A good guess. After she left her father, Lucy walked north along Eleventh Avenue, the unfashionable western edge of the Chelsea district. For now, the residents were still largely Puerto Rican, the landlords were too somnolent to smash and condify everything, the bodegas were still bodegas rather than galleries, and the restaurants served comidas croillas and not Mediterranean. There were still small remnants here of the New York that was, a fur warehouse, a few small factories, the big rail yards north of Twentieth. These tended to block the yuppie tide, as did the public housing projects and the two mental-health outpatient centers. Lucy should have been heading back to the Upper East Side, where her school was, to make her three- and four-o'clock classes, but she had already decided to cut them. It was something she did more often than formerly. It was a very good school, but it bored her. Her classmates bored her even more, rich girls, lunching on ice cubes to stay razor-thin, talking about clothes and boys.
She had promised to work a shift at the soup kitchen run by Holy Redeemer at Twentieth-ninth and Ninth, but that was not until five, and before she went there she wanted to check on some people who lived in the neighborhood of the rail yards.
The wind was blowing south, driving cold rain with it, and she walked with her head down and the hood of her cloak drawn up over her beret and clutched tight. She was therefore nearly upon the slow-moving, dark figure before she was aware of her, an oversize mobile fireplug, the familiar shape of people who in cold weather habitually wear every piece of clothing they own. It was a woman, pushing a rusting grocery cart piled with the usual plastic bags. She wore a wool cap, with a cheap, flowered, plastic rain kerchief over that and a set of men's overcoats, and a poncho made of a tan garbage bag. Lucy said, "Hey, Elmira."
The woman looked at her suspiciously, as if surprised to hear her name on human lips. Her face was cinnamon-colored and ashy with the chill. She blinked away raindrops, saw who it was, grunted, and said, "Gimme a cigarette."
Lucy, who did not smoke, always carried cigarettes. She offered a Marlboro. The woman took it, stuck it in her nearly toothless mouth, waited for a light like a duchess. Lucy gave her one with a Bic.
Lucy asked, "Are you going up to Holy Redeemer?"
"No, I'm gon' eat in peace today. I got me bread and SPAM. And cheese. I got me a nice piece of cheese today."
"You should get some warm food on a day like today, though. Hot coffee. We're making vegetable soup and biscuits. And salad. And pie."
"What kind of pie?" Suspicious. Greedy.
"I think apple."
The woman pushed her cart along for half a block, puffing the cigarette hard and mumbling to herself. "I might do it. Or I might not."
Lucy doubted Elmira would come. Some of them would not emerge from the isolation they had imposed on themselves for dinner at Le Cirque, much less for a church-kitchen meal. From things others had told her, Lucy knew that Elmira was ashamed of her missing teeth. And she was too disorganized to set up and keep the free dental-clinic appointments she would need to get them fixed. Elmira was low-end homeless, although not the lowest, not by a long way.
"Well, I'll see you, Elmira. Take care." The woman didn't answer. Lucy stretched into her usual aggressive urban pace and quickly left the shuffling woman behind. At Thirtieth Street, Lucy turned west toward the yards. It was a scruffy area: warehouses, garages, anonymous, blankfaced industrial structures, five-story apartments built for workers back when this was the south end of the great freight-handling district of the metropolis. It was one of the last neighborhoods in Manhattan still connected with the physical movement of material things, another world from the real New York, the one that grew rich beyond all imagination off the fabrication of images and the manipulation of data.
Lucy came to a rusted chain-link fence with one end peeled back from its support. She slid through and descended a rough, weedy embankment to a concrete apron overlooking the sunken Metro Transit Authority-Long Island Railroad yards. Graffiti covered every vertical service, some of it elaborately wrought, and with a certain barbaric beauty, a museum of the doomed. There in the shadow of a high, buttressed, gang-tagged retaining wall, she found what she was looking for.
It was a kind of village. The dwellings were constructed with varying degrees of art and skill out of large corrugated cartons, fiberglass, scrap lumber, sheet metal, and the ubiquitous black plastic. There were a dozen or so of these structures, each occupying one of the bays marked off by the tapering buttresses of the wall. At either end of this fancy district (walls, roofs), there were humbler dwellings, sometimes only a plastic tarp covering a shopping cart, or a crude tent. The social center of the village was a fire flaring in an oil drum, silhouetting half a dozen lumpy figures clustered around it. Her foot struck a pebble, making a small sound, and the group stopped its buzz of conversation. Two dogs yelped and growled. Every face turned to look at her, wariness showing in each one. When they saw who it was, they visibly relaxed.
