Authors: Colin Harrison
He felt better now, his affection for Bobby bringing him closer to himself. He switched off the light, smiled in the dark. He was almost asleep when the phone rang. He hoped it was Janice.
“Yes? Hello?”
“Mister fucking D.A.! My brother is fucking rotting in prison and it ain’t—”
“Wrong number, buddy.”
Peter slammed down the receiver, his heart kicking in his chest and washing in his throat. He flicked on the tape machine next to his bed, and while waiting for whoever it was to call back, tried to place the voice. He had heard it before. His chest throbbed. He wished he had an unlisted number, but as a public official felt an obligation to be reachable.
The call came. He let the phone ring three times.
“Oh yes? Hello?” Peter spoke in a faintly effeminate voice to further enrage the caller into betraying himself.
“Yo, Mister fucking D.A.! You fuckin’ recommended my brother be denied bail and so he’s rotting away up there in the prison! There are a bunch of fucking homos queering him up the ass in the showers. He took seventeen stitches in the goddamned asshole last week. This week he got the shit beat out of him by the bastard prison guard for doing nothing! It’s on your fucking head, Mister D.A.! It’s on your fucking
head
… “A pause. Peter heard conversation and a jukebox in the background, a bar somewhere. “So you listen to me, you son-of-a-bitch! You hear what the fuck I’m saying? One of these days soon when you’re out in front of your house washing your Mercedes or BMW or whatever fucking piece of shit you drive, me and some of the boys are going to make you wish you were selling candy corn at Woolworth’s, instead of—”
“You just broke the law, Robinson.” He flicked the tape machine off. “Section 4702, paragraph A-3, Title 18. Threat to do unlawful harm to a public servant with intent to violate known legal duty, a felony of the third degree. I’ll let it go this time because fools like you deserve more than one chance. If anything happens to me or to my property,
Robinson,
you will be the first one visited by the police. This call has been recorded,
Robinson,
so it would be useless denying you made it. Your voice will be identified by the very able voice experts we employ from time to time. Let me repeat what I have just said to you,
Robinson,
you dumb shit. If you call, threaten, or harass me again, your life will become even more miserable than it already is.”
He hung up, brushed his teeth a second time, decided not to floss, castigated himself for not doing so, told himself he could sleep soundly, drank a glass of milk, and, in the middle of the night, reached out his hand and found the phone. He wanted to call Janice, knew he couldn’t, and wondered if John Apple was over there banging her, slipping it in and out. Maybe a mile away. By the glow of that dangerous kerosene heater. He pictured her giving Apple a blowjob, slow and wet and huge. The idea made him sick. There had to be a way to hide it from himself. He had not been thinking of Cassandra that day but now he called her. He didn’t know if he wanted her to answer, but on the second ring she picked up her phone.
“I’m alone, Cassandra. I’m tired and alone.”
She would be over in thirty minutes, she said, and he instructed her that he’d be in bed and would leave the house key taped inside the storm door, under the handle. He didn’t like getting out of bed again, but the city, unfortunately, was not safe enough to leave a door unlocked—and of course he knew that this was the same key that Janice had given him so recently, but the irony didn’t bother him; he was too horny and tired to care.
When Cassandra came in, he heard her re-bolting the door, the jingling of her car keys, and then her pumps on the stairs.
“Peter?” The bedroom was dark.
“Right here,” he said, face turned toward the window.
He listened to her undress, the clatter of earrings in the ivory dish on the dresser, a gift to Janice she hadn’t taken with her. The air smelled sweet, perfumed, now. How did Cassandra know to put the earrings in the dish?
“I appreciate your coming over, Cassandra.”
“Don’t be silly.”
