Blood Acre

by Peter Landesman

  "-Nathan's son."

  “Of course not." Claire looks at Ruth, unconsciously watching her, the frilly bow at the neck, the brown bob circling her ears, the piercing black eyes. To read her face you'd need a map. "God, you can be beautiful. What a fool Nathan is."

  Ruth isn't even blushing. "You have a child? You and-"

  "But of course you knew."

  Ruth says nothing.

  "You knew I was pregnant, Ruth. I know you. You understand everything, you have all the information. You hoard information. And you don't give out a thing. That leaves you in charge. You pull the strings. I like that. I respect that in a woman."

  Ruth gives no reaction, betraying nothing.

  "So you knew," Claire continues on. "Though not many did. I’m not sure anyone did. I didn't even tell my parents."

  “Baptists, I remember."

  “They don't want to know. And I hid it well, then took that leave. Though anyone who cared to know could have seen-"

  She looks at Ruth, amazed. "Isn't it extraordinary, how much is right in front of us, how truth is right there, and we don't see it, won't see it, despite ourselves, just because we don't want to? We look right tbrougb it. How powerful we are, Ruth. How utterly, utterly magical."

  Ruth is saying nothing. Her eyes are casting about for something to grab on to, something safe, something cleaner. Which surprises Claire. This is just the kind of scene Ruth specializes in: barriers breaking, soft spots exposed, vulnerabilities, and Ruth coming in to sweep up, collect information, and clean, clean, clean.

  Claire, watching herself in the mirror, is reduced before her own eyes to the status of her own-and only-witness. Her testimony, flawed, raw, sentimental, will have to be revised to do anybody-even herself-any good.

  How lonely we are, she thinks.

  "You know, I actually once had an idea," she says. "I don't know why. I've always dreamed of having a farm somewhere with

  Nathan. A real one, with that blue silo they have now with the American flag painted on the side. A red barn, of course, an old pickup truck."

  "Nathan hates the country," Ruth says with a wife's nonchalant bitterness.

  "He does have that East Hampton house," Claire points out. "That mansion, that hideous gargantuan thing. That Sheetrock palace, as sturdy as a house of cards."

  "It's beautiful in its way."

  "Big enough for a family of ten plus servants, if that's beauty."

  "He has all those gardens but never weeds it. All that lawn and doesn't mow it. He even has a pool."

  Claire's eyes are blurred with tears. She is laughing, she thinks. "But he can't swim."

  "Hates the water."

  "Does he even own it outright yet? He probably doesn't even know. There are so many things he used to own, or owns, or thinks he owns. Though all he really has are those stashes in his closets and drawers, the rolls of cash and all those Rolexes, in his suit jackets for god's sake." Her martinis are finally beginning to take pleasurable effect. Claire gives a snort. "Sorry, it's just the idea of Nathan knee-deep in the rhubarb, in overalls and boots and a John Deere hat, a shovel in those soft little hands of his, digging into the manure. All his Armani suits sealed in plastic in the closet. It's almost too much to imagine."

  Ruth is laughing, too, but embarrassed, her little dark pouched eyes glinting, beaded and distant.

  "What is it?" Claire asks her. "What's wrong?"

  "I think of him differently. Maybe as he should be."

  "Ah." Claire spins back to the bar and eagerly swallows what is left of her martini. "And what way is that?" But there will be no reply. "You love him," she says flatly. "That's why you put up with everything you do. Though I don't see how you can. After a while, I couldn't. He would have liked the farm, though," she says, drying her eyes. "Just to own it, like his record collection. Own it just because he could. And he'd have hired some Guatemalan to run it for him, the wife of some client doing fifteento-life. And her daughters, of course. Can't forget daughters. Especially Guatemalan daughters."

  Ruth clears her throat. "Nathan never told me you had a child. "

  "Nathan doesn't know. But you did, didn't you?"

  Ruth presses on, as a good lawyer would: "Does Errol?"

