Blood Acre

by Peter Landesman

  The girl shrugs.

  "Well I don't know Spanish. Let's see. Possession. Resisting arrest. You have court tomorrow-but no one's been ing motions. Why hasn't anyone been filing motions?"

  Regina says nothing.

  "Haven't you had a lawyer?"

  "He don't come."

  Claire sniffs. "You drunk, too?"

  The girl looks at her slippers and takes a breath. "I spilled something. "

  "You smell like you've been dipped in whiskey." Claire's eyes linger on the girl's swollen belly. "Maybe you shouldn't drink."

  "I didn't ask for you," the girl says, and her eyes, slippery, their hold on things tentative at best, lose their grip, tracking some faroff place, not home, Claire thinks, but some place she dreams of going. Hollywood. Disneyland. Niagara Falls. The girl's eyes pool. Teary nuggets fall to her lap. Behind all this, a child.

  Claire leans forward but feels no desire or need to touch her, or offer comfort. "You've been here three months. Let's at least get you to make bail."

  "I don't have money," the girl says.

  "It's just five hundred dollars."

  "Too much."

  "It's not that much." Claire points at her folder. "There's an address here. There's family?" Claire instructs herself to breathe. "Okay. Who is it-was it? Your lawyer."

  The girl holds out her palm, as though, there in her hand, the lawyer will appear.

  "I need the name. I need to know where to start."

  “Nathan Stein."

  Claire looks up abruptly. "What did you say?"

  "Nathan Stein?"

  "That's what I thought you said. And how long have you known Mr. Stein?"

  "Know him?"

  "How many months, how many years?"

  The girl shrugs. "I never-"

  "Have you actually met him?" Claire demands. "Have you seen him? Has he ever been here?"

  The girl gives a look of defeat. "Mr. Stein will come."

  Before Claire's eyes opens an encyclopedia of heroes and villains and combats won and lost, and poisonings and bloodshed. White knights. Fair maidens. Ancient history disinterred from the mud.

  "You want your child born and raised in a prison? Because that's what will happen if you wait.", She shuts the folder. "You are going to give birth in a hospital like a human being."

  The girl is sobbing into her hands. "I'm taking your case. You're mine."

  Nathan's watch, or is it his beeper, chirps like that captive bird somewhere beneath his coat. But the commotion on the boardwalk is spreading. People are lining the rail. A body in red has been dragged up the sand. "Oh, God," he says, and begins to run, wincing at the tug of his suit against a wound he doesn't remember, this one across his left rib cage. Everywhere dogs are barking. He feels the pull of the boardwalk and heads there, then finds his body veering off, taking him another way. He jogs back across Stillwell, under the El, and, looking over his shoulder, slows to a gimpy walk, clutching his chest. "Shit," he breathes. It's all gone, his stamina, his air.

  The tide of cold shade has risen high on the brownstone and brick. On the rooftops a forest of naked antennas grabs at the porous light. In a plexiglass door between a doughnut shop and a shoe repair, a girl leans, examining her nails. When Nathan stops she lifts her face. She was one of the girls he'd seen earlier on the beach. Eyes set deep in blue caves. “Where's your friend?" he says.

  The girl cocks a hip.,What's wrong with me?"

  "There's nothing wrong with you."

  “I'm better than her. White meat's better.” She laughs at her own joke. The glass door fogs.

  Nathan looks up and down the street, wanting in some place, though not necessarily this place; just some shelter, to solve some need as unutterable and instinctive as a baby's, like air but not as good.

  A stairwell narrow and corkscrewed as a steeple's. Nathan's eyes climb the bowed steps, the shaved banister, the girl's thin legs into her skirt, following the gradual warmth of the building that ends at the second floor. The hallway, cold and gray with dirty light, disappears at both ends. There is a strip of yellow under one door and then other closed doors. Doorways clotted by shadow. The girl enters the lighted room without knocking, and Nathan follows.

