Intruder

by Peter Blauner

  But the picture doesn’t come and neither does the blow.

  After a few seconds, he opens his eyes and sees a husky black man with dreadlocks talking to the one-armed man and poking him in the chest with a sharp index finger.

  “He was a spy,” Rumpelstiltskin is arguing meekly.

  “Don’t you be trippin’ on me, James. You hear? We don’t need no Amtrak police down here. My God is the God of Abraham and I am the head nigger in charge. So you gonna bug out, go do it somewhere else.”

  The one-armed man drops the tire iron and slinks away, his jeans drooping off his ass in discouragement. The man with dreadlocks turns to John G.

  “The hell you look at, man? Get the fuck up. What are you? A animal lying there?”

  John G. rubs his eyes, not sure whether the whole incident has been another hallucination.

  As if to answer the question, the big guy comes over and gives him a hand standing up. His grip is strong and sure, and his eyes are calm. But a long scar runs from the right side of his nose over to his ear. It’s impossible to tell how old he is.

  “You looking for a place to hide out awhile?” he asks.

  “What makes you think I’m hiding?”

  “Ain’t nobody comes down here after they won the lottery, man.”

  He goes over to a shopping cart full of aerosol cans and old Jergens bottles and starts pushing it up the tracks, as if he just expects John G. to follow.

  “I’m Abraham,” he says, barely glancing back.

  John G. jogs alongside him and introduces himself, but Abraham doesn’t shake his hand.

  “Man, you gotta get yourself situated,” he says. “Look at you. You a mess. You got those drugs running rampant in your system. They wreaking havoc on you, man.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Man, I been there. I put shit in my veins that would peel the paint off your car.”

  John G. stands there, trying to figure out how he got from where he was to where he is now.

  “Well, come on, chief. You coming or what?”

  He leads John G. around a slight bend toward a small white abandoned construction trailer. Two pit bulls tied to the front steps bark furiously. John G. notices that the shack next door has been burned to the ground. Charred pieces of wood and clothing fragments are strewn in the gravel.

  “Get on in here a second, man,” says Abraham, going up the steps. “We gotta get you orientated.”

  He fiddles with the padlock on the front door. “Fuckin’ white people,” he mutters. “You all ain’t used to living like niggers. You hit the street and you all lose your fuckin’ minds.”

  A stout brown rat runs across John G.’s path and he gives out a little yelp of panic.

  “Yeah, I used to hate rats too,” Abraham says, smiling and stepping into the trailer. “But I got over it.”

  John G. goes in after him. He smells incense and sees a small room lit by hundreds of Hanukkah candles in dozens of ragtag brass menorahs. Margo had a Jewish friend once. Mindy Feirstein, from City College. She used to tell Margo, “Don’t marry that guy John, he’ll never amount to anything.” She never knew how right she was.

  A mattress sits in the corner with hunks of foam spilling out. In the other corner, there’s a burgeoning mountain of empty Sprite and Diet Coke cans in clear plastic bags and a bunch of old car parts.

  “See, I had an unusual experience with a rat when I was over in Vietnam,” Abraham says, pointing to a U.S. Army helmet at the foot of the mattress. “A rat saved my life.”

  “Yeah, how was that?”

  “We was sleeping in a graveyard right outside of Mytho, when this huge, tremendous rat bit me right on the tip of the nose. So I jumped up screaming and this mortar shell came in and hit right on the tombstone where I’d been.”

  John G. laughs. “If you ever have a son, you oughta name him after that rat.”

  “Well, for a long time, I didn’t see it that way,” Abraham says solemnly. “See, I had to take twenty-one shots in the abdomen because of the way that rat bit me. So I had this hatred for rats. I used to put cheese down and throw gasoline on them when they came along. Light a match. Watch ‘em go, EEEEEEewwww!!”

  He shakes his hands in front of him and makes a high-pitched squealing sound. John G. just stares.

  “So I guess you could say I got some complicated feelings about rats,” Abraham tells him.

