I looked around. "Well, I can see why you wouldn't want to leave
."
"Oh, listen, buddy"
"I'm only kidding. Who wanted you?"
"BU, Columbia, Seton Hall."
"Damn, Columbia, you could live in Manhattan. How old are you?"
"Seventeen."
"Oh, shit. Oh, God, seventeen years old, beautiful, all alone and living in New York City." I threw my head back and howled like a wolf. "Awrooooo
"
Nicky looked up from his book and laughed. "Don't mind him, Nicky," she said. "He's crazy." Nicky patted me on the leg and went back to his book.
"So now Columbia's offering you a free ride, and you don't want to take it? That's like somebody putting a hundred and fifty grand in a bag and handing it to you. You can't give it back. When someone offers you that much money, if you don't take it, man, that's a sin that God cannot forgive."
"You stole that from Zorba."
"I adapted it." There's an old salesman's trick, they use it when the mark keeps coming up with lame excuses why she can't buy the vacuum cleaner. I decided to give it a shot. "Tell me the real reason," I told her. "I won't tell a soul. Nicky won't, either. Tell me the real reason you won't go."
She stared at the floor for a full minute, then looked up at me. "How would you feel," she said, "if you were some hick from the sticks? Suppose you lived half your life out here on the far side of the moon? I can't even fit in with the kids up here, how the hell am I gonna make it in New York City?"
"That's not good enough," I told her. "I can get you around that one in ten minutes. You gotta do better than that."
I heard the sound of Gevier's tow truck pulling up next to Louis's Jeep. "They're back," she said, sounding relieved. "Don't you think you should go help out?"
* * *
I figured Louis didn't have any money to pay Gevier, but I owed him a couple days' rent, so I settled up with him while Gevier patched the Jeep back together. He used some scrap steel and a shock absorber that was a long way from new, and it took him almost no time at all to get the truck fixed. He tried to get Louis to let him go further and beef up the bed where it had rusted through, but Louis, it seemed to me, preferred living on the edge of crisis. Gevier didn't want to take Louis's money, he said that all he'd done was weld some small pieces of scrap steel onto some larger pieces of scrap steel, which did not change the essential nature of the finished product at all. Louis pretended to be insulted. They worked it out after a while, and then Gevier drove his tow truck back to the garage, and Louis followed him in the Jeep to save him having to ride his bicycle back. Nicky went with Louis, and I headed for Eastport.
If you hold your hand up in front of you with your fingers spread apart, Lubec is at the end of your thumb, and Eastport is at the end of your forefinger. The space in between is one small corner of Passamaquoddy Bay. Louis and Gevier lived down by your wrist somewhere. The point being, although you can see Eastport from Lubec, and vice versa, it is not a short drive from one to the other. Eastport is bigger than Lubec, too, and it doesn't have that half-finished air that Lubec does. It's actually on the end of Moose Island, and you drive over a long causeway to get to it. They call it a city, there's a sign that says so on your way in. Maybe so, but you could fit the whole damn thing in the subway yards in Jamaica, Queens, and have room left over.
* * *
They had only a couple of cells in the building where Taylor Bookman had his office, but a couple is enough. In fact, all it takes is one. Let me tell you, there is nothing on earth like the clang when that metal door slams shut on your ignorant young ass. I can hear it now, and I don't ever want to be on the wrong side of that sound again, in fact, I don't want to be anywhere in the neighborhood, which is why I was nervous, looking for Bookman's office. Tell you the truth, I was shitting my pants. They had some kid in the lockup, you couldn't hear him through the thick steel and glass door but you could see him huddled up in the corner, sweating and shaking and crying. I was following the deputy, but he wasn't Hopkins, he was a different guy. He stopped to look through the window at the kid in the cell.
"What happened to him?"
"OxyContin cowboy," he said without looking at me.
"You guys ever heard of a detox?"
"This is a poor county," he said. "No money for that shit up here." He shook his head. "This kid's father used to be a friend of mine."
"Fucking drugs." I had my own story on that topic, but I didn't think he wanted to hear it. Actually, neither did I.
He turned and looked at me then, his face etched with anger. "We caught this dumb son of a whore headed south with two bags of OxyContins in his car. A hundred beans in each bag. This is going to tear his family apart."
"I guess he'll be going away for a while."
The guy shook his head. "He's just a mule. We need to get him to tell us how they're coming across the border. If he'll do that, he might still have a life."
"You think he'll do it?"
"Who knows," he said. He didn't sound optimistic. "C'mon, let's get outta here." We went on by, leaving the kid to suffer through on his own.
Bookman's office had a big window, and you could see over the tops of the few little downtown buildings in Eastport to Passamaquoddy Bay. The water never seemed calm. Every time I saw it, the currents seemed to be fiercely ripping in one direction or another, and sometimes both ways at once, downstream out in the channel, upstream near the shore, constantly worrying away at the stone that made up the islands. I don't know anything about boats or the sea or anything like that, but I do know that it doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference if the tide is in or out when you go to the beach in Brooklyn, I don't remember noticing it one time in my entire life there. The vertical rise of the tide might be three feet or so, tide goes out, you might get twenty yards of extra beach to lie down on at Rockaway or Riis Park, should you so desire. But if you tie up your boat to the pier at high tide in Eastport, you'd better use a strong piece of rope, brother, because the son of a bitch will be hanging there like a bauble on a Christmas tree when the tide goes out. And they don't have sand beaches up in Eastport, or any use for them, either, the water is too goddam cold to do anything but look at. They do have clam flats, though, and the water might be right up next to the road at high tide and a half a mile away at low. Twenty-three feet of rise is what I heard they get, and that's a hell of a lot of salt water. I guess that's why the currents always look so busy. Makes sense, given the amount of work they have to do.
