Straight Cut

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “My God, you make me so angry,” Lauren said. “I’m not a prize in a pinball arcade. I’m not going to be a conquest. I am a sovereign human being. What you and Kevin do to each other doesn’t matter to me that way.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I should know that. I’m sorry.”

  “I want to stop fooling around now,” Lauren said. “I want us to have a real marriage and I want it to work. “

  “Oh baby,” I said, “you know I’ve always wanted that too,” and then I had crossed to her chair and was kissing her face and mouth, until her grip on my shoulders turned from an embrace to a shove.

  “Not now,” she said. “I don’t want to feel. I want to think.”

  I went back to the couch and sat heavily down.

  “All right,” I said. “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s going to be very hard for us,” Lauren said. “It’s strange, but it feels like the end.”

  “Respice finem,” I said.

  “What?”

  “It is the end. It’s the end of everything and the beginning of everything else. “

  We looked at each other. I said nothing and she said nothing and we stared at each other until I began to feel quite dizzy. I shook my head to clear it, and when I looked again I saw that Lauren’s eyes were shut, and as a matter of fact she’d gone to sleep. Right then and there. It was amazing, really. Her lips were a little parted and her breathing was slow and deep. I could see her eyes moving back and forth below their closed lids, which meant, I suppose, that she was dreaming. I watched her reverently; it’s hard not to fall in love with any quiet sleeper, and I loved Lauren so much already. Then she twitched a little and woke up.

  “I want to go home,” she said sleepily.

  “You are home,” I said, thinking she was only drowsy.

  “Not here,” she said. “Back to the farm.”

  “What for?” I said. “I never thought you liked it much. Why there?”

  Lauren smiled and closed her eyes again, settling deeper into the chair.

  “Because I’m pregnant.”

  After I had put her to bed, carefully, as if I were wrapping a Ming vase for storage, I left to take the train back uptown. I suppose it was a Freudian slip that made me overshoot the Sheridan Square stop and ride on to 14th Street, where Grogan’s just happened to be. Trade in the bar was slow. There were two or three people on the stools besides me and a couple more asleep in the booths in the back. Terry nodded to me crabbily as he poured me my first drink. A beer and a shot and a beer and a shot. On the third round, the one he poured me free, I started crying. It wasn’t that I was unhappy exactly, only that I’d had more than I could really absorb. I dropped my face into my folded arms to hide it.

  A voice, not wholly familiar, spoke briefly in my head: I’m bleeding to death and I don’t even know it.

  Terry was shaking me by the shoulders. “No sleeping at the bar,” he said.

  I raised my head, obediently.

  “What’s the matter with you, then?” Terry said with some surprise.

  What could I really tell him? My dog died?

  “My wife left me,” I said, knowing he’d prefer it kept simple.

  “Ah, don’t worry,” Terry snarled, releasing my upper arms. “She’ll come on back.”

  19

  YOU MAY WELL ASK at this point, or soon, why, in view of Lauren’s change of heart and my happy prospects of the restoration of my love and the renewal of my marriage and even the foundation of my family, why then didn’t I just lay off the other project altogether. And the answer will be, I’m afraid, that I don’t know. Of course there are the obvious reasons, prominent among them the point that there were a lot of other hungry people involved and there probably would have been precious little peace and contentment down on the farm if I didn’t do something to satisfy them or otherwise calm them down. Then there was the simple momentum of the whole thing, which was already sweeping us all along with it, me very much included. But more even than that; I had a quite conscious sense that I would have to deliberately put an end to everything before everything else could properly begin.

  Respice finem, indeed. Or you might just say that I didn’t want to leave any unfinished business behind me. I myself will say nothing, because any sort of apology I could make would be too little and too late at this point.

