by Norman Green
“Not that you know of,” she said. It was a good point, and it torpedoed whatever I was going to say next.
“How long have you been out?” she said.
“Out of what?”
“Mr. Fowler. Your face and your hands are very tan, but your ears and your neck and your chin are white. Your shirt is new, I can still see the creases from the store. Your jeans are stiff, I doubt if you’ve washed them yet, and pardon me if I say that I can’t imagine a man like yourself ironing his jeans. But your shoes look like you stole them from a homeless person. Who are you really, Mr. Fowler?”
“That’s a good question.” It came out before I could really think about it. “I think you missed your calling, Ms. Wing. And I wasn’t in prison or anything like that. I was up north, on the coast. Near Canada.”
“Doing what?”
“Getting away from it all,” I told her. “I was trying to reboot.”
She nodded, looked at me for a moment, pensive, and then she fluttered a raised hand. Two men seated at a nearby table stood up, glared at me, and left. Ms. Wing watched them go and then turned back to me. “If you are going to survive this quest of yours,” she said, “you are going to have to learn to be careful.”
I seemed to have passed some sort of test. “You’re very perceptive, Ms. Wing.”
“I have to be.” She looked out the window. “He was beautiful, back when I knew him.”
“McClendon?”
“Is that what you call him?”
“I’ve never been sure what to call him. He’s been out of my life for a long time.”
“I used to watch him on television sometimes,” she said. “Not so much, lately. But he’s still a fine-looking man.”
“I suppose.”
“He’s a Christian now,” she said.
“Do you believe that?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “I don’t know what sort of life he’s had since he left me, but the notion of forgiveness can be a powerful draw to some people. And he never really was a deep thinker, your father.”
“You cared about him.”
“Oh, I loved him,” she said. “And he loved me, too, in his own way.”
“Sounds like small consolation.”
“No, he really did. But then again, he probably really did love nearly every other woman who smiled at him more than once. Your father is like a flat stone skipping over the surface of the ocean. It is only at the very end of his trajectory that he’ll ever gain any real depth.” She picked up her coffee cup, looked into it, put it back down almost exactly the way McClendon had done six hundred miles to the north. “You’re not close with either of your parents, Mr. Fowler.” It was not exactly a question.
“No.”
“If that’s true, it isn’t going to be easy for you to understand Melanie,” she said, “because to do that you have to understand her family. Not just me, and not just McClendon, either.” She looked around the crowded restaurant, then back at me. “This is not a conversation that I’m willing to continue here. We have to go someplace private.”
“Did you really think that someone in that McDonald’s might have been listening in?”
Annabel Wing did not answer the question. We stood on the top floor of a parking garage, in an empty corner far away from the stairs. Almost directly overhead, a Boeing 737 banked, throttled down and lined up for the approach into LaGuardia. Wing waited until the noise abated somewhat. “Fowler sounds like an English name to me,” she said. “Is your family English?”
Her question surprised me. “Ahh, I’m not sure. I heard stories about my mother’s grandfather coming to this country from Belfast, in Ireland, but I never knew if that was true or not. My mother liked to reinvent her past as she went along.”
“So Irish, maybe,” Annabel said.
“Yeah, maybe. Who knows? He was supposed to be an Orangeman. My great-grandfather. Protestant, not Catholic. He may have thought of himself as an Englishman, I don’t know. I don’t even know if he was real. Why do you ask?”
Again she chose not to answer. She leaned her elbows on the parapet wall and stared off in the general direction of Citi Field and Arthur Ashe Stadium. “So you don’t celebrate St. Paddy’s Day, I suppose. What about McClendon? From his name I would assume that you are half Scottish.”
“McClendon? Do you seriously think he came into the world with that name?”
She favored me with an appraising glance. “You do know him, then.”
“I know what he is. But what I am, Ms. Wing, is your basic American mongrel. St. Paddy’s Day never meant a thing to me.” I waited to see where she would take it.
