Players (20 page)

In bed he remembered the man on the roof. Such things are funny. Trapped in the act of having sex. It exposes one’s secret feeling of being involved in something comically shameful. Luis in the doorway with a pump-action shotgun. It’s funny. It exposes one’s helplessness. He wondered what “pump-action” meant and why he’d thought of it and whether it had multi-level significance.

All this time they were making love. Marina was spacious psychologically, an elaborate settling presence. At first she moved easily, drawing him in, unwinding him, a steadily deepening concentration of resources, gripping him, segments, small parts, bits of him, dashes and tads. She measured his predispositions. She even struggled a little, attaching him to his own body. How this took place he couldn’t have said exactly. Marina seemed to know him. Her eyes were instruments of incredibly knowing softness. At her imperceptible urging he felt himself descend, he felt himself occupy his body. It made
such sense, every pelvic stress, the slightest readjustment of some fraction of an inch of flesh. He braced himself, listening to the noises, small clicks and strains, the moist slop of their pectorals in contact. When it ended, massively, in a great shoaling transit, a leap of decompressing force, they whispered in each other’s ear, wordlessly, breathing odors and raw heat, small gusts of love.

Lyle dressed quickly, watching her, recumbent, the soft room growing dim about her body. There was a noise on the roof, concussion, someone jumping down from a higher roof or ledge. His hand circled her ankle.

“Does Luis raise pigeons up there or maybe hides explosives in a chimney.”

“We get a fireball,” she said.

“Whoosh.”

He hailed a cab on Avenue C. At the apartment he changed and was out again in fifteen minutes, having already packed. He was well ahead of schedule, as anticipated, and was now operating from an interior travel plan, the scheme within the scheme, something he did as a matter of course when traveling, being a believer in margins, surplus quantities. He rode out to La Guardia, relieved to be clear of the apartment, where he was subject to other people’s attempts to communicate. The cabdriver drank soup from a styrofoam cup.

Lyle paid for his ticket, using a credit card, watching as the woman at the console entered various sets of information. He’d thought of traveling under an assumed name but decided there wasn’t reason enough and wished to avoid appearing ridiculous to anyone who
might
be interested in his movements. He checked his bag and went looking for a place to get
a drink. It was early evening by now and across the runways Manhattan’s taller structures were arrayed in fields of fossil resin, that brownish-yellow grit of pre-storm skies. The buildings were remarkable at this distance not so much for boldness, their bright aspiring, as for the raddled emotions they called forth, the amber mood, evoking as they did some of the ache of stunning ruins. Lyle kept patting his body—keys, tickets, cash, et cetera.

He found a cocktail lounge and settled in. The place was absurdly dark, as though to encourage every sort of intimacy, even to strangers groping each other. Airports did this sometimes, gave travelers a purchase on what remained of tangible comforts before their separation from the earth. Piano music issued from a speaker somewhere. Lyle had two drinks, keeping an eye on his watch. Five minutes before boarding he went to a phone booth and dialed the number Burks had given him. To the man who answered he gave his own phone number by way of identification. Then he reported Marina’s address and where her car was parked and provided a physical description of Luis (Ramirez) and a general idea of what kind of explosive device he was putting together. The man told Lyle to stay by his phone. They’d be in touch.

The 727 set down at the airport in Toronto. He told the man in the customs booth he was visiting friends—two or three days. Then he rented a car and drove toward the lake, deciding to spend the night at a motel called Green Acres. Looking over one of the maps he’d brought and the street index attached to it, he came across the names Parkside, Bayview, Rosedale, Glenbrook, Forest Hill, Mt. Pleasant, Meadowbrook, Cedarcrest, Thornwood, Oakmount, Brookside,
Beechwood, Ferndale, Woodlawn, Freshmeadow, Crestwood, Pine Ridge, Willowbrook and Greenbriar.

In the morning he drove southwest, about sixty-five miles, to a place called Brantford. He put the car in a parking lot and walked around. Stores, a movie theater or two, a monument of some kind. The town was a near-classic, so naturally secure in its conventions that he suspected J. had chosen it partly for (anti) dramatic effect Another of his bittersweet maneuvers. To Lyle, enmeshed in a psychology of stealth, Brantford’s clean streets and white English-speaking population took on an eerie quality, an overlay of fantasy. It was more familiar than the street he lived on in New York. He’d come all this way, border-crossing, to encounter things he’d known at some collective level, always. Common themes. Ordinary decencies. He could enjoy the joke, even if it was at his expense, more or less, and even if it wasn’t a joke.

