Shoot the Moon (8 page)

Goodman spends Sunday afternoons with three buddies of his from his days in the navy. They call themselves “the Walking Wounded.” Not because they were actually wounded during any war: There
was
no war going on during their stint, which was back in the mid-seventies. The name is more a reflection of their own shared awareness that the four of them are misfits of one sort or another.

Goodman himself is probably the least remarkable of the group. True, he has an erratic employment history and is out of work altogether at the moment. He certainly has his share of peculiar habits, of strange likes and dislikes, of obsessive little mannerisms. But compared with the other three, he’s positively
normal.

Krulewich is a diabetic who refuses to take his insulin because he suspects his doctors at the VA hospital are trying to poison him. As a result, he’s lost one leg and several toes of the other foot and is nearly blind. He needs surgery to remove cataracts that have formed over his eyes, but he continues to put it off, because every time he checks into the hospital, he seems to come home with fewer parts. As a result, he squints out at the world through lenses so thick that the weight of them seems to lower his head and thrust it forward permanently at an odd (and seemingly belligerent) angle.

The Whale is pretty much that. In his navy days, he was five nine and 180 pounds. He’s still five nine (give or take an inch), but has ballooned to the point where he’s closing in on the 300-pound mark. He drives a cab for a living, but is constantly getting his hack license suspended for refusing to get out and help passengers load or unload their luggage at the trunk. “I don’t
refuse,
” he’s explained to the Taxi and Limousine Commission over and over. “It’s just that by the time I get out from behind the wheel, they
think
I’m not gonna do it.”

And then there’s Lehigh. His true name is Lehigh Valley, given him when he was found abandoned in a boxcar on the Lehigh Valley Railroad, somewhere between Altoona and Pottsville. A black boy raised by white foster parents in the coal towns of western Pennsylvania, Lehigh talks of repaying “Mommy and Daddy” by buying them a retirement home to replace their twelve-foot trailer. He works as a dishwasher at a cafeteria on Avenue C and lives above it in a single room. They pay him $4.56 an hour. So far, he’s saved up a little over $200.

Goodman’s aware that he himself is a cut above the rest of the Walking Wounded - not only in terms of his superior mental health but educationally, professionally, and socially, as well. Yet it’s precisely this awareness that keeps him from dropping out of the group. He’s afraid the others might regard it as a snub and end up feeling hurt. So he stays, as much for their sake as his.

They meet at Krulewich’s this Sunday afternoon. They usually meet at Krulewich’s, not because his place is any grander than those of the others (it isn’t), but because of the simple reason that it’s hardest for Krulewich to get around.

The Series is on. It’s either game three or game four - Goodman’s not sure. It’s the top of the fifth, with the Braves leading five to nothing. The Whale wants to bet on the outcome, or the final score, or who’ll win the Series, or who’ll be named MVP. But nobody’ll bet with him. The Whale is a recovering gambler, and he’ll bet you on tomorrow’s weather if you give him a chance.

They watch the game to the end. The Braves win five to three. “I coulda won fifty bucks!” the Whale moans. They send out for pizza. There’s talk of playing cards, but they can’t agree on a game. They’ve given up playing poker - it’s too hard for the Whale to keep it a friendly game.

“You guys know how to play hearts?” Lehigh asks.

No one seems to know.

“I could teach you, easy,” Lehigh offers.

But Krulewich’s eyes are bothering him, and Goodman’s not really up for it, either. For the last hour, about all he’s been able to think about is Kelly’s MRI.

They decide to put off hearts till next Sunday. Around eight, they break up.

Russell Bradford is awakened by the sound of a woman’s screaming. He’s been dreaming, and in his dream he was standing out in the rain in nothing but his undershorts, and it takes him a minute to figure out where he is and who’s doing the screaming.

“Nana! Nana!” he hears, and finally remembers that Nana is his grandmother, and the screaming voice belongs to his mother.

“Russell!” she calls. “Get in here and help me!”

He forces himself up from the sofa and follows his mother’s voice into Nana’s room. What he sees is his mother crouched over the body of his grandmother, who lies on her side on the floor. Russell’s first impression is that Nana is dead, and he stands stupidly in the doorway, not knowing what to do.

