Blood Acre

by Peter Landesman

  "Last week Johnny tried to get me out to Rikers by promising me a pair of tickets to a samba fest. That or ten pounds of veal from his brother the butcher." He drinks his drink. "But hey, who cares. Screw Johnny and his family. With Milton doing that rape case now-"

  Nathan raises his head. "Rape?"

  "What do you mean? That Riverside Drive thing."

  "What's Milton got to do with-"

  "You know, that advertising exec getting snatched jogging along the river, pulled into the trees. They banged the shit out of-"

  "I know the-"

  "What do they call it? Whupping? Whipping?"

  "Wilding."

  "Good term. Fits them. Fucking animals." Schreck's masticating jaws pause at their work, and his eyes, studying Nathan's face, betray the rules of a new game. "And where's Isabel by the way? Shitty time to disappear. She's not answering her beeper. "

  A silence between them. Nathan believes Schreck is examining him out of the corner of his eye. He is sure of it. Or is he? Selfconsciously he covers his wrist with his hand. Schreck is waiting. Schreck, he is certain, is calculating.

  "Isabel-" Schreck begins.

  "But what does Milton-"

  "What are you talking about? Don't you talk to your own father? It was two days ago. It's been all over the news for over forty-eight hours. Milton Stein of Stein and Stein and-"

  "Forty-eight hours? Where have I been?" "A good question."

  "And what do you mean Stein and Stein and-?"

  Schreck throws back his head and dro s in a handful of pretzels. "Look, you need to expand your horizons. I'm telling you that store-front office in Washington Heights is a great idea.

  You need fresh blood."

  Nathan, smiling strangely, looks past Oliver into the middle distance.

  "You should really listen to me, Nathan."

  "I'm listening. Who asked him?"

  "Who asked who?"

  "My father, Oliver. Riverside Drive. I thought those kids all signed lawyers already."

  "Did. They did all sign lawyers. But which lawyers, Nathan. The question is did they sign the right lavryer."

  "Which one, Oliver, which one is it?"

  Schreck beams with mischief. He throws in another fistful of pretzels and chews slowly, savoring the moment. He swallows, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and lifts his glass. "Williams," he says, throwing back the shot.

  "Williams. Jesus. "

  Schreck lifts his hand for a high five, but Nathan's arm is stayed by his drink.

  "Fucking A," Schreck says, his hand chopping the air. "I mean wouldn't you know it? The fucking ring-leader. Christ, Nathan, today the answering service had to give a whole operator to our line alone. The Today show. Charlie Rose. Ted Koppel himself called to get him for Nigbtline. They all think Milton's some vault of knowledge about the seething rage in Harlem, the war between the races, the continuous pulse of violence and greed undercutting urban America. What did Koppel say? Martin Luther King's true legacy? So this poor advertising chick goes logging one night to blow off steam, she blew a multi-million-dollar account, whatever, she gets on the walkway in the eighties, not so smart maybe, but hey, it's America, why shouldn't she? And they sweep down on her at 102nd like a pack of wolves and drag her kicking and screaming. Christ, Nathan, one of them jammed a fucking Coke bottle-"

  "Oliver." Heads are turning down the bar. Though it is, Nathan realizes, a pot of gold. All this will be, he himself will be, very public.

  Schreck lowers his chin but not his voice. "I mean, just think about it for a minute, Nathan. Some fat Jewish lawyer driving around in his Rolls rising to the defense of some poor, abused, fatherless, fifteen-year-old walking time bomb, a vacuum of power venting his rage on some young white advertising-exec prodigy, the symbol of the white marketing establishment. Can't you see it, Nathan? Oprah. Donahue. The Daily News wants your father to write a running column during the whole thing. But of course he can't. It's client-attorney privilege. It's conflict of interest."

  Nathan is looking at him. "You have it all figured out."

  "Me?" Schreck says, his hands spread on his chest in fake humility. "What's to figure? The animals went down like a line of dominoes. They tripped all over themselves to confess. One of them was still wearing the girl's Harvard sweatshirt, her panties practically hanging out of his belt. I mean, come on. Even Milton agrees. "

  "You talked to Milton?"

  "Of course I talked to Milton. Didn't you talk to Milton? Don't you talk to your own father?"

