Afterburn

by Colin Harrison

  Christina wished her own mother had been as kind—not a chance. It appeared, in fact, that Melissa, dutiful and concerned, had heeded her mother's wishes. Slitting open one of Melissa's bank statements, Christina could see that Melissa had withdrawn three thousand dollars from her checking account six weeks prior, at the end of July, and that the checking account had registered no activity after then. The account still had eight thousand dollars in it—clearly Melissa W. was as level-headed as her mother said she was. It occurred to Christina that she could walk into a bank with the bank account number and attempt a withdrawal, even without identification as Melissa. But she didn't want to take money from another woman. Besides, men were happy to leak money on women. It was a form of urination or even ejaculation, depending on the amount involved. No, she had no desire to swindle Melissa's money from her, but she did suddenly and happily wish—as if having found a secret friend—to ingest all the stuff in the three musty boxes.

  Let's see what Melissa was doing while I was in prison, she thought. Melissa W. had frequented the Angelika Theater on Houston Street; she had received an abortion with no complications in April of 1997; she had subscribed to The New York Times for five months; she had served as a juror for a civil trial; she had registered as a Democrat; she had given money to the National Coalition for the Homeless; she put little Xs on her calendar when she got her period, which was utterly regular until and after the month of the abortion; she had read through the works of Marguerite Duras; according to a sequence of photos, she'd had her hair permed; she had enjoyed a lengthy affair with a divorced filmmaker who ate lunch every day at the Union Square Café; she had subsequently received an AIDS test, which was negative; she had witnessed a bicycle messenger be killed by a city bus and composed a notarized summary of what she had seen for a city agency; she had donated blood three times; she had written her company's president and received a raise; in short, Melissa Williams was a hardworking, independent, and reasonably happy young woman who had left town precipitously and who planned, sooner or later, to come back. Her time in New York City, thought Christina, was probably no better or worse than the years I would have experienced if—if what? If she had not spent the night before a big high-school swim meet drinking with her girlfriends. If she had, the next day, finished second and not third in the one-hundred-meter backstroke of Pennsylvania's regional championships, thus missing a swimming scholarship to Stanford, her first choice. If she had not picked Columbia instead. If she had not slept with her religion professor in the fall of her junior year and, having suddenly been dumped by him, gone out one night and seen Rick at the bar of the Pierre Hotel (he'd been wearing a suit and a great tie, and after three drinks, she was more or less ready to climb the Empire State Building). And if she hadn't found Rick so alien and fascinating and the best lover a girl could ever dream of, then she would not have put up with his bullshit machismo or started helping him with his stolen-goods operation. If she had not realized that Tony Verducci was using Rick and her for his own ends on the last job. If she had not figured out how to outsmart Tony Verducci—if, if a lot of things.

  The last item she found in the box was a tube of lipstick. She pulled off the cap and discovered to her delight that the wine-red color was absolutely perfect, and she went into the bathroom and put it on. Thank you, Melissa W., she whispered into the mirror, for you know not what you have given me. Now she had lipstick, a dress, the pumps. In the dresser lay her one decent pair of pantyhose, the black mail-order bra that fit well enough, a pair of matching black panties, a cheap little handbag with the inside lining torn, and some of Mazy's prison perfume. She would look—well, she wouldn't look great, but she also wouldn't look like someone who'd woken up in Rikers that morning. In the handbag she put her hairbrush, two of Melissa Williams's condoms, the perfume, the lipstick, forty-three of her remaining sixty-three dollars (wedging the last twenty-dollar bill under the wooden slat of her bed in case anyone came in while she was gone), and her new keys. Then she went downstairs and stepped out into the street, as free as she had ever been.

  SIX HOURS LATER she lay in darkness seventy blocks uptown and thirty stories above the street, and having endured all manner of comments, solicitations, come-ons, gestures, jokes, offhand remarks, earnest questions, unasked-for confessions, and, finally, a sequence of stiff drinks that became a rather nice swordfish dinner, she remembered an old trick and slipped her fingers down between her legs, felt the guy's penis, and made a tight circle around it.