  A thickly walled space, a perfect cube, a high closed window ticking with blown sand and snow. A bulb hangs from the ceiling. Someone has made gestures of cleaning up, a sagging bed unconvincingly made. Beside it a pressboard nightstand painted brown in imitation of wood grain. A half-full glass of stale, bubbled water, illuminated under the dim lamp like a fetish. In the summer the street below is sandy, and salt-dust floats in the room and collects in the lee of upright things, but now the room is clammy and cold, the dust has fallen, and everything is coated in a thin, gritty paste.

  "You want dope? Crack, smack, meth? We could do it now." She drops atop the ragged bedspread with her back against the wall. "Or whatever."

  Nathan's eyes have settled on a calendar Scotch-taped over the bed, wrong month and old year. He sees there a shot of distant beach: Roatan, or some place just as good. Under an unseen brilliant moon a ribbon of radiant sand meets a white blameless sea. The breathy voice fades in, and Nathan works the private rhythm in his head, The Girl from Ipanema, a young woman rising from the water, passing up the beach-

  The saxophone slides in, charming all the senoritas out of the water with thin sighs-

  Wearily, the girl unbuttons her thin jacket and the blouse underneath and slips both together off her shoulders. She is narrow, more frail than her clothing has described. Her breasts are adolescent, her skin pale, blue, translucent; her ribs like notched acknowledgments of misdeeds, of bad memories unforgotten.

  Nathan meets the girl in the middle of the floor. She is no more than sixteen or seventeen, he sees, her makeup a mask. Her tongue appears in the corner of her lip. Everything she is doing is young and tutored. And he, he knows, is here because he has been, because he can, because he will. Not because he wants to, but because he could. It feels, like everything lately, as needless as it does inevitable. And always what follows is a little dream, a shallow, furtive thing. Usually what comes to mind is someone from his long ago or his day-to-day, someone he's already left, someone safely behind him. Atop one woman he'd imagine another, and another, until, exponentially removed from his life, he'd be as good as dead, beyond harm, dreaming his little dream, until he twitch twitch twitches and opens his eyes, waking from the glorious twilight of his midday nap, and it all comes crashing down around him: the hard strip of lamplight, the touch of her clammy skin, her foreign smell, the crater in the middle of the cheap mattress beneath them like a foxhole-

  A soft chirp at his belt. With immense relief, Nathan reaches inside, peering down at the darkened beeper display. Frowning, he reads the message again, losing himself for a moment, then looks up to find the girl naked and blue before him. She has left her socks on. He steps back, shrugging, Can you believe it, at a time like this? Smiling, he presses his business card into the girl's palm

  NATHANIEL STEIN, ESQ. ATTORNEY AT LAW

  and leaves her standing.

  Then gone, safely behind his car's salted windows, switchbacking through traffic across the Belt Parkway to the strains of Leontyne Price's Aida. His eyes are everywhere but the road, settling for a moment on a sheaf of papers on the floor, a brief due in court last Thursday, finished Friday morning early, forgotten Friday morning late, disregarded until now. Cars honk from every direction. He straightens the wheel-he has been drifting between lanes-then reaches for the volume control and calibrates six speakers the size of quarters embedded in the doors and ceiling, a woofer in the glove box, tweeters hidden in the dash, the console as bright and elaborate as a pilot's cockpit-all of it compliments of Julio, who, thanks to Nathan and a brief miraculously unearthed in time, is back on the street in time served instead of inside for fifteen-to-life.

  The phone in his breast pocket buzzes. He holds up his watch to the light in the rear-view mirror; not yet four.
<
br />   "Hello? Hi… No, I wasn't-… a new client… no, not a lot of money, only a couple grand, that's it, look-… What music. That's just traffic. Some accident, ambulances everywhere… Around eight. I'll come by… what? I'm losing you. An underpass. A tunnel. Hold on, I'm losing you-"

  Placing the phone face-down on his thigh, he lifts his thermal mug and sips at old, cold coffee. He sips again, holding the liquid in his mouth, and lifts the phone, uncapping the unceasing chatter. "Wait, what?… Serena, how could I? I haven't been near a television all day. What about what boat, can't we talk about it later I have to make a few calls, some bad boys at Rikers Island… Serena? I'm going to lose you. Yes, eight o'clock. Yes, I promise. Another tunnel… I'm losing you-"

  Nathan taps the mute button, flicks the mouthpiece into place and slides the phone in his pocket. The barge-like car bears him along, shooting him through a bottleneck of orange work trucks and zebra-striped barriers into wide-open sky. Leaning forward on the wheel, his eyes lift, his own voice simpering a few famous bars.