She slipped beneath the covers, matched her curves to his. Oh, did he like this; he was grateful. Her thick nipples pressed against his back and one leg nuzzled between his. She kissed his ear and ran her hand over his chest. He was immediately erect and desirous of her yet did not want to be pleased, even vaguely despising her for being so adoring and attentive. His anger was also a brutal lust, and as he turned her onto her back and pushed apart her legs, he knew that there was a great meanness
in him. Cassandra had just washed between her legs, smelled soapy clean, and he began to pay attention. It seemed clear to him, his tongue now beginning to flick and dance over Cassandra’s clitoris, that we must suffer in order to achieve love. But how much? What price wisdom? Peter felt the heat of Cassandra’s thighs, remembered Janice and the women before her, flicked and teased and built up rhythms he riffed away from like a jazz musician, slowing into a tiny, insignificant flickering of pleasure, a minimum pulse that he would redeem sooner or later with a compensatory blast, building and choosing to fall back, Cassandra harder and fuller by the minute, until he decided that he would settle into an aggressive rhythm that she could not stay abreast of; it overtook her until the muscles of her stomach lifted into a knotted ridge and she contracted like a fist, her head and thighs pulling together, and when this happened he paused but did not stop. With one eye he watched the digital clock. She came five times, in nearly perfect minute intervals, and just before her hand crawled down to his forehead to beg him to stop—the pleasure apparently so intense it was nearly painful—he slowed the pace, wily and devious lovemaker that he was, and her hand lingered indecisively in the air for a moment before falling helplessly backward, his tongue apparently having slowed to a wide crosswise fluttering such that she could catch her breath. Yes—this was all good, what they both wanted, these precious, fleeting seconds. She inhaled, beginning to relax. But then a momentum began; there was a slightly faster speed and Cassandra’s body tensed. Her hands spidered their way across her breasts and grasped his head, and when his tongue settled into fast, light flicking,
though not the fastest,
her fingers dug quite wonderfully and painfully into his scalp, and for this he was pleased, because in all honesty with himself and with the stadium of demons who watched over him, he loved the intimacy he had right now with another human being. He smiled into her flesh, knowing that she was open to him and that she trusted him and that he would take her where she wanted, give to her what he could. And he cared for her truly. He was in the safe real place where certainty has overtaken expectation, connected to someone now, and that meant that at least in some way he was not lost completely from himself. The muscles in his neck and back loosened, and his penis surged against the sheet. Cassandra’s hands
pushed and urged his head, tearing a little at his hair, which was curly and wet from sweat. Her thighs quivered independently of all conscious intention. When she came, she cried
yes
in a hoarse whisper and stabbed her fingernails into the cartilage under the skin of his ears. He whispered with her. Her strong arms pulled him up on top of her lean ribs. She spit into her hand and wet him.
“C’mon, Peter,” she whispered in a hoarse growl that filled the room. “Hard as you can.”
“That’s going to be pretty hard.”
“It doesn’t scare me.”
He began, then, with his palms under her buttocks, crushing her against him.
“Good,” she whispered.
A few minutes later, as his heart slowed and Cassandra’s contented breath washed in his ears, part of him—he swore it to himself—kept vigil next to the bed, standing absolutely still in the corner of the room. Now dressed in a plain black suit and plain black hat, arms folded, judging him. Was he a good man? If he wasn’t, how severe would his punishment be? The figure’s eyes glowed fearfully and angrily at the way his promises to Janice and hers to him were being lost.
SATURDAY, THE WEATHER COLD AGAIN,
Peter caught the Paoli Local commuter train on the Main Line. He’d gotten a first-degree conviction of Robinson at three o’clock the previous afternoon. The forewoman, an insurance office manager, had read the guilty verdict. Of course, Peter had known, as had Morgan. He could tell by watching the jurors as they came into the nearly empty courtroom; they avoided looking at Robinson and his bizarre expressions, which by now only appeared pathetic. Instead, they maintained the precious, fleeting objectivity they had constructed in isolation long enough for their judgment to be passed. Robinson’s brother sat in the back while his younger brother heard the verdict. Peter gave the man a long, unmistakable look. Judy Warren’s family gasped, looked at one another, and clapped in satisfaction and relief, but the moment was by definition anticlimactic, for it only reconfirmed her death. Robinson, in perhaps his first moment of public lucidity during the trial, suddenly looked down, eyes shut.
The big mob trial downstairs had broken up at the same time and Peter had run into several reporters on his way out. They asked him about developments in the Whitlock case and about the second arrest of Carothers. Were the crimes linked? Did he have new evidence linking Carothers to the murders? The reporters pushed at him, and he used the opportunity to discuss the Robinson conviction. One of the papers briefly noted the conviction the next morning. He hoped Janice had seen it.
Late on such a Friday afternoon he might have taken off a little early, but he’d headed over to the office and on the way in Melissa told him that a Mrs. Banks had called. The name meant nothing to him. “She didn’t say why, only that she needed to speak with you. Wouldn’t leave a number.”
Melissa had stared at him expectantly then and this was unusual, for she had no reason or right to know why people called.
“Is there something you want to tell me?” he asked quietly.
She had only shaken her head.