He crossed a large square and waited outside the modern city hall. About ten minutes after the designated time, he saw a figure half a block away, recognizing the walk, the fluid stride, as familiar, the body itself, familiar, its set of identifying lines and verges. Seconds passed, however, before he realized who it was, coming toward him through a group of children playing a game, that it was Rosemary Moore, her skirt swinging in the breeze. Of course, he thought. Ambiguity, confusion, disinformation. A learning process. Techniques, elaborate strategies.

He decided to offer a warm smile. Took her hand in his. Kissed her cheek. She brushed a lock of hair from her forehead and suggested a place for lunch.

“Just the two of us,” he said.

“If that’s all right.”

“Sure, absolutely, why not.”

They walked down a hill to a restaurant called the Iron Horse, a converted train depot. It was dark inside. At the next table four men discussed a shipment of gypsum, speaking the flat language of industrial cultures, a deflated tone, unmodulated, fixed in its stale plane. The waitresses wore trainmen’s caps and abbreviated bib outfits. Rosemary took off her sunglasses finally, prompting Lyle to lean toward her, surveying intently.

“Really you, is it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Call me Lyle. Use names.”

“I quit my job.”

“You quit your job.”

“I’ll have to find something, I guess.”

“Job-hunting.”

“I have to see.”

“Seeking employment,” he said.

“I’d like to get something more interesting this time. I sat at that desk.”

“Fly, go back to flying.”

“That was awful. You wait on people. I hated it after a while.”

It continued through a couple of drinks. He spoke and listened on one level, observing from another. The curiously stirring monotony of it. The liquor and dim lighting. The unvarying sounds from the next table—ladings and capacities. The waitresses coming out of dark pockets on the floor, all
legs, all pussy and ass. The surface context, a landscape unaccountably familiar, the sanity of a clear afternoon.

“J. wants to know did you have trouble with the money part.”

“No,” he said. “But tell him I’m let down, frankly. Tell J.”

“It’s a precaution. He couldn’t be sure type thing.”

“Do I give you the money?”

“If it’s all right.”

“Can I at least call him?”

“He’s not at that number anymore. He’s at a different number.”

“Have another drink,” he said.

“I shouldn’t.”

“Have another drink.”

“If you tell her to make it weak.”

“You’ll be with J. indefinitely, I take it.”

“I don’t know. I still have my apartment, at least two months to go. I may go back and look for a job. I have to see.”

“Do I get to talk to him at all? He said we’d talk.”

“He promises.”

“He wants me to stay in the area?”

“He said not to go back right away.”

“So he’ll call.”

“You’re supposed to give me a number.”

“I’ll have to find a motel. What happens, you come with me?”

“All right,” she said.

“Did he tell you to do that?”

“Why does it matter?”

“Use names.”

“You have to give me the phone.”

“He didn’t tell you to suggest that, going to a motel with me?”

“He said a number, let him give you a number to reach him at.”

“Where is he, nearby?”

She nodded. They smoked awhile in silence and then ordered something to eat. The place had emptied out by the time they finished lunch.

“You’ve been with him for a while then, I take it.”

“I guess, sort of.”

“You impress me. I’m impressed.”

“Why?”

“One more drink,” he said.

“Maybe one.”

“He buys a new identity, is that it?”

“He knows someone who can get him whatever he has to have.”

“What else?”

“He practices looking different.”

“Practices looking different how?”

“In front of a mirror,” she said.

“I love it.”

“He stretches his mouth. It’s gotten so he does it an awful lot lately. It’s very macabre if you’re walking by.”

“Stretching exercises.”

“He wants to do his chin next.”

They drove half an hour before finding a motel. He checked
the road map, not certain where they were. Rosemary sat on a corner of the bed, handbag in her lap. He had the map spread over a small desk, his back to her, and he was taking off his shirt as he tried to retrace the route they’d taken.

“When do you have to be back?”

“Whenever.”

“Where—where we met?”

“Right there is fine.”

