Blood Acre

by Peter Landesman

  She looks up, quickly, as if at a sudden sound. There, before her, is the winter Sunday years ago, their last year of law school, when she and Nathan and Errol were strolling arm-in-arm together with a forgotten purpose down this street, that street, alongside the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway stretched out below them in an open pit. Traffic whizzing by and kicking up clouds of road grease and mist. Alongside, finally, a school-yard fence.

  In the muffled quiet of that winter day, six boys were playing baseball. Like apparitions, she remembers, one kid with a bat stood in the corner, penned in by the skeleton of a backstop either half built or half gone, the others spread over the asphalt. Basketball stanchions stooped at the perimeter, the rims netless halos.

  Like inmates, she, Nathan, and Errol stood with their fingers clawed to the little diamonds of fence, watching as the one with the bat tossed the ball and swung for the school beyond the outfield and missed everything. The kid, seeing them in the corner of his eye, picked the ball out of the snow again and again and eventually reconsidered and tapped a few around the yard, grounders, skippers, getting the others involved.

  Then-not a word had passed between them-Nathan and Errol palmed down their hair and ducked through a space where the fence had been pried away. The clop of their footsteps lifted the kids' heads, three Chicano, three black. Nathan and Errol walked like gunslingers, mercenaries. They cinched their coats. Dressed the way they were, Claire knew the kids thought they were cops. The kids' eyes slid and stared.

  Errol's voice echoed off the back of the school. "Strange time of year for baseball?"

  Nathan headed for the kid with the bat and held out his hand, a gesture vaguely menacing. Warily, the kid handed him the bat and grabbed his glove and took his place atop a small island of snow in center field.

  Setting his feet with care, Nathan flipped up the ball and caught it in the palm of his hand. From the fence Claire saw its leather skin was all but gone. Only the mysterious petrified core was left, which was nothing like what she'd expected inside a baseball; it seemed insidious, full of worms. Nathan was rolling it nervously in the fingers of his left hand, jiggling the small wooden bat in his right, searching for minor adjustments he may have thought he'd forgotten to make but hadn't. Errol called out for him to hit the damn thing, to show them what he's still got, and Nathan takes a practice swing, panels of the overcoat straining, the lapels in his face. Claire can see this feels good to him, this twisting, this uncoiling like a human spring again. He looks light, almost heroic. The body machine. Metal and rubber and grease never forget. The body doesn't either, in its way. With a mind of its own, it will reach down through the years to fly again despite you and all your aspirations. The past etches itself on your tendons and bones, even if it's the last thing it does.

  She can see Nathan breathing hard already. Errol bends forward, his hands on his knees, pensive, as if there is something more at stake, them and the kids, them against the kids, to prove something, to her, maybe, about time and the body. Just a few years before such a close target as the school wouldn't have inspired in Nathan even a thrill. Now it's the cheap seats, looming high and far as he tosses the ball and the kids disappear from view and Claire looks up into the luminous murk, waiting as Nathan brings the bat around, intending to connect up near his eyes. But he swings through it, and the ball bounces and settles amidst the shards of a broken bottle at his feet. It's his body that lets the bat go. It falls to the ground, pointing somewhere like an hour hand, or the point of a compass. Where it points Claire-watching Nathan's eyes – doesn't know. Nathan steps over the bat looking apprehensively to center field at the kid he's taken the bat from, the hitter. Claire's mouth fills with the metallic taste of unquenched thirst, rage for Nathan, on his behalf, at the kid, at the bat. At herself; for she sees something in Nathan's face that terrifies her, not the disappointment but the apathy, the letting go so easily of what used to be his to keep. He doesn't fight for it. He doesn't take another swing or even seem to care, but walks off with a shrug.

  "Fuck you," Errol says at something one of the kids said, covering Nathan's escape.

  "Yeah, fuck you," Claire mutters. She is feeling testy, closed in, intensely loyal, intensely afraid, and she doesn't know why. Nathan has been frightening her, letting things go right and left, sloughing off the little things he was, ballplayer, musician, the lives he'd wanted to lead.