“Don’t juss
stand
there, boy!” his mother shouts. “Help me!”

Russell takes two steps into the room, and can now see that his grandmother isn’t dead after all. She’s twitching, her whole body shaking in these spastic little movements. Her eyes are wide open, but where the pupils should be, Russell can see only the whites of her eyes. A string of spittle runs from the corner of her mouth down to the threadbare rug beside her bed.

“Don’t die, Nana,” Russell says in a voice barely above a whisper. The remainder of his thought he keeps to himself: If you die, where am I going to find money to cop?

* * *

While Russell Bradford worries about money, so does Michael Goodman. He sits in his apartment this Monday morning, drinking a cup of weak coffee and reading through the “Help Wanted” ads in the classified section of
The New York Times.
There are always ads for accountants, but most are for CPAs or college graduates willing to start as trainees with big firms. No one ever seems to want an over-forty bookkeeper without so much as a junior college degree.

He circles four ads and, beginning at two minutes after nine, starts calling the numbers listed. The first job is already filled. The second place would prefer someone with more education; the third one is looking for someone just a bit younger. The fourth one, the Bronx Tire Exchange, is more promising.

“You know it’s only two afternoons a week?” a young woman asks him, cracking her gum as she speaks.

“That’s okay.”

“What are your salary demands?”

“Whatever the job pays,” Goodman says. He knows this isn’t the time for pride.

“Can you come in to talk to Manny tomorrow?”

“Sure. What time?”

“Anytime,” she says. “He’s here by seven.”

“How about today?” Goodman asks. “I could come in right now if you like.”

“No, today’s no good. He’s having a boil lanced today.”

“He must have a trap in there,” says Pedro Aguilar to Antonio Rodriguez and Sixto Quinones as the three of them huddle over Cuban coffee at Victor’s Restaurant. A trap is a specially constructed hiding place, often discoverable only by the pressing of a button or some other remote device. “There’s no other way. You saw him go in with it, and he never came out with it.”

“No way, man,” says Hot Rod. “We turned that place upside down. There was a trap, we woulda found it.”

“Yeah,” says Six. “It’s not like you can hide twenty keys in a fuckin’ coffee can, boss.”

“Didja find out who this guy
is?”
Aguilar asks.

“I went through his shit, like you said to,” Hot Rod says. “Best as I can tell, he’s some kinda bookie or banker, or something like that. Got all these ledgers with columns of numbers in them. Couldn’t figure out what they all mean, though.”

“That’s it!” Aguilar announces. “He’s their moneyman - he washes the money for them. What else would a banker do?”

“Thass it.”

“Yeah.”

“But who are
they?”
Aguilar asks. “Who does he work
for?”

None of them has an answer for that question.

“You guys stay on him,” Aguilar says. “See who he meets. Sooner or later, he’s gotta take you to his people.”

Around eleven, Goodman’s phone rings. He answers quickly, nervously, as he always does. Unlike life itself, which he embraces with unjustifiable optimism, the phone is something Goodman rather fears, and he is constantly afraid that it’s ringing with news of some disaster.

It’s only his mother-in-law.

“The insurance is no good,” she tells him.

“I know. I told you it was no good, remember?”

“They called to tell me. They won’t send the test results to the doctor until you make other arrangements.”

“Other arrangements?”

“Cash or certified check.”

“I’ll take care of it,” he assures her. He figures it must have been someone from the cashier’s station who called. “How’s Kelly doing?” he asks.

“It’s hard to tell. She tells me it doesn’t hurt, but every once in a while I’ll see her wince when she doesn’t think I’m looking. I think she’s afraid that I worry too much about her, so she pretends she’s better to protect me.”

His mother-in-law can be a pain in the rear sometimes, but she reads people like Goodman reads balance sheets.

Russell Bradford’s grandmother is taken by ambulance to Jacoby Hospital. Russell’s mother rides in the ambulance; Russell meets them at the emergency room. By the time they arrive, the EMS team has stabilized Nana, and she’s no longer in seizure. But it’s soon determined that she’s suffered a cerebrovascular accident - a stroke, they explain - whether as a result of the seizure or the cause of it, they’re not sure. She’s admitted to ward 7-D. She cannot speak, and the entire right side of her body seems to be frozen and beyond her power to control. She’s listed as being in guarded condition.