“Take down the phone number while we’re at it. I want to be sure to hear from him. Tell J. that. I was let down. But as long as I hear soon, within a day or two, then that’s all right. The money’s in a black leather billfold in my jacket. Why don’t you count out thirty-five hundred while I’m doing this? Tell J. a day or two. Two at the most. Because I don’t know what happens next.”

Eventually he turned toward her, beginning to remove the rest of his clothes. He could see himself across the room, angling in and out of view, in the mirror over the dresser. The light coloring. The sandy hair. The spaces in his gaze. It was a body of effortless length, proportional, spared bunching and sags. Nice, the understated precision of his movements, even to the tugging of a sock. And the satisfactions of moderate contours. Of mildness. Hairless chest and limbs. Middling implement of sex. Interesting, his formal apartness. The distance he’d perfected. He could see it clearly, hands and stance, the median weave of coarse hair, gray eyes eventually steadied on themselves.

She went into the bathroom to undress.

He liked motels, their disengaging aspect, the blank autonomy
they offered, an exemption from some vague imperative, perhaps the need to verify one’s status.

When Rosemary came out, ten minutes later, she had a plastic phallus harnessed to her body.

A dog sniffed out hidden riches, circling a grassy patch of earth, again and again, making sure, ascertaining
place.
The gulls were startling, so large at this distance, landing on mounds of garbage, wings beating. She watched them scatter when a second police cruiser pulled up at the edge of the dump. The dog’s circles became smaller, more urgent. It was zeroing in, snout down, a little crazy with anticipation. She’d stationed herself at a point where Jack’s body was hidden from view by the bulldozer that customarily leveled out the mounds. Smoke rose from charred areas, fitfully. That acrid, acrid smell. She’d stationed herself. She’d chosen carefully. The dog walked off, long gray animal, a corn cob in its mouth.

The gulls stood in garbage, bodies occasionally extended, wings flapping. There were cans of Ajax and Campbell’s soup. Maxwell House, Pepsi-Cola, Heinz ketchup, Budweiser. She hated the way gulls walked. They were ugly on the ground, this close, chesty and squat. Burnt garbage. Stinging, bitter, caustic.

Jack was sitting crosslegged. She knew this from the first conditional glimpse. That stump was Jack. While still in the
car she’d taken another look that lasted perhaps two full seconds. His head was slumped forward and black and he was badly withered. She wouldn’t have known it was Jack except for the note he’d left, telling them where he was, advising them to be prepared. After that second look she was diligent in keeping a large object between herself and Jack’s body. First the car and now the bulldozer. He was shriveled and discolored, burned right through, down to muscles, down to tendons, down to nerves, blood vessels, bones. His arms were in front of him, hands crossed at about the same place his ankles were crossed. This had seemed ceremonial, the result of research on his part. She
did
think that. She thought fifty different things, all passing through each other, illustrated breezes. She recalled wondering whether he’d had to exercise will power to keep his body in that position during the time it took for the fire to negate all semblance of conscious choice. The gulls beat their wings, screeching.

She saw Ethan disengage himself from three policemen and a civilian, this last apparently being the man who operated the bulldozer. Pammy assumed he’d found the body and called the police. Ethan walked over to her. He was chewing gum. There was a strange menace about him, the slackness of his body. He seemed to be walking right into the ground, getting smaller as he approached, more dangerous somehow, as though he no longer possessed the binding force, the degree of concentration, that keeps people from splintering.

“Yeah, it was gasoline,” he said. “There’s a large tin over on its side right nearby.”

“Burned.”

“He set himself on fire.”

“He poured it over him.”

“Yeah, and lit it.”

She held Ethan by the shirt, twisting the fabric in her fists. An ambulance arrived and the gulls scattered again. Ethan looked off into the trees, thinking of something. Not intently, however. He might have been trying to recall the sequence of events in an anecdote. Or something he was supposed to do, perhaps. Some errand or small task. The men were out of the ambulance. Pammy didn’t want to think about the mechanics of what happened next or even hear voices in the distance, or sounds, whatever sounds would have to be made. Several gulls started to leave the ground, rising on their scraggy feet, wings rippling, stirring up air. She let go of Ethan’s shirt and turned toward the woods, her hands over her ears.