The Canal (2 page)

Old habits, he sighed. He dropped the hose,
and left it where it lay.

Tomorrow his strength would be back. And he'd
need it, because tomorrow there would be dinner...although he still
wasn't sure how he could match last night's meal--

She would not have approved, whined the old
self. If only she knew...

Paul limped back to the waiting shade of his
home, following the trail of blood that squirmed across the patio.
It was true, Teresa would not have approved. Nobody would have.

But Paul, he was no longer one to care.

>> CHAPTER TWO <<

Detective Joe Lombardi turned up the collar
of his trench coat and waited to begin. His coat was the kind
usually preferred by peep show creeps and playground flashers, and
he had found it months ago, lying in the street among accumulated
trash, waiting to be found, to be tentatively examined -- he didn't
look for blemishes or scars but rather holes, because there could
be no drafts, none at all -- to be tried on, to be admired, and to
be kept. Joe had yet to wash this coat. And he rarely took it off
-- even now, with humidity that made you stick to yourself in your
pits and joints, even then the coat stayed on.

He sucked on his cigarette, letting the smoke
sit in his nose and throat. The aroma of tobacco was far preferable
to the alternative -- the canal was in painful strut tonight, its
stench having achieved a frightening intensity after seven days and
counting of unrelenting summer heat. As usual the river was
refusing to give up on the memory of all those pollution-spewing
coal yards and factories that had once marked its shores (back when
shipping needed water, before eighteen wheelers and superhighways),
and was reviving their heyday with an olfactory salute that soured
your stomach and assailed your hope. There was almost an art, a mad
genius, to the canal's awfulness -- it combined raw sewage, runoff,
and garbage to a very specific and proprietary blend, in exact
concentration, under an expert control that could only come from
decades of experience, from hatefully soaking in industrial and
human waste. This was beyond mere sewer water. This was blight, it
was ruin, it was complete and utter failure, distilled and then
energized in the swirling schools of hepatitis and typhoid that
played beneath the water's milt-speckled surface. Yes, bad days
like today got the canal brewing a stronger than average
melody.

"Tick tock, Joe. You've been out here half an
hour."

Startled, Joe turned to find Alan, his
partner, behind him.

Alan stepped closer. "Time to get off your
ass Detective."

Joe studied him a moment, taking in the man's
overall mis-en-scene. Then he calmly blew a ball of rancid
cigarette smoke straight into his eyes.

"You should be more nice," said Joe,
matter-of-factly, as he watched the smoke coil around Alan's
head.

To his credit, Alan took it rather well. No
combustion, no detonation, his eyes and mouth merely narrowing to
their bitter minimums. Joe often wondered how people like his
partner managed to exist. It was the hottest night on record and
Joe, like every other human being, was thoroughly sponged with
sweat, absolutely absorbed...but not Alan. Alan was as dry as Joe
was drenched. Nary a stray drop, or the slightest, glistening sheen
adorned that man's waterless face.

Alan was always this distracting. And clean.
Distractingly clean. If he got a smudge on his shirt, be it a spot
of ink, a granule of dust, or a lousy subatomic particle, the shirt
would be immediately removed and replaced. Crooked hair:
straightened. Piece of litter: removed. Mispronounced vowel:
corrected. Frankly, it was a disgusting habit.

Joe ground his cigarette into the bottom of
his loafer and flicked it in the water. He and Alan were standing
at the end of a bridge, a small one about the length of five cars.
Instead of drawing up like most bridges did, this one, the whole
thing, got pulled on tracks via a pulley system, into a clearing
along the side of the road. It was the last and oldest of its kind
-- so old you half expected a horse and buggy to come rolling
across, snuffing you under its parasol-sized wheels.

Joe and Alan weren't alone