  "Oh, wow," he moaned, his breath full of vodka and nachos and some kind of hazelnut liqueur they had shared that was just about the best thing she had ever tasted. He was a boy, really. Twenty-five, maybe. The bars of the Upper West Side were full of boys, boys in suits. He didn't know anything about fucking, that was sure—or what she remembered of it. He had climbed and clawed and writhed around on top of her, never settling into the kind of long hypnotic driving that she remembered—remembered Rick for, unfortunately. As far as this guy was concerned, the sex was about him, not about her. But that didn't matter now—it was time to finish. She squeezed her fingers and whispered the absolutely dirtiest thing she could think of into his ear—it was a little exciting—and he grunted in fervor and came dramatically, banging at her in self-congratulatory frenzy, the stubble of his chin brushing her forehead. Then, as if gored by an ax-swinging assailant, he toppled off her and fell onto the sheets. She rubbed the guy's head. He wasn't so bad, just too young, really, didn't know anything. Too young to protect her from Tony Verducci.

  "I'm going to pee," she whispered.

  "Yass, 'kay."

  She stood in the bathroom examining her breasts in the mirror. They might have fallen a little while she was in prison. Just a tiny bit. Her nipples were swollen from the guy's mouth, her neck blotchy where he'd snuffled Mazy's perfume. She opened his medicine cabinet, didn't see anything in there interesting, except some kind of toothpaste that made your teeth whiter. I started the day in prison and now I'm naked in some guy's bathroom, she thought. That was something. What exactly, she wasn't sure. She sat on the toilet. The next part was not good, but she had to do it. The guy had bragged to her that he had earned three hundred thousand dollars last year, including his bonus, so, from a Marxian perspective, her crime was merely going to be a redistribution of capital to one who didn't have it.

  She flushed the toilet and tiptoed back into the bedroom. He was on his back, Melissa Williams's condom still on him, a droopy hat. A good thing, too—her mother always said the two of them, mother and daughter, were "built the same," which meant Christina could get pregnant if a boy "went by in his underwear." Amazing that she'd never gotten pregnant with Rick, considering. Now she watched the guy roll over. He was good-looking, like an underwear ad, but she'd felt nothing, despite grinding herself against him while straddling on top. Not even close to an orgasm. Why? She used to have jillions of them. But now she was out of practice and had been a little nervous. Also, he had been clumsy, too slow sometimes, too fast others. The whole thing was like a bad ride at the amusement park—looked fun beforehand, but you were glad when it was over. He had no clue who she was. Thought she was a graduate student in history.

  "Hey, urban professional guy."

  "Yeah-ahh?"

  "You okay?"

  He flopped around, loose-armed, drunk. "Thas was—I'm telling you, I jus' am fucking kinda knocked out here . . ."

  She knelt on the floor and found his pants. He'd used a credit card at the bar, but she was sure she'd glimpsed some cash in the wallet.

  "Roll over, I'll give you a back rub."

  He did. He was a guy. Not so bad, really. He'd tried his best. If they screwed a few more times, she could train him to do a few things right. She pressed a hand into his shoulders and then along the spine. A great smooth back, wide as a door. No woman had shoulders like this. A good butt, too. Mazy had been right. Christina would go back to men; she might just go attack them, in fact. She moved a hand across the guy's shoulder
blades, listening to the deepening of his breath. Her other hand found its way into his wallet. Not much. She slipped four or five bills into the front of her panties.

  "You had kind of a long day." She kept her hand moving.

  "Yass, I did, yassir," he gurgled. "Very big day. Many things happened. How about you? You have a big day?"

  "Not much, except for you."

  He smiled into the sheet. "You had a good time? I'm a okay guy?"

  "Yes." She gave him a meaningless little kiss on the back of his neck. "But I have to go."

  "Oh, no."

  "Oh, yes."

