City on Fire (44 page)

“I’ve got pretty bad asthma.”

“How old are you, Charlie?”

“Eighteen,” he said, rounding up. And, slightly defiant, “Why? How old are you?”

“Twenty-two. But I’ve been here before, if you know what I’m saying.”

“I don’t believe in reincarnation.” He imagined test-driving the word: I’m a Christian now.

“It’s because you’ve got a young soul. But that’s cool. Chaque a son goût. My mom used to say that.” She paused for a coughing fit that sounded like her lungs climbing out of her mouth. Her big face went lovely with color. “It means each to her own, something like that. She was kind of a hippie, there at the end. Now she’s probably a bird or a deer or something terrific.” She took another puff, considered him through the harsh, sweet smoke. “You know your friend Sam was missing a mom, too. We bonded over that, way back when.” And when he didn’t say anything: “I’m kind of the den mother here.”

“Can I ask something, though? You guys go by initials, right? S.G., D.T.—”

“D. Tremens. D. for Delirium.”

“I get that. But why do they call you Sewer Girl?”

“Nicky says I’m stuck on a lower level of consciousness. Because I’m from Shreveport, or whatever. It’s like, if you didn’t grow up in the city, it’s hard for dialectical materialism to be your bag. I still get sentimental about moms and deer and my horoscope and stuff.”

“That was like Sam’s least favorite word, though. Sentimental. Did you ever read her ’zine?”

“You don’t miss a trick, do you?” she said, and rose to pour the tea. From inside a go-go boot, she retrieved a little baggie of pills. Methodically, she crushed one under a spoon and scraped the crumbs into his tea. “You’ve had a rough day, this way we’ll be on like the same wavelength.” He couldn’t do more than sip the tea, almost choking from the heat, but he could feel the pill working pretty much immediately, unless that was his imagination.

“Hey, are you hungry?” she said. “I always get hungry this time of day. The getting-high time of day.” She laughed. “Which is every time of day. I could run out and get us a treat.”

He didn’t have any money. But that was cool, she said. It was like part of her job, to welcome novices. She’d be back in a flash. She put a long, fake-fur coat on over her jersey—no pants—and went out, leaving Charlie alone. He got up to examine the kitchen, staggering a little. The Quaalude, or whatever it was, was stronger than what Sam used to get, or else he was more receptive to it. Waterstains swelled and subsided like big, brown jellyfish on the plaster above. Soon, he was lost in the maze of cracks winding down from the molding. In one place was a fist-sized hole. He pushed at a bit of plaster experimentally; it skittered down into darkness, but the sound of it hitting bottom was lost behind what seemed to be a gray metallic buzz back in his fillings. He realized this was the fume hood, which for some reason was over the sink and not the oven. He turned it off.

The others were tromping now down unseen stairs, heading out into the backyard. Through the cigarette-stained window, he watched them disappear into the outbuilding, under a lintel of birds. Plant life rose thigh-high between here and there. It spilled over into the next yard, and the next, these yards flowing together, walled in by tenements, all surrounding that little aviary, or fortress. He was still standing over the sink with his tea, swimming down into the dark cursive of winter weeds, when Sewer Girl returned.

“Oh, geez,” she said, reaching for the fume hood. “Charlie, the fans have to stay on. There aren’t many rules here, but that’s like number one.” She offered him a crumpled-looking pastry. Had he ever tried pasteles? “I live on Long Island,” he said, and when the synapses fused in her brain she started laughing again; it really was the squarest place on earth, wasn’t it? Charlie didn’t mind. He liked sitting there stoned and pretending not to watch her tits jounce around like grapefruits in a sack. He knew it was the drugs making him feel better, but after the day he’d had, was that so wrong? And wasn’t this how Sam had felt, hanging out here? Maybe he’d said this last part out loud, because it seemed like they were talking about her again. It was amazing, said Sewer Girl, how devoted people were to Sam. Men, especially. “Nicky wasn’t always happy about that, but that’s because he sees so much more than the rest of us. He always puts these things in terms of like how is it going to affect the Phalanstery. You know—is it going to compromise the project.”

From within the gauze of the drug, something solid struggled to surface. He could make it out: shape, size, and color. “What project? You mean Ex Nihilo?”

“You’re probably going to want to take that up with Nicky.”

But when Nicky came in from the cold a few minutes later, he put his hand on Sewer Girl’s shoulder and said Charlie had had a big day, maybe it was time he headed home. The rest of them had work to do.

“Can I come back?” Charlie asked.

