Lowboy (15 page)

The question of my penis is an ongoing question. My penis seems to be a kind of Answer. I took it out during TV hour & Prekopp & Fleisig & everyone else stared & hummed at it & let it happen. Another sign that things might be improving. My unzipped pants like Direct Cable Service. I’m not dead Violet. I’m not even tired. I’m making myself an airconditioned body
.

Why was I born Violet? Can you tell me why?

I’m writing to inform you that I remember who you are & not to worry.
I’m writing because I’ve gotten so much better. Men are going to visit
you with questions. Men are going to make you Propositions. Please
don’t answer. Please don’t worry about The last bad thing that
happened. Or in the old man’s house or in the basement. Those things
should not be cited Violet & you didn’t cite them so you should be
proud. I AM PROUD OF YOU VIOLET. I am proud of you Violet.
Please don’t forget. Your son William
.

T
he first thing Violet did when her son turned his head was to retch as though she’d swallowed something sharp. Lateef watched her go down with the calm of a man watching a rogue wave rushing toward a crowded beach, able to witness the event and guess at its meaning but helpless to keep the event from happening. The children broke into a run, but there was nothing to be done about that yet. He had time to catch her by the arm and plant his feet before she fell, time to ease her down onto the pavement and arrange her with her head between her knees. If he felt disappointment or frustration he was not aware of it. She was costing him time but there was plenty of that. The children were still less than a block away when he got back to his feet and started running.

Almost at once he became aware of a change in the way they moved. Half a minute earlier they’d been holding hands slackly, almost bashfully, shuffling past the storefronts as mildly as retirees: now they were sprinting in unison, not a glance or gesture wasted, with the single-mindedness of lifelong fugitives. More surprisingly
still, the girl was out in front. He wondered what in God’s name she was thinking. She shot across Seventh Avenue during a lull in traffic and the boy followed her without the least sign of concern. Stockholm syndrome suggested itself, certain celebrated cases, abductees taking the names of their captors. The comparison was a romantic one and he flushed it irritably from his mind. She’s seventeen years old, he thought. That’s a syndrome in itself. He worked his arms and kept his breathing even. The main thing now was not to lose his footing.

The children were more than a block away already, almost to Hudson, but Lateef chose to believe the gap was closing. The girl held the boy by his left hand or possibly his shoulder. “Thank God for small favors,” Lateef said out loud. The handholding would slow them down a little. He drew his arms farther in and stared down at the pavement and set himself to lengthening his stride. Someone shouted as he passed them and the cramp that he’d been nursing since Seventh Avenue bloomed in that instant, as though the pain had its source outside his body, in the parked cars or the pavement or the daylight. The children were closer now, standing perfectly still, penned in by the traffic at the corner. The girl had her thumb hooked into the back of the boy’s collar. They didn’t seem to want to turn uptown.

How much can I do, Lateef thought. How much farther. He was not in embarrassing shape for his age, he was strict with himself, but his last foot pursuit had taken place in the previous century. Runaways rarely bolted when you found them: most of them were relieved to be brought in. He let out a laugh, a senseless discharge of breath, and the cramp crept cheerfully up into his stomach. He was a few hundred feet from them now, keeping as close to the curb as he could manage. A groan of pain slipped out of him with every step he took. Through the tinted windshield of a Lexus he saw the girl’s hand hovering at the base of the boy’s neck.

They’ve done it already, he said to himself. Look at them. For some reason the thought of it made him feel faint.

For the briefest of instants he was able to admire them both, the picturesque pair they made, each of them the other’s complement. The boy was a sight to behold: even Lateef could see that much. Pale and finefeatured but in no way girlish. He had none of the awkwardness one would expect, none of the hesitancy, none of the fear. He was more beautiful even than his mother, perhaps because he seemed so self-assured. More than self-assured: exalted. The girl seemed proud to have him by the collar. You never would have guessed he’d tried to kill her.

Just then the girl turned on her heels and looked Lateef straight in the eye. The boy didn’t bother.

“Stay right there,” Lateef shouted. A vain and senseless gesture. By the time he’d stepped around the Lexus they were lost in a clot of pedestrians outside a café and he was standing up straight again, blinking and groaning, stumbling after them like a lovesick drunk.

Motherfuckers, Lateef thought, struggling to keep his balance. Neither of you even looks athletic.