NOW THAT HE SETTLED BACK IN HIS SEAT,
riding the Paoli Local for at least the thousandth time in his life, knowing without thinking that the train had cleared the great yard outside Thirtieth Street, feeling the long passenger cars roll into each wooden station and the hypnotic cadence beneath the seats slow to a rocking stop. The conductor called out, a few Saturday commuters departed. The train lurched forward again, hurtling past houses and leafless trees, slowing rapidly as the conductor called the next station; all this had been the same since Peter was very small, going into the city with his mother, Christmas shopping perhaps, carrying the large Wanamaker’s bag, his mother searching her purse for the tickets as the trainman clipped holes in tickets or checked the watch connected to his belt by a gold chain. On weekday afternoons the outbound train was full of private-school children in uniforms and—at the other end of the same class trajectory—attorneys and businessmen with ruddy faces and blue eyes and graying hair; it had been this way for fifty, seventy-five years. They read the
Wall Street Journal
usually, and greeted one another and asked about work and the family. He was about ten when he understood why thick-ankled black women carrying plastic bags (containing work uniforms and low-heeled shoes) rode the train into the city while at the same moment these men in Brooks Brothers suits hurtled by in the opposite direction. There used to be a time when only men, more or less, rode the train in the morning, and the conductors, men of comparable age, union lifers in the old Penn Central company, would greet them, ask about the family. That was twenty years ago.
His grandfather had ridden this train for half a century, neck straight in a pressed shirt, the train ticket tucked inside his watchband; he was a man who conducted himself with the pride and disdain of one who felt he was seeing the last rotting moments of civilization. For a man who believed so fervently in God, he had very little faith in the nature of man. Whether this came by way of personal experience or historical perspective, Peter didn’t know. Grandfather Scattergood’s ancestors had been in Pennsylvania more than three hundred years. While William Penn had been drafting the laws of the colony named after himself and the vast tracts of forest King Charles II had granted him, his grandfather’s ancestors had been chopping oak stumps from their fields. In the years when Benjamin Franklin, that unreconstructed bachelor, advised that older women remained sexually desirable because their lower parts had yet to dry up, his great-grandfather’s great-grandfather was surveying Western Pennsylvania—which was more or less on the edge of the known world—and beginning to finance its exploration. Penn’s idealized vision of a prosperous, tolerant city in a wilderness was under siege by human nature from the very start; during Revolutionary times his grandfather’s ancestors confronted a depressed city that reeked of horse and human shit, where dogs, pigs, and chickens rooted through the quagmire for spoiled vegetables, fish heads, the guts of butchered animals, and rotted oysters, where shackled black children praying in African dialects sold quickly at auction, where merchant ships carrying silks, rice, tea, and other goods disgorged sailors who mingled in the bars with prostitutes, boozers, vagrants, and criminals, and where the framers of the Constitution, while perambulating around the brick State House, confronted a fetid jail where prisoners thrust begging poles from the dark recesses of their barred windows, crying and singing and roaring out their suffering. And then, after the Civil War, and toward the turn of the century—the great gilded age of electricity, streetcars, typewriters, and department stores—his grandfather had been born the son of a banker. Back when money was loaned at a laughable three percent per annum. As a child living in old Philadelphia, Peter’s grandfather had collected horse dung from the cobbled streets for the family garden behind the house. He became an immensely stern man, but the repression was not so great that he didn’t forcibly bed his fiancée before the wedding,
so it was said. He became a prominent Philadelphia lawyer. Peter stared out the window, caught in a brief, compressed awareness, thinking of his grandfather riding the train, coming to the same stops for all those years, into the late fifties, while Ike was playing golf and Peter’s parents were busy birthing two sons, and America slept happily in the somnolence of immense and ever-greater wealth, and the flickering black-and-white eye of the television suddenly appeared in more and more households, and the French still believed they could control Vietnam, and Elvis Presley wasn’t dying his hair black yet or taking drugs, and Marilyn Monroe was just another beautiful movie star, not the static image nobody would let die forty years later, and JFK was still a young senator and Reagan a faded actor on the stump for General Electric—while all this happened, his grandfather became a heavy-chested cigar smoker who steadily worked himself toward death. By the time Peter knew him, he was an elder at the Meeting, a wealthy man who did not give freely of his money, but who nonetheless donated funds to Quaker activists giving medical aid to the North Vietnamese and setting up work camps for college students in the city’s ghettos. That he could do so and vote for politicians who continued the policies these activists opposed was not a troubling fact for him, for he was that strange combination of a man who is socially progressive in belief, morally judgmental, and, in matters of economics—both personal and national—deeply conservative. The Philadelphia of the 1990s would have filled him with profound disgust. Here was a once-great city that no longer could support decent civil services, whose school system produced legions of illiterates, whose judges and police were corrupt, whose businessmen borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars to build bizarre towers of glass, whose unprecedented violence and drug-dealing had absorbed seven years of his grandson’s life, and where the Mayor’s family was no longer safe from violence. Which reminded Peter that he would get the blood test on Carothers’s coat on Monday. Just a few specks of Johnetta Henry’s blood on that coat would do.