Nicky’s smile then was a thing of beauty—an artful rip in the denim of time. “Oh, sure. Oh, most definitely. We expect you back, Prophet. Once you’re in, you’re in.”

30

THE RANCH HOUSE OFF THE CUL-DE-SAC had shrunk since the fall, like some kind of withered organ. But at least there weren’t news-wagons everywhere, sinking into the slushy lawn, klieging up the siding, waiting to endow with sinister significance images of its last remaining occupant checking his mail. Richard walked around to the backyard, but for the first time that he could remember, the aluminum hangar was silent, its great fans immobile. Maybe Carmine had gone to the hospital, and they’d passed right by each other at some point in the last hour, one commuting out, one in. Then Richard thought he saw movement behind the sliding door to the kitchen. He mushed back up to the icy patio. On the other side of the glass, the fridge was open, a little parenthesis of light; Carmine, wearing only a towel, had bent to place something on the bottom shelf. The sight of his friend peering in seemed not to startle him when he straightened. The door slid open. “Sorry,” Richard said. “I came out to see how you were doing.”

“I was about to shower,” Carmine said, as if the words took a second to reach him.

You should have stopped there, Richard would think, looking back; far be it from him to stand between a man and his shower. But when had he ever known when to stop? “You mind if I come in for a minute?”

Carmine, unembarrassed by the graying sag of his own chest and gut, or possibly unaware of it, stepped aside to let him pass.

The kitchen table was still set for two. On one of the placemats sat some rosewood beads; on the other, a cylinder of Duncan Hines cake frosting. “It’s Sammy’s birthday,” he explained.

“I remember.”

“I was hoping to get the icing on quick while the shower warmed up, but the cake’s too hot. The stuff just melts. They don’t tell you on the package.”

“How’s she been, Carmine?”

“Depends when you saw her last.” It was entirely possible that this was an honest statement, not meant to make Richard feel guilty about his two-plus weeks of radio silence.

“It was the last time I saw you. In the waiting room New Year’s Day.”

“Critical but stable, is what they’re saying now. Whatever that means. Like, ‘It’s bad, but it’s not getting worse.’ ” Richard could hardly stand to look at Carmine’s biblical near-nakedness, or even at the hands closing around the frosting tube. They wanted work to do, cartridges to pack, necks to wring. Outside, the sun had withdrawn from the sky in defeat, but not a single light was on in here. “You need a beer?”

“I’m pacing myself,” Richard said. “I’d take a glass of water, though.”

Carmine went to the tap. There was a groan, a shuddering, a curse. “The goddamn pressure in this house. I forgot the shower was still on.”

“Don’t worry about me, go take your shower.”

“No, no, let me go shut it off.”

“Please, Carmine. I can wait here until you’re done.”

Carmine muttered something to himself and padded off down the hallway that led to the bedrooms. Richard had been back there once before. Now the avocado shag looked gray. Dimness made the water in the pipes seem louder.

Samantha’s room, he had reason to know, was the second door on the right. The blue curtains, batiked with sunflowers, had been left halfway open. Other remnants of girlhood lingered here and there—the dressing table with stickers on the mirror, the canopy affixed to the bed. Back in the fall, dozens of Kodachrome photographs had been clothespinned to lengths of twine on the wall opposite the window, but those were gone now; he could just barely make out the darker rectangles on the paint where the sun hadn’t bleached it. Carmine must have let the cops take anything that could conceivably be evidence. Not that this was any of Richard’s business. It was only that cynical omnivore, the newspaperman, who would have allowed himself to be excited by, for example, the plastic bucket of laundry parked in front of the closet, as though the room had been vacated only minutes ago. Still, just hypothetically, what might Richard have been looking for, were he looking for something? The dressing table’s center drawer was locked. He thought about checking under the mattress; it was where, as a kid, he’d kept the dirty playing cards Cousin Roger had brought back from the Italian front. Then he spotted the film canister on her nightstand. Inside was the key. The drawer slid open with a woody squeak. He found at the bottom a trio of homemade pamphlets or magazines, unlined paper stapled twice in the fold. Each cover was a jumble of text, some of it written, some of it typed, some of it cut out of magazines and stuck on like a ransom note, all of it photocopied. Issue 1. Issue 2. Issue 3. The last had a piece of Scotch tape still clinging to the outer edge. 25¢ at the top. You want this. But now the water sluicing through the walls had stopped, and Richard, with his sharpened senses, thought he heard doors opening and closing. He jammed the pamphlets into the back of his waistband, covered them with his sportcoat’s tails, and hastened out into the hall, trying to remember how many inches ajar her door had been. He’d just taken his hand from the knob when Carmine spoke up. “You need something back here?” Richard had never seen him like this, in a starched white shirt. Comb-lines in his slicked-back hair.

