“Which way?” he asked.
ON THE WAY over the bridge I began the interrogation.
“Have you ever heard that Cyril was violent or threatening toward Chrystal?” I asked.
“Naw, man. But, you know, I never had much to do with him. Only time we evah really spoke was at the weddin’, an’ even then it was like he wasn’t even talkin’ to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was just a whole bunch’a words. He talked but didn’t listen, then moved on like I didn’t make no difference at all.”
“So you didn’t like him?”
“I’m not married to the mothahfuckah,” he said, raising his voice.
The driver looked up nervously into the rearview mirror.
The bark got Tally coughing again.
“Was Shawna close to him?” I asked after he got his lungs under control.
“Shawna don’t care ’bout nobody, man. That’s why I wondered why she send you to me.”
This brotherly revelation renewed my speculations about Shawna’s motives.
“She told me she cared,” I said. “She gave me the money for your bond.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I bet.”
There was something behind this private wager but it would take longer than a taxi ride to tease it out.
WE MADE IT to Brooklyn and Tally guided our reluctant driver through a labyrinthine journey to a house in a run-down neighborhood.
When we got out I gave the driver a fifty and said, “Keep the change.”
“Fuck you, nigger,” he said to me before hitting the gas.
I grinned, watching the yellow cab fishtail down the street. The man was Eastern European and unschooled in the ways of American racism. He used that word to hurt me and express his fear and resentment. But in truth it was I who had oppressed him.
There is no balance between men unless everything around them is even. My father used to say those words to me. On that ramshackle street in Brooklyn I began to understand their meaning.
“Come on, Mr. McGill,” Tally said at my back.
He was walking down a lane between two six-story apartment buildings. I followed until we got to a little cove where a small tarpaper dwelling was nestled like a dying rat.
“Hey, asshole!” a voice called.
I glanced to my left and saw two good-sized young black men moving toward us. They were both wearing black leather jackets and blue jeans—uniforms of the street. Tally took a step back.
“So here’s the rub,” I said out loud.
“What you say, mothahfuckah?” the fatter of the two thugs said.
I grinned broadly.
14
OVERCONFIDENCE KILLED THE CAT, dog, pouncing lion, and the entire global alliance of the Axis powers. That is to say, when two men who have the strength to stand upright get in your face you have to act fast and with certainty.
I took a step toward them, holding out my right hand as if I expected somebody to shake it. The gesture was meant to say that we were all brothers there in the rat’s-nest cove behind the dirty brick buildings. The smaller of the two men was five inches taller and forty pounds heavier than I. That put him well over two hundred pounds. I could see that it wasn’t all fat. He tried to stiff-arm me when I got close enough. I lowered down into a squat and hit him with a left hook to the gut that made him whimper. Instantly, with my right hand, now a fist, I slammed the jaw of Shorty’s jumbo partner. He would have hit the ground if I hadn’t followed up with six or seven punches that both debilitated him and kept him standing upright. Then I turned back to the whimperer and threw a long right hand.
That was a mistake.
Sometimes I forget that you are not compelled to follow the rules of boxing when in the street. The second man stood back and pushed against my shoulders. Already off balance, I fell to the ground. Even though he was probably suffering from a broken rib or two, the guy tried to kick me in the head. I rolled onto my left shoulder, grabbed his ankle, and yanked. Falling, he cried out again. I climbed up his prone body, throwing punches at anything flesh. I connected with half a dozen punches and got to my feet just in time to duck under a fist aimed at my head by Jumbo. The fact that he was still conscious meant that he would have made a good specimen for the sweet science. But he was raw, untrained.
We traded blows for all of ninety seconds, me landing and him not. When it was over he’d lost a few teeth, broken his right hand against a brick wall, and had blood streaming from three cracks in his face.
I stood back and gestured at the two men; the larger one was down on one knee and Shorty was lying on his side, wondering how to breathe right.
The gesture said that if they wanted more I had it for them.
Working together, they managed to get to their feet and stumble away.
To my surprise Tally had not fled. He hadn’t helped in the fight, but he was standing in front of the shack with a fist-sized rock in either hand.
“You were waiting for me to soften them up?” I asked the frightened young man.
Tremors traveled from his shoulders down into his hands. He showed his teeth in a rictus that might have been anything from a laugh to the beginnings of a heart attack.
“Shall we go inside?” I said.
He looked back the way his attackers had gone.
“They’ll need medical help before coming back here,” I said. “You think they might send some friends?”
He shook his head and then gazed at me with those unhealthy orbs.
Dropping the stones, he said, “You know how to fight.”
“Comes in handy in back alleys and jail pens.”
Tally pulled a key from his pocket and turned toward the entrance. He went through the rough-hewn door into a dwelling that was most likely a temporary workman’s shed when it was first thrown up.
It was a medium-sized room with no windows, a cot against one wall, and a huge plank table against another. There were clothes on the floor and comic books strewn around. Taped and tacked up on the walls were blue-lined sheets of notebook paper that had drawings of faces on them. Lots of native talent with little follow-through. The doodlings of a talented but hyperactive mind that the teachers never got through to—if they ever tried.