  Now his beeper vibrates, a cricket caught under a plate. He fumbles with dials and buttons small enough to be bumps or imperfections of design. He presses them individually and in various combinations, accomplishing nothing. The sound of a blaring horn makes him raise his head, and one hand on the wheel, eyes everywhere-road, lap, pocket, speedometer, road-his thighs close around his thermal mug as something jerks his head to the right. A red sedan has pulled alongside and is keeping his own pace exactly. The passenger leans forward, as though the driver has said something admirable about Nathan's car. As though Nathan's car were noteworthy, especially elegant, a vintage model, which it isn't: it is a badly beaten 4x4 with running boards and caged lights and a smoked plastic windbreak, everything a TV voice-over narrating the journey of a 4x4 across a butte somewhere-it looked like Hell-told him he had to have, and Nathan, sucker for a hitch to a dream, believed.

  He squints over at the men. Both are wearing suits. Their car drops back, and looking at their silhouettes in the rear-view mirror, Nathan understands that the car has been tailing him all along; for the last few weeks, it seems. He had never had any doubt he was being followed, though until now they had acted with discretion. Today, a change has taken place; they want him to know.

  “There," Nathan murmurs, pressing down. He shakes his head. A miracle. How is it done-it almost doesn't matter what the message says-how words transmit through air-who needs actual talk-we have answering machines for when we're not at home and Twenty-first Century Message Center/Beepers for when we are.

  A little proud, a little smug, he doesn't understand: how had he ever gotten along without it? Pressing thumb and forefinger in rapid succession, he squints at the tiny screen:

  Cabron. Fuck you and your tunnel. Turn on your phone.

  Refugees have been straggling into the Spindrift all afternoon, emerging from the snow singly and steadily and already a little tight. Everyone a conspiracy of one, a statue of something. Opposite the bar three big windows bordered by tinsel and Christmas lights face the street and the Red Hook piers and the harbor beyond-alternating pictures of the dingy radiance inside the bar and the length of barren lamplit waterfront across the street, so that if you turn your head with either each coming or each going of the lights' blink you have opposing views of the world, in and out, you and them. You and some other you, Claire thinks, watching through her own reflection the snow devils rising off the street and jigging out of control, collapsing like drunks in the doorways.

  Down the street the hulking converted warehouses of the Jehovah's Witnesses are recast as castles in the sky. The artificial turrets looming over the entrance ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge trumpet the veiled threat: now passing up God's Kingdom. The young men and women in their heels and trench coats are filing past the bar to mealtime or to their homes, a good day's work done. They've turned out their Watcbtower in the tens of thousands in fifty languages, convincing the world that the Big Bang is a hoax, that Christ's crucifixion wasn't enough to purge us of original sin, that we must go door to door for deliverance. Brooklyn, Claire knows, is home base, their safe haven, one of seven spots on earth prophesied by someone or other to survive the apocalypse. She thinks that sweet and hopeful. Fixing on her face an economical smile, she returns their cheerful nods.

  Someone in the bar has actually brought a baby. The cries grate on her; she feels them like radio signals in her fillings, setting her on edge. And underneath the murmurings from the perky blonde anchoring the local TV news, the outside sweeps in through the windows. In comes the clanging of the distant buoys. In comes the constant hiss of traffic along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

  Claire returns to the bar. The baby is walling. The bartender, a small Greek with corkscrew hair, has turned his face up to the TV. There, footage of a sinking boat and the hunched backs of drowned bodies-the Dominicans, she assumes-dropping one by one beneath the waves as the unseen news helicopter hovers overhead, its rotors spreading the choppy water while one of the bodies-can it be?-actually seems to be waving.