A tall, bearded black man wearing a greasy olive-drab mechanic's jumpsuit hailed, "Hey, Lucy. My girl! What you got for us today? Chicken?"
"Vegetable soup, bread, salad, and pie."
"Pie? Pie is good," said the tall man, who was called Real Ali. "Hey, Benz, you going to get some of that pie?"
"I might," said the woman thus addressed, a large, heavily swaddled woman with a pitted Hispanic complexion. "Lila Sue likes pie. Is there any meat in that soup?"
Lucy said, "No, no meat, but we got a bunch of bones cooking in with it. How's Lila Sue today?"
Mercedes Ortiz, who was never called anything but Benz, stroked the head of the creature leaning comfortably against her padded bosom. Lila Sue was looking at the fire with pleasure, her large, dark eyes reflecting the sparks. She was a pretty girl, as far as features went, elfin, yellowy tan, with a sharply pointed chin and a straight little nose. Lucy thought she was probably in her late teens, although it was hard to tell. No one knew where Benz had picked her up, but they were inseparable.
Another man, dark, thin, spoke up. "Lucy, what we want is a little room service around here. How come you don't deliver, is what I want to know. I'm too beat, to use my feet, to go and eat."
Real Ali said, "Man, you think you still in Vegas."
The other man became animated and started jumping around the fire, shadowboxing. "Yeah, Vegas, that's where I beat Ron Lyle, eleven rounds. Pow! Ka-pow! Okay, first round, he goes, left, left, right to the body. It don't hurt me none, I'm feeling him out. Pow! Left jab… pow!"
"Oh, shut the fuck up, Ali!" This from a man standing opposite, wearing a Raiders cap over dreadlocks and a greasy blue parka with stuffing oozing out of it. He had the twitchy moves and fuzzy features of a crankhead. The shadowboxer bounced away from the fire barrel and started dancing around, twirling his fists artistically. "Hey, let's go. You want to go with the greatest? Come on!"
Real Ali walked over and put a big arm over Fake Ali's shoulders. "Take it easy, champ. It's not worth it. Doug ain't in your class."
"Fuckin' nutcase," said Doug Drug under his breath. "Jesus, I got a fuckin' headache about to take my skull off. You got any aspirin there, Lucy?"
Lucy handed him a flat tin of Bayer. He popped it open and tossed half a dozen into his mouth and swallowed them dry. He said, "Think I'll go by Redeemer and get some of that pie."
"Pie," said Lila Sue. "A pie was walking down the street and saw an elephant a flying elephant with silver wings and he said hello Mr. Elephant I want to go to pie heaven will you take me and the elephant says yes I will and then they flew up high high high high high up on top of the clouds and then the elephant said here we are in heaven but first I must have a bite of you, no no said the pie I must have a bite of you because I am a vampire pie-"
"Christ, can't you shut that bitch up!" yelled Doug. "Benz!"
"Shut up yourself, asshole. She ain't doing you no harm. She just telling a story."
"-And all the other vampire pies came out of vampire heaven," Lila Sue continued,
"and bit on the elephant and the elephant said oh oh I am all eaten I will change into an angel so he did and the angels came and changed all the vampire pies into flowers but flowers that had wheels and televisions and they rode down the hill until they weren't in heaven anymore and they said let's look for the mother pie…"
Doug Drug pulled a filthy rag out of the pocket of his jacket. "Hey, stick this in her mouth, Benz."
"Get fucked," said Benz.
Real Ali said, "Go eat, Doug, or go score one. Your fuckin' personality is deteriorating."
Doug looked across the fire at Desmondo and Ralphie, the two other men in the group, but saw no rush of support. He said, "You going over?"