  But what it all immediately meant was that I had to pull myself together and get out of Grogan’s reasonably early and reasonably sober. I walked the long diagonal of Greenwich Avenue down to Sixth, where I could cross over to the Earle. In my room, I shook out the sheets and remade the bed, turned out the light and lay down. I needed to be as fresh as I could possibly manage the next day, so although at first I couldn’t sleep, I didn’t reach for the bottle or switch on the TV. I kept myself lying still in the dark, eyes closed, breathing deeply, listening to the tick-tock of my blood and feeling the alcohol roll out of my system like a tide.

  Then it was four, four the next afternoon, and I had slept enough to get rested. I got up, washed and dressed, then went to the window and peered out. Yonko was on duty today.

  Hell. I knew they’d be more careful now. The back door trick would never work on them twice in a row. I thought and I thought and then I had an idea. An absolutely simple idea. I checked the street again, picked up my shoulder bag, which was empty now, and went down to the desk. At my request the clerk called me a cab. When it arrived, I got in and rode away, leaving Yonko gaping on the sidewalk. It’s only in the movies that there’s always a second cab standing by, waiting to engage in hot pursuit at any moment.

  I had the driver drop me at a midtown address where I could get an Aqualung. You can always get anything somewhere in New York, even if there’s no obvious local use for whatever it is. I bought the gear outright and paid in cash. No cards, no names, no references. The tank was small and didn’t take up much room in my bag, though it did add a lot of weight. I left the store and walked to where I could catch the F train downtown. At Delancey Street I changed for the J for Williamsburg.

  It was rush hour now, and standing room only on the J train. I was packed into a mass of Puerto Ricans and Orthodox Jews for the most part, though there were enough other WASP invaders so that I didn’t attract any special attention. I fought my way to a pocket against the connecting door of my car and when the train came clear of the tunnel and began to climb the bridge I stepped through it. The train turned and I swayed, unbalanced by the extra weight in my bag. The door slammed shut behind me and I caught the handles and braced myself back against it.

  Fifty-dollar fine if I was caught, but I didn’t really care. There was a raw visceral rush of speed as the train roared up the grade, cleaner and purer than any drug, and I gave myself up to it, until the bridge began to level offand the train slowed down. I looked between my feet, between the cars, to where the slow water of the East River blinked dully back up at me. Then I remembered what I was doing there and I looked to the north, stooping to peer under the steel I-beam that whizzed by at eyelevel, to see the low Brooklyn waterfront, the eastern shore.

  There. Between the Pfizer tower and the Domino sugar factory, the Eleusis rode at anchor. Just as the shipping news had promised. She seemed as unmoving as the buildings behind her, as solid and secure. Sweet mystery. I bent over and cupped my hands to light a cigarette. So far, so very good.

  Then the train braked and began to descend the far end of the bridge. A transit cop came out of the car opposite, plucked the cigarette out of my mouth and flipped it into the water without even looking at my face, and brushed by me into the next car. He didn’t write me a summons or pull my I.D., which under all the circumstances meant I was getting off extremely lucky, so I contained my irritation. wedged my way back into the car and when the train pulled into the first station I got off.

  Now the thing was to stay clear of my own little former neighborhood, where somebody might conceivably recognize me. I went north on Havemeyer Street, where I was not
known. At a hardware store there I stopped and bought a small block and tackle and some lightweight high-test nylon cord. There was still plenty of time to kill before nightfall and I doubled back toward Kent Avenue and the waterfront.

  A good way north, twenty or twenty-five blocks from the bridge, in the middle of the warehouse district on Kent Avenue, there was still an old waterfront bar open, and that was where I went. It faced the river across a vacant lot and so caught the best of the sunset. I sat down at the table by the window, pushing my bag down underneath it. The bar was tended by an elderly Polish lady, who knew me by sight perhaps but not by name. I bought a tall can of beer and let it sit in front of me for an hour, two hours, more. The only other customers were a couple of truck drivers and a few of the withered emaciated prostitutes who walked Kent Avenue to serve them. I outlasted them all. I didn’t drink or even smoke a cigarette. I sat staring across the river at the Empire State Building, and beyond it, the sun. Every so often the bartender shuffled across the room to draw the blind a little farther down, moving the bar of sunlight farther from me on the table. At length the shaft of light dropped from the table to the floor. An hour later, it was dark.