  "Martini," Claire says, eyeing the little Greek pouring her gin. She worries about him. Last week, the Arab who owned the bodega a few blocks away was shotgunned in cold blood, blasted into the racks of Snickers and M &M's. It's the Old West out there once again, these city store owners pioneers in their way, risking everything to nickel-and-dime their way to some low-fat version of prosperity. Bartenders are no different; any old nut can wind up at the end of their bar, running a tab, waiting for closing time to reach inside his jacket. Her own clients, for instance; thanks to her they are walking around free on ball, or just plain free. Claire resolves to call the Times when she returns from her holiday, have her paper chucked at her door from a passing car. She will phone an organic produce company and have delivered to her live and virginal things. She will shop for clothes exclusively by phone. She will buy a new phone by phone. She will call friends when she knows they will be out, preferring tape to an actual human being. More and more a life by proxy.

  "This is no place for children," she proposes, to no one, as the baby walls on. Pouring and straining Claire's martini, the Greek brings the glass forward by the stem, as if offering his grandmother a rose.

  Santos has appeared beside her. She is plucking macadamia nuts out of a bowl of bar mix, shoving aside the pretzels and the little orange fish. "Where have you been?" she asks, and busies herself by pulling his jacket down at the bottom; it seems, this minute, too short. She presses the back of her hand to his cheek. "Don't get too comfortable. If I have to keep looking at that baby we'll have to leave. I'm sorry-you were saying?"

  "I wasn't. We had an extra call. Another illegal fell out of a plane. Or he jumped."

  "They're 'ust dying to get into this country. I don't understand it." Outside, a sudden volley of thunder. "And this weather," she says.

  His porcelain neck and hands, she sees, his black suit, damp, clinging, revealing every mystery, mysteries she once thought she had solved. But he has, lately, become strange again. He is growing puffy and obscure, an emblem of contrast and contradiction.

  "Unfortunately," she says, "I can't get too drunk. At some point tonight I need to go to the office." She picks at his lapel. "You won't guess who I ran into today. Well, not into him, exactly. It was one of his little messes."

  A blank expression crosses Santos's face. "I saw Nathan, Claire."

  She cocks her head in confusion. "Extraordinary. That's just what I was going to say."

  "After all these years, it's incredible, he actually looks better."

  "It was typical of him, some pregnant kid in Rikers he just overlooked, just left her there. He never would have done that ten years ago, maybe five years ago. I never could understand his method. Not that he ever had one, just shooting from the hip, no strategy at all. One day, Robin Hood, the next day-whatever he is."

  She sees he has, in fact, if not looking directly at her, been taking her in.

  "You're not breath
ing, Errol," she says. "Breathe-"

  Her hand, long and slender, rests between them. Santos sets his over hers. She makes a half-hearted attempt to pull away but he holds her down, looking directly into her face.

  "It was strange seeing Nathan today," he says. "It's been years. Everything comes back in a flood."

  She responds with an ironic smile, impenetrable, she knows.

  He releases her, waving down the bartender. "I'll get us some coffee."

  When it comes neither of them touches it. Claire stares ahead blankly, as if unconscious of her surroundings. Though she feels the air alive around her, feels every little thing, every grain of dirt under her shoe, every floating dust mote, the electric fields around the lamps, the breezes of microwave, the ultrasound, the invisible, sourceless currents. The Herbie Hancock still playing in her empty car down the street, the endless loop of tape going around and around and around. Nathan's tape.

  The thunder comes steady now, close, then echoing far.

  "It sounds like target practice," Santos says.

  "No," Claire replies, "it's war."

  This bar, for example, had finally felt purged, swept clean of the past. But now with Errol here alone, in the flesh, seeking, it seems, her help-

  "Claire, you said we could talk about it. About a child," he begins.

  She clears her throat. "So that's what's on your mind. Sort of strange timing. This wouldn't have to do with seeing Nathan, would it?"

  "Time is what I'm talking about. I want to be a father, I want to send something out there, pieces of us-"

  "Out there-?" Claire points. "Pieces?"

  "We aren't getting any younger."

  "Well," she says, "usually one gets married first."

  Again she feels him taking her in, overturning every particle, every thought, in that thorough detective manner of his.

  "Don't look at me so hard," she says.

  "I've considered marriage, too," he replies.

  Claire grips the lip of the bar tightly, light-headed. "Tell me," she says, "did Nathan remember about us?"