"Yeah, we'll go over," said Desmondo, and Ralphie nodded in agreement. "I think I heard this story before, anyway." A chuckle of acknowledgment floated around the fire barrel. Every story was different, and every one had the same pointless eloquence. Lucy reflected that of all the people in the little group, Lila Sue and she probably had the most in common, both of them having strange brains. Lila Sue could tell stories by the hour, that being the only part of her intellect that had any real function. She could not dress herself or go a block without getting lost or stepping into traffic and would walk away cheerfully with anyone.
The three men departed, and Lucy moved around the fire to get closer to Real Ali. Lila Sue's story had sunk to a low warble, like a TV on in a distant room. He grinned at her and said, "You looking for your boyfriend?"
She felt her face heat. "He's not my boyfriend."
"You wish he was, though."
"I do not!"
"Uh-huh. Well, he ain't been by today. You probably meet up with him up at the church, cut up some vegetables together."
Lucy ignored this. "How's Canman?"
"Hell, honey, I don't know. He's acting like a spooked cat. He keeps talking about Joe Romero."
"Was he friends with him?"
"Oh, he just knew him from around, you know, from the streets. Joe helped him haul stuff once in a while. He thinks the slasher's after him, gonna do him like he did Joe. He's talking about moving out of the paper house."
"You mean to a shelter?"
Real Ali laughed. "Hell, no. The Canman, he rather get his throat cut than go in a damn shelter. Canman don't like rules and regulations. I'm not particularly fond of them myself, if you want to know. Nah, he was talking about the tunnels."
"I should go talk to him. Is everyone else afraid, too?"
"Not particularly. I figure we're pretty safe here, all of us being together. Someone's up most of the time, and we got the dogs. No, the slasher, he's going to take out people sleeping alone, like Joe, and the guy he did before Christmas, that Chaney character, over by the convention center. Anyway, life on the mean streets." Real Ali laughed. "You ain't afraid of no slasher, are you, Ali?"
Fake Ali did a little shuffle and said, "The greatest ain't afraid of no man or beast."
"I'm going to see him now," said Lucy, and walked down the cracked concrete to a low black structure snuggled into one of the bays. It was made almost entirely of baled newspapers covered with tar and plastic. Its roof was a cone of scrap lumber and lath, tied together tepee fashion, and covered with a wrapping of tar paper, plastic, and foil sheeting from insulation. Smoke emerged from a tin pipe above. It had two windows covered with translucent plastic sheeting and a low door, made of packing-crate slats, plastic, and duct tape. A canvas laundry cart was parked next to it, like a Toyota at a suburban ranch house. Lucy knocked on the door.
"Who?" said a voice after a considerable pause. A dog barked sharply, twice.
"Lucy."
"What?"
"I want to talk. Can I come in?"
Nothing. Lucy pulled back the door and entered. A small yellow mutt trotted up to her, sniffed her, and hopped back up to his master's side. The man was sitting cross-legged on the edge of a bed made out of baled newspaper, with a layer of orange finger-foam on top. A thin white man in his mid-thirties, he had a patchy tan beard and long, unwashed hair. He wore a mixture of military surplus and Vincent de Paul throwouts: OD fatigue pants, a flannel shirt, a gray wool sweater with ragged elbows, Adidas patched with duct tape. It was warm in the room, musty with the smell of dog, unwashed man, wood smoke, wet newspaper, cigarettes, and over all, the sweetish stink of the residues in the hundreds of aluminum cans, which, in bags and cartons, occupied half the volume of the dwelling. Hanging from the low ceiling and stuck in corners were hundreds of beautifully crafted ornaments made from tin cans-flowers, angels, animals, human figures. They jingled faintly in the slow air currents. Tools were lying neatly on a low brick-and-board table, with coils of wire and, more ominously, a large can of Hercules smokeless powder. Canman made booby traps to protect his gear from thieves. No one went into the paper house when Canman was gone from it.
The place was heated by a small stove made out of a washing-machine drum. It had a hood and pipes of scrap sheet metal and was swathed in pink fiberglass insulation and duct tape where it ran through the tepee roof, and a little door cut out of a car door, incorporating a single hinge. Like everything made by Canman, it was simple, elegant, perfectly functional. Light came from fat plumber's candles stuck in elaborate tin-can candlesticks, posed in niches carved into the paper walls. Lucy sat down on the floor, which was thick with industrial-carpet remnants.