Russell leaves his mother at the hospital and goes home. There, he goes to the front closet, reaches up, and finds Nana’s purse. He searches through it, finds $10.

“Shit,” he mutters.

He takes it and goes back out to cop.

Goodman goes back to the office where they did Kelly’s MRI. The receptionist directs him to the cashier’s station. There, they tell him that since he has no valid and current medical coverage, they will release the test results only upon receipt of cash or a certified check, just as his mother-in-law has reported.

“I’ll get the money,” he promises. “In the meantime, can you just tell me how the tests
look?”

“I’m sorry,” he’s told by a stern-faced woman in white.

“This is my
daughter,
” he tells her. “She’s
six
, for God’s sake.”

“State law prohibits us from releasing any films, information, or opinions to anyone but the referring physician.” He’s reminded of the Fort Lauderdale Police Department’s policy regarding narcotics you want to turn in to them.

Walking home, he thinks of the black duffel bag in his storage locker. He doesn’t notice the two Hispanic men who fall in behind him.

Russell Bradford spends his grandmother’s $10 on two yellow caps of crack that he buys from Big Red. But when he tries to get a couple of dime bags of heroin on credit from Eddie Boy, he’s turned down.

“How ‘bout you give me somethin’ on consignment, man?” he asks. “I’ll sell ‘em down on the Concourse for you, and you can gimme a cut of the take?”

“Sorry,” says Eddie Boy. “Things are tight right now. I can’t be doin’ no favors for nobody.”

Russell knows he should save the crack for later, when he’ll be needing it more. But his lack of money causes him to feel apprehensive and depressed, and he detours on the way home to an abandoned basement apartment where he keeps a stem and a torch. He smokes the contents of one vial but still doesn’t feel quite right. Ends up smoking the second one, as well. The feeling he finally gets is good enough to take the edge off and allow him to stop worrying for a while. But it will last him less than an hour.

That evening, as he sits in front of his TV set waiting for his frozen macaroni and cheese dinner to cook, Goodman sees a news item on Channel 4. The reception is bad because Goodman can’t afford cable, and his set is an old eleven-inch model with a coat hanger for an antenna, but he watches intently as the commentator describes the seizure of a large amount of cocaine from a warehouse in Queens. A high-ranking police department spokesman is interviewed; he announces that the seizure definitely represents a major blow to organized crime.

“Perhaps,” says the commentator, “this is an indication that in the war against drugs, the tide of battle is at last beginning to turn our way.”

Across the Harlem River and three miles to the north, Russell Bradford spends a very difficult night. His mother returned from the hospital around 8:30 with the news that Nana’s expected to live but may need to be hospitalized for a month or more. When Russell asked his mother for money, she snapped at him that she had none and that if anything, she should be asking
him
for money, he being a grown boy and all.

He went out around ten, made the rounds, checking every dealer he knows, hoping that someone would give him something on credit, trust him with something to sell on consignment. But Russell already owes too many dealers too much money, and no one will give him anything unless it’s “C and C” - cash and carry.

Back home shortly after midnight, Russell’s already sick from the beginnings of heroin withdrawal and irritable from his craving for crack. Unable to sleep, he alternately watches TV, sits by the kitchen window overlooking the fire escape, and paces the floor. Finally, he rolls himself into a ball and lies on his side on the living room rug, not unlike the way he’s seen his grandmother lie following her seizure. He readies himself for the chills and the sweats and the waves of nausea that he can feel even before their arrival.

All Russell knows is that he’s got to cop tomorrow. No matter what it takes.

In his Ninety-Second Street walk-up, Michael Goodman lies awake, too. He worries about his job interview tomorrow, worries about his daughter, worries about how he’s going to get the money for the test results.

It’s nearly four o’clock by the time either of them falls asleep, these two very different men from very different worlds, whose lives are being drawn closer and closer toward collision.