  I went back south on Kent Avenue till I reached the break in the line of warehouses at the end of Grand Street, where there had been a halfhearted attempt to build a park. There were a few benches, a sad picnic table or two on the graveled surface, and a pervasive gaseous stench. I walked out on the pile of rocks that tipped into the water. There, down to my left, I could see the stern of the Eleusis, exactly where I’d planned for her to be.

  I picked my way back across the rocks, sat down on the nearest bench, and slung my bag up on the table that came with it. My hand brushed something there which when I picked it up and felt it and examined it in silhouette against the faint light of Manhattan turned out to be a set of works, too dull to use again. Works, works, they call to you on the street. I remembered the forest of dropped needles in that Roman park, and I remembered the film and several other things as well. Of course, this also was a needle park, when it was used at all. I threw the syringe in the direction of the river and unzipped my bag.

  Then I saw the flaw, the gap, the lesion in my planning. I’d forgotten a thing or two, hadn’t even brought a swimming suit, though that was a small problem. What was worse was that I had no partner, no one to watch my back, so that I’d have to leave some stuff exposed on the shore while I was underwater, and I’d be terribly exposed myself when I came out, lugging a heavy weight of the very thing the people most likely to turn up in this neighborhood would kill and die for. Kevin should have been there with me, but that wasn’t in the cards. I sat there, my fingers curved to the cold rondure of the air tank, until I felt equally cold, equally mechanical. It was an uncalculated risk, to be sure, but I would just have to take it as such. I’d cut myself into this scene a long time before and there was nothing left to do now but just let it run through the sprockets.

  So it seemed for the next strange few minutes to be not actually me at all who stripped to his underwear and put on the tank and the mask and the awkward swim fins. It was as though I were watching some other man pick up the sealed lamp I’d bought earlier that day and lurch over the rocks and down into the water, like some movie monster returning to the swamp, moving slowly and then deliberately until its head sinks from view. Then it was me again, sinking, alone and a little frightened in the dark.

  I flicked on the lamp and began to swim. The East River water was so murky that the lamp was nearly useless. It had the sort of blanking effect that headlights do on fog. So I ran against the hull of the Eleusis before I had really seen it, and found my way forward to the bow mostly by touch. I measured my way back by arm spans and located that row of rivets at the water line. Counting, I swam down, my fingers on the bolts, fifteen, twenty, twenty-one, and nothing. Nothing, the load had gone to the sharks after all, and I drifted a little away from the hull, breathless, as though the tank had been ripped off my back and I were really drowning. Then I remembered: of course, the ship’s draft would have been constantly changing as she was loaded and unloaded, so I swam farther down, not counting anymore but only following the line of rivets, and then I found it.

  The metal mesh that covered the load was still secure, the lamp showed me, and I went to work slowly, shifting the powerful magnets inch by inch, loosening the package until I could grasp it and draw it out. It had a hook to attach to my harness, but I’d brought no harness, another oversight. I let the lamp go then, its light fading quickly as it sank, and hugging the package to my chest, I kicked away from the ship. It wasn’t far; I swam a few dozen yards maybe, estimating, and let myself float to the surface at what turned out to be a perfectly safe distance from the bank. Compared to underwater the night seemed very bright and I saw at once that the park was still vacant. Clutching the package to me, I swam in to shore.

  Of course I hadn’t thought to bring a towel either, so I just had to stay wet. Though the water had been warm I was cold enough once I stood up, soaking, in the light breeze that came across the river from the city. More alarming was the tingling, not quite a burning sensation yet, all over my body, which I took to come from the acid content of the river water.

