The Ballad of West Tenth Street

by Marjorie Kernan

  “Munster! What time’s it?”

  “Time to log on.”

  “Wha?”

  “Come on, kid—I’ll buy you that new computer you’ve been after me for if this works.”

  Hamish got up blearily in his cotton pj’s and sat at his desk. “So, log on to what?” he said.

  “Type in your father’s name. What’re you doing?”

  “Googling. Everything else sucks.”

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “It means it’s logging through the files, it takes a few minutes. Here it is, okay, three hundred and thirty-seven thousand matches. What’re you looking for?”

  “Bootleg recordings.”

  “Okay, let me define the search.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “It’s too boring to explain to someone like you, okay?”

  “Need the Vulcan mind meld, huh?”

  “Yeah. Hang on, here’s some. Lots of them. Look at this, geeze, Pops live, on tape and video, trading for twenty-four bucks!”

  “Kid, I can’t look at this shit on the screen, it all makes me feel hypnotized. How about I hire you for a job? I mean it, I’ll make it right to you, okay? Like real business. If you can track down a single name, the most frequent one in this bootleg stuff, either a company or a person, give me a list.”

  “Okay,” Hamish said. “But we might have to discuss a cut of the profits. But could I please get some sleep before I do this?”

  “Report on my desk at twenty-one hundred tonight,” Sadie said, as she closed the door.

  The result of their efforts was a rail-thin young man named Ira Salter. Sadie met him in a café. He ordered tea, she asked for a vodka rocks. She presented him with his crimes and held a threat over his head, saying, “You ever read that FBI warning they make us suckers sit through in the beginning of a video?”

  “I think I’m usually firing up the popcorn maker at that moment,” he said.

  “The Rutledge Recording Company could, if it wanted to, skin you alive. I as executor, could cry for your head. Thing about sales on the Internet, is they leave a paper trail. Or so my twelve-year-old son tells me. You can run, but you can only hide for a month or so. I have no interest in stopping your sales.”

  “No?”

  “No. I would like to increase them. I think I’ll have another drink.” She held an arm up and the waiter came back. “Hit me again,” Sadie said. “And get this boy some booze, for Christ’s sake. What is it you will drink?”

  “I’ll have an Irish coffee.”

  “Gawd.”

  “Do you actually have something to say to me, besides making fun of me?”

  “Okay, here, this is all the business we’re going to do at this meeting.”

  She took a Polaroid out of her pocketbook and held it in front of him, keeping her fingers on it. It was a photo of a bank vault, one that opened out to reveal rows of shelves. On them were tapes and films in deep yellow boxes, dates and titles written in Magic Marker on their sides.

  “I was a multi-media sort when I was young,” she said. “Fancied myself a filmmaker.”

  “I’m interested,” Ira said.

  “Think cash.”

  “I live cash.”

  “So maybe you’re not such a wuss after all, even if you do drink Irish coffee,” Sadie said, hitting his glass with hers.

  The next time she met him in the same café and handed him a reel of film, duped from the original, and he handed her six grand; she took a quick drink, counted the bills under the table, and left. She stood on the wide avenue, holding her arm up for a cab. One pulled up almost immediately. “Driver, take me to a furrier,” she said.

  13

  A great lumpy figure in a sheepskin coat belted and tied with twine made its way up Eighth Avenue at the dim and gloomy end of a November afternoon. The old khaki pack on his back made him a towering hunchback and the cat in his pocket gave him a crooked gait.

  Cap’n Meat was on the run. He knew that the little world he inhabited was fragile, but not how fragile until a boot had come splintering through its paper walls. Some days ago he’d crept back to his underpass in Central Park after dark, to lay himself down to sleep. Someone had been there, some malignant being. Bags of reeking garbage had been kicked open and strewn over the ground. The Cap’n, thinking it was kids at first, shone his flashlight over the scene. Where he normally slept, over by one curving wall, an area of trash had been cleared in the shape of a man’s body. Where his heart would be, a razor blade was jammed into the soil, its edge pointing up. Above it, on the stone, an eye had been painted, by a finger dipped in red paint.