  "Girls—they always want to stay."

  "Which girls?"

  "All the girls I ever knew."

  She rubbed his neck, kissed it. He was all right. "Maybe you never knew anybody like me."

  "That's right, hey. Goddamn fuck like a pony." He threw a sleepy arm at her, pressed his hand as artlessly against her breasts as a man applying stucco to a wall. "Can I call you?" he breathed. "Gotta call you."

  "I wrote my number down." For believing this lie, he deserved just one more kiss, maybe three or four, right along the backbone. She wanted to fall asleep on top of him. Don't, she told herself. Go now.

  "I'll get up, call a cab," he said.

  "No, you're tired. I'll just slip out. Give me a call in the late morning, if you want."

  He sighed into the pillow. "Oh, I want. You can take that to the absolute bank."

  I'll be taking something else, she thought, but you'll find that out soon enough. Five minutes later, with her little black dress back on, each clever button in its clever little place, and with his bills in her handbag, she stepped out to the street, holding a cardboard laundry box. The bills, she discovered in the cab, were hundreds, five of them, which the taxi driver might not take. But she had her own remaining cash for the fare. She pulled open the stapled laundry box as the taxi flew downtown. The box contained exactly what she had hoped for, ten tailored shirts, freshly starched and pressed—and no monogram. She'd get at least ten bucks each for them from the guy in the clothing store. Six hundred bucks—and dinner. Not bad. She reminded herself to have the taxi stop a block from her apartment house, in case someone asked the driver where he'd taken her. Stealing was something she hated herself for, probably, or at least usually, but it was also what she needed to do, to get a start—and without a start, she told herself, especially on a day like today, you don't get anywhere.

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  604 Carroll Street, Brooklyn

  September 11, 1999

  DAWN, the rush of traffic—and nobody had killed him in the night. He lurched up, looked in the rearview mirror. Brush your hair. He was going to be civilized, even if he'd slept in the truck. Coffee and sandwich under the front seat. He opened the door and pissed with one hand and ate the sandwich with the other. Nobody could see him. Across the parking lot, guys in business suits stood whacking golf balls into a wall of netting, Jersey rising over the river. The all-night sports complex was the safest place he'd found, yet he'd bought a baseball bat anyway and slid it under the seat. But when you're sleeping, the bat is of no use. The guy could stick a gun in the vent window, pop-pop, and you'd never know. You were dreaming and you never woke up—the sound of the shot muffled inside the truck. He couldn't keep parking there, he was too vulnerable. He needed a twenty-four-hour garage. You could hide forever in a garage.

  Now he stood outside the truck in the dead farmer's boots, his back stiff, stretching. He knelt down to the pavement and did fifty decent push-ups. Then twenty-three lousy ones. Getting too old for this shit. He was losing his advantage. Christina had not been in the courthouse downtown when the prison guard said she would be, and then, the next day, the court officer said she'd been released earlier in the morning. Rick had almost strangled the guy. Maybe it was just bureaucratic inefficiency. Maybe Peck had made sure Rick went up to the prison so that they could start to follow him from there. Or maybe they wanted someone else to follow him, one of Tony Verducci's soldiers, some punk twenty-year-old with a flash-roll in his pocket—like Rick had once been. But after the court officer said Christina had been released, there was nothing for Rick to do. Be functional, he warned himself. Don't do something stupid. Don't start going to bars. Don't listen to your dick. Don't go to bars, don't talk to women. You miss women so much that you can't be trusted. You're so good at doing the stupid things, do the smart thing. Sit and think first. She hasn't gone far, he told himself. She's out there. She loves New York City, could never live anywhere else. There are ways of finding her. She'll want to feel the streets around her, the people and buildings and noise. She'll want to dive right back into it. He knew she didn't have any money—how could she? You can never have enough money in the city. And if Tony Verducci had ordered somebody to follow her, then she was already in trouble. So what are you going to do, Rick? Who are you, are you any good? His time out in the cottage next to the ocean had been wasted if he could not make use of it. You have an obligation to become a better person. You have an obligation to use the baseball bat if it comes to that. He was going to find her and save her from Tony Verducci, and maybe she would want to see him again, maybe not. If yes, good. They would see if they still had the old music. Of course, he believed they did. If she didn't want to see him, well, okay. At least he'd have given it a shot, would be clean this time around. You can find her, he thought. You can figure stuff out as you go along. You can find her before they do. They have their ways and you have yours. You know her, for one thing, you know what she likes. She'll call her mother. She doesn't want to, but she will.