The sidewalk cleared quickly once he’d passed the café and he saw that he was closer than he’d thought, maybe two dozen steps back, close enough to talk to them if he wanted. A question might do it, he thought. Ask them a question. Name, age, destination, antipsychotic of choice. Break their rhythm, distract them, make them consider what might happen next. What will happen next, he corrected himself. He felt grotesque and hamfisted, a cop on a sitcom, a show that never made it past the pilot. Not like those kids, he thought. Not like them at all. They run as if somebody’s filming them.

And yet in spite of it all he seemed to be gaining ground. The children were moving differently than before, less automatically, less sure of their purpose. The girl glanced back at him more often: with each foot he gained her self-assuredness weakened. She was careful to keep the boy from noticing, keeping herself just behind him, but her doubt and her fatigue were obvious. Slowly Lateef came to understand her, to categorize her, to arrive at an adequate profile. She’s
not in too deep yet, he said to himself. She’s starting to think. She’ll feel nothing but relief when this is done.

But in the excitement of this new intelligence he’d forgotten to consider the boy. The boy saw her looking back and pivoted in mid-stride and pulled her toward him. That was all he did, but it was enough. They were moving in concert again, better and more easily than before, and the girl was smiling at him gratefully. They crossed Greenwich without the slightest effort. As Lateef’s foot left the curb the girl glanced back one last time, as if to commit him to memory, and he called out her name but by then it was already finished.

Consciousness returned to him delicately, measured and mild, as though there were no need to hurry. His eyes were shut tight and he took his time getting them open. A man in a turquoise helmet was addressing him from a great height.

“—for a nigger,” the man in the helmet was saying. He reached down and took hold of Lateef’s blazer. He seemed to be trying to read the label.

“Helmut Lang,” Lateef said, sitting up. “The collection.”

“The which?” gasped the man, scuttling back like a crab. A mountain bike lay on the tarmac behind him. He wore scuffed spandex shorts and his arms were tattooed to the elbows. He looked to be well over sixty.

“Nothing,” Lateef said, getting to his feet. He still felt at a slight remove from things. He held up his badge and asked how long he’d been lying in the street.

“Don’t know how long,” the man said thickly.

“Take a guess.”

“Maybe a minute.” If the man was pleased to see Lateef alive and in working order he kept his pleasure to himself. “Next time you cross the street, Officer, you might want to pull your head out of—”

But by that time Lateef was up and running. The pain was back in all its glory but it was somehow less insistent than before. He
judged that he’d lost two blocks, possibly three, and that the children were still heading west on Tenth Street. He had no evidence for either theory, but there was no sense in questioning them now. If he did that he might as well lie back down in the street.

Soon enough his lightheadedness returned and with it came a dull surge of indifference. The accident knocked something sideways, he said to himself. Something got tipped. As he had this thought he felt his body coming to a stop, slowing like a watchspring at half-coil, and his eyes struggling to close against the light. What he wanted most at that moment was to let the children go. It occurred to him to look at his reflection to find out whether he was bleeding and it turned out, not surprisingly, that he was. He reached into a pocket of his JCPenney blazer and pulled out a lintcovered napkin and pressed it to the back of his skull.

I’m Rufus White, he thought suddenly. The thought came to him in an odd voice, faraway but insistent, like the thoughts that sometimes visited him as he fell asleep, or the voices reportedly heard by schizophrenics. Rufus White, the voice repeated, not unkindly. For Rufus White, it seemed to be saying, you’ve done better than anyone expected.

He sat down on the stoop of a bodega and waited to hear what else the voice might tell him. That morning he’d felt well suited to his work, but at some point unknown to him that feeling had been abolished and the old uselessness had claimed him absolutely. It’s the boy, he thought as the first wave of nausea hit him. The boy and Violet together. He knew that the accident was behind it and he recognized the symptoms of concussion, but the true cause seemed to be the case itself. It should have felt familiar to him but it did not feel familiar. The boy was different from all previous SCMs, somehow out of proportion, and everyone who knew him seemed to have been sent out of plumb. His girlfriend, his doctor, his mother. His mother especially. Lateef knew that he wasn’t thinking clearly but the idea calmed his nausea regardless. He’ll change me too if I allow it, he thought. Maybe he already has.