  Errol follows Nathan through the fence.

  Nathan waves. "See you around."

  "We will," Claire says fiercely, hooking an arm in each of theirs and pulling them on. "The punks. One day they'll walk into the wrong side of our office. All those kids."

  They stride with purpose, it seems, toward Court Street. Church bells peal in the distance. The federal court with its scrubbed and spotlit colonial splendor would make a convincing birthday cake. A Disney set surrounded by the grime of downtown Brooklyn. New York is inside out, Claire knows: the old looks fresh and better preserved, the brand new already tired and out of date. It's the past creeping up on you and the future falling apart. The surrounding office buildings-blank and anonymous as cliffs-are wrapped in an alpen glow. Borough Hall. The board of ed. Labor. Night court. Empty, abandoned weekends and after hours.

  And then, at the curb in front of Barney's Cut Rate, there is a throng of people, strange for a Sunday. On weekdays those corners are choked with city bureaucrats and their attendant beggars and hot dog carts. And by Sunday the Friday papers usually have the whole street to themselves to tumble happily around and pile up in the lees of doorways. A strange collection has gathered: Chinese waiters, the help at McDonald's, a smattering of homeless, a few locals in slippers and housecoats. A lone dog wearing boots of grime. They all look to be waiting for a bus.

  An ambulance pulls up at an angle against the curb. A policewoman stands in the street waiting to direct traffic that isn't coming. A bank clock has nothing to add, frozen in neither morning nor light.

  "Jesus," Errol says, and stops.

  Two police cars pull up. In this light everything is fluid, including the time; everything an apparition of itself, full of shadowy possibilities and illusory goodness. Like the man standing on the ledge of the apartment house in the middle of the next block. There are fifteen or twenty stories between him and the street. The balconies are filled up and down with spectators, as if they are lining the route of a vertical race. The jumper is in a parka, arms straight out, measuring his dive.

  Claire bites down a chill. "He wouldn't dare," she mutters, still in her feisty mood. As if it would be something to admire.

  Nathan seems wrapped in a preternatural calm. It's that apathy again, that waiting as if for a cue. Something is missing.

  The police, meanwhile, seem bothered, milling around helplessly with no one to arrest. There are no psychologists or experts and there is no giant trampoline. Just the wide river of street and a few parked cars and the crowd on the corner looking upward expectantly.

  In the corner of her eye Claire can see Nathan peering upward.

  "Jump," she whispers, half because she wants to prick him, spark him, maybe to impress him with her morbid sense of humor; half because she knows the jumper never will.

  But Errol is gripping her elbow. "Don't say that."

  And he is right, Claire sees, because she looks up and feels the jumper already dead; he is still up there, but he has nothing left to give. He is no faker, he is not screwing around, just gathering the courage, aligning his powers with gravity's.

  "What did he do?" Nathan wonders aloud.

  "What didn't he, more likely," Errol replies.

  "He needs a lawyer."

  Something up the block catches Claire's eye. Another police cruiser is making its way over, lights off, in no hurry, trailed by a dark ambulance. Something is already done. They're coming-but who for? By the time Claire turns back someone is already screaming, someone near. The shriek trills off all that glass, the concrete barriers and orange barrier tape of a nearby construction zo
ne, off the parked cars and uplifted faces. Then a loud explosion, a crisp report, like a rifle shot, and for a second Claire thinks the police car hit something, maybe the ambulance. Nervously, she lifts her eyes: the roof ledge is empty. Everyone is peering off the balconies, following the route down. In the street lies a level mound of clothes and shoes. In the middle of it something is heaving. A fist clenches and unclenches then freezes in a claw. There is no blood, a clean harmless bundle too compact and flat to be an actual human being. We're small in death, Claire thinks, but then sees the jumper has sprung a leak. Steaming, it begins to spread beneath, black and thick as oil, as though he is melting into the frozen asphalt.

