It was cool that day, but Smoke was in his shirtsleeves.
"Excuse me, mister sir!" someone called.
Smoke had a cigar that day as well, and he seemed to remember it was a dollar cigar he had bought at a highway rest stop.? A man running for his life wasn't always picky about cigars.? His new name was James Dugan, and although he himself had created the name years before, he wasn't comfortable with the first name.? It seemed too bland to him.? James.? Everybody was named James.?
He looked up from his reading and across the fence at the woman who was about to change his name for him.? She was a small woman, round, impossible to tell her age, with gray and black hair and Mayan or mestizo features that seemed to have traveled time to arrive at his fence.? Indeed, she wore a kerchief on her head and from the neck up could just as easily lived in 1399 as 1999.? But that's where the illusion ended.? She also wore a big bubbly winter parka.? It was bright red and had the words TRIPLE GOOSE DOWN stenciled in white on one of the sleeves.
"Accuse me, mister smoke," she said, and outside of signing bank statements or paying bills, the name James went out the window.
He raised an eyebrow at her.? "Mister smoke?"
She smiled.? She was just tall enough to clear the fence.? "Mister smoke, yes.? Can I help you?"??
"Can you help me?"
"Yes.? Of course I can."
Talk about turning the tables.? The woman's smile was infectious.? "How can you do that?? Help me, I mean?"
"I can clean your house for you."
He frowned.? "Oh, that's okay.? I don't need any house cleaning, thanks.? I just moved in, and I don't have very many things.? In any case, I only have the basement."?
She went away, but the next day she was back.?
"Mister smoke!"
"Yes," Smoke Dugan said.? "I am Mister Smoke."
"I am thinking last night.? It is a terrible shame about this garden.? It is such a wonderful place."
Smoke looked around at the murky jungle that surrounded him.
"I can help you with that," the lady went on.? "I propose a deal."
"Oh, I'm not thinking about doing any gardening."
"That is the beauty of it.? You don't do any gardening.? You don't pay me.? I do the gardening.? I pay you rent in the food I grow."
"Well?" he said.
"You will eat only the freshest foods.? No bad chemicals on them.? I only grow them natural.? Please?? I have such a small garden at my home.? This will be much better.? It will be the wonder of the whole town."
And so it began.? Against his better judgement, Smoke had keys made for Lorena.? He had to have keys made because there was no entrance to the yard.? The only ways to get in were either by climbing the fence (quite out of the question for a woman "of a certain age" who just about cleared five feet tall), or by coming through the basement apartment.? Lorena came there early in the mornings, tip-toeing through the efficiency apartment, past a sleeping Smoke Dugan.? In the afternoon she came back, stopping for some small talk with Smoke if he sat at the back table, or leaving him alone if he was in his work shed.? Smoke would sit at his table, absorbed in the problem of this or that, and gradually his awareness would begin to include sounds.? The sound of clippers cutting, or the grunts of an old woman as she pulled weeds, or the squeak of the ancient wheelbarrow she had arrived with one afternoon.
And the place took shape.? She cleared half the big yard that first year, the half that ran the length of the concrete wall.? There was cabbage that year, tomatoes and green beans.? The cucumbers were a disappointment, and the peppers were so hot that Smoke couldn't put them on anything.? But all in all, he had to agree with Lorena that the backyard was better for the garden.
Now the garden was an oasis.? She had put in flagstones to mark the path to his patio, and then on to his workshop.? There were giant sunflowers.? There were all manner of vegetables and herbs.? There were flowers.? She kept the mosquitoes under control through a variety of natural means, and in any event, mosquitoes tended to stay away from Smoke's cigars.? All summer long he would get some vegetables here and there when their time came.? But every year at harvest time, she presented him with a bounty of food, her part of the bargain for his allowing this garden to happen.
"Smoke," she said now, placing three giant cucumbers and a pile of green beans in front of him, next to a paper sack filled with ripening tomatoes.? "It is a beautiful, beautiful day, no?"
"It sure is," he said.
