2.
LUPI FOUND HIM—fetal heap dozing under the flashlight beam, snoring loudly, shivering—and was a little surprised at his own sense of enthusiasm at having been the one who solved the problem. If Madeleine had been correct in blaming Henry’s disappearance on Lupi in the first place, Lupi who had come to ruin the delicate balance of their lives, this would go some way toward setting things back again. Crouching down to pat Henry on the shoulder, he found himself angry at Krieger. A vigorous wind played in and around the silo. It was just after midnight and Hannah and Hammond were still out walking the streets searching for him. Hannah had gone downtown toward dusk, walking a crosstown pattern a block at a time from east to west and from west to east along the next street down. She had circled through Stuyvesant and Union to thread her way by sunset into Washington Square. Passing under the bronze regard of evergreen Giuseppe Garibaldi she made her way to a bench, sat down, footsore and nervous. Krieger had once sat here in the park with her many years ago (which bench was it from which they watched in sunlight people, birds, trees?). They’d sat there like lovers. She recalled how she’d reached over for his hand, where the fingers were spread across his knee, and how while he’d not taken hers into his own he didn’t move it away—he was caught up in explaining the patriot Garibaldi who in a long life of expeditions, exiles, invasions, victories, escapes, defeats, once arrived here in Manhattan, penniless, after being pursued through central Italy by the combined armies of France, Austria, Naples, and Spain, and having successfully fled them all, set himself up first as a chandler, a supplier of goods to ships that docked in the harbor, and then as a trading skipper who piled up a small fortune with which he returned to the homeland to buy his own island, the isle of Caprera, in 1854.
A wop, Krieger said, but a man with a grade-A American mind. “Hannah,” it was as if she could hear him now, that last time he had come to her. No threats in his desperation that week, no telephone messages—instead he had waited for her across the street in the Cuban-Chinese takeout, sipping cups of their tea, and when she’d come down he’d followed for a few blocks, as he later told her, building up the courage to call out her name. “Hannah, I’ve found him.”
“Peter?” having turned to see him, gaunter and paler than ever. “You look terrible.”
“Always the compliments,” but something was missing from the normal sharpness of the sarcasm. “Hannah, I found him for you.”
“Found who?”
“For christsakes, Nicky of course, Nicholas. Didn’t I tell you I’d find him? well, I have.”
“Franz told me you were somewhere in Central America.”
“Central America,” distracted. “You want to see him?” Krieger leaned against the brick of a building.
“I wish you hadn’t bothered,” she said, a little unconvincingly. “I’m happy the way things are. I don’t want to go rooting all of that up again.”
Krieger pushed himself away from the brick, looked at his palms which were stained with soot, clapped them together, turned and said, “Did I get that on my suit? never mind, I’ll see you.”
Hannah stopped him; he looked pathetic, shoulders hunched down, arms hanging at his sides. “Where are you staying? I’ve got to think. Maybe I should see him. But, you’re not okay, are you.”
“Krieger’s fine, little defeated, little homeless, little out of work, legal or peripheral, but fine.”
“Can’t you stay with Franz?”
“That bridge is burned.”
The week which followed was calamitous insofar as it was the romance Hannah had never allowed herself to imagine with Krieger. Her femininity (womanly more than ladylike; girlish as a rough cub) was never greater than during the hours they spent in the double bed in the back, the one in which Olid now lay sipping quinine. Hannah knew she was neglecting the ranch, and intuited that Maddie was uncomfortable about this visitor lingering so close to their secret lives, but she wasn’t able to get herself to bring it up either with Krieger or her friend.
About Nicholas she found herself irresolute. That Krieger had seen him seemed enough to her. She was both father and mother to this invented family, and to go back now was impossible. Why had he bothered? Krieger. He never loved anybody, certainly not Hannah, did he? That was another time Hannah asked Krieger about his own parents, his childhood, and Krieger’s reply was that he simply couldn’t remember ever being young, ever having a childhood, there was something about an aunt, a spinet piano which he’d taken lessons on, so far out of tune that even he who ended up having no ear for music could hear that any chord struck on it sounded off—childhood, he offered, not so horrible, he said, blank slate, maybe a few trinkets of memory (“costume jewelry covered in cobwebs”) but nothing necessarily based on anything further from reach than the merely plausible. Now can we change the subject? and, anyway, you already tried that on me way back when, the first day we ever met.
“It’s not such a horrible thing to have parents, a family.”
“You’ve never given birth, all that ooze, that slime, and out comes this, this thing.”
“Since when do you know about it?”
“I’ll be right back,” Krieger’d said, even kissed her on the side of her head, and walked toward the telephone stands in front of the library. She watched him but suppressed the impulse to follow. She’d noticed he had begun making calls again. He arrived at the stands, lifted the receiver and cradled it on his shoulder as he dialed; Hannah slumped back into the curve of the bench and gazed at the people walking by. When she looked again toward the library he was, of course, gone. That was the last time she had seen him, the last time, too, she had slept with him, or anyone.
