by Jess Walter
“Hey! You deaf?” The cabbie turns. “Where we goin’, mon?”
No, back here, it comes to you in a flash that while you were capable of doing anything when you left the city three years ago, in theory at least you couldn’t really break out of patterns that were beyond your control. Maybe a person can’t change his own nature—not in any important way—any more than a lake can cause itself to evaporate.
“Fuck’s a matter with you, mon? Where to?”
“Greenwich Village,” Vince says.
The driver turns forward. “You got a address? ’Sa big place.”
Patterns you aren’t even aware of—“Washington Square.”
“You lookin’ for smoke? Junk? I know a closer place.”
Maybe you’ve never had control. Not really—“Park’s fine.”
“Is your dime.” The cabbie cranks the meter and begins driving and Vince settles back. Dog-tired; he flew from Spokane to Chicago the day before, then spent the night not sleeping on the plastic furniture at O’Hare. To get his mind off everything, he bought a new paperback book in the airport store, The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth, about two Jewish writers, one young and full of potential, the other old and famous. Vince liked the book the way that he likes science fiction, for creating a world that he could never have imagined himself, but which seemed real enough. Then, at two in the morning, in Chapter III, the older writer, E. I. Lonoff, said, “Sometimes I like to imagine I’ve read my last book. And looked for the last time at my watch.” And just like that, Vince set the book down and knew that he was done with it. In the morning he caught the first flight to LaGuardia, and when the jet touched down he felt himself tingling, anticipating.
In the cab, he slides over on the bench seat and cranks the window to get a little air. He drifts in and out, and the ride takes on this dreamy quality—the tractor trailers and buses (more brands of diesel stink in New York City than the sum of all the smells in other cities) and people on corners, waiting to cross, leaning into traffic; you don’t see that in Spokane, people surging across streets, perched against lampposts and sitting on car hoods, everyone outside, on stoops of row houses and brick Queens storefronts where the world merges and flows onto the Grand Central Parkway, and the horns—he can’t remember when he’s heard so goddamn many horns—and then bam! He jolts awake and comes to the window like a kid at the first sight of the silver-trussed spans of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and below, Roosevelt Island, what they called Welfare Island when he was a kid and the island was all sanitariums and smallpox hospitals, before the developers got their hands on it and built apartments where even the swimming pools have views (the swimming pools!) and he peeks across the bridge and sees Manhattan, the ivied, old-money town houses of Sutton Place holding back the army of glass and steel crowded onshore and behind—the needles of Chrysler and Empire and the sulking twin towers, a full skyline, a riot of buildings, a revolution of brick and steel and stone and glass, crawling with people, sick with people, cars surging down long gashes of avenues and short, packed cuts of cross streets and…the world. The fucking world. It’s all Vince can do not to laugh and clap his hands. And why he’s so surprised when he feels the smooth trace of tears sliding down his cheeks.
AFTER HIS FATHER died, Vince used to walk from the apartment on Elizabeth Street to Washington Square, duck between the trees, lean against the marble arch, and watch the world. He was fourteen. He was dreamy and he walked through the city like a tourist, like a mark—always gazing up, taking in the architecture—unlike most natives, who kept their eyes level or pointed slightly down, affecting alertness without eye contact. But Vince had looked up at the world as long as he could remember, always searching the skyline for some sign of his father at a job site. By the time a crane guy wire snapped and cut the old man in two, it was the only way Vince knew to look.
In the park he learned to play chess and poker, to pick out the scams and pickpockets, the shooters swapping dice or shuffling shells, the ball rolling off the table. He learned to get out of the way of knives and barefoot women and people on smack, to drift-not-run when the cops came. Everyone he knew stole and fought, and so he stole and fought. Like all the fatherless boys, Vince was drawn to the local crews, pegged for boys’ jobs—buying smokes, lookout, and delivery. Everyone liked Vince. He wasn’t Sicilian, or even Italian, so he could never belong, could never be made, but he also didn’t look Irish or Polish or Jewish, or any of the other ethnic shorthands. There was something odd and unapproachable about his curious melancholy and his dead-calm eyes—a quality easily mistaken for fearlessness—and he was that rare kid, at least in his neighborhood, who never had to prove himself.