And seagulls, everywhere you look, you see seagulls. Stand out in the road anytime and look straight up, and as far up as you can focus you'll see seagulls soaring. Mostly herring gulls and great black-backed gulls, maybe a stray laughing gull, wondering which way it is to Brooklyn. They have a lot of the other shore-birds you see in Brooklyn, too, cormorants, sea crows, ducks, and so on. The herring gulls are the most fun to watch. They are the jet fighters, acrobatic fliers, fast and beautiful, and they seem almost human to me, fighting, squabbling, eating, and flying with what seems to be great relish. Walking down a street, you hear a loud, hollow metallic
bonk,
some seagull a mile or so up in the air has taken a shit and hit a car trunk, I always picture him up there thinking, Damn, missed him again.
Taylor Bookman was sitting behind a metal desk, his back to the window, watching me look out. "How do you get any work done?" I asked him.
"That's what deputies are faw," he said, deadpan. "Have a seat." I sat down across the desk from him, and he looked at me in that way of his. "How long you been out of prison?"
My heart stopped. I knew it, I fucking knew it. "You got me confused with some other guy," I told him, trying to keep my face as blank as his.
"Manny," he said, and he grimaced slightly, just for a fraction of a second. "We may be a long way from Noo Yok, but I don't live in a cave."
"I never thought you did." I turned my left arm over, looked at the back of my wrist where the black snake's tail came out from under my sleeve and wrapped around the space where you would normally wear a watch. "I grew up on the street," I told him, and it was true enough. "I got most of these as a teenager."
"You paht of a street gang?"
"When I was young. The Poppy Chulos." That last part was a lie. The Poppy Chulos that I knew ran over in Sunset Park, which is a neighborhood in Brooklyn. Their name is Spanish for "cute guys," and I never met the admission criteria.
"So? You didn't stay with them? Why not?"
I looked out the window for a couple of minutes. "Well," I said, rehearsing some bullshit story to give him, and then I decided I didn't need to. "There was five of us, growing up, hung out together. Time I was twenty, I was the only one left. They were the closest thing I ever had to a family, Mr. Bookman, and they were all gone." I ticked them off on my fingers. "One overdose, one shot and killed during a robbery, two buried in a cell somewhere, doing life plus. And me."
"You saw the light and decided to go straight. Nice to know that can still happen." He lifted one eyebrow a millimeter or two, curled one corner of his mouth up. It was probably his equivalent of a belly laugh.
"You know, when you're a teenager, it's like playing Russian roulette with no bullets in the gun. Nothing can happen, you're a minor, there ain't shit anybody can do to you."
"Noticed that."
"I bet. You turn eighteen, though, they put a bullet in the gun. But you're still immortal, you're Superman, right? Five out of six is still pretty good odds, that's what you think when you're that age. But the longer you play, the more bullets they put in the gun."
"How many in yaws?"
I shook my head. "Couldn't tell you. I quit playing years ago."
"Glad to heah that," he said. "I worry about folks like the Averys sometimes. There's such a thing as being too kindhahted. Did you know it ain't safe to pick up hitch-hikahs any moah?"
I nodded my head.
"Louis Avery," he went on, "used to be an awful rakehell, back befoah he found the baby Jesus." His expression did not change. "Thought maybe good living might have clouded his thinking. But Eleanor, now, you'll nevah get much past her. She told me she thought you was probably all right. Said you'da nevah raised that little boy up as good as he is if you didn't have some finah points."
"I appreciate the vote of confidence."
"I trust her judgment," he said, "up to a point. Why don't you read ovah this statement, see if you agree with what it says." He handed me a couple of typewritten pages. As I took them from him, he picked up a newspaper that had been lying on his desk. It was a copy of the
New York Daily News,
a couple of days old. I was pretty sure it was the issue that had had the story about the Russians and the stock scam in it, and the story about Nicky going missing in Bushwick.
It was hard to concentrate on the statement, but I did the best I could while Bookman paged idly through his paper. After a few minutes I handed the pages back to him. "Says here he punched her in the face, but he didn't. All he did was whack her head against the car."
"A fine distinction," he said, putting down the paper. "Hold on, this won't take a second to change." He came back with a new printout a minute later. He handed the sheets to me, picked up his paper again.
"I 'magine those tattoos ah kind of a handicap for a guy like you, ain't they?"
"I'm a software designer," I told him. "They don't handicap me at all, I just get tired of the questions."
He was nodding. "That's right," he said. "Eleanor Avery told me that, but I forgot." He rolled the paper up and tossed it into his trash can. "Don't know how you can live down to Noo Yok," he said. "People robbin' each othah all the time. Don't seem natural." He was staring at me.
"You get used to it."
"I 'magine," he said. "None of my business, what you do to each other, down to Noo Yok or Boston. I got enough to do right heah. You know what I mean?" He regarded me calmly, giving me a minute to think about it, then cleared his throat. "Wife told me you was out to the house yesterday."
"Out to your house?"
He turned around one of the framed pictures on his desk so that the image faced me. It was a picture of Bookman and Franklin, the big kid with the broken bicycle. The two of them had their arms around one another, and Bookman squinted into the camera while Franklin looked at the ground. "Ah. He's your son."
He nodded. "My son. Funny thing about him. He don't talk a lot. He won't say a word about who it was run him off the road, and I really need to know who done it."
"Nobody likes a rat."
He stared at me. "Populah misconception," he said.
"I didn't see the accident. I saw a pale green pickup truck, seventy-four or seventy-five GMC, with two kids in it. Mile or so later, I saw Franklin."