There was no bathroom that I could see but he had a chrome sink filled with dirty dishes. This was a poor, uneducated man’s home, replete with the earmarks of poverty in the twenty-first century. There was a brand-new laptop computer and an Xbox on the desk amid the empty pizza cartons, Avengers comic books, and reams of lined paper, either scrawled upon or waiting their turn.
“Nice computer,” I said.
“Chrystal gave me that stuff.”
“That was nice of her.”
“She just wants me to stay away, so she gives me stuff not to feel guilty.”
“Who were those guys?” I asked.
“Big Boy an’ Two Dog,” he said. He pulled out a metal-and-vinyl folding chair from a corner and set it out for me.
He plopped down on the cot and said, “They give me some weed to sell but the cops busted me and took what I had left and all my money. But, you know, them two expect to get paid, or kick somebody ass.”
I had yet to sit down. I was still wondering what I could hope to get out of this hopeless brother.
The shack smelled of Tally, that hint of rot that you might find in the wing of a hospital where they put the patients who can’t pay.
I sat and asked, “What does Chrystal have against you? You’re both artists.”
“You like my drawings?” he asked.
“They have a lot of power. Portraits mainly, huh?”
“I like faces. Sometimes I ride the subway all day long and just draw one face after the other. They got every race in the world right down on the F train.”
“That why you have problems with Chrystal?”
“What you mean?”
“Maybe she thinks you’re competing with her,” I suggested.
“The la
st time I went to her house some kind of silverware went missing,” he said. “I didn’t steal it. What I want with some old forks and spoons? Probably one of the servants did it, but they blamed me ’cause when I come around is the only time they check.
“But you right about that art, man. It was me who first asked Dad if maybe I could have a welding set to copy comic-book characters on steel. He got it for me but then, after a while, it was Chrystal doin’ it all the time. She hogged it up and now she famous, married to some rich white man, and blamin’ me for a thief.”
To punctuate his dissatisfaction Tally took off his fake snakeskin jacket and dropped it on the splintery floor. His black T-shirt showed off arms that were thin and unencumbered by muscle. His milk-chocolate lips hung down in defeat.
“So you wouldn’t know where she went or how I could get in touch with her,” I said.
“We don’t talk. Shawna said that Chris went on a vacation or somethin’.”
“She tell you that four or five days ago?”
“I’ont know, man,” he complained. “Neither one’a my sisters care about me. Shawna just wanna use you an’, an’, an’ Chrystal don’t wanna hear from ya.”
“Chrystal gave you the computer and games.”
“But she don’t care. All she got to do is leave a note with that Mr. Pelham. She don’t even have to go shoppin’, just tell him what to buy an’ where to bring it. And he don’t come himself. They got that white niggah Phil to bring it out here. He just call on the cell phone and I got to run outside to pick it up from his limo.”
I could see the kid’s point. I understood his sister’s position, too. The thing I didn’t know was about my employer.
“What’s your problem with Shawna?” I asked.
“Why?”
“She hired me and you said that she must not really care and is tryin’ to do something I don’t even know about,” I said. “I don’t wanna be used any more than you do.”
“Shawna smile in your face, call you her best friend, and then, when you tell her sumpin’, it be all ovah the street before you could sneeze. She jealous an’ spiteful and won’t even visit her own mother in the hospital. If she got hold of that green-and-red necklace she prob’ly stoled it. Prob’ly stoled that silverware, too, and then told Chrystal it was me. I bet she did.”
I wondered. The words indicted Shawna but he delivered them in a way that seemed . . . insincere. I was sure he knew more but this was neither the time nor place for a full interrogation.
“You know you can’t stay here, Ted.”
“Why not?”
“Because Big Boy and Two Dog will be back.”
Tally glanced at his one door and I suppressed a smile.
“Where I’ma go?”
“I got a friend in the Bronx got a pool hall needs cleanin’ and a room for the janitor. I could get him to let you stay there for a week or two. In the meanwhile I got a lawyer that can represent your case.”
“Why you wanna help me, man?”
“I was hired to do a job by a woman you say I shouldn’t trust. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not just taking your word on that, I have my own suspicions. So I might need you to help me later on. The only way I can be sure you will is if I help you now.”
15
I CALLED MY LAWYER, Breland Lewis, and informed him about Tally.
“Have him get in touch tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “Shirley will take down the information and make his appointment. I’m sorry, LT, but I’m due in court in a few hours and I still have notes to pull together.”
Breland was in a rush but I didn’t mind. I never like talking to lawyers—even when those lawyers are my friends.
“WHATEVER YOU SAY, LT,” Luke Nye told me over the airwaves.
“What’s it with this kid?”
“Don’t leave out your fancy silverware,” I replied.
After that we put the Xbox and computer, some comics, and a ringed notebook of lined paper in a suitcase. Tally hauled his luggage four blocks to a limo service, where I paid the driver up front for the long drive to the Bronx.
As I watched the beat-up, dark-green Caddy drive off I wondered if Tally would be at Luke’s when I needed him—if I needed him. He was a lost cause, even by my standards. I kinda liked the kid.
I STOOD OUT in front of the hole-in-the-wall limo service for a few minutes, thinking about the young man and his life, such as it was. America was tethered to its lineage by a frayed rope made up of millions of young men and women like him. It wasn’t any wonder that so many of these youth had no notion of their history and no hope for a future except what they were told by the TV.
This notion felt very important at that time. I must have seemed a little cracked standing under the hot sun in a dark suit, sweating and staring at the empty street.
Finally I decided to walk to my next meeting. The task, I felt, would be some kind of penance for my abandonment of so many youngsters like Tally.
IT WAS A NICE DAY and so there were hundreds of people ambling and power-walking, running and biking across the Brooklyn Bridge. They spoke French and Mandarin, Spanish and Russian, with English accents and southern drawls. Bicycles whizzed by my right side as lovers holding hands unconsciously nudged me into the bike lane. Joggers weaved in between the tourists and lovers, and every sixth or seventh stroller was chatting on a cell phone. The sky bloomed with clouds over the dark, sinewy East River, and my dome was beaded with sweat.
The bridge always made me happy. Tally and Two Dog and Big Boy would live or die, but the bridge would still be standing, connecting the world with a history that cannot fade.
PRISTINE ENTERPRISES Retirement Community was on Rector Place, in the center of Battery Park City. It was a pink-and-clearglass building that took up half a city block. The front desk was round with a raised floor that allowed the copper-skinned receptionist (whose nameplate read D. DIAZ) to sit in a swivel chair instead of standing on her feet, cultivating varicose veins and bad knees.
Ms. Diaz had a skinny frame and a pinched face. Behind her was a large circular area where there was a wide variety of chairs interspersed with uniform, dark-orange sofas. This furniture was populated by maybe half a dozen oldsters and their visiting kin. The ceilings were high, somehow putting the dread of death at a distance. The windows allowed in copious light.
I wiped my mostly bald head with a napkin left over from breakfast and said, “Nathan Chambers, please.”
“And who are you?” Ms. Diaz asked with no discernible accent.
“Leonid McGill,” I said. “I’ve come to discuss business with him, representing his daughter.”
The copper woman smiled for the first time.
“Chrystal,” she said.
“Shawna,” I corrected.
The smile went away.
“And what is your business?”
“Shawna wanted me to ask her father about Chrystal and her brother Tally. She’s been trying to get in touch with both of them but hasn’t been able to make contact. She thought Mr. Chambers might have some idea where they are.”
“Why didn’t she come herself?”
“She’s indisposed.”
“Neither Chrystal or Tally have been here lately,” the guardian said.
I was slightly surprised that she’d be so certain of this. There were obviously many residents of the home. Why would she know so much about one single man’s guests?
“Is Mr. Chambers too busy to receive guests?” I asked.
“I’ve answered your question,” Ms. Diaz said stolidly.
On a hunch, I asked, “Do you have a number for Cyril Tyler in your Rolodex?”
“What?”
“If you don’t, I have it. Either way, I’d like you to give him a call. Tell him that you are refusing entrance to Leonid McGill.”
A jolt went through the slender woman’s angry face. She swiveled around in her chair and picked up a phone. I couldn’t hear what she was saying or guess who she was talking to. After a minu
te or so she turned to face me again.
“Mr. Chambers will be down in a little bit. You can sit in the visitors’ area.”
I CHOSE AN empty orange couch near the southern window. The floor was a little higher than the street and so I could see only the heads and shoulders of pedestrians walking past. I thought that Tally would have a good time here, seeing faces by the hundreds march by.
I had a soft spot for lost young men. That was me back in the days after my father was killed in some South American revolution and my mother died of a broken heart. For the longest time I destroyed young men like Tally for a profit; now I tried to save them—but it was all the same.
“Excuse me,” a voice said.
He wore pajamas that were so light blue someone might mistake them for white. The nightclothes were old, threadbare in spots. But they were clean and the man was sturdy. Five eight with maple-brown skin, Nathan Chambers was near seventy but had not yet crossed that border. He neither smiled nor frowned nor exhibited any other emotion beyond mild curiosity.
“Mr. Chambers?” I said, standing and extending a hand.
His handshake had some strength to it. He had more hair than I did. I’m sure to the casual observer we would have appeared similar in age.
“You look surprised,” he said. “You expectin’ somebody else?”
I sat back down, and he settled next to me.
“No, it’s just, just that I’m surprised that such a healthy man would be in a place like this.”
Chambers grinned, showing me a mouthful of dingy but otherwise strong-looking teeth.
“This is an elder community, young man, not a nursin’ home. I’m here ’cause the retirement pays for it and there really ain’t nowhere else to go. Your ship sink in a storm, you take the first island you see.”
I could see Tally’s features in the older man’s face.
A gray mouse ran along the edge of the windowed wall, stopped a moment to regard us, then hurried off. Nathan noticed me noticing the rodent.
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