“Just the can, Carmine.”

“There’s one off the living room. You know that, you’ve used it before.”

“Right.”

He slipped past Carmine without meeting his gaze and went to try to piss in the front bathroom. As he stood above the robin’s-egg toilet, with its carpeted lid, various selves did battle. Some part of him sensed some other part trying to meddle with what was clearly now the story. And he’d sworn he wouldn’t get himself mixed up with his subjects this way again. Not after Florida. Hadn’t he told Pulaski that the goal was just to finish the profile? And yet there was this dissembling body, this conglomerate Richard, returning to the kitchen, reiterating that he was sure Samantha would be okay (which he wasn’t), and that Carmine should get some sleep (which he probably couldn’t), and just generally knitting that doily of horseshit you were expected to insert between the bereaved and the fact that no one, in the end, made it out of this life alive. “I meant to tell you,” he said. “I managed to track down my friend, the Deputy Inspector.”

Carmine had taken the cake back out of the refrigerator to smear on icing with a butter knife. Now he paused, considering his handiwork. “Why’d you do that?”

“They’re supposed to release her name to the press now that she’s legally of age, but I got him to hold off. I know how you feel about your privacy.”

“And what if somebody out there has information—did you think about that?”

The knife, perpendicular, let drop a dollop of white goo. Whichever Richard was in charge now felt a little sick. He’d been so sure it was his better angels leading him up to the Bronx. “You’ve got to trust me, the broadcast media can be merciless. And with a random shooting, it shouldn’t make a difference whether her name’s out there or not.”

“I’ll tell you something, though, Richard, in confidence. I sometimes wonder how random things really are.”

He studied Richard’s face, as if daring him not to take this seriously. For a moment, something rustled among the crowded file cabinets of Richard’s mind. But it was wishful thinking, he knew. Hadn’t Samantha used the word “paranoid” to describe her father? Richard’s own paranoia was currently that the pamphlets, now sweaty, might at any moment fall to the linoleum. He said gently that he sometimes wondered himself; a logical cause would mean things weren’t out of control. But in his experience, looking too hard for one could lead to feeling guilty, to making yourself the cause, when you were the furthest thing from it. “Honestly, Carmine, I don’t know how you’re doing what you’re doing. I was just hoping to buy you some space to do it in without jerks like me getting in your way.”

For a second there above the cake, Carmine seemed to weaken. Then he was himself again, a stoic piece of Italian marble.

“Anyway, I should be getting back,” Richard said. When he stood, it was with extreme care, trying not to dislodge his contraband.

“You don’t have to do that.”

“No, I mean it. You want me to let myself out?”

“Wait, Rich. I was going to take this cake in to her. Why don’t I drive you?”

Crawling along the grim and salted expressways of Nassau County a half-hour later, they would listen to sports radio, but the details were lost on Richard. He could think only of the pamphlets clinging to his lower back and whether he could somehow sneak them under the seats of Carmine’s truck before it reached the city, to leave them there as if Samantha had dropped them. He didn’t, though, in the end. Because wasn’t this, if he was being honest, the sort of thing he’d come out here hoping to find in the first place, an hour of travel each way? At any rate, as soon as he was safely back behind the deadbolt of his apartment he took out the pamphlets and began to read. And so began his first, tentative descent into the daughter’s secret life.

31

THE FOLLOWING THURSDAY WAS INAUGURATION DAY, a half-day at school, and after the last bell, Charlie returned to East Third Street. He told himself he’d stop by the hospital, too, to wish Sam a happy birthday, but knew already there wouldn’t be time before it got dark. Instead, he would spend the last hours of daylight in that tumbledown kitchen, drinking more of Sewer Girl’s special tea … At best, she might illuminate for him, finally, the mysteries of Sam. At worst, he’d have someone to whom to make his own confession: that he had been—that he was still—in love with his best friend. And maybe if Solomon wasn’t on the scene, Sewer Girl would offer poor Charlie the consolation of a mothering embrace. He would crawl into the chasm of her cleavage, never to be seen again. But neither she nor Sol was around, nor anyone except for Nicky Chaos, who came to the door (which, strangely, had been locked) in the muscle-tee that read Please Kill Me. “Good timing,” he said, like he’d been expecting Charlie, and took a bite from a half-eaten nectarine. “I could really use a hand.”