  Thoroughly spooked, he turned and made quick progress toward the nearest place with people and light. He had no way of knowing if he was being followed by whoever had put this curse on his shelter, so he zigged and zagged, hoping to get away. That night he wandered Times Square, feeling safer there, but not enough to find a shadowed place to lie down in.

  For days, too afraid to return to any of his regular haunts, he stole about the city, seeking places that had never known him and keeping his face averted from the world. He had almost no money and was feeling too low to panhandle. The nights were getting cold, especially so in those friendless hours before dawn. He knew of a number of tunnels he could go to, but he’d lost the nerve it took to go in among the other bums and look tough enough not to be attacked and robbed of everything. He dreamed of a box car somewhere way up north that he could crawl into and sleep. He scratched around for leavings of meat to feed to Titus, who ate them but seemed to have caught his owner’s lowness of soul, for the cat merely sat in his pocket, hardly moving. The Cap’n himself lost interest in food, the iron talons of despondency that gripped his being causing him to forget everything else.

  One night he lined up for a shelter, but when it came to his turn the people at the desk recognized him. The young guy, the one with the hole for a mouth, hit the side of the Cap’n’s coat hard, making Titus rise up and screech.

  “Get out of here!” he yelled at the Cap’n. “You know the rules about pets, get that filthy animal out of here! Bum’s can’t have cats, can’t you get that through that fat old head of yours?”

  Desperate, he sneaked and edged his way toward his old bench in Washington Square Park the next morning. He’d found some trash bags and covered his coat with them, trying to disguise himself. He looked around: there didn’t seem anything out of place. Gingerly he sat, gradually easing back, a faint thread of hope snaking into his insides. Maybe Sadie would come by and give him some money. Maybe he’d get his courage back if something good like that happened, get some food and the strength to return to his old routine. A flash of sun came as it rose above a rooftop and he leaned back, sighing. Above him, on the limb of the old oak, a red eye stared down at him.

  He did go north then, in search of his boxcar. Dogs barked at him as he picked through trash cans, their yaps and howls echoing down the empty night streets. Titus growled inside his pocket. He’d find something for them both to eat then head west, find the railroad tracks.

  He was stumbling over a tract of broken land spotted with refuse and the drying husks of milkweeds when a cruiser came bounding over the terrain, fixing him in its lights and whoop-whooping its siren.

  The Cap’n sank to his knees and cried out to the sky. This was the end. They might only book him for vagrancy, that wasn’t what mattered, but what they would do was take Titus away and give him to the Animal Control. In his grief at the cat’s certain abandonment he spoke softly to it, trying to explain, ignoring the policeman approaching him.

  “What’re you saying, old man?”

  “How can I ever explain to him that I didn’t abandon him,” the Cap’n cried.

  “Who, sir?”

  “My poor cat.”

  The Cap’n looked up, he couldn’t see the cop, only a tall black figure outlined by the headlights. But the cop hadn’t kicked him, or made any move. His partner was standing to one
side, lighting a cigarette.

  “All right, what gives here?”

  “I’ve got a cat in my pocket, a friend. If you take me in, you’ll take him away from me, give him to the Animal Control.”

  “Hey, Tommy,” the first cop said to the other. “You see me takin’ in some old vagrant, kickin’ the shit outta him, then takin’ his cat away?”

  “Nope,” Tommy said.

  “Hey fella, just tell me it’s really some cat, not some old lady’s head you got in your pocket, okay?”

  The Cap’n undid the flap on Titus’s pocket. Titus stuck his head out and blinked at the headlights, then ducked back in.

  “I tried to get them out of the swamp, but they died,” the Cap’n said. “But it was long ago, and I never felt they hated me because of it.”

  “Oh yeah, where was that?”

  “It was called Pyong.”

  “Oh yeah. You get hit too?”

  “Just in the leg. I tried, you see, to get them all out of there, but then the radioman got hit.”

  “Hey, Tommy—we got any of that chicken left?”

  “Yeah, and some slaw.”