"On a day like this, I feel like there is nothing in the whole world to worry about."
He grunted at this, hoping his grunt sounded like agreement.?
"Hmmmm?" Lorena Hidalgo said.? "You say something, Smoke?"
"It's a great day," he said.?
Open on the table was a large book of the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci - anatomical studies, studies on the nature of water, drawings of the Deluge, and of various machines and other half-completed projects.? Smoke loved Leo, less for his art than for his mind and for how he had pushed the envelope of human knowledge.? Leo and his zany, high-speed dissections of the fresh corpses of criminals - there was no way to preserve the dead in the 1500s - had bridged the gap between the medieval understanding of the human body and the modern.? Smoke could picture Leo, up to his elbows in wet gore, carefully describing and illustrating the relationships between the organs, the skeleton, the nerves and the muscle systems.? But anatomy was just part of it - the sheer range of topics that came under his investigation was amazing: zoology, botany, geology, optics, aerodynamics and hydrodynamics among others.? Long before these things came into being, Leo had imagined and drawn the bicycle, the automobile, the submarine, and the helicopter.??
Today Smoke had hoped to study the plans for Leo's proposed bridge across the Gulf of Istanbul, connecting the Golden Horn and the Bosporous.? The bridge plan was squelched by the engineers of the time, who cringed when they found out how big it was supposed to be.? Somewhere, Leo had gotten the last laugh, however, because modern engineers determined that the bridge would have been completely sound, even with the materials and methods of the 1500s.
But Smoke couldn't focus on Leo.? Instead, he kept thinking about simple booby traps.? Ones you could make easily and that were practically guaranteed to seriously maim, or even kill.? Wasn't that funny?? There was a long road between Smoke Dugan and Leonardo da Vinci.?
The particular death trap Smoke was fixated on at this moment was a light-bulb trap.? He had made one earlier in the day.? So simple, a child could do it.? He had taken a medical syringe and filled it with gasoline.? Then he had injected the gasoline into the top of a 100-watt incandescent bulb.? It had taken some doing to poke a hole through the top of the bulb, but once he had, it was nothing to inject the gasoline.? In fact he injected several syringes full.???
Then he had screwed the bulb into the overhead light fixture of the small corrugated shed that crouched in the back of his yard.? The shed served as his workshop.? Voila!? The bulb hung naked, and was turned off and on by a small chain that hung down beside it.? If someone were to pull that chain, the bulb would come on and the filament would ignite the gasoline.? Instantly.? The bulb would shatter, spraying liquid fire all over anyone standing below.? Breathing the flames would roast a person's cilia, the tiny hairs in the esophagus that protect lungs from harmful pollutants.? Should be enough to kill anybody.?
Maybe the person would even catch fire.?
Now that would be something.?
?
* * *
?
Smoke didn't like heights.?
That's how he thought of it: he didn't like heights.? He didn't consider that he was afraid of heights.? He rarely talked about it, and when he did, he didn't describe the breathlessness, the shaking, the heart palpitations and the fear - nay, terror - of dying that seemed to come over him when confronted with a high place.? Even in the reaches of his own mind, he seldom admitted the sense of things spinning out of control that heights brought on, or the
waves of unreality that seemed to wash over him.
He didn't like heights, that was all.? He didn't like them a lot.???
On the drive over to Lola's apartment, Smoke got caught on the Casco Bay Bridge.? He watched with dismay as the red lights began to flash, the safety arms - so like the safety arms at railroad crossings - came down, and the traffic ahead of his little Toyota Tercel slowed to a stop.? The span that crossed the high end of Portland harbor, where it met the Fore River, was a drawbridge.? He put the car in park and sullenly stared ahead as the giant steel grates of the bridge began to inch toward the sky.??
He was ten cars back from the front of the line.? He was way up there, six and a half stories above the high water mark.? And it seemed like more than that.
