Until she confessed her sins .
.
.
Forget the Salem witch-hunters who left people chained and naked while vermin came and chowed down on their extremities.
That’s
nothing
compared to what will happen to me, Will thought.
And he pulled back his hand from black velvet.
He looked left. The driver’s window was fogged up. He wiped at it.
The store across the street had closed.
A few minutes ago — or was it an hour, two hours? — it had been open. He didn’t remember.
It was a fruit and vegetable store. He remembered brilliant floodlights outside the store, hung from a green awning. They illuminated the bright, inviting display of sparkling lettuce, and blood red tomatoes, and plump squash, and grapes of every kind. Oriental men in white coats bustled about, checking the produce, weighing selections for customers.
Now all the produce was gone. The store was dark. The men in their white coats were gone. The awning had been folded back into itself. Corrugated riot doors covered the windows.
I wish they were still here, Will thought.
To keep me company.
He looked back across Madison Avenue, and the black hooker was gone. Scooped up by some lucky, if unsuspecting, soul about to taste the duplicitous pleasures produced by sexual camouflage. Will saw another girl, a different professional, standing across from the bank. She was chunky, with waves of synthetic blond hair.
Probably young. Probably much too young.
Where do they come from? Will wondered. And what could possibly make them come out here, to stand here, night after night, in the cold, in the rain?
Has life gotten that nasty, that tough?
A white Cadillac, with incongruous pink pinstripes, took the corner and pulled up to the girl. A tall black man in a leather coat got out. The man talked to the girl and gave her something.
Will watched, in the darkness of his car. Feeling like a spy, a voyeur. They don’t see me.
But I see them.
He watched the girl take whatever it was the man had proffered and bring it up to her nose.
She kicked her head back. And she grinned. A nice big grin visible from all the way over here.
Thanks. I needed that, her smile said.
The pimp got back into his duded-up wheels and made his whitewall tires screech as he pulled away.
Just putting another dime in the meter.
Keep his girls running.
As simple a concept as the donkey and the carrot.
Will heard a noise from behind him.
Shit, he thought. Goddammit. His hand closed on the barrel of the gun and then moved around to the handle. His heart raced, and he scolded himself.
Stupid, absolutely dumb! I should be checking the rearview mirrors, watching all around. I can’t get caught up in the street theater.
I can’t screw up, not tonight. Even if that
is
what I do best. I can’t screw up.
Not tonight.
He turned around just as his hand felt the gun handle.
And if it’s a cop, Will thought, what will I do then?
What if he starts looking in the car? What if he sees the gun? There were supposed to be cops all over here.
Supposed to be .
.
.
But it wasn’t a cop.
It was — yes — a homeless person.
When I was a kid we called them bums, he thought. Mom used to warn me. Stay away from the bums. And when I went to the city, to Manhattan, I’d spot them on the subway platforms, ghostly, rag-like creatures, one hand bent in a permanent cup shape, searching for a coin.
And Will learned to keep his eyes off them, to move away.
Sometimes there’d be a blind guy with a dog, stumbling through the subway car. Looking up at nothing, rattling along with the car. Stumbling this way and that, sometimes falling into people. Excusing himself to the embarrassed passengers in their seats. While the blind man held his tin cup at the ready. Right below his neatly lettered sign that read:
I am blind.
Please give whatever you can.
Praise God.
And then there were the cart men, the guys with no legs. Will never asked how they lost their legs. He didn’t want to know. It might be catching .
.
.
They were the scariest, those legless people who seemed so full of energy, waving pencils at people as they hurried by. So scary, as if they could threaten to turn
you
into one of them, and you’d become a cart person if you didn’t give them something, anything.
Now they were all called homeless.
And now there were committees and action groups, and people said it was our responsibility to do something, that it could happen to anyone.
He had been right as a boy. You
could
turn into one of them.
Nobody cared if a lot of them preferred the streets to the shelters, that they actually liked rustling through overflowing mesh garbage cans for discarded McDonald’s buns and stick fries. They liked living in the underworld.
And they still scared him.
Will watched this man shuffle next to the car. He was of indeterminate age. He might be twenty. He might be seventy. He had a beard that surely carried the leavings of countless grisly interactions with food and God knows what. He wore a regulation brown coat, Rapping open to the breeze, probably covering layers of clothes.
They wore all their clothes when it turned cold, layer upon layer upon layer.
It was easier than carrying them.
But this fellow also dragged a cherry-red Bloomie bag filled with his life’s treasures. The man stopped before he got to the corner. He put down the bag and then looked around, waving back and forth as if a good stiff breeze would blow him clear off his feet.
He didn’t see Will.
The man dug at his groin, pulling at what must be a bunch of zippers.
He was only feet from Will.
Who kept watching him, fascinated.
This is like bizarro television, Will thought.
The human circus.
The man finally hit pay dirt. He arched away from a pillar-like protrusion of the office building and urinated. The wind caught the steamy smoke .
.
.
At which point in the show, Will turned away.
Will kept looking away, giving the man time to move his act on.