She rubbed her hands now over her face as if to wipe Krieger away. How could she have not foreseen that contingency, and this: that Henry might someday end up on the streets—Henry who was innocent as (what? hardly a kitten?) a stable cat, but who knew too much about the workings of the ranch to make it very safe for him to leave. And poor Maddie crying; it was clear Henry could not care for himself out here alone.
She thought of the possibility he had been taken in by Krieger, and winced. If only she had been kinder to Krieger? She placed her fist, closed tight, slowly down on her thigh.
“Running a small cattle ranch in the heart of Chelsea violates,” as Krieger had been careful to point out on the telephone when he had first made arrangements for Lupi and Olid to stay with her, “New York City Health Code, Title IV Environmental Sanitation, Article 161.09 Permits to Keep Certain Animals, sections (d) and (f), to wit: ‘Except on premises abutting upon slaughterhouse no person shall yard horses or keep or yard cattle, swine, sheep or goats without a permit issued by the Commissioner’ and ‘No person shall keep a cow for the purpose of selling milk without a permit issued by the …’”
There was a time when Hannah could have given it up, the pasture, cattle, chickens, the roof garden, silo. She hadn’t exiled herself from the Nebraska flatlands only to return from her Manhattan, defeated by this inheritance, to go back to Babylon, its tall empty sky, its tornadoes and dust, its endless yellow dirt, its memories, apparitions, the stench of the junkyard behind the barn heaped high with generations of objects that reverberated each with the dissolution of the family. There was no returning. It was as if Babylon had been an island, a penal colony where only her nightmares resided, and now was cut free of its mooring to drift away into the sun’s furnace.
It was gone; Hannah’s bank account was converted from several hundred to over two million. A few thousand acres outside Red Cloud became a quarter block on the West Side. All conditions of the will were satisfied, every object her uncle had owned down to spoon and suspender, flyhook and button box, chicken and cow … all were shipped in, each with its identification number painted, branded, carved by uncle himself to check off against the master inventory.
She saw a quarter lying dull on the pavement not ten feet from where she was sitting. Someone stepped on it, walking through the park. Fr
anz Wrynn, she thought. She should call him, tell him what fruits had come of their champagne-dizzy day so long ago, up there in his own invented world above the waters in the reservoir and treetops of the park. She had always meant to, after all, had always wanted to pose the question: What had Krieger said? or worse yet, What had he been willing to do, that would somehow coax from Franz her new identity in the world—and where it was she had assumed it? She could almost hear his friendly yawn, the decorous optimism which would ascend through the answer as he figured out some way the situation could be finessed to the abiding happiness of all. He would say he had nothing to do with it. He would deny Krieger had spoken with him at all. More disquieting than the obfuscation, however, would be the chance that Franz would tell the truth—she adored him too much to want to hear it.
“Manhattan,” Krieger had gone on, “city of hills where the Injuns came in summer, from their colonies up the Hudson, came by quaint barques, to vacation, to fish and trap and fuck, as colonies of nudists—Manhattan: verdant, often precipitous, as from Beekman’s or Peck’s Hill, in the neighborhood of Pearl and Ferry streets, or Nassau Street down to Maiden Lane. Water flowed between these hills. Canal Street gratified Dutch recollections of home, left behind across the Atlantic. Broad Street was a tidal inlet. Near Peck’s Slip existed a river which at high tide ran up in union with the Collect (Kolck) and joined with Lispenard’s swamp on the other side, to produce a waterway that ran clear across the city. The high grounds along either side of Pearl Street sometimes had to be crossed by ferry boats, farms dotted the island, proliferated, like the goddamn Injuns, just faster, as settlers pushed back the tribes. Sophistication festered, then reigned. By 1641: a cattle fair was established, held annually on the fifteenth of October; prize steers were showed by proud, competitive Dutch farmers, under the shortening sun and leaf-yellow breezes. The rich land outside the bounds of the town walls (Wall Street looming a century away) was designated public grazing grounds for cows, sheep, swine. Governor Stuyvesant himself bought the ‘Bouwerie’ (translates ‘farm’) in 1631 and procured himself, for the sum of sixty-four hundred guilders, besides the land, a dwelling house, barn, reek lands, six cows, two horses, and two young blacks. His cattle climbed around the hilly island, drank from inlets and the East River bless them, where they wandered as the windmill whirred over the broad way, the town kine, sheep, swine, and stood in the staved activity of shadows, indifferent to youths that watched by their gills of brandy or maids by their quarts of cider. Stuyvesant’s descendants were made wealthy by the sale of these farmlands and there now in overcoats on the hottest day of July, shoeless on the coldest snowy day of January, is a dude doing windshields at the red light at Houston and Bowery who’s gonna finish up, clean as piss, then off! boom—eat shit mo-fo.”
Pin oaks, yellow locust, ash, plane, the ghosts of American elms. Under their darkening canopies the pushers, roller skaters, hotdog vendors, and students sat, stoned, listening, waiting for something to take place, anything to happen. Nothing happened. Except the break dancers twirled like lunatic windmills—paying homage to Dutch forebears—on plates of cardboard to the music belting from an enormous silver badbox …
“I’m the Duke of Rap
And I’m on fire
Baby look at me
I’m your heart’s desire
The Duke of Rap
Your thang’s desire
I won’t stop rappin
Till I expire …”
(The cardboard flat, fashioned from a large carton with Hi-Dri Paper Towels printed over its smooth brown surfaces, would be appropriated later in the night by an ingenious wanderer, who used it to construct a kind of lean-to home against the side of the restrooms at the south edge of the park.)
