neck to tell him the last thing. The dead will take the living with them if they can, and he wheezed his son's name to draw him closer in, but Santos pulled back against the wall and listened to his father suck at the cold air between words. His father said that in the courts and the billable hours is the carnival of the powerful and the insane while your people walk blind and helpless. His father said that the life Errol would one day feel he was missing was occurring in the streets. And since that day, on this planet, what has he done? By that autumn Santos stepped out of his suits and his law-firm offers and into dank bars full of sweaty cops. Knights of old, wielding their stubby little guns. Into the streets, his father had said. Into the streets. After his first collar, downtown to central booking and a meet with an A.D.A., he stepped into the sour spice of a hall strewn with men, men sleeping along the walls, propped up on elbows to stare stonily into the dingy middle distance. It looked at first like a railway station in the dead of night in a far part of the world, the bums, the unwashed drunks, the reek of refugee dishevelment and sleep and malnutrition. But here and there they wore parts of patrolmen's uniforms, the pants or the shirt, or the blue cap pulled low over the eyes, their street shoes. Pretenders, kids, those beat cops, twenty, twenty-two, buzz cuts and puffy cheeks and semiautomatics and off days in front of the tube. Stepping quickly over their legs, like a halfback running through the tire drill, Santos turned for the main waiting chamber where a fuzzy TV in the corner played soaps to blank-faced and slack-jawed cops. An emergency room at a public hospital but without the urgency.

  What Santos has done, he has done it there. He has done it in elevator shafts and dumpsters. He has done it in fields of rubble where sheets of newspaper roll in the wind.

  All that school gone to waste. All that law and the money to come. His sister Isabel thought he'd gone mad. He hardly understood it then himself; today, he's forgotten his reasons for almost everything.

  Warily, Santos eyes the horizon. There are clouds, he sees, over open water, black as thunder. Like a herd, or cavalry, body parts and animal shapes charge toward shore, fists, the fleeting contour of faces, vanishing as soon as they appear, dark horses rearing up.

  Inside Famous's, Nathan's footsteps turn no heads. He slaps his arms and breathes in the tepid air, wanting to be glad to be here. After all those Sunday excursions from Queens and then Manhattan in the Silver Shadow with Milton, the pastrami, the foot-longs.

  The friends he's brought, the women, Claire a dozen times, for this taste of old New York. Errol Santos-when weren't they here together, riding the train all the way out, kids leaving behind a wake of minor mayhem. Now Errol is thicker around the middle than Nathan remembers and shorter, with his hair slicked across the front of his scalp.

  The fact is none of it is much to remember. Lately Nathan has been robbed of his ability to sentimentalize. Like a camera his shutter opens and closes, recording, not thinking, not feeling, while what sticks to mind is the opening scene of La Boheme when Marcello, staring out his attic window at an infinity of Paris rooftops, mourns the consuming appetite of love, while Rodolfo, hungry and cold, burns the manuscript of his five-act tragedy for fuel. Nostalgia, what is that? A settling of scores, small acts of vengeance and indiscretion between the now and then, the past and present.

  "Buddy," Nathan says with false bravado.

  "Mister Stein."

  "It's cold."

  "It's cold, yessir."

  Behind the counter the old black man stands on wooden skids laid over pools of brine and sandy mud.

  "Staying out of trouble?"

  "Am, sir."

  Nathan wags his finger. "You're bad for business."

  Buddy smiles and his toothless face presses in like a rotten fruit.

  "How many?"

  Nathan looks over his shoulder at the stand-up bar lining the window. At one end, a pair of men eating: businessman, junkman. At the other stands Krivit.

  "Three. With everything. And coffee."

  "Four fifty."

  Nathan peels off a twenty, holds up his hand. "Keep it," he says, and goes to the window bar with the tray. He passes a hot dog to his right.

  "I don't like to be kept waiting, Stein." Krivit taps his watch. "One hour. How could you be late today?"

  He grabs at the hot dog and the right side of his face balloons, his eye almost disappears. As Nathan lifts his coffee, his sleeve falls away. A patch of skin on the wrist has purpled.

  "That's a nice little scratch there."

  "Damn cat," Nathan says, spilling coffee, snatching at a used tissue on the counter. He dabs nervously at the brown puddle but feels Krivit's eyes on his wrist again and slides his hand deep in his coat pocket.

  "You don't have a cat," Krivit says.

  Nathan feels first surprise, then indignation, having believed for the moment his own lie.

  "The cunt bit you too, you know," Krivit says. "You got to watch that these days."

  Nathan grins, gathering his wits, and spreads out his hands dramatically. It is something he's good at, something he knows to do, screw up his mouth and arch his eyebrows in an attitude of profound disbelief: Can you believe it?-as he might do at Yankee Stadium when someone all of New York reveres and counts on does something incomprehensibly witless, drops a pop fly, boots a routine grounder; things thirty thousand rabid fans would not ever have do
ne themselves-not for eight million a year. His profound disbelief in the face of dramatic but ultimately trivial things. Can you believe what the 'udge said? Can you believe she actually bit me?

  "You shouldn't let them get away from you," Krivit warns.

  Nathan knows there is a question he should ask but he sidesteps it, slides around, finds something else. "Just tell me what you have. "

  "A little deep-sea fishing."

  "The fishing," Nathan says, "is still better up north. Washington Heights-"

  “Minnows, Stein. Greedy minnows. Bullshit. Boring."

  "Boring," Nathan echoes.

  "Today I'm offering ambition. Russian kikes."

  Nathan sips at his coffee then sucks in, his tongue burnt. "I don't do ambition." He fingers his tongue. "Ambition is complicated."

  A pleased smile plays on Krivit's lips. "I got you this because you fucked up, and you need to make new friends."

  Nathan passes him a second hot dog. Krivit shrugs his left shoulder. Nathan glances over at the family standing by the counter. The father wears heavy black clothes, the mother a peasant dress and wool shawl. An older girl in her twenties, slim, tight 'eans and sweater. An anonymous boy levels at Nathan an expression darkened either by adolescence or plain wrath or some combination of both. They all have the parboiled features of Slavs, people with thick fingers and pillowy palms. No makeup, no flash. No one is talking, no one is having fun. It could be a regular family outing.

  Krivit takes a swipe at his forehead, panting. "They look like peasants, but they're into smack, whores, rackets. Not big time. Not yet. But just wait. The Russians will own Brooklyn. They'll own everyone."

  The parents and the girl nibble at their food, their eyes roaming over the plastic menu displays overhead. The boy glares on, unrelenting, as though waging some dumb high-school war.

  "It's the kid?"

  "His brother. Bail denied. That's all we're talking about. A simple writ."

  "That's what I'm doing here?"

  "It's due tomorrow."

  Nathan looks at him. "Tomorrow."

  "If we have to maybe we can have the case sent Rodriguez's way." Krivit wipes the corners of his mouth. "You can still arrange for that?"