  But Claire's attention has been tugged back to the TV. "My god, isn't that-?" A stunning face in high-school portrait, a strange hybrid of Hispanic and some blood that gives the girl green, bottomless eyes, virtuous, maddeningly off-line to the right; that gummy blue background behind every adolescent's head; her white shirt buttoned chastely to the neck, a tiny silver crucifix looped through the collar. Prim as a nun the day she marries Christ. The face vanishes, spliced into a long shot of Coney Island and its ferris wheel and its long and vacant-boardwalk. Finally a pan across the icy beach, focusing on a shrouded corpse. "Isabel Santos of 147th Street, Manhattan," the anchor says with the swagger of one calling a horse race, "a gruesome discovery made earlier today by chilly members of the Polar Bear Club."

  “Oh-" Ruth has clamped her hand to her mouth.

  'Errol's Isabel? My god-" Claire pictures Errol's sister, Milton's secretary, mastering the phones, making the coffee, collating the depositions, then sashaying into Milton's office for dictation, the door locking behind her, to actually do god knows what. Ruth is on her feet. "The phone?" she asks the bartender.

  Claire can only stare. "Call Nathan? But they have already-he must already know. After all, they called Errol."

  Against the wall near the johns, Ruth dials one number and says nothing. She dials another and turns her back, cupping the mouthpiece with her hand. She hurries back, her coat already on. "I couldn't get him."

  "Then who was that on the phone?" Claire asks, then waves off the answer, for a moment having forgotten whom she is dealing with. "I'm sorry."

  "I have to go."

  "Of course. Some other time."

  Claire looks up at the bang of a door and an icy gust and Ruth's hunched bulk shrinking in the frame of the window, trudging away through the snow.

  Santos is on the sidewalk before Barbados has stopped the car. The tenements run like hedges, none the same yet all alike. Gaps among the buildings like punched teeth. Arms full of flowers and eyes crippled by memories, Santos lets himself in the front door and leaves it open for Barbados. The derelict building. Upstairs, in the apartment in which he was a boy, plain rooms, pressed-tin ceilings, rough-hewn floors. A gust of wind moans through the windows, prowling room to room through the puckered-glass transoms, making them chatter. Somewhere a clock ticks. His chest is tight, his throat rattling. He goes to his pocket for his inhaler. The clock tocks. Something more than time passes here. The little spray of medicine tricks him: his eyes clear, his lungs rise, his veins run.

  "She was clean," he says, turning at the door. "I still don't get that.

  Barbados touches the center of Santos's back. "The examiner will know everything in a few hours."

  "They did the core temp? Sometimes they pass on the core temp.

  "They never pass on it. They didn't pass on it now."

  "They pass on it. Believe me. When they don't give a shit."

  "About her, they give a shit," Barbados says.

  "You saw her nails. They were clean. Do you get that? You telling me she didn't fight? That girl didn't fight? She fights everything. She fights all the time. There were marks. She was fucked up. You saw the marks-"

  "Errol."

  They watch him from the couch, gathered there below the X-ray light of the fluorescent ring, as for a family photograph. The sister he has left, his mother’s hand on her shoulder. Others, old friends and neighbors, line the walls. Here and there, displayed proudly on old, unworthy furniture, gleam the expensive gifts Milton Stein has given Mrs. Santos, his long-time secretary: vases and wood boxes, a brass lamp; in the corner, a stereo system with all of the doo-dads. A neighbor raises a hand, a solemn gesture.

  Santos kneels before his mother, rests the bouquet in her lap and takes her limp and clam
my hand. "Momma," he begins.

  She blinks some signal. Beside her, on the end table, a lush display of flowers. Wildflowers, carnations, poinsettia, their cards. Blood-red roses, Milton Stein and Natban Stein. Santos fingers the card and snaps it from its string and hands it up to Barbados.

  "They're fast," Santos says.

  "It is their business to know."

  Santos's mother slides a finger along his hairline, contemplating.

  "What was she doing out there?"

  Since he saw Isabel lying on the beach he has tried to see her face in his mind but he cannot. He remembers her hand, like a tiny creature in his. He remembers tugging her through a schoolyard fence in the muffled quiet of a winter's day, deploying her to the outfield on a pond of asphalt as blank and featureless as airport tarmac. A playground strewn with old snow, glittering puddles of broken glass. Her even breaths hanging before her in transfiguring balloons. He remembers that while the boys moved listlessly in grimy parkas Isabel in her white snowsuit scurried here and there, flailing, giggling, blocking the ball with her shins. Errol hit the ball high into the gloom, Isabel staggered beneath, face to sky, hands outstretched, waiting to cradle anything that might need catching.