??? Smoke knew how high he was because he had studied the schematics in the public library.? He crossed the bridge damn near every day - he figured he ought to know something about it.? It was a new bridge, opened only in late 1997, and had won awards for design and for aesthetics.? It had replaced the old, deteriorating and outmoded Million Dollar Bridge that had stood there before it.? It was a vast improvement over the old bridge, which had cleared the water line by a scant two and a half stories.
Portland was a busy oil port, one of the busiest on the East Coast.? It was also low to the water.? To make any bridge tall enough for the tankers would have meant an impossible angle shooting straight up in the air and straight back down again.? So they made these goddamn drawbridges instead.
Which was fine with Smoke except when he got stuck with the bridge up.? Driving across the bridge itself, he was okay with that.? Although it was nearly a mile long, all that meant was about a minute, maybe two minutes on the span.? And most of the bridge wasn't all that high.? There were maybe two hundred yards at the very top of the bridge that were a good six or seven stories above the harbor.? Even this section was okay if Smoke kept his eyes on the road or on the car in front of him, and thought of other things, and drove smoothly along until he reached the stoplight at the far end of the span.? He made it across the bridge many times in just this manner.
But today he got caught at the draw, and to make matters worse, he got caught at the very top.? As he sat behind the wheel he felt beads of sweat breaking out on his back.? Then they broke out on his brow, and his hands began to tremble oh so slightly.?
Look at you, you're ridiculous, he thought, a grown man acting like this.? And not just any grown man, he realized.? A criminal.? A bank robber.
A murderer.
He was a man who had sunk his own boat - his Boston Whaler - in a terrible storm off the eastern end of Long Island, and lived, not to tell about it, but lived nonetheless.? He had been through real dangers and had escaped death.? Yet this simple act of sitting on a bridge put him in his place.? Just ahead, the steel cage towered high above him, still rising.? It filled his windshield.?
So don't look out at the water, he told himself.? Which was silly, of course.? It was like telling somebody not to think of the color red.? Then of course all they can think about is the color red.? Red barns and red apples and red fire trucks and red stop signs and bright red cherries.? Don't look out at that view - the one some people raved about, how it took in the vast blue sky, and the sweep of the city's skyline along the harbor, green islands and white sailboats in the distance.???
Smoke looked.?
He was high above the water.? Way down below, he saw the tanker pulling through the bridge and into port.? The deck of the tanker was about to pass through the opening.? If Smoke were to somehow fall from that height, he imagined, he would smash like a tomato against the solid decking of that tanker.? It would be a sickening five second fall, followed by a wet thud as the liquid insides of his body splashed in different directions much to the chagrin of a few startled Chinese sailors.?
They'd probably laugh about it later.
Remember the suicide, he thought.? Remember the suicide.? Three years before, just after Smoke had settled here, a distraught mother of five had walked out onto the bridge.? She had been put off welfare some time before, and had ground out a slow struggle on a work program.? But she hadn't cut the mustard.? Work just wasn't for her, not at the age of thirty, not after twelve years, her entire adult life, on the dole.? Her electricity had been cut off, so she and her children were now sitting in the dark with no money, no prospects and most of all, no lights.
She walked out on that bridge, and without so much as a scream or a speech or a final telephone call, she climbed the very low fence at the top.? It was little more than waist high.? Smoke had noticed it several times.? To his mind, it was so low a person could practically fall over it, never mind climb over.
As traffic screeched to a halt all around her and people came running to stop her, she leapt to what she thought was a certain death.? A crowd of people gasped as she fell away and seconds later, hit the water far below.?
And lived.?
Without so much as a broken bone, or even a sprained ankle.
In fact, a young carpenter on his way to work acted without thinking, and jumped off the bridge in a desperate bid to save her life.? And lived.? Without a scratch.? When the Coast Guard fished the two of them out of the water, the young man told the waiting reporters that the jump was the most fun he had ever had.?
None of which made sitting there any easier on Smoke.? He knew it intellectually.? A person could live after falling from that bridge.? But his body knew different.? A fall from that bridge and he would be fish bait.? And curiously, he felt drawn, compelled even, to the edge of it.? The worst of his dislike of heights was the madness that gripped him - it made him want to jump.