  John takes another look around the place as Abraham reaches into a torn purple Jansport bookbag and hands him a ham-and-American-cheese sandwich on Wonder Bread wrapped in cellophane.

  “It’s from the Saint Stephen’s soup kitchen,” he says, putting a hand on John’s shoulder. “Whatever I have is yours. You can sleep here if you want for a few nights. We can share some of the food. All I ask is that if you’re gonna bug out, you go do it somewhere else.”

  John G. notices he’s standing next to a stack of scratched-up old Paul Anka records and a pile of CDs by a rap group called the Wu-Tang Clan. The past is the present and the present is the past.

  “What’s all this mess?”

  Abraham takes a serrated steak knife out of his pocket. “I’m trying to combine the sounds of the old with the sounds of the new,” he says, pointing between the two stacks. “If I could put ‘em together, I know I could have me some hits.”

  John G. nods. For some reason, this makes sense to him.

  He casts his eyes over at the mountain of cans in the corner. This is not quite hitting bottom. It’s a ledge. A place to rest a while. Que sera, sera.

  “So you taking medication, man?” Abraham asks.

  John G. shows him the amber Haldol bottle. About a dozen pills left.

  “Well, you wanna stay with me, you start taking them again,” says Abraham. “You hear? I don’t go for no lunaticking screamin’ homicide down in my tunnel.”

  “What if I don’t feel like taking them? What if I don’t see any point in taking them?”

  “There’s always a point. The scriptures say the head of every man is Christ, and the head of every woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God. You got to be aware of who you are, man. God put us here for a reason. You may not get better all at once. You may not even stop falling down. You just may not fall quite as far each time.”

  What the fuck, John G. thinks. It’s a place to hide out awhile. He’ll start taking the damn pills again.

  A train goes rushing by. The cans and bottles clatter. The dogs howl. Even Abraham looks perplexed, though it’s a sound he must hear several times a day.

  “There’s something else I gotta tell you,” says John G. “I’m gonna die.”

  “Dag, man.” Abraham pulls his lips back from his teeth. “How long was you planning to stay?”

  23

  How’s the leg?” asks Philip Cardi, watchingjake hobble across the roof.

  “It’s all right.” Jake touches his left knee gingerly. “Just feels like a charley horse. Fucking bike messengers. Guy plowed into me and started bitching he was gonna sue.”

  They are up on the roof of the town house. Philip takes a fifty-pound sash weight with a long rope tied around the end and drops it down the chimney. He waits until it hits something about fifteen feet down and then hauls it up again.

  “Yeah, you definitely got an obstruction,” he says, taking a break to wipe the sweat off his brow. “Something’s in the flue line.”

  He lets the weight drop once more.

  “You think you can just knock it out?” asks Jake.

  “I’m gonna try.” Philip lets the weight crash into the obstruction before he pulls the line again, like an urban fisherman.

  It’s nine-thirty on a Saturday morning. The streets below are empty and quiet, except for John G. trailing a blue plastic bag full of soda cans and talking loudly to himself.

  “We still haven’t gotten rid of him, huh?” Philip asks.

  “We still haven’t got rid of him.” Jake looks down over the ledge, clenching his fists in frustration. “
He disappeared for a couple of days after the accident, like he was lying low or something, making sure the cops weren’t going to arrest him.”

  “So why don’t they lock him up?”

  “He still hasn’t broken the law technically. Alex ran out into traffic and I ran out after him. All Gates did was threaten us verbally.”

  “Minchia. “A frown wrinkles Philip’s tanned face. “It’s the lunatics running the asylum.”

  “The thing is, I’m starting to think he knows the law better than I do. He keeps just coming right up to the line without actually crossing it.”

  “Sneaky fuck,” Philip mumbles, peering down into the chimney with a flashlight.

  “Yeah, well, pretty soon I’m going to be the one walking down the street talking to myself.”