  "Momma, who did she go out with last night?"

  His mother is weeping. "She didn't say."

  He looks to his other sister.

  "Has she been going out with somebody?"

  Nothing. A dull shake of the head.

  Santos presses his eye with the back of a hand. "I have to call Claire," he says.

  At the kitchen table he rolls a bottle of beer in his hands. Bar bados puts down the phone. "Nathan Stein didn't call in, but someone else did."

  "You call his home?"

  "Yes."

  "The office?"

  "Yes."

  "His service?"

  "Someone else returned the call."

  "Someone else."

  "Oliver Schreck."

  "Schreck? I don't want a call from Schreck."

  "He says he has an idea about Coney Island."

  Santos raises a palm, warding it off. "He's zero. He's always been nothing but zero."

  "But he called."

  "What is he, Stein's boy now?"

  "We're going to pass it on in the morning, Errol."

  "Just tell me why he's returning Nathan's business."

  Barbados sighs. "He didn't say."

  "We'll talk to him tonight."

  "They're going to put someone else on it tomorrow."

  The specter of his sister behind the reception desk of the venerable law office of Stein & Stein, where his mother had sat for years before her. How close she'd come to working for him, too, had he accepted the place Milton offered. In their hands, she quickly took on that lawyerly quiet and seemed neither happy nor unhappy. To Santos she was vaguely cold, an old teammate traded on. Different manager now, different league. Now she is a rag of meat, a puddle in the sand.

  There is a knock on the door. Someone says it is the funeral man and Santos begins to cry. He didn't know he was going to and he is ashamed. Barbados looks away. Muffled weeping from the living room. Santos lets his neck go and closes his eyes, but in the dark, guided only by vague notions of human frailty, he does not know what to look for, little even of why.

  Nathan is off, trailing vapor, striding downtown, his watch aimed at the light. Snow slithers dry underfoot, dusting the cars, the balconies, casting them as marble statues. A bitter draft starts and stops, rattling the trash in the doorways. He stops midstep, making a sudden move for his belt, drawing his beeper. His cellphone appears in his other palm. He pulls its antenna and pokes. An operation that seems vaguely military, like pulling the pin on a grenade.

  "No, Serena, you can't meet me here. Did I see what?… What boat? I told you, I've been out all day… From Puerto Rico?… A brother? I didn't know you had a brother… no, it couldn't have been. Listen to me. Puerto Ricans don't have to sneak across the water into the States. They're honorary citizens. They're not Haitians or Cubans in some broken-down wooden bathtub, or some Mexican roasting in the engine of a banana truck in Tijuana. They can come to America in a plane like human beings."

  At the creaking of tires against the snow, Nathan catches a glimpse of a red sedan passing slowly along the curb. Some uneasy flame relights in his gut. Those faces in the window from this afternoon, and other afternoons. And these faces, hovering in the fogged window, snapping away as the car passes, "-Isabel," he thinks he hears Serena say, then flinches, clicks Serena off, and walks on.

  Inside Jackies, an inch and a half of hundreds in his palm, wrapped like a spring roll in a few twentles-a chunk from his fifty-thousand-dollar day, and he hasn't done a thing. What a country. The bartender comes quickly. The shelves are thinly stocked, the bottles well spaced. Nathan steps up but says nothing. Instead, with his hands pressed against the bar's edge, he loses himself momentarily in the opposing mirrored walls. They yield reflection within reflection of a woman past her prime pitching forward over an imaginary pony. The debris of a great dream, the joffrey Ballet, Balanchine. Her false eyelashes are coming loose. To her right on the short stage, two other women spin on fireman's poles in a urine-colored haze to a medley of rock songs fifteen years old.

  "Scotch rocks," Nathan finally manages to say, his elbows landing on the bar. The drink comes and he drains off half the glass, breathes, then drinks off the rest. He now feels himself in a position to contemplate, for a minute, the possibility that everything is normal. He pulls the legal envelope from his jacket pocket and leaves it on the bar before him, stares at it-and clutches, again, the beeper on his belt. Again it is Errol Santos NYPD with his attendant numbers, home, work, beeper, cell-phone, a play for urgency. Already, he can see the conversation. He can see Coney Island.