“An American mongrel,” she repeated. “I wonder if you know how lucky you are. The kids are all worried, these days, about preserving their heritage. Personally, I always felt imprisoned by mine. A true conservative is merely someone who is haunted by the superstitions of his forefathers. Have you ever heard the expression ‘Chinaman’s chance’?”
“Rings a bell,” I said.
“Long odds. As in, ‘You don’t stand a Chinaman’s chance.’ Sometime back in the 1860s, five brothers emigrated to San Francisco from a small village outside Canton. Four of them died building the transcontinental railroad. One survived.”
“One in five,” I said. “A Chinaman’s chance.”
She nodded. “It was very hazardous work. There were many fatalities.” She sighed. “But, at the end of it all, it was possible to ride the train from New York to San Francisco. Or, the other direction, which is what my ancestor did. He knew quite a lot about demolitions by then. It was a skill that served him well in New York City, his new home. But anyway, all of his children, every member of his extended family was born in this country, and yet we are still not Americans. We are Chinese Americans.”
“Why is that important now? You guys were probably already in Manhattan when my great-grandfather got off the boat. Whoever he was.”
“Because I cannot escape my family’s history the way you seem to have escaped yours, Mr. Fowler. I was born in St. Vincent’s Hospital. I grew up on the Lower East Side. I’m as New York as a mugger with a brick in his pocket, but the choices made by the fifth brother, my earliest American ancestor, still hold me back today, all these years later.”
“How is that?”
“Family lore has it that he was the founder of what is known in English today as the Mott Street Merchants Association.”
“I think I begin to see,” I said.
“Do you? The Mott Street Merchants Association is the American name for a very old Chinese institution. It is the tong that runs most of Chinatown. If you do business in that part of Manhattan, in one form or another you pay for the privilege. That money goes to the tong, which is still run by one of my distant cousins. Peter Kwok.”
“Okay.”
“Funny, how invisible we still are. Not so very long ago, Hoover and the rest of the FBI finally woke up and today the Italian Mafia is largely out of business. But they never bothered with the tongs. They still don’t. We only hurt our own, that’s what they think. Who gives a shit what they do to one another?”
“Is that why you moved out here to Flushing? No tong?”
“Please,” she said. “Nature abhors a vacuum, Mr. Fowler. The tong that rules Chinese-American life in this part of Queens originated from the remnants of Chiang Kai-shek’s army. They came here from Taiwan in the fifties. You see, when I got pregnant with Melanie, my family threw me out. I was offered refuge here, by Li Fat, who runs the tong in Flushing. Those were his men, back at McDonald’s. They call themselves the Green Pang Tribe. Hip name for a very old institution. I think he just wanted to stick his thumb in Peter Kwok’s eye. Kwok hasn’t forgotten it.”
“How long has it been since you’ve been to Manhattan?”
“I stay close to home,” she said. “Where I’m safe. Peter Kwok can’t touch me here. I tried to warn Melanie, I offered to send her anywhere, but she had to go to school in the one place where
she couldn’t survive. She thought I was foolish. Superstitious and ignorant.
“Now she’s gone.” She turned and looked at me, and all of a sudden she looked every bit as old as McClendon, every bit as ill-used by time. “I’ll ask you again, Mr. Fowler. Who are you really? What are you after? Because I’ve been expecting someone like you ever since Melanie passed.”
“Someone like me? In what way?”
“McClendon could never let this go. To him, Melanie was an asset, something of his that was taken from him. It’s just like him to hire some mercenary, no offense, some guy not unlike yourself, and send him sniffing after whoever has done this to him. Can a Christian do that, I wonder? Hire a killer to take his revenge for him?”
“What would you have me do, Ms. Wing? Let’s say you had a sister . . .”
“I had a daughter.”
“So you did. And someone cut her up.” I watched her flinch. “They had their fun with her first, and then they dumped her in the river like a piece of garbage.”