  Nathan, lifting his drink, hides behind his glass.

  "I've never seen him so excited. Who gives a shit what they do to Williams. It's what Milton's going to say. It's what he's going to look like. It's the exposure, Nathan. It's all about exposure."

  The barrage of thoughts incites red patches high on Nathan's cheeks. He sets down his glass and touches, again, the wound on his wrist, as if to connect the worry itself, news of Isabel hitting the streets, the papers, with his base instinct: he is, after all, still Milton's son, territorial and protective. The timing is bad. He knows this rape case will turn out to have been everything. The old life will have ended here, and the new life will have begun. Isabel will be a bad coincidence.

  Schreck has rested a hand on Nathan's shoulder. "About that storefront. I was talking to someone today-"

  "Give it a rest."

  "No pressure or nothing, Nathan, but it's a guaranteed gold mine. Got people working on things already. Especially after they see your dad on the tube, they'll flood that office thinking Stein and Stein and Schreck are direct emissaries from the Vatican wangling truth and justice and green cards for all. I need you. I need your Spanish."

  “You need."

  "I'll give you a cut. A percentage off the top. Right off the top. In or out?"

  "A percentage. Stein and Stein and Schreck, and you're going to give me a-"

  At the faint, almost reluctant bleat from his beeper, Nathan peers into his jacket:

  I knew you'd be late. You promised. You

  – falls off the edge of the screen Just as the beeper vibrates again for the second installment, but Nathan, not bothering, rebuttons his jacket.

  Schreck jabs the air. "Was that Johnny?

  "What? Yeah," Nathan says, holding his beeper still.

  Nathan shrugs.

  "You've spent the money." Schreck looks at him. "Am I right? Tell me, am I right or what-?"

  "Their boy has ten kilos of coke under their floor, Oliver. What are they going to do, sue us? Sue the big-shot law firm of Stein and Stein and Schreck? Sue the Pope's epistolary saviors?"

  "I don't think-"

  "Oliver, when they get to the part where they say they want a lawyer, just give them your card."

  Pretzel dust rimming his lips, Schreck laughs and lifts his hand in a gesture of concession to Nathan's parting volley, allowing the matter to be put to bed where it belongs, save a last shot of his own, "I don't think they'd bother, Nathan. Because I'll tell you, between you and me," he says, and pokes Nathan in the ribs, "I think they'd rather just kill you."

  Turning and pointing, as though at a passing plane, or a shooting star, Schreck waves down the bartender.

  Nathan watches him, sober, suddenly. Suddenly, not even tired. “Oliver, what did you come down here for? Why did you want to see me? What couldn't wait?"

  A plastic smile, poured and now cooling, sets on Schreck's face. Eyes open-not missing a thing-teeth bared, he slaps Nathan on the shoulder. "Nothing, buddy boy. No reason at all. just happy to see you."

  Again the dancers cease mid-writhe and kneel for their heap of belongings and rotate, the one farthest over stepping into her slippers and down and zipping across the floor along the bar. A new girl surfaces out of the beaded curtain. The off-duty dancer stops in front of Nathan. Her eyes are red-rimmed. She lifts a knuckle to her nose and sniffs, and staring walleyed at Schreck, withdraws from her purse a packet wrapped in butcher's paper the size of a pound of swis
s cheese and slides it into the pocket of Nathan's jacket. She doesn't look, Nathan says nothing, and she turns abruptly for the back as though she's forgotten something there, as though the phone in back has rung.

  Schreck slaps the bar. "Stay there, be right back," he says, patting his pocket for keys. "I have something to show you."

  He runs out, but his presence lingers, like an offensive smell.

  Nathan probes the package in his pocket. He pats his jacket for the shape of the envelope. In the mirror he sees Isabel on the boardwalk turning a sloppy pirouette, much too drunk. Her mouth open, so beautifully, in laughter, or a scream-

  Schreck returns, steering before him a young girl wearing dayglo lipstick and a little black dress. "This is what I mean," he says, winking, his voice sliding to a whisper. "Consuela wants a green card. What was I telling you?"

  The girl eyes Nathan's scotch. Nathan hands it over and she drinks it down thirstily. "Where the hell were you keeping her, leashed up outside?"