  With a wave from the bartender the show behind Nathan has stopped, and as if by agreement most of the men avert their eyes. The dancers gather pocketbooks, stockings, hairbrushes, rotating to the right they carry their belongings in their arms like piles of laundry. At the farthest edge the last one steps into her slippers and down out of the lights to the floor, chaffing along the bar, tightening her silk robe around her waist. Off stage she is older, without resources.

  Nathan catches the bartender's sleeve. "Mind if I make a call?" reaching for the bar phone while the music starts up again, he dials, lifts his watch, counts the seconds.

  But the drinkers are spinning on their stools. Something odd is happening. The silence has brought a new girl out of the back through a curtain of beads. Halter top and pleated plaid skirt. Her adolescent knees. A field hockey captain, a Catholic-school girl, her face heavily painted, a touch of glitter, a screen of black hair across the brow. She steps onto stage left while the other two dancers turn their backs and put on for the men in the next sector the same clothes they had taken off for the men in the one before; as if they are not a mere five or six feet away but in another room. The new girl dances badly, stiff, out of sync with the music. Tall, gangly, her long arms outstretched, her lips pursed in a precocious smooch, she can't be more than seventeen. She's in over her head. It may well have been only hours since she was accosted by Jackie himself at the Port Authority gate, fresh off a bus from Gary or Omaha.

  Nathan dials Santos's message service and leaves an address in the East Eighties with an hour that may or may not correspond to the time at hand or any time in the near future.

  The girl is nude to the waist. While she moves her hips in her underpants, the other two dancers throw her dirty looks. But the girl's eyes are not unsure, unamused; they work the room with haphazard confidence. Nathan thinks it isn't impossible that her night on stage at jackie's-her debut-is no more than a lark, a perverse holiday from the tedium of the Dalton School or Spence or her freshman year at NYU, or even her outlay against a lost bet made at her best friend's birthday party.

  Nathan sits with his elbows cocked behind him on the bar. He believes he understands. The girl is putting them o
n. He enjoys a good joke, even at his own expense. Bills fall over her feet like leaves.

  A tightness, though, has begun in the back of his -neck and slips over his head like a hood. It is the sight in the open door: Oliver Schreck in green blazer and cowboy boots strides in reaching for his belt. He unclips and waves his beeper with one hand while shaking Nathan's with the other. His palm like raw meat coated in pretzel crumbs.

  "It's fucking Johnny again, Nathan. It's the fifth time in the last two hours. I thought you were going out there today."

  His accent is heavy on the outer boroughs. The Bronx, Brooklyn. Thick-wristed, balding, under his blazer he has the thick, sloped shoulders and long dangling arms of a fighter. He knows the streets. It is easy to see he never left them, P.S. 132, Queens College, New York Law nights while working in his dad's dell.

  Nathan shakes his head. "Too busy. I've been crazy all day."

  Schreck waves for the bartender, pointing into Nathan's glass for another round. "Because his family really wants to know what happened to the bond money."

  "It's in transit."

  But Schreck isn't listening. He snatches at a bowl of pretzels. "Well, thanks for inviting me down. Haven't been here in ages."

  "I didn't invite you, Oliver. You asked where I was going to be, and here you are."

  Schreck smiles, his mouth full of mash. "So Coney Island. How'd that go?"

  Nathan turns aside. "Zip."

  "Zip? I thought-"

  "Small fry. Nothing. I let it go."

  "And getting you out there Sunday morning. What's Krivit thinking?

  Nathan looks at him. "You tell me."

  "That fat fuck," Schreck says, spraying pretzel. "Fuck him. We don't need him. It's you and me, Nathan. And Milton. We all have better things to be doing now."

  Nathan halfheartedly raises his glass. "Okay, Oliver."

  "So who are you meeting?" Schreck asks.

  "Some bad guy is threatening to pay my retainer."

  Schreck turns, elbows cocked on the bar, and surveys the room.

  "Which one is it?"

  "He's still in the Tombs. He's sending someone."