“You cannot change what is, Mr. Fowler. The person responsible will have to contend with his karma, as will you.”
I sighed. “Buddhist,” I said, and she nodded. I wondered if she believed in karma any more seriously than Josh Whelen did. “I never understood you guys. Don’t you believe in history? From the Taoists in China six hundred years ago all the way up to Lon Nol in Cambodia, any time anyone wanted to wipe you out, you all stood there like a bunch of sheep and let them do it.”
“We die in serenity,” she said.
“That has never been one of my goals.”
“Go home, Mr. Fowler. The path you are on leads only to more suffering.”
“I can take it.”
“It isn’t you I’m worried about.”
I shook my head. “Well. Thank you for seeing me, Ms. Wing.” I turned to go.
“Are you in touch with Mac?” she said, looking away. “Do you talk to him?”
“I have his number. You want it?”
Once again she chose not to answer. “It wasn’t his fault,” she said, staring out over the roofs of Flushing. “Not entirely. We were so isolated, my family and I. And here I am, still in my own little neighborhood, all these years later.” She looked back at me. “I never hated him. Resented him from time to time, sure, but never hate. My world is very small, by my choice. One neighborhood was never going to be enough for a man like McClendon, nor was one city. He wanted the world.” She turned away again. “I’m glad I had him. For a while, anyway.”
I heard someone say that we are, all of us, like men standing in a river, looking downstream: We can only see where we’ve been, not where we’re going. I suppose that makes me blind by choice, because I have never liked looking back, it never seemed to me that I got much profit from it. If I could, I would just go forward from this point right here, clean.
Run away, run away . . .
But I could not come back to New York City without returning to Brooklyn at least once, back to one little corner of the borough, because if there is anything good about my life at all, it started down on Bedford Avenue. The big brick church was still there, of course, and they still had an NA meeting there in the basement, I could tell that from a half a block away. The most dependable sign of an NA or AA meeting is a bunch of guys hanging around by the back door of a church smoking cigarettes, and there they were. The neighborhood had changed somewhat in the years I’d been away, because there were a few white faces mixed in. When I first showed up on their doorstep, I was the only one. I was a lost dog then, half past dead, a homeless refugee, a white kid with a chip on my shoulder and a jones I couldn’t handle.
Hard to say, sometimes, what changes and what doesn’t.
The smokers nodded to me as I made my way to the door, and a couple of them stuck out a hand and gave me a name to go with it, Bobby and Michael and Kenny. With those guys the things that make them the same are bigger and more lethal than the trivialities that make them seem different. They are a brotherhood of pain, and of rebirth.
Inside, I stood in line for a cup of coffee. They had bagels, too, another sign the neighborhood had grown more prosperous. The coffee was dark and fragrant. Man, addicts know how to make coffee . . . I got my cup and scanned the room. The guy I was looking for wasn’t there, and I stood in the back of the room thinking of all the reasons he might be gone, thinking, God, please let him be okay, don’t let him be dead, bend the laws of time and physics for me just this one time, please, but I needn’t have worried, he stepped through the door a couple of minutes later. He was of average height but he was not average. Sleepy eyes in a black, lined, street-hardened face, an unshakable calm, a gift for listening, and for asking you the right questions, after. He spotted me, made his way across the room. I held my hand out. “Hello, Tommy.”
He ignored my hand and dragged me into a rib-crushing hug. “Hey William,” he said to someone I hadn’t met yet. “What do you get when you sober up a horse thief?”
“A sober horse thief,” that someone said, and Tommy let me go.
“I have never stolen a horse,” I said, but that was not true, strictly speaking, and Tommy spotted the lie on my face immediately.
“Yeah?” he said. “What?”
“It wasn’t a real horse.” It was a bronze, a signed Frederick Remington from the estate of a dead oil baron, and one of the bastard’s ex-wives wanted the thing badly enough to pay me to go get it. Which I did. “It was just a statue.”