  No one approaches the corpse. The police turn their backs, focusing on crowd control now, on something they can do. Claire's hand crawls into Nathan's and begins to probe. She hears herself crying softly. "Oh God," she says-

  And she says it now, again, "Oh God," seeing ten or so years too late, the curious familiar glare in Nathan's eyes, the blank stare that terrified her to the end, a kind of inward-facing dread, that eventually swung outward and swept over everything, denying everything, that swept over, turned on, and denied her.

  And there, as Claire lies on her bed, in the pit of her mind is the image of a woman-not a man, not the jumper-a woman very like herself twitching like a marionette, throwing her fists again and again at the ground.

  "Why," she says aloud, "did you do it, did you do it, did you do it?"

  Quickly, to steady herself with other news, she scans her Times. Spotting something absurd she brings it closer. In parts of the Bronx and Spanish Harlem, she reads, South and Central American women with unbaptized children are hurrying in droves to their neighborhood churches and storefront chapels and lining up their babies for emergency baptism. Word has spread that the Antichrist s coming this Christmas and will murder the unanointed. Those women merely pregnant, in a panic, are having their bellies blessed. No one knows where the rumor originated, or why. Outside, the icy rain still falls. The day is silent, but it is not calm. She hears distant foghorns and sees the windows flicker as the lightning flies, and waits, in vain it seems, for the thunder. The storm seems to come and go at will.

  She notices the time and runs to her closet. She runs through her apartment, through the door, through the sleet.

  8 A. M.

  Will this work, this jangling? Nathan shakes the keys at the door like a shaman with his amulet. Eventually spotting the downtown ring he tries one key from that, then remembers that he is uptown and picks still another. Finally, less with luck than with random interest, he finds a key that fits. But the door is already open, the lock half-cocked. The red sedan comes to mind. He looks behind him and through the window in the lobby door finds only a square of empty street. He lurches in, calling, "Benny?"

  In the half-dark of the living room the old woman sits upright on the couch, her hands rooted deep in a heavy, coarse overcoat. Simple black dress beneath the coat's hem. A pair of orthopedic shoes. The room around her is tidied, books reshelved, CDs stacked, his clothes folded and piled on the kitchen table.

  "Mrs. Rosa. I'm sorry. Maria-"

  The sink is empty, the dishes done and put away. Nathan looks over his shoulder. "Where's Benny?" he asks, and pokes his head into the small side room. The boy there is sprawled across the bed, the blankets bunched and kicked aside, his head twisted violently away from his shoulder, as if fallen from a roof, left randomly on the sidewalk.

  Nathan sees his own bed is made. Maria's clothes, once everywhere, are nowhere. Her drawers, her side of the closet, empty. Boxes, suitcases, plastic bags-there is nothing left. The sink has been scrubbed. Also the floor, and that ring in the bathtub. Maria's mother came every day so that Benny did not return from school to an empty house, but she never once cleaned; didn't bother, Nathan always assumed. Now, everything after all these years gleams. As though with Maria's last exhalation all signs of her and her belongings all over town vaporized, accompanying her to the steamy other side.

  He squints at the clock. "Benny has to get to school."

  She addresses her hands: "He isn't going to school today."

  “Did you tell him?"

  "Maria's brothers are waiting at my apartment. I will take him there. He will be with his family when he learns."

  "Of course, you all want to be there." Nathan glances at his watch. "What time do you want me?"

  "No-" Up comes her hand, her face, insistent. "No."

  "I thought I'd be the one to break it to him."

  She folds her arms across her chest and turns her head to the window.

  "We've been living together, I should be the one," he says, trying to keep up with his own logic. After a long pause, he floats the idea, like a trial balloon: "I'd like to keep the boy."

  Her eyes widening in fear, she slips forward on the couch, ready to stand, or spring. "I am taking him away from here," she says.

  His nod is less an affirmation than a failure to deny the truth of it. Of course it is a ridiculous idea. "I have to go to the hospital now."

  "Go look at my girl," she says.