Sit up, Rufus, the voice told him. Don’t fall asleep. He recognized
it as his own voice now. His other name hadn’t left him, only been temporarily obscured. The roof of his mouth had a flat metallic taste that put him in mind of childhood accidents. He drew his knees in to his chest and let his head hang slack the way Violet had done some time before. How long before he had no idea. I need something to drink, he thought. Seltzer water. A Coke. A Glenfiddich with water. Rufus Lamarck White, Detective Second Grade, he thought. Forty-six and one-half years of age. Sitting on a bodega stoop and bleeding in an unassuming way. His right elbow was propped against a stack of day-old copies of the Post, and he tossed one to the ground and tried to read it. A polyp had been removed from the vice president. A warm front was approaching. The corpse of a woman pulled out of the Central Park Reservoir had been identified by tracing the serial numbers on the implants in her breasts.

With time he began to feel better. The bodega clerk was still nowhere in sight. He passed a hand over his face and pushed his head slowly backward, taking sharp, shallow breaths, compelling himself to revisit the last quarter hour. Like a multiple exposure his every thought was colored by the image of the boy. He’d been so docile as he followed the girl’s example: so comfortable, so self-possessed. It was impossible to conceive of him as violent. Even while sprinting into traffic a part of him seemed to be standing apart and still. His mother’s that same way, Lateef thought. That same stillness. There’s a wrongness to it, even though she’s beautiful. Everything she does is done in spite of herself.

He remembered how the boy had looked running. From the back the resemblance to his mother had been absolute. He’d moved differently, of course—in a loose, disjointed way that called attention to his sickness—but that had only emphasized their sameness. His sickness somehow made him more like her. There was a mystery there that Lateef could not enter. Yda and William Heller. Violet and Will. In some way they were interchangeable.

She wanted to keep him locked away, he thought. She told me so herself. She petitioned for an extension of his sentence.

Why was that?

Just then a blond head was spotlit by the sun on the opposite corner, closecropped and boyish, flickering in and out of sight along the storefronts. No sign of the girl but of course that meant nothing. He got up as best he could, supporting himself on the newspaper rack and the doorframe: the door gave a squeal and swung angrily inward, forcing him to jerk upright. The head was plain to see above the cars, the lone golden object in a monochrome field. He fell in step with it as though joining a religious procession. Another ridiculous comparison, he said to himself. He put one foot in front of the other with fanatical precision, gritting his teeth from the effort of keeping upright. Even once he was sure that it was Violet and not the boy he made no attempt to call her name out or to catch her. The avenue seemed wider than before, a river at full head, something any sensible man would be afraid of. At the corner of Tenth Street and Washington he finally mustered his courage and eased himself gingerly out into the traffic. He was halfway across before he realized that the bloodspattered napkin was still dangling absurdly from his neck.

She’d seen him by then and she stopped and watched him tottering toward her. At no point since they’d met had he felt more at the mercy of her judgment. She was studying him closely, shading her eyes with her sleeve, as though trying to recall where they’d last met. Her lack of urgency would come to perplex him in time, to add to his misgivings, but in that moment he was grateful for her patience. His head was misaligned somehow, out of step with his body, and the ground under his feet was vague and fluid: he had no choice but to take things at face value. All he asked of the world was that it keep reasonably still.

He’d thought she might show some trace of chagrin herself— frustration at the very least, possibly even anger—but she seemed carefree and serene. She smiled at him as he came alongside her and took him amicably by the arm. “You’re bleeding,” she said, wrinkling her nose. She might have been pointing out an inkstain on his shirt.

“I was knocked down by a bike.”

“Yes,” she said placidly. She stopped him and lifted the napkin away from his neck. “You ought to see a doctor.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine, Detective. Why shouldn’t I be?’

“Because—” he said, then stopped himself. He felt oddly cautious. “You had that spell. I thought you might be sick.”

“Let’s worry about you first. Are you having trouble walking?”

He wasn’t used to solicitude from complainants and he found it particularly hard to bear from her. He slid his arm out of her grip as goodnaturedly as he could. “Miss Heller, if you have any medical condition, such as asthma, for example, or are prone to lightheadedness—”

She shook her head sweetly. “No asthma, no lightheadedness, no scarlet fever. How long ago did you lose track of my son?”

Here it comes, Lateef thought. He stared down at his feet like a schoolboy, feeling his toes curling inside his loafers, casting anxiously about for a reply. “Five minutes,” he said finally. “Maybe ten.”