  Schreck smiles. "Mr. Philanthropist all of a sudden. She was in the car. Don't worry so much. What am I, an animal? The engine was running. But, look, Nathan, can't you see it now? A line of Dominican peasants around the block with hundred-dollar bills in their hands?"

  Nathan looks at the girl with alarm.

  "No English," Schreck says. "No habla inglgs, hey?" He grins an even row of white caps at the girl, and the girl grins broadly back, her teeth ragged and gray. "We hire some law students for eight bucks an hour for the shit work," he says out of the corner of his mouth, "get some of Isabel's cousins to watch the door." He leans forward, squinting with sincerity. "Ten percent of the gross, Nathan"-chopping the air-"clean cut off the top. Overhead's my problem. Fair or what? In or out?"

  Behind them the music starts again. Consuela, fingers meshed around the empty glass, steps softly to the beat.

  "You feeding her, Oliver?"

  "Okay. Fifteen. I'll make it fifteen. Fifteen percent, Nathan. Trouble-free dollars. You and your father's name. My work. I couldn't be more fair."

  "Just get her a drink." Nathan slips away.

  In the men's room, clutching his side, he reaches out and lands on the condom dispenser. He locks the stall door behind him. He has a fever, he feels it on his face like the sun. His own wavy reflection stares back from the toilet water. Crushing his thumbs in the palms of his hands, he looks about the graffitied stall. Limericks, phone numbers. Ten-inch cocks.

  The pain is numbing. Laughter, anonymous, fills his head then is sucked out. He leans his ear against the wall to hear within. A vent overhead hums with cold air. His knees draw up sharply and he goes down, the porcelain sweating cold in his hands. Kicks, kicks him again. He holds himself tightly around the waist while the muscles beneath collide and wrench loose the debris down below, his mouth falling open as though he's been punched in the groin, the air rushing both ends, all of him working to expunge what? Again the dry retches burn the roof of his mouth. Then his reflection shatters, the water darkens, the drool reaches the floor. He pats his pockets and brings out the vials. Two labels made out to him, two to Maria. Shaking, he struggles with the childproof caps, finally bringing the vials up over his shoulder and down one at a time against the toilet bowl rim. Pink blue yellow ricocheting like hailstones over the floor, into the water, twirling like confetti in the loose mud. "Fuck it, fuck it." He sweeps together what he can off the sandy floor. Off the urine-stained rim into his trembling palm, picking out one of each. His eyes blurry with tears and pain he spits at the little mound of pills in his hand, spits again and overturns them into the toilet with the rest. "Fuck-you," he says.

  Panting against the steel partition, his hair matted to his forehead, the trembling of his lips stills as he digs into his pocket, fingering the paper. The package gives with a squeeze. Cornerless.

  No money. Fuck. Fucking cold cuts I'll kill him, I'll have him killed. Johnny owes me, I'll just have him bumped off, kill two birds with one stone, clean off both accounts.

  Working the corner he inserts his pinky and brings it up frosted, like a vanilla-topped creamsicle.

  What am I? What-? He thinks for a split moment, like a flash of a bad dream, an old recollection, of all the people he owes. He thinks, briefly, of the Citibank mail sorter in her bunker in Sioux Falls distributing Visa stubs and checks and hate notes into plastic pneumatic tubes, opening a package containing a half-kilo of cocaine, unfolding the note: To Whom It May Concern: Please accept enclosed in lieu of my debit of eight thousand fifty-four dollars and seventy-eight cents. Keep the change.

  The outside door opens. The tinny music washes in, then chokes off. Footsteps stop outside his stall. An eye peers through the crack of the door. "You all right in there?"

  The footsteps retreat. The door bangs softly.

  His cell-phone rings beneath his clothes and a choked bleat of sound escapes his throat. The phone rings, then rings again, then stops. It begins once more but is cut before the first ring is done. Then his belt chirps. He peels aside his jacket, hands trembling, thumbing the illumination button. His chest lights up like a flare:

  Cabron. Bastardo. It is 9 o'clock. I rain dead roses on your bed.