  His problem was that he was getting low on cash. Down to a hundred bucks. He sat heavily in the truck and took his last tomato from the dashboard. Perfect, not one spot, and he ate it, getting juice in his beard, while he thought about Aunt Eva. If she had not changed her locks, then his chances were good. In and out in a few minutes; no one will know. Civilized, functional, a man with a plan. He started the truck and pulled south on the West Side Highway, then from there around the bottom of Manhattan and over toward Brooklyn, where Aunt Eva had lived on Carroll Street between Fourth and Fifth Avenues since his boyhood. But he didn't know anyone there anymore, he didn't want to be seen. The street used to be all Italian families, with a social club on the corner—old guys in permanent-press pants and hair grease, sitting around. Tired, but not too tired to drive new Cadillacs. They knew what was going on. Some remembered Tony Verducci as a young man. Some even knew Paul. Yet most of the old families had died off, or married out, with other people moving into the neighborhood of grand old brownstones, full of money now, full of Manhattan people who worked in law firms and investment banks and computer companies, and they'd trickled down the hill onto Aunt Eva's block, where the buildings were not brownstones but squat three-story brick row homes half the size. She'd never move, though, never sell out. Maybe she hadn't changed her locks, either. Maybe his money was still there.

  He turned off Flatbush and headed south on Fourth Avenue. A fat woman in a short yellow dress and yellow boots stood on the corner looking into the cars while slipping two fingers in and out of her mouth. One of the forgettables. He pushed the truck past the bodegas, the closed hubcap shops. The only things moving on the street this early were the taxis and the cops and the newspaper delivery vans. He'd turned down one of those teamster jobs. The guy who had taken the job instead of Rick now owned a sixty-foot, five-chair Chris-Craft that he took out into the Gulf Stream three days at a time. Somebody else's life. He decided to circle Aunt Eva's block, just to see how things stood. At the corner of Carroll and Fifth, the Korean deli had a light on in the back, some poor Mexican fuck sitting on a bench cutting carrots. He could smell the bakery down the street. Nobody would recognize the truck, nobody would recognize him. The last time he'd been around, he'd sported a shaved head, twenty-two-inch arms, and a Fu Manchu mustache. Veins full of growth hormone. Now he looked like a regular guy—some heavy regular Brooklyn guy drivi
ng past. But if somebody recognized him, it could get back to Tony Verducci. Everything got back to him. Rick parked in the lumberyard driveway on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Carroll Street. It was too early for the business to be open. The truck would be okay for ten minutes, which was all he needed. He lifted out the gallon tub of chimney cement he'd bought the day before. Nobody would think anything; it looked like a can of paint. Ten minutes; don't fuck with my truck. The question was whether Aunt Eva's block was still respected, whether the neighborhood kids had gotten the message. All you needed was a few young guys in flashy suits and good haircuts standing around now and then, that was it. Or that used to be it. What did Rick know anymore? Not much: how to grow corn, how to tie a boat to a dock, how to talk to dead fish. He could tell from the stores around the corner that there was more Puerto Rican and black action nearby, but here, walking up the rise of the street, he saw no graffiti, no heavy window bars, no broken glass in the gutter, and a preponderance of heavy, American-made cars, none of them with detailing or goofy shit hanging from the mirror, no bead-lights around the license plate. And trash bags already out for the garbage pickup, each tied neatly. Some of the old families still lived on the block.