He was boosting cars before he had a license, but rather than take them directly to the chop shop like the other hoods, Vince drove, windows down, even in winter, wind buffeting his face, out to Brighton Beach for the day, or to Rockaway. More often he just tooled around the city, leaning half out the window like a dog. His first pop came when a foot cop found him double-parked on Reade Street, staring at the Corinthian columns at the base of the massive Municipal Building. “I don’t care what people say,” Vince told the cop after he was cuffed. “I think it works fine.”
It was less a city of neighborhoods and ethnicities than a collection of forms for Vince; he liked the puffed-up, classical area around City Hall, the earnest wrought iron of SoHo, the extravagant stone-mountain bluffs of Central Park West. He used to have dreams of Manhattan without the people, just the buildings guarded by formations of driverless cabs moving in sync down empty streets. Even his early incarcerations had their release in structure: he took strange solace at the thought of an overnight in the classic Tombs, with its turrets and towers and Egyptian pillars. If you were going to be locked up, better to be in a work of art like the Tombs than someplace like the Rock—Rikers Island, which looked a some rural community-college campus, a herd of razor-wire sheep lazily grazing the perimeter.
Back then, Vince would return to Washington Square each time he was released, only to find it thicker with hippies and NYU students, who were shifted to the Village when the Bronx NYU campus closed. On one of these releases, it dawned on Vince that there were two distinct breeds of people in the park now: those who were going somewhere and those who weren’t. They were easy to tell apart, the lowlifes—players, pushers, and muggers—ambling, glancing side to side, looking for the next action, and the students—striding, walking purposefully across the park, heads down, holding their backpacks like suitcases or babies, their eyes darting around, replaying in their heads the repeated warnings about the park’s drug dealers and thieves, panhandlers, runaways, whores, street musicians, and Mafia wannabes, slick men of confidence and vice—men, he hated to admit, like himself.
He was twenty-six, full into his burgeoning credit-card scam—which, for all he knew, he’d invented—in jail for the fifth time, when his mother died of a liver infection. When he got out, Vince sat in the square and watched the college kids, trying to figure out what they had that he didn’t. He knew he was smart. He probably read more than most of the students with their full book bags. And yet he didn’t entirely get what he read. There were entire disciplines and schools of thought that he knew nothing about. Something was missing. Was it simply the sense of opportunity that came from having money and education? Was it a question of patterns of thought; were they conditioned to make better choices? Or was it some personality trait—a drive, an assuredness, some measure of place in the world—some quality that Vince could define only by his lack of it. Perhaps it was something as simple as a lack of ambition. After all, how can you make something of yourself when you’ve never dreamed of anything that wasn’t a girl in shorts, a six-pack, a straight flush?
In fact, the only thing that even came close to ambition was an idea Vince first had when he was sixteen, of opening a chain of restaurants called The Picnic Basket, that would serve summer food—sandwiches, fried chicken, potato salads, and pies in a cheaply produced,
mass-quantity picnic basket: entire meals to go. The funny thing was—he’d never even been on a picnic, never eaten out of a picnic basket, never been to summer camp. He’d only been out of the city a few times. Maybe that was it: you can only be seduced by what you’ve never had.
Then, one day before a court hearing, Vince confided his idea to his young lawyer, Benny DeVries, who seemed touched by the idea of a low-level crook opening a picnic restaurant. Benny was a Vietnam vet who’d scrapped his way through law school and represented to Vince all that Vince might’ve become if he’d known how to aspire. He and Vince developed a friendship that was genuine and served both of them well—Vince occasionally in need of a criminal lawyer, Benny occasionally in need of a criminal. In time Vince stopped charging for the dope and stereo equipment he procured for his friend, and Benny never charged for representing Vince.
Benny was one of those lawyers who got off defending mobbed clients, who liked to talk the talk and lunch in mobbed-up places. He was an aficionado—a little guy who wanted to rub it with the bigs—and at Benny’s thirtieth birthday party Vince saw a handful of made guys. That’s also where he met Benny’s sister, Tina, only twenty at the time, a part-time clerk in Benny’s office, small and shy, with big brown eyes. For Vince, this girl became everything: the personification of his ambition and desire. And if Benny never quite came around to his little sister dating a thief and drug dealer, he also never actively tried to convince his sister to stop seeing Vince—at least, not until the trouble came.
The trouble was like any trouble, with all the momentum and hope of a sinking ship. There was a card game and a loan and a shipment and a double cross and a bust, and just like that, Vince was into this crew boss in Queens for fifteen thousand and points, owed another ten in restitution to the court, and was looking at two years upstate. That’s when Benny said that the cops had tapes of a threat against Vince’s life, and he whispered that he’d gone to law school with the prosecutor. If Vince would testify against Dominic Coletti and his crew, they’d get him into the witness protection program. Vince didn’t want to, but Benny said they might go after Tina, and so Vince agreed, and after the trial, when his friend announced what he wanted in lieu of payment, he didn’t hesitate. When he went in the program, Vince would leave Tina behind.
He straightens up and looks around Washington Park. He’d allowed himself to think of that as a different life entirely, and that desperate guy—Marty—as someone else, until it all came back around on him. And now…he’s right back in it. Vince steps around the arch and watches the streams of people, an endless flow. It never dawned on him when he lived here, but now he can’t help wondering: Where are they going? Tourists and businessmen and punks and greasers and artists and kids—the NYU students looking even younger, cleaner cut, and somehow more professional—where can all these people possibly be going?
He checks his watch. One. It’s possible that Benny doesn’t stick to his old Friday routine…but as soon as Vince thinks that, here comes the man himself, all five-five of him, looking a bit older, more settled, his blond Afro trimmed to half its size and just starting to gray at the corners, to recede on his long Garfunkel forehead. Benny is in a suit with a blue dress shirt, and a nice wool overcoat. He carries a thick bundle of newspapers under his arm.
Vince ducks behind some park benches, then steps in twenty feet back and follows Benny through the park, up Fifth Avenue to East Eleventh, where the lawyer turns and walks into the Cedar, through the restaurant and straight back to the bar, to a table near the wall. Every Friday during football season, Benny comes here with as many newspapers as he can carry. He orders a pork chop and a beer and reads the sports pages, looking for injuries or disgruntled stars, anything he can use to get an advantage on the weekend games.
Vince watches from across the bar and waits until Benny’s pork chop is delivered and heavily salted. Then he walks over and plops down across from his old friend. Holds his duffel bag in his lap. Benny looks up and the left corner of his mouth goes up in a smile.
“Hey,” Vince says.
“Son of a bitch,” Benny says quietly. He stands up, comes around the table, and hugs Vince so hard and so long that people in the bar begin to stare.
BENNY CHEWS A bite of pork chop and talks out of the left side of his mouth. “His name is Ray Scatieri—Ray Sticks. He used to work for Angelo Bruno in Philly.”
“Used to?”
“Last March, Angelo got dead over that shit in Atlantic City. His guys have been shooting each other up ever since. Like dogs on meat over there. This Ray Sticks took the opportunity to get out, came to New York, and has been working here, doing special jobs for the Gambinos while he waits to see what happens in Philly.”
Vince swirls J&B scotch in a rocks glass. “What’s a special job?”
“Anything the fellas don’t want to do themselves. Off-the-record stuff. Maybe they’re worried about someone talking, or the contract is a friend, or a cop or a judge—something sensitive. Maybe they don’t trust local talent, or they’re looking for a guy with a certain specialty.”
“Specialty…”
Benny blows air. “You know, arsonists. Or those guys who are good at making it look like an accident, or disappearing someone. There’s torture guys. Long distance stuff. You know, different specialties.”
“So what’s this Ray Sticks do? What’s his specialty?”
Benny takes a bite of pork chop. “I got this client who knows Ray Sticks, plays cards with him. He says Sticks has the reputation…he’ll do anyone anytime. No conscience. Guy’s a friggin’ factory. Full service. Loves his work. But supposedly”—Benny looks around—“he especially gets off doing women.”
“Women?” Vince imagines Ray’s black eyes again.
“Lot of the old button guys won’t take a contract on a kid or a woman. But with the Colombians now, and this cocaine, everything’s crazy. All the old rules are gone. Women. Kids. Whole families. Done. And this Ray Sticks, he takes these kinds of jobs, the ones that some of the older guys won’t do.”
Vince takes a drink.
“Guy’s an animal. I’m telling you, Marty, if it is this Ray Sticks they sent after you…well, it ain’t good. It can’t get any worse than that.”
“Why me?” Vince finishes his drink and waves the glass at the bartender.
Benny chews on a piece of pork chop and shrugs his narrow shoulders. “I asked enough questions to get myself disbarred and indicted and maybe killed. I got no idea. Maybe someone inherited Coletti’s paper on you. Maybe they’re clearing the books. Or someone told ’em where you are and they want to send a message to snitches. Who knows why these things happen?”
The bartender brings Vince another drink. He takes a full sip and looks down at the table, trying to put the pieces together. When he looks up, Benny is staring at him.
“What?”
“You look different,” Benny says.
A ghost. Vince runs his hand over his stubbly head. “Yeah, this haircut.”
“No. Not that. You look…I don’t know, different.” He takes a drink. “So what are you going to do, Marty? You gotta run, right?”
“I don’t know,” Vince says. “This town where I was…if they could find me there, they could find me on the moon.”
Vince sighs. “This is gonna sound crazy. But I brought a little money. I was thinking, what if I just repay the money I borrowed? What if I march in and act like it’s no big deal. Just go pay it off.”
Benny laughs, and then sees that Vince is serious. “How much do you have?”
“How much you think I need?”
Benny shrugs. “Three years’ action on fifteen grand, they’re gonna want sixty, and they’ll probably still waste you on principle.”
Vince stares into his bag. “I don’t have sixty.”
“How much do you have?”
“I brought ten.”
“Ten thousand?”
“I got more at home. I’ll tell ’em, the only way to g
et the rest of it is to let me go home and I’ll send it to ’em. That’ll be my insurance.”
Benny stares at Vince, then smiles sadly and takes the last bite of pork chop. “Make sure you hold a couple hundred out for your coffin.”
VINCE HAS AN address in Bay Ridge for old Dom Coletti. He walks two blocks and descends the tile steps of the subway station on Broadway, thrilling at the rush of smells and sounds; roasted chestnuts and cigarette smoke and the seizing of train brakes. A couple of kids bump him as he waits for a token and his hand reflexively goes to his wallet as he queues up to the turnstile and then—you’re in: fluorescent lights on tile walls, some stoned Latin guy yelling on the dark platform—“Pacífico!”—while a woman in a dirty sundress plays the theme to Rocky on a hail-pocked clarinet, the case at her feet littered with nickels and dimes from commuters hiding behind tabloid shields; on the platform they shift and step and stare down the tunnel—desperate for the space between them—and you smile at the clacking groan of a train coming, lean out over the tracks down the black tunnel to see the faint Cyclops light and feel the first breeze—dust and garbage—and then a gust of pure nostalgia as newspapers dance and the B train bursts into the station—clathup, claathuup, claaathuuup—and squeals and grinds to a stop.
Doors pop and people on the platform drift onto the train, swing around poles into plastic seats, eyeing one another, clinging to purses, backpacks, and shopping bags. The car smells like piss. Vince stands, thrilled to be reading graffiti again, like someone seeing his hometown newspaper for the first time in years. Chulo is still a motherfucker. Jennifer continues to eat big cock. Finally, Vince takes a seat and closes his eyes.
Cross the river, off at Seventy-seventh Street in Brooklyn, Vince walks eight blocks and finds himself in front of Coletti’s building, a clean three-story walk-up, almost in the shadow of the Verrazano. He takes a deep breath and starts for the door. Kids on the stoop part for him and he steps into the foyer, reads the name-plate, and rings 3B. After a minute, an old woman’s voice comes over the intercom, bursting with static. “Yes?”