Smoke's grip had tightened around the wheel and he heard his breath coming in shallow gasps.? He was mouth-breathing, never a good sign.? He tried to loosen up and relax, but gripped the wheel harder than ever.? A bead of sweat rolled down to the end of his nose.? It wasn't even hot out.? His heart skipped a beat.? His stomach lurched and did a lazy barrel roll.
He saw himself hit the deck of that tanker again.?
"Shit," he said through clenched teeth.? "Shit on this."
It had happened more than forty years earlier, back in Hell's Kitchen.?
He could see those days like they were yesterday.? The five-story walk-ups they all lived in - tenements, the newspapers used to call them.? All along Ninth Avenue, clothes were hung out to dry on the fire escapes.? There was a constant buzz of sound, day or night, punctuated by the odd shouts or screams.? The Irish, the Italians, all poor, all cramped together, and now the Puerto Ricans coming in.? Smoke couldn't remember a time when there weren't Puerto Ricans, but his mother - all the grown-ups - talked like the spicks had never existed just a few years before.
Smoke was still Wally O'Malley then, and he was already running with the wrong crowd.? In Hell's Kitchen there was no other crowd.?
Born with a bum leg, there was a lot little O'Malley couldn't do.? He couldn't play stickball.? He couldn't fight - in a fist fight, his leg would give out from under him.?
But there was one thing he could do?
It was a hot spring day.? The boys stood out on the corner of 53rd and Ninth, laughing and joking.? O'Malley was with them.? They leaned against the lamppost or the wall, cigarettes hanging from twelve year-old mouths, wearing stove pipe jeans, sports shirts with collars turned up.? The teacher would wring your neck for a turned up collar in school, but there were no teachers on the street.? They patted down their slicked back hair, every strand in place.? Very carefully, very precisely cool.? Squinting and watching the cars cruise the Avenue.? Talking, talking, talking that good bullshit.?
"You seen the tits on Maggie Lefferts?"
"Maggie Lefferts?? Shit."
"You seen the ass on that spick girl in class?? Jesus.? Now that's a nice ass.? What's her name?"
"Yeah, but whaddya gonna do?? Fuck a spick girl?? You know what I'm saying?? Who gives a shit what it looks like if you can't get at it?"
; Artie Mulligan came walking up the block.? O'Malley could see from half a block away that something was wrong.? He was walking?wrong.? Then he saw the blood streaming down Artie's face.? Artie Mulligan - twelve years old and already tougher than leather, a born leader of men, shot dead in a tangle with FBI agents eleven years later - Artie had gotten a beat down.
He stood among them now, his eyes on fire.?
"Motherfuckers."?
He leaned on a car and lit a smoke.? His hands were shaking.? His whole body was shaking.? O'Malley noticed, not for the first time, how skinny Artie was, how small.? Size didn't mean shit.???
"Who did it, Artie?"?
"Ace McCoy, Phil Evans, some of those."
The boys looked at him and nobody said a thing.? Ace McCoy was 16 years old.? His whole crew were fifteen, sixteen, just about to cross the threshold into manhood.? In a year or two they would go to work on the docks, or join the Army, or get on board as street muscle in man-sized rackets - in a few years they'd be doing man-sized prison terms.? If they weren't men yet, they were about to be.
Artie stared right at O'Malley.? Wally O'Malley was high up in Artie's brain trust.? More than that - O'Malley was Artie's brain trust.?
"What can we do?"?
O'Malley shrugged.? Then he smiled.? "I have an idea."?
The older boys had a clubhouse they kept in a vacant lot between two buildings.? The clubhouse was made of wooden pallets stolen from the docks on the river.? The pallets were tied together with rope.? The roof was a slab of sheet metal placed on top of the pallets, and the furniture was discarded rubber tires.? The clubhouse slumped in the back of that vacant lot, hidden by the weeds, but all the neighborhood kids knew it was there.? They also knew not to mess with it, or go there at all.
"I need gasoline," O'Malley said.? "And motor oil."
Smoked Page 4
