And for a few seconds right now…and even more seconds and minutes and maybe hours in the times to come and all the times that these men have left to them to think their midnight thoughts, the four men watching the stairs and the stranger called Bernard Boyce Bennington think maybe they imagined it, the footsteps…that maybe the night and the hour and the stories have gotten the best of them…that maybe it was the wind blowing down the New York City streets the way it does, a lonesome wind looking for a little late-night company, blowing the door so it clanged a little, nothing more: because, hey…it was late for a woman to be walking down into a bar by herself wasn’t it?
But not all of them harbor such doubts.
Without so much as a word, B. B. Bennington takes the stairs out of the Land at the End of the Working Day, a low deep sad moan building in his throat as he takes the stairs two and even three at a time, putting distance between himself and the people still standing watching him…McCoy’s hands partly outstretched in a mixture of defense and reasoning, Jim Leafman holding onto Edgar Nornhoevan’s arm, and the old man with the black valise already starting for the stairs. Jack Fedogan watches it all in dumfounded amazement.
“Hey!” Edgar calls, sliding off of his stool, though nobody is sure whether Edgar’s calling out to Bennington or to the old man with the valise.
And then there’s the sound of a car horn, squealing brakes, raised voices…and the unmistakable dull crump! of something being hit out on the street.
Already, the old man is nearing the top of the stairs.
Edgar Nornhoevan is halfway up.
McCoy and Jim are on the first couple of steps, and Jack is stepping from behind the bar.
They arrive in that order out on the rainy windswept street.
It’s late at night on the corner of 23rd and Fifth, and there’s nobody to be seen. Nobody except a small man with what might be the beginnings of a beard or just stubble from laziness. He’s wearing a small peaked cap, a sleeveless cardigan sweater and his rolled-up shirt sleeves are already soaked. He’s standing by the side of a yellow cab, its motor still running, the driver’s door wide open and the strains of rap music drifting out into the night, savoring a freedom of sorts. The man is looking down at a bundle in the road, partly covered by his cab, and every few seconds he looks around, his arms spread in confusion…and just once in a while he glances across the street at the empty sidewalk which carries on along 23rd in the direction of Park Avenue South and, beyond that, Lexington which, of course, gives onto Gramercy Park.
“Not my fault,” the man is explaining to anyone who will listen. “Not my fault, man,” he says again, waving a hand whose fingers are kind of pointed and kind of curled in, waving it at the people who have suddenly gathered on the sidewalk. “Guy comes up out of-” The man looks around and sees the sign, The Land at the End of the Working Day, and his eyebrows flick up, just for a second or two, and everyone knows there’s a voice in the back of his head asking What the hell kind of a place is that, man? but immediately dismissing it because he’s a New Yorker and he’s seen many strange names on the buildings around town and many strange people coming out of them. “Guy comes up out of there, man, runnin’, and he gets to the curb and he looks around and then it’s like he sees somethin’ across the street and he just steps off, man…I mean-” He does the wave with his pointy-curly hand again and then smacks both hands together. “-and Blammo!, you know what I’m sayin’, man? I couldn’t do nothin’, I mean I couldn’t do nothin’ at all. Dude just steps out and Blammo! Shit,” he concludes, dragging the word out so that it’s two syllables, ‘shee’ and ‘itt’. He shakes his head and pushed his cap back. “I ain’t never hit nobody, man, and I been drivin’ cabs for eighteen years.” His voice is a little high-pitched and he sounds close to tears. He turns to the others and says, “Any of you guys a doctor or somethin’?” He looks down at the bundle again. “Shit,” he says, “you think maybe he’s dead?”
Jack steps across and leans over Bernard Boyce Bennington and looks into the man’s open eyes, watching the rain drops fall on the pupils without so much as a blink. There’s a thin trail of darkness at the corner of his mouth—his smiling mouth, Jack notices—which washes away every three or four seconds and then reappears, and there’s a wide stain of blackness on the man’s shirt front.
The cab driver has turned away and is now looking down 23rd. “You know, he says over his shoulder, “there was somebody across the street, you know what I’m sayin’ here? Some woman, looked like. She must’ve seen it wasn’t my fault, man but she just up and went. Where the hell did she go?”
The old man with the black valise steps forward and places a hand on the driver’s shoulder. “Where’d she go?”
“Huh?” The cab driver looks like someone’s just asked him an arcane algebraic formula known only to Harvard lawyers.
“The woman. You see what she looked like … where she went?”
The driver shrugs. “She looked like…I don’t know what she looked like, man,” he says. “She was…she was just a woman.” Then he shakes his head. “Maybe there wasn’t any-”
“You see where she went?”
“I think it was a woman, man,” the driver says looking around at the street and trying to piece it all together again because everything has happened just so fast. “Too dark and too wet to tell for sure. But seems to me she was standin’ right there, like she was makin’ to cross but standin’ well back from the curb.” He shakes his head again, trying to shake free the sight of a woman’s face—oh, such a sweet face—looking up at him, speaking silently to him about the loneliness of the streets and the night…telling him, deep down in his head, down where everything mattered and nothing mattered…telling him that she understood and that one day she would take that loneliness away from him…and that all he had to do was wait, wait and keep silent…because one day they would meet again. And she reached down to the man on the road way and lifted a brown paper package from his hand.
“She saw it, man. She saw it wasn’t my fault.”
From his crouched position next to the bundle in the road, Jack Fedogan says, “He’s dead.” Jack feels around the body, beneath the jacket, and then leans over to look beneath the cab. Then he stands up and looks out into the street, shielding his eyes.
“What is it?” McCoy Brewer asks.
Jack shrugs. “The cassette player. It’s not here.”
“It must be there,” McCoy says, crouching down.
The old man spins the driver around. “Which way?”
“What?”
“Which way did the woman go?”
“Hey, man, I didn’t see her go no way, man.”
“How far is Gramercy Park?” the old man asks.
“Huh? You want to go to Gramercy in this?”
“How far?”
The cabbie points down 23rd. “Couple blocks down to Lexin’ton and then one block down, man.”
The old man pulled his coat collar up and started across the street, his arms wrapped tightly around his battered valise and its cargo of release. He’s already across the street before the shouts but he doesn’t respond, just keeps on jogging along 23rd, passing beneath overhead lights, growing smaller and smaller, his footsteps growing fainter and fainter.
“I’d better call 911,” Jack says. He removes the apron he always wears and drapes it across Bernard Boyce Bennington’s face and chest. The rain immediately pastes it down and the first tell-tale signs of darkness start to show amidst the apron’s stripes. “You want to come inside?” he says to the cabbie, who is still staring down 23rd, staring and frowning, although there’s nobody to be seen any more.
“What’s he want in Gramercy Park?” the driver asks.
It’s Edgar Nornhoevan that answers. “He wants what we all want,” he says. “A little companionship to keep out the cold.”
The driver reaches into the car and switches on his hazard flashers, slams the door. Then he joins the others and, as one, they go
back down into the Land at the End of the Working Day, prolonging the dream and putting off that dreadful moment when they, like all of us, must be alone again.
Bernard Boyce Bennington & The American Dream
Copyright © Peter Crowther 2008 & 2011
The right of Peter Crowther to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Originally published in printed book form in The Land at the End of the Working Day by Humdrumming.co.uk in 2008. This electronic version is published in March 2011 by PS by arrangement with the author. All rights reserved by the author.
This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
PS Publishing Ltd
Grosvenor House, 1 New Road, Hornsea
HU18 1PG East Yorkshire / England
[email protected]
www.pspublishing.co.uk
Bernard Boyce Bennington & The American Dream Page 4