  9 P.M.

  Santos rehangs the pay phone and cinches his coat tight at the waist. His heels pace off the minutes, echoing past the house of detention, a highrise of crosshatched windows ringed by a skirt of razor wire. Past a row of alternating pawn shops, bail shops. Past black and padlocked storefronts. Across the river the Manhattan Municipal Building with its spires and grand arches and engraved cornice naming the old quadrants of the old city when all was wilderness. Years ago, Santos arrived there dressed in white and pinned a two-dollar flower to his young wife-to-be and an old black man with a beaten box camera took their wedding portrait against the scuffed marble.

  The sky to the west shivers with lightning. Streaks of frozen rain race the snow. He turns in at a doorway and finds Barbados at a table by a window. "He's coming down," Santos says.

  "That's awfully sweet of him."

  "He said he's eager to help," Santos says.

  "How likely is that?"

  Santos edges past a dark pinball machine toward the sound of dull chopping and the beating of eggs. At the counter he grips the menu in both hands and studies it. The waitress appears tapping her pencil against her pad. "After all these years you still need to look at that?"

  "No. I'm sorry. Coffee, please. A grilled cheese." He looks back at the booth but Barbados is staring out the window. "That's all."

  The waitress tears off the ticket and turns to go, then stops. "You okay?"

  He sightlessly watches her through her thin blue uniform: as she heads back to the grill; as she stands on one hip in a cloud of steam; as she comes back with the coffee. She sets down the cup with a click and the liquid tilts and slips over the rim and fills the saucer. She covers her mouth and contemplates the mess. Not a pretty face, but eyes that see and lips that form words and kiss a baby's moist head.

  "Thank you," Santos says.

  In a minute she comes back with the sandwich. Saturated with sweet butter, the filling orange and gummy, crammed with hope. Santos holds a wedge of it to his nose, closes his eyes and chews slowly, but it goes down like a wad of cotton and fills him with nothing he wants or can even imagine and his body registers nothing of it at all.

  From the booth, Barbados looks over blearily. He puts one finger in his ear and jiggles it.

  The door opens and lets in a cold gust.

  "Sit down," Santos says.

  Outside, a car sits at the curb. Pellets of exhaust ride up the back.

  "Your car is running," Barbados says.

  "I have someone waiting."

  "You don't plan on staying long," Santos says.

  "This won't take any time at all."

  Oliver Schreck slides into the booth and Santos slides in after him.

  "Isabel was a beautiful girl. I couldn't be more sorry, Errol."

  "You said you'r
e eager to help. How is that, Oliver?"

  "Let me come straight to the point."

  Barbados nods. "That's a good idea."

  Santos stabs a cigarette into his mouth, frowning at the brief orange flame.

  "I thought you can't smoke in these places anymore," Schreck says.

  “You can't." Barbados leans forward.

  ‘Isabel was with Nathan last night," Schreck says.

  "So what," Barbados says. "They were working, on a brief or something. "

  "They were out."

  "So they were working late and then he took her home."

  "Did your mother say she came home last night?" Schreck asks

  Santos.

  "Careful," Barbados says.

  Santos drapes his arm around the back of the bench. "What are you saying, Oliver?"

  "All I'm saying is that they were out."

  "That's all you're saying," Barbados says.

  "They've been out. A lot."

  Santos, bent over the table, rolls the salt shaker in his palms. "That would be quite a mouthful."

  "Look at Nathan's hands," Schreck says. "Look at his arms."

  Santos has made a fist around the salt shaker. "Nathan has known Isabel for years."

  Schreck leans back to look at him. "Isabel was a very beautiful girl. A girl with promise. Maybe she would have been a lawyer herself one day. Nathan was at Coney Island. You saw him there. "

  Santos looks across the table at Barbados, who holds out his hands toward Oliver Schreck. "And how do you know something like that?"

  "You saw him, Errol. Did you see his hands?"

  "How do you know all this?" Barbados asks.

  "Did you see the marks on his arms?"

  "It doesn't mean anything," Barbados says.

  "But it is interesting."

  Santos's eyes are locked unseeing on some spot on the wall.

  "Errol?"

  Santos tilts his head. "It is interesting."

  The waitress brings over the coffeepot and a cup and saucer for Schreck. "You want some more coffee?"

  Santos's hand is up, warding her off. "We're good."