  John G. stops in front of Jake’s house, matter-of-factly opens the gate to the front courtyard, and starts going through the garbage cans as if he’s the owner of this home.

  “Get the fuck away from there!” Jake calls down. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

  John G. squints up at him, smiles, and goes about the business of looking through all three aluminum cans. When he’s done, he deliberately knocks each one over with a loud crash. Then he bows like an arrogant Flemish fop and leaves the courtyard without closing the gate.

  “Did I tell you I’ve been missing some more tools from the van since the weekend?” Philip asks.

  “No.” Jake is still shaking with outrage. “What’d he take this time?”

  “A tack gun and a Black & Decker power saw. How many vials of crack you think you could buy with those?”

  John G. crosses the street and starts menacing an old lady with a walker. He blocks her on the left, blocks her on the right, and then starts walking directly behind her, like a malevolent suitor.

  “I swear sometimes I’d like to kill him,” Jake says, wincing as he puts weight on the bad leg.

  Philip moves up close behind him. “Forgive me, but have you thought about what I said before?”

  “What’s that?”

  “About you and me paying him a visit with a baseball bat.”

  Jake just looks at him. Everything seems very still. The Broadway traffic noises have faded away. Even the birds seem to have stopped singing. The only sounds are John G.’s distant cursing and the dull thud of Philip’s sash weight hitting the obstruction.

  “I’m a lawyer,” Jake says quietly.

  “I know you’re a lawyer.”

  “So I can’t go around whacking people just because I have a problem with them.”

  “Who said anything about whacking anybody? I’m just saying we should have a talk with the guy.”

  “A talk.” Jake turns his head and looks sideways at the sky.

  “Yeah.” Philip shrugs fuhgedabout it-style, shoulders back, palms up, as if all they’re talking about is a paint job. “I mean, he can’t be that crazy, he keeps coming right up to the line without crossing it. I say we go over to where he lives, try to talk some sense into him.” He wraps the rope around his knuckles. “You know where to find him, right?”

  “He’s out every night by seven-thirty, begging for crack money on Broadway. By ten o’clock, he’s hollering under our window.”

  “Minchia, if they could get somebody to run the subway that regular, it’d still be a beautiful city.”

  Jake decides to let that go.

  “Look, what are your options?” asks Philip, pulling up his sash weight and mopping his brow. “You already been to the police and you been to the doctors, and basically no one else gives a shit. What are you gonna do? Sit back and wait ‘til this miserable fuck kills someone?”

  “So you’re suggesting we go seek him out for the purpose of intimidating him?” Jake’s head wags from side to side.

  “Listen, if you don’t want to do it, you don’t wanna do it,” Philip says, putting a brotherly hand on Jake’s shoulder. “To me, it’s no big deal. I was over in Nam. I know how to handle myself. I’d bring my cousin Ronnie and we’d have a talk with the guy. Not busting heads. Just letting him know we don’t appreciate the way he’s acting. But if that’s too ... I don’t know, heavy, for you, then forgive me for saying it. I just know that where I come from, a man can’t go too far to protect his own family.”

  Jake stands quietly for a moment. He thinks about his wife staring out the window and his son standing by the door, hesitating before going out in the morning. He thinks about the long silences at the dinner table and the ways their lives have gotten smaller and smaller, hemmed in by apprehension. And he thinks about the pair of headlights coming right at him on Seventy-ninth Street.

  “Supposing I decide to go along with this, up to a point,“ he says to Philip. “What if I got a bad feeling along the way? Would you be willing to pull back?”

  “It’s your call, Counselor. I’m just here to help.” Philip gets ready to drop the weight again. “But let me tell you, you gotta draw the line somewhere. The guy stole my tools, not once but twice. If you’re not in with this, maybe me and Ronnie will handle it on our own.”

  The sash weight goes down and Jake hears something breaking in the chimney. He sees another six feet of rope get swallowed up. Then the weight stops again.