  Across town the traffic in the St. Luke's lobby is already heavy. No one asks his name or offers a direction. On the sixth floor an unmanned cart bristling with brooms and mops and clean linens Sits stalled outside a room near Maria's. A male nurse at INFORMATION sends Nathan to the basement.

  The gurneys are lined up end to end along the stainless-steel cabinets, the mounds blanketed in baby-blue paper. Here and there a manila tag tied to a leached and shriven toe.

  Nathan rubs his eyes. "Busy night."

  "Busy week, month, whatever," the attendant replies. "They're dying of everything."

  When the steel slab slides out on its silent bearings, Nathan is sure there has been some mistake.

  "This is her?"

  "There's been some swelling, just so you're prepared," the attendant says, and, without delaying-Nathan wishes he'd wait just a minute-lifts the sheet, making a loose tent down which Nathan can see all. He reaches toward her as a blind person might. Darkened leather face senseless as a handbag. Eyes, halfclosed, squint dully into the middle distance. She looks to Nathan punched out, bruised. Even the bridge of her nose has spread.

  Below she is as shapeless and bunched as a baby. The sheet flutters down.

  "Sign here."

  When all the words are written, the attendant feeds Maria back in with a little shove, the throbbing hum of the hospital boiler just the other side of the wall some suggestion of where she's going. Nathan steps back against the massive cabinet. "You all right?" the attendant lamely asks. Nathan turns to rest the side of his face against the refrigerated metal, choking on a sorrow he has never known, but which, like his death itself, has hunted him these months and years.

  "She wanted you to do it, no one else."

  Nathan raises his head to find the attendant gone. In his place is a short man in a black pants suit with his throat clutched in a white cleric's collar. His head outsized and closely trimmed, perched on his neck like a golf ball on a tee.

  "Cleary," he says, holding out a hand.

  The priest seems about Nathan's age, and oddly it's the near-baldness that makes him look that young. Coming down from the rarefied air of fight and recovery into the basement of the damned and defeated, Cleary, robust, energetic, seems to thrive where he can admire his work, the fermenting corpses stretched out like loaves in their individual ovens, rising, getting ready to go. Cleary gives Nathan's hand a special squeeze, and for a second Nathan is sure the priest will never let go. Maybe he's sizing him up, taking Nathan's spiritual pulse while he adds together all Maria has confessed with what he now sees before him. So, here, finally, Nathan Stein.

  "Maria," Cleary says, finally dropping his hand and nodding toward Maria's drawer, "spoke of you all the time. Especially toward the end. I heard you were down here. I've been wanting to meet you."

  "I bet you have."

  Cleary seems almost glad fo
r the opportunity, glad even for the circumstance. Strange how the professionally faithful seem to run right over social nuance, as if their faith has shielded, or freed, them from the necessity.

  "She knew just when she was going to die," Cleary plows on.

  Nathan pictures their own non-goodbye, Maria preoccupied with her tranquilized neighbor, and he slipping out from under her blank stare. He'd assumed she was staring at him, but now he knows it wasn't him she was seeing at all. How long after he'd left had she actually stopped breathing? He should have gone up last night. He would at least have liked to say something to her, anything at all. Though what it would have been he has no idea. "She knew yesterday afternoon?"

  Cleary's nod turns into a continuous, mechanized bob, smug with amazed discovery. "Down to the day. The hour. Yes, she knew." Inclining his head, the priest leans against the enormous cabinet, the fluorescent light glancing off both his shiny forehead and the wall of stainless steel behind him, ankles and arms crossed, as if waiting for the bus in the cold sun. "Yes, Maria spoke about you quite a bit."

  But Nathan just stares, bracing himself, unwilling to rise to this bait. He is starting to resent the way Cleary isn't letting him have it, giving him a stern talking-to, like Maria would have. Either he doesn't know his job or it's part of that grand strategy they all seem to have of letting you probe yourself, reprimand yourself, levy your own fine. Nathan can feel the growing annoyance in his gut. When was the last time he ate? He slaps his coat pockets for his pills.