  Trembling, I stripped off my shorts and put on my pants and shirt, which lay clammily against my wet limbs. I pushed the rubber-sheathed load and the scuba gear into my bag and left the park, headed north on Kent Avenue now, toward the bridge. I was still dripping wet and I knew I must look very peculiar, but it was not a neighborhood where much attention would be paid to that and in any case I met no one walking along the waterfront. At the bridge I turned east and walked three or four blocks along the supporting wall, to reach the entrance to the walkway. By then the wind had blown me nearly dry, but I was still shaking a little, possibly from nerves.

  The broken rail had not been repaired since my last visit to the bridge. I set the bag down near the gap and took out the load. That was the difficult point, the moment when it would have been so easy to peel back the waterproofing and have just a little blast. And maybe fill my pockets up for later … The prospect froze me on the spot for five minutes, maybe ten, but in the end I didn’t do it. Instead I began climbing the stanchions, calling up acrobatic abilities I wasn’t sure I had. I arranged the rope over the pulleys and hauled the package up into the shadows, out of my reach and sight.

  A temporary solution, but I believed it would hold for a couple of hours’ worth of nighttime. I dropped back onto the metal plates of the walkway and retrieved my shoulder bag. The Aqualung would be of no use to me anymore, I knew, and it wasn’t a good idea to hang on to it. I wrapped the hose and the flippers around the tank and heaved it all spinning out over the bridge rail. If there was any splash I didn’t hear it. My bag empty again now, I walked down into the city.

  Grushko and Yonko were both covering the Earle tonight. I came in through the park and slipped up on them from behind. From the way they whipped around I could tell that they were ready.

  “Tonight,” I said, and nothing more. Grushko nodded stiffly. Yonko, aiming his shopping bag at my torso, didn’t respond at all.

  I went into the hotel and rode the elevator up to my floor, inspecting myself in the convex triangular mirror in the upper corner of the car. My hair was matted from the dive, but otherwise I thought I looked no different than usual. In my room I took a long soapy shower, scrubbing my skin until that last acid tingling was gone. I threw away my wet clothes and put on fresh ones, then went back down to the street.

  The Bulgarians were gone, as I’d expected. There was time to spare so I began walking: down to Houston, over to the Bowery, down to Delancey Street, over to the bridge. It was past midnight and the area was abandoned, all the shops along the street locked down and shuttered for the night. At a pay phone on the corner of Clinton I dialed Kevin’s number. It was my last piece of uncourted good luck that I got him and not his machine.

  “Early delivery,” I said. “Sa
me place, tonight, right now. You’ve got thirty minutes, then it’s gone.”

  I hung up before he could say anything and crossed to the island in the middle of Delancey Street, opposite the stairway to the bridge. Waiting for the light, I scanned the area carefully, but there seemed to be no one around, which was all to the good. At ground level inside the stone stairwell there was a broken door behind which someone could have hidden, but the door was ajar and there was no sound or movement from the space behind it. No one was loitering around the rail at the head of the stairs either. I began to climb the bridge. Halfway up the ramp I turned back and looked again but there was still no one and nothing to see.

  It was twenty minutes later, maybe twenty-five, when I saw a shadow slip between the bars on the walkway where the metal superstructure started. I’d climbed the girders again and braced myself in a joint about ten feet above the walk. I watched the shadow approach me, growing larger, until it resolved itself into Kevin. He must have taken a cab to get there so quickly and I wondered, without too much concern, if he could have persuaded the driver to wait. But the main thing was that I seemed to have caught him flatfooted by moving up the date. As I’d hoped, he hadn’t had time to round up any semi-silent partners or other extra people, and so he’d come alone.

  When he got a little closer I saw that he was wearing glasses, small round lenses with wire frames. The glasses made him look vulnerable somehow, or maybe it was only the idea of his needing them. Kevin was wary, I could tell; he kept swinging his head from side to side, peering into every shadow, but he walked with his usual light confidence. Then he was almost directly under me, beside the broken rail.

  “Heads up,” I said in a normal speaking tone.

  It was maybe the first time, I thought, I’d ever seen him really startled.