  “Ah shit,” says Philip.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “You got another obstruction.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “There’s only two ways you deal with a blockage.” Philip gives him a hard, serious look. “You try to destroy it from the top, and if that doesn’t work, you have to reline the whole chimney, chop into the walls on every floor of your house, and break the mantels over the fireplaces. And then you live with a terrible scar on every floor.”

  “What happens if you just leave it there and don’t do anything?”

  “The exhaust from your boiler backs up and you can slowly choke to death on the carbon monoxide.”

  24

  At quarter to eleven two nights later, a man with a Burmese mountain dog walks past the baseball diamond at the south end of Riverside Park. Sodium vapor lights cast an eerie glow over the batting cage. Philip Cardi and Jake stand in the shallow part of the outfield, staring at the hole in the fence they just saw John G. go through.

  After a couple of minutes, Philip’s cousin Ronnie, a swarthy Italian kid in enormous black shorts and a Snoop Doggy Dogg T-shirt, comes down the hill carrying a couple of aluminum baseball bats.

  “Were they in the trunk like I said?” Philip grabs one from him and takes a practice swing.

  “In the back.”

  “Hey, what do we need these for?” asks Jake nervously.

  “We need them so we don’t have to use them,” says Philip, resting the bat on his shoulder. “You understand what I’m saying? Where we’re going, we don’t want anybody to get the wrong idea about messing with us.”

  For the last couple of hours, they’ve been following John G. from a discreet distance. Stopping at a coffee shop while he rummaged through cans in front of Gristede’s. Watching from a corner bodega while he tried unsuccessfully to buy crack on Amsterdam. But now that he’s disappeared into the mouth of the tunnel, they’re hesitating.

  “So we’re really gonna do this, huh?” says Jake, looking back at the hole in the fence some fifty yards away.

  “Why, you got a problem with that?”

  Philip turns slowly. Jake can feel the potential for disappointment coming up like a wall between them.

  “I’m just starting to wonder if this is still such a good idea.”

  Ronnie windmills his bat like a charter plane’s propeller. Jake notices his black sneakers have blinking red lights in the back.

  “So where’s all this coming from?” Philip says. “We’re not breaking any law here.”

  “I know we’re not breaking the law. It’s just, you know, I have a bad feeling about it.” Jake looks away. It’s like he’s punking out of a street fight in front of Sweet Tooth’s.

 
“A bad feeling? What’re you, afraid of a railroad tunnel?” Philip takes another swing. “Forget about it. I was on one of the crews that helped clear out the tracks a few years ago. I know my way around there better than most of the bums. We had kids coming down there all the time, trying to ride in our geometry cars. We hadda shoot them with salt pellets, make ‘em go away.”

  “But what if something goes wrong? How would I explain it to my family?”

  Ronnie and Philip look at each other. Then Philip spits on the grass and hands Jake the bat he was swinging.

  “Here, hold this a minute.”

  He bends down to tie his shoe.

  “Jake,” he says, “you and me, we’re men of the world. Am I right?”

  “I guess.” Jake feels his palms and fingers sweating on the taped bat handle.

  “I mean, we’ve both been around—even if you weren’t in Vietnam. We see how things operate.”

  Philip stands up and Jake gives the bat back to him. “You could say that.”

  Philip smacks the ground with the bat. “So one thing we understand that women and children don’t understand—that most people don’t understand—is that nothing important in life is ever accomplished without risk. Okay? There’s always a chance somebody’s going to get hurt.”

  Jake stares hard at him, knowing it’s true and wondering how Philip can know him so well. For every significant achievement in his life, there’s been an underlying threat of emotional or physical violence: standing up to his father, destroying his best friend, Joe Loehman, during moot court in law school, regularly eviscerating witnesses on the stand. His guilty secret, which he’s never admitted to anyone, including his wife, is that success has always come at the end of a dagger pointed at someone else’s heart.

  And now he sees that in order to protect his family he has to be willing to do it again.

  “So all right already, where’s the opening to this goddamn tunnel?” he asks Philip. “I don’t want to stand here all night.”