  “Listen, old man. There’s an old railway depot right over there. I cleared a coupla winos outta there last week. I ain’t sayin’ it’s perfect or nuthin’, but at least you can kip down there tonight. Here, Tommy, hand me that chicken. Now, no fires, I’ll come back and roust you out of there if you make any fires, got that? And here’s ten bucks, nah, I was in the forces too. Come on, Tommy, we gotta go.”

  What had become of that little boy in a sun suit, with his tin truck zooming across the dirt? Of days of jam and motes of grain dust suspended in a shaft of light in the barn. His mother sighing over a picture magazine, tracing her finger over the silhouette of a cocktail dress.

  The road between there and here seemed impossible to map, the Cap’n thought. A cartographer would look at it and say it couldn’t be done.

  They’d dubbed him Captain Meat that day in the saw grass and the mud filled with live, squirming creatures, some of them human. The chain of command eaten and shot and blasted away until he was the only one left to command. His one idea to get them the fuck out of there.

  He’d dragged two injured friends but they’d gotten shot again, so there was no point in dragging them any farther. Then their radioman got shot, geeze, Ma, they got me right in the gut! Inappropriate laughter, they called it.

  Five of them had made it to the rendezvous, one screaming. The other men sat there, giving him the look, not because they thought he’d done any worse a job than any other poor sucker, but because he’d become a commanding officer, become the real enemy.

  He’d never seen any reason not to call himself what they’d named him that day, why pretend to wash away something you were never going to get off your skin? He didn’t recognize any part of what he’d once been, so they’d done him a favor giving him a new name.

  14

  In no time at all the Hollander children were spending nearly as much time in the colonel’s house as in their own. Hamish ate leftovers and helped Ettie in the kitchen, and Deen practiced on the colonel’s Chickering. The colonel had consulted with Sadie before inviting Deen to use the piano whenever she liked, to make sure she approved of the idea.

  Sadie had. It was her opinion that adults had to be somewhat cautious in making friendships, but that children had diplomatic immunity and were not expected by the adults who befriended them to do much beyond receive their offerings politely.

  Deen had leaped at the chance. The colonel’s piano was far superior to their own cranky Steinway baby grand, and it was wonderful to practice in a room where no boys clumped in and out.

  Colonel Harrington let out a fat man’s sigh of contentment from his chair by the fire. Deen was playing Brahms and he had a glass of bourbon in his hand. There was no more a man could wish for. True, the house was a bit chilly, it seemed the furnace had broken down, but Mrs. de Angelo had been called and she’d be sure to sort the problem out.

  Basking like an old bull sea lion in the heat from the fire, he listened to Deen’s playing. A great admirer of classical music and quite knowledgeable on the subject, he’d recognized in Deen a serious talent from the first. In fact, he’d spent many hours listening to her play through the open window by his chair. He was intrigued by what this new fellow was setting her to do lately. Strange as it seemed, he thought it was showing results, that Deen’s playing had a new maturity and assurance.

  Ettie came in quietly. “Colonel, the man who Meez D call, he look at the furnace and say he got to talk to you. Meez D coming too, any minute.”

  “Hey man? Hi. Name’s Robert,” the plumber said, coming into the room. “Fact is, we got to talk about your entire system down there.”

  The colonel offered his hand. “Sit down, sir. May I offer you a drink?”

  “Well, say, it is kind of late, and I ain’t union, so sure, I’ll take a drink. Thank you kindly.”

  The colonel leaned over and handed him the bottle. “Everything you need’s there,” he said, indicating the drink tray. “There’s no ice though, would you like some?”

  “Natural be just fine for this here,” Robert said, taking a sip. “Just fine.”

  “Ah, and here is Mrs. de Angelo. Sit down, dear lady, have a drink. This is Robert, who has kindly answered your summons and has much to say about the heating plant.”

  “I came as soon as I could,” she said. With an air of having far more important things to do, she shook Robert’s offered hand. “How bad is it?” she asked him.

  “Bad.”

  “Oh crap, maybe I will have that drink.” She poured herself a bourbon and took a slug. “Okay, give it to me straight.”