"Make yourself at home, why don't you," said the man without looking at her. He was working with a long knife and a pair of pliers on a device he held in his lap.
"What are you doing?" she asked to break the silence.
"What does it look like?"
"You're fixing your can crusher."
"Yeah, and if you knew that, why did you ask?"
"I was making conversation. I was being social."
The man snipped off a piece of wire and glared at her. He mugged looking around the room. "Uh, man's living in a place like this, what makes you think he wants to bullshit with people? Go home!"
"I'm concerned about you."
"Not my problem. Go away!"
"You're feeling better, I guess."
The man picked up his knife and pointed it at her. "Hey, look. I was flat on my back last month, you brought me juice and aspirin, you walked Maggie. I didn't ask you to, and it doesn't mean you own a piece of me either. I don't need your soup. You want for the aspirin and the juice? Take some cans. You want money. Here!" He pulled a few greasy bills out of a pocket and flung them at her. The dog growled.
She did not touch them. "Real Ali says you're running scared."
"He does, huh? Real Ali should mind his own fucking business. This is why I got to fucking get out of this slum. I came here, built my place, it was nice and peaceful, everybody was living down at the station, fucking beggars. Now it's wall-to-wall crazy people. It's like Times fucking Square here."
"It seems a shame to leave here now you've got it fixed up so nice."
"See, that's what you don't understand. I don't need this. I got a knife, a pliers, a snips. I got a hand-baler and a can crusher and my wagon. I could put a place like this together in two days, if I got the paper and the plastic. The stove takes down, but I got a better idea for one, make it out of a muffler and exhaust pipes. A smaller place, someplace quiet, just big enough for one. Build it like an igloo. Get away from these crazies."
"Then why don't you hang out with sane people, have a real life? You're smart. You read." She gestured to a double row of paperbacks sitting in a milk crate. "You can make things, fix things. You're a terrific artist. You could get those can sculptures in a gallery…"
"Sane people? Where? Wall Street? The government? Corporations? You think those people are sane? They're nuttier than Fake Ali out there. There's no fucking difference between what you hear on the news and what Lila Sue spits out. You think that's an improvement, being a slave to crazy people, wrecking the planet, turning everything into cash to buy shit they throw away? Don't even know they're crazy. Which is as crazy as you can ge
t. You want me to hang with sane people? Find me three. Two."
"I'm sane."
"Ho! You believe angels talk to you. Jesus rose from the dead."
"What do you believe in, John?" she asked mildly.
"Me? This!" He held up his knife. It was a military knife of some kind, shiny and pointed. "I believe this is a knife." He scratched the mutt behind her ear. "I believe this is a dog. I believe life is a pile of shit and the world would be a better place if more people were dead. Especially those pathetic loonies and hypes you hang out with."
He put the can crusher down on the floor and began fumbling through his pockets, his face twitching, cursing under his breath. A baggie of pale tan pills appeared. He grinned and held it out to the girl. "Join me?"
"Maybe later."
A snort, and he ate two of the Percodans, swallowing them dry. "Maybe later," he said derisively. "You know if Jesus was hanging around nowadays, he'd be into everything, hanging around with the lowlife. I thought you were trying to be like him."
"I doubt Jesus would be a doper, John. He was always casting out unclean spirits."
"Yeah? Well, I don't have any of them." He lay back down on his bed and flung an arm across his eyes.
"Actually, you do," she said, but in a low voice. She stood up and retrieved a felt pen from her bag. She wrote her name and phone number on the newspaper wall. "If you're going to leave here, I wish you'd tell Real Ali where you're going. And I left you my number. Call me if you need anything."
"I need you to get lost."
4
The frog person was explaining Rule 174 of The Securities Act, and Marlene was drawing tiny linked roses on her yellow pad, as she had done when bored, starting with her days at Holy Family parochial school in Ozone Park, Queens, and continuing through Sacred Heart, Smith, Yale Law, and the district attorney's office. Had she kept all of them, she could have run a garland from New York to San Diego, for she was often bored, in the way good soldiers are bored between battles. Rule 174 governed the quiet-period phase of the complex train of events that places a private company's stock before the public, the so-called initial public offering, the IPO, which, Marlene believed, is what the nineties had instead of really good rock and roll.
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