“The Duke of Rap says
You My Slave,
Ya gotta spoil me
Till my dyin day
Gotta do what I say
Love what I do,
You gotta spoil me
Cause I’m royaltee
… If ya stick to me
You’ll stick like glue
It’s the natural thang
For us to do
So come on baby
Doncha hollar doncha kick
When the Duke of Rap
Pulls out his lickin stick …”
The soccer game disbanded after the fist fight broke out. A pair of mounted cops continued indifferently to chat as the fight drew a small crowd. At the top of the circle blue-sleeved arms reached out the window of a patrol car to frisk a man with a heavy Rastafarian helmet of hair. Hands turned their suspect around and palmed skinny torso, bottom, thighs inside and out before giving a slap on the rear to send him stumbling on his way. The crowd was dispersed of its own lack of interest, was reabsorbed into a larger throng whose legions were changing guard from the daytime to the nighttime corps.
Oak, plane, ash, and locust. Hannah got up again and strolled around the wide central fountain. Krieger’s voice went on.
Washington Square had once been a field, too. The Minto farm once bordered this field along its northern edge. Certain trees dated back to the time when tobacco and corn crops were sown close by, tended by slaves, fed by springs. Through the first quarter of the last century this had been the city’s potter’s field and, conveniently, its hanging ground as well. This old elm had served as the gallows, plausibly. Or that plane tree, its heavy branch extended over the sidewalk. Execution day brought out hordes to gawk as the convicted was stood up on a platform, neck in noose, blindfolded, quaking, before his footing was kicked out from under and he dropped into a bob. A finch preened its wing there now.
How had it gotten so late? Out of the square, through Waverly to Sixth, she ambled back toward the ranch, still searching faces in the streets. Her feet hurt, she needed coffee. She sat alone in a short-order Greek diner several blocks shy of the loft, and drank black coffee until her vision began to redouble images that soon became parallax. The pocket of her wallet was pulled back to show her she had seventy dollars to run with.
When Lupi announced, rather more full of the glory of accomplishment than the situation prescribed, “I found him, up in that tower,” relief passed over Hannah, the parallactic world receded, and she smiled a wide tired smile that in turn made Lupi smile reflexively, in sympathy both with her and consequently with himself.
“The silo? but we already looked up there.”
“I know.”
“Well, where in the, where was he all this time?”
“I think he went away down there, but he came back.”
Hannah strained over her boots, which resisted coming off.
“Where’s he now? can you help me with these?”
“With his woman.”
“He’s all right, then.”
“Not very all right.”
The boot came off, Hannah falling backwards. “My feet they’re so swollen, I guess I’d better go down and see him—”
“I don’t think there is much to do for him.”
The other boot came off.
“What about Hammond?”
“Mr. Hammond’s down with the animals.”
“When’d he get back?”
“Hour, no two hours ago, Mr. Hammond was pretty tired, very tired. And mad, too, very mad. He came back, no luck. I thought I’d take another look up here and there he was. I found some things. These, he tried to hide them.”
Hannah went outside, mounted the stairs to the landing in the silo. She easily picked her way under the twinkling, reflecting lights of the city, and in any case already knew about Henry’s loose brick. When Madeleine had come up to the bunker that afternoon searching for Henry, this was the first place Hannah had come to look. Behind the loose brick Henry kept a not-so-secret menagerie of sacred possessions—mostly candy bars, gum, cookies. Hannah peered into the rectangular chink but it was too dark to see. She felt around its depths with her free hand. It was empty. She replaced the spoon and syringe and put the brick back in i
ts place.
Downstairs, she opened the doors on the pasture. “Ham?”
She could hear the asthmatic breathing of the cattle as they slept in a group, huddled under the deep glow of the heat lamps. Hammond was snoring in his canvas director’s chair, his Stetson fuchsia above his tilted head.
“Good boy,” she whispered to the dog who too had been asleep but was vigilant to any unexpected intrusion in the pasture. He made a pleasant little squeal as he stretched beside Hammond’s chair and meandered, tail wagging widely, over to Hannah. Hannah patted him on the head. The smell of manure pervaded the loft; no one had mucked out that afternoon. Hannah flicked a switch on the wall by the door. The low hum produced at the far end of the pasture came from industrial ceiling fans that began to draw air out of the space, thus to deposit it in an atmosphere where it was simultaneously unique and indistinguishable.
Stetson rose, was removed by a hand; a cough came from beneath.
“Stinks.”
“It does. That’s no good.”
“What’re you going to do, whole afternoon lost looking for that junkie.”
“He’s not a junkie.”
“Still and all,” Hammond said.
“Don’t worry about it, it’s my problem, not yours.”
“You know what shape that spic found him in, though.”
“Lupi’s an Italian.”
“Whatever he is, him and the old fart.”
Come Sunday Page 38