Can’t blame him, Will thought. When you gotta go, you gotta go. And where the hell are you supposed to pee in the city? There are no toilets in the subway — they’re all locked up.
Though you’d have to be crazy to venture into one of those halls of horror.
In Paris, they had WCs right on the street, discreet cubicles where you could relieve yourself.
In Manhattan, you checked for the cops and let go.
Just like a dog.
If you can make it here
.
.
. Will’s mind hummed.
When he looked back, there was nobody there. The man had moved on, disappearing around a corner.
The sideshow had, inexplicably, ended.
No hookers. No homeless people. No crack magnates.
Will felt cold. Creepy.
As if he were being watched.
He looked at the digital clock.
Hoping it wasn’t midnight. Not yet. I’m not ready.
Il:l5.
Plenty of time.
Imagine, all that
activity
in just ten minutes or so.
Imagine .
.
.
And now he knew that he still had plenty of time.
Lots of time.
To sit and think.
And now — without anything to watch — to do what seemed unavoidable.
His constant activity now.
Unavoidable. Incessant. This thinking …
Always searching for the way out, the escape hatch.
The fucking way out.
And never finding it.
No matter how many times he let himself do it, no matter how many times he forced himself to remember .
.
.
* * *
St. Jerry’s, 1965
* * *
2
“Dunnigan! Will you come off it? Have a smoke, for Christ’s sake!”
Tim Hanna turned to the rest of them and grinned, as if to say — for the umpteenth time — What the hell is wrong with
this
guy?
But Will Dunnigan shrugged and took a sip of the Coke, too cold, too sweet for so early in the morning. The communal plate of fries — greasy, covered with a disgusting smear of ketchup — was more than his stomach could handle.
It didn’t bother anyone else, though. His friends all dug into the plate as if it were perfectly normal to be chomping on french fries at 8:15 in the morning.
“Come on, Hanna,” Will said. “Just get off my case, will you? I don’t want one of your goddamn cigarettes. I don’t want to smoke, and that’s the end of it, okay?”
Now Tim pulled at the cuffs of his sport coat — they all dressed in sport coats and ties, regulation dress for St. Jerry’s. And Will watched Tim lean across the table, close to him, until Will felt manic intensity, the power of Tim, who, at five feet, was the shortest of them all.
And Tim said:
“Dunnigan, when are you going to stop being such a fuckin’ pussy?”
And everyone laughed.
This time, even Will laughed. It was all in fun. Tim was his best friend, maybe his only real friend. And the language, all the ranking out, was just the way they talked.
It didn’t mean anything.
Will, never one for the sharp comeback, sipped his Coke.
Then, looking at the clock, he said, “Five minutes, guys.”
And a flurry of hands darted to the fries, eager to leave no greasy prisoners to Mr. Kokovinis’s dumpster.
Ted Whalen looked over at Will. Whalen seemed older, slicker than the rest of them, Will always thought. Maybe he
was
older. Whalen’s straight hair was combed completely to the left, flat against his forehead.
Whalen made a disgusted look at Will.
That’s in earnest, Will knew. Because Ted Whalen didn’t like him. No, he put up with him because of Tim. But Whalen made no secret of his distaste — his dislike of Will.
Will seemed to feel himself shrivel when Whalen looked at, past,
through
him.
“Don’t fucking worry, will you, Dunnigan?” Whalen said, snapping the word “fucking” like a whip, his voice filed to a nasty edge. “Gately doesn’t care about some fucking seniors missing the first bell. Jeez!”
Will didn’t say anything.
He learned that it didn’t pay to argue with Whalen. Whalen was too quick on his feet. And then, even Tim would start laughing at him.
And that was something that Will really couldn’t stand.
“We better go,” another voice said. Quiet. Even quieter than Will’s. It was Michael Narrio, who was what Tim crudely called their “token wop.”
Narrio never had much to say. He didn’t laugh much either, he was just always
there
.
Narrio played trumpet in the band. He was good. And then everyone heard him fine .
.
.
One ketchupy fry remained when the Kiffer — Jim Kiff — came flying through the luncheonette door.
Everyone turned and looked at him.
Sometimes Kiff made it to school, and sometimes he didn’t. He had arrived last spring near the middle of the junior term. He had some trouble at another school, grades maybe, maybe something else that he never talked about. At least not to the group, not to Will.
Kiff had an uncle with connections and he ended up at St. Jerry’s. From that first day Kiff just glued himself to the group.
He wasn’t in any of the things they were. He didn’t run track, like Whalen. He didn’t debate, like Tim did, and Will tried to. And he would have nothing to do with something as corny as the band.
“Screw extracurriculars” was Kiff’s motto.
Kiff, they all recognized, was crazy.
When they went drinking at the Oak Leaf Tavern in Germantown, where the old barkeep and his wife from Deutschland didn’t bother the nice, well-dressed boys for IDs, Kiff always went too far. He’d drink more beer than anyone else, and then — God — shots of real whiskey, matching the old farts, the regulars, whose big asses barely fit on the barstools.