  “Whole shebang’s got to be replaced. Some fool put in pipes all the wrong gauge. Boiler’s not what it says it is either, somebody took some leedle teeny screws and stuck on the name of a respectable manufacturer, got full price for it too, no doubt. Probably some union dudes, those guys know every scam in the book. Boiler’s just plumb too small for this here house anyways, even if it weren’t a hunk of Chinese junk. They go and stick this thing in and for a few years it looks all right, even gives out some heat, but now she’s all burned out.”

  “Colonel, I want you to know that I had a contractor look over the place from top to bottom before you signed the contract. He never said anything about this. And the listing said the boiler had been replaced three years ago.”

  “Three years, that’s just about what I’d figure that piece of junk would last,” Robert said. “Say, Colonel, you mind if I have some more of that sippin’ whiskey?”

  “Please, go right ahead. Well, well, Mrs. de Angelo, don’t fret, these things happen. The question is, Robert, can you fix it?”

  “Nope. I mean, I can get you all fixed up and install a proper system, but I can’t fix that old gal. I can even give you some heat while I’m doing it. It’ll take a little longer that way but I don’t charge union wages. And I don’t do union work neither—I do the job right.”

  “How much?” Mrs. D asked.

  “About sixteen grand. That’s for as sweet a boiler you ever seen included, and all the fittings. And all I charge is ten percent over cost for the materials. I don’t have my hand down everyone’s pockets, not like them union bosses with their diamond pinkie rings and their shivery smiles, all teeth.”

  “When can you start?” Mrs. D asked.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Excellent!” the colonel said. “Let’s all have another drink. My, think of how toasty we’ll be this winter. It almost makes me feel guilty, when so many people haven’t even a home to go to.”

  “Now, now, Colonel,” Mrs. D said. “You pay me to manage the household for you and I’m not going to let you turn it into a shelter. Speaking of which, Ettie find her bum yet?”

  “No, I fear something may have happened to the poor fellow. Listen, hush everyone, my girl’s playing one of her favorites.”

&nb
sp; They sat in silence, drinking whiskey and listening to Deen play a rousing gavotte. A few minutes after she’d finished they heard her call out “Good night, Colonel!” then let herself out the front door.

  “That’s some flying fingers on the eighty-eights,” Robert said. “How old’s that kid?”

  “Fourteen, I believe. Rather remarkable, isn’t she?”

  “A goddamn genius,” Mrs. D said.

  “You said a mouthful, Mrs. D,” Robert laughed. “Say, let’s all have another drink. I’m starting to like this here job.”

  “What the hell have I gotten into?” Mrs. D asked, looking at her refilled glass.

  “Some mighty good sippin’ whiskey, I’d say,” Robert told her.

  The colonel leaned back. Ah, life was good. He’d dreamed for so long of a life like this, of sitting by a fire, drinking whiskey and talking, it was such a fine thing to have friends gathered at his hearth. Yes, a fine thing, something a man could spend his entire life seeking and never find.

  I never thought Paul would take a pupil,” Kristen said to Sadie. She’d called the day before and more or less blackmailed Sadie into coming to tea. “But he seems really taken with Deen.”

  Sadie thought that while the sentiment was irreproachable, there was something unsettling in the woman’s smile, or was it a leer?

  “Deen’s so pretty, isn’t she, with all that hair, just like her father’s.” Kristen got up as the kettle whistled.

  Sadie took a look around the kitchen with distaste. It wasn’t so much the griminess, there were plenty of places she’d been that were dirtier, but it was just grim, no life or personality to it. Unknown to her, poor Kristen had been scrubbing it all day, cramming nappies into cupboards and hiding certain of Rinaldo’s less presentable toys.

  Sadie also looked with disfavor at the infant sprawled in its pen. Rinaldo, what a peculiarly horrid name, she thought, and so perfectly suited to it.

  “Here we are,” Kristen said, bringing a tray to the table. In deference to her guest’s English associations she’d bought real tea, was in fact afraid to serve Sadie her usual Constant Comment. She’d also tried to assemble something like a proper tea set, washing each piece with care, even the undersides, where hosts of smears and dried egg yolk lurked. A plate of sugar cookies from a packet completed her supreme effort. “Do you take milk?” she asked, pleased by how British it sounded.