“Hah!” Tommy held me out at arm’s length. “But you get my point. You look good, though. Got some color in your face now. How you doin’? And what brings you back to Brooklyn?”
“It’s a long story,” I told him.
“Stick around,” he said. “We’ll talk after.” It was a ruse, it was just Tommy’s way of getting me to sit for a meeting in case I hadn’t been to one in a while. Tommy had a million of those. And it was okay, in fact it was better than okay. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve walked into a place like that church basement wondering what the point of it all was, sort of wishing it was all over, and walked out afterward playing with the idea that my life could maybe be okay if I could somehow manage to quit pissing all over it.
I don’t like the word “spirituality” because it is too malleable, people squeeze it into whatever shape pleases them, and as a result it really has lost its meaning. One thing I am pretty sure of, though, when you can spot it from across the room, when it involves robes or jewelry or a beatific smile on a rich man’s face, it’s probably fake. I entertained unkind thoughts about Mac and his Bible as I watched Tommy after the meeting ended. Tommy was the sun of this particular solar system, it seemed like every stray cat in the room had to touch base with him at least once before they wandered back out into the merciless Brooklyn landscape. When I first met him, Tommy had only been a couple years removed from one of the more violent biker clubs in Brooklyn and I could sense the wildness in him then, maybe that was one of the things that had drawn me to him. He had changed, though, I could feel it, and it wasn’t just a matter of losing some of the biker bling and covering up the tats with a long-sleeved shirt. It was easy for me to feel diminished, sitting there and waiting for Tommy, indicted because he had made that leap and I was still standing on the far bank, maybe not content, exactly, with what I was, but afraid to jump. Tommy had been able to become something bigger than what he once was because he’d been willing to let go of some of the things that had kept him alive, once upon a time, but were holding him back in his new life. I’ve never had that kind of faith. Like a lot of addicts, recovering or otherwise, I had merely achieved a comfortable level of misery.
It seemed to take forever for that room to empty.
“Saul, my brother,” Tommy said, after everyone else was finally gone. “How the hell are you?”
It wasn’t a meaningless greeting, not like “What’s up” or any of that. It was a real question. He wanted to know. “I’m okay,” I told him. It wasn’
t the answer he was looking for but he accepted it.
“Listen, Saul, I’m sorry for that ‘sober horse thief’ crack. I shouldn’t have said it.”
Another sign of his progress. Admit it when you’re wrong, that’s one of the things they teach you in that kind of room. Make things right, don’t let them fester. “You don’t have to apologize for telling the truth.”
“No? Maybe just for the way I said it, then. What brings you back to Brooklyn?”
I told him about Melanie Wing.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said when I was finished. “I’m sorry for your loss. That kind of thing leaves a bruise that can take a long time to go away. But I didn’t know you had a sister, you never told me.”
“I didn’t know. I still don’t, actually. It would take more than a few DNA tests to untangle my family tree, and I’m not sure it would be worth the trouble. What it boils down to is this: Someone killed the girl, and her father, who may or may not be related to me, wants me to find out who did it, if I can.”
“That the kind of thing you do, these days?”
I thought we’d come to that . . . “Not exactly. I’ve been sort of retired for the last couple years. The last job I had . . .” I caught the look in his eye. “All right, okay, the last horse I stole, if you want to think of it that way, involved a museum in France, and I did okay enough to take a step back for a while. So I don’t know. I don’t know what I do these days.”
He nodded. “An uncomfortable place to be. Not a bad place, but uncomfortable. So with this sister of yours, do you have a plan? How are you going to pull this off?”
I shrugged. “So far all I’m doing is knocking on some doors, asking some questions. My operational theory is that whoever killed her will probably hear about it and start to get nervous. You know how it is, Tommy, when you stir things up, shit happens.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Even smart people will do some stupid things when they think they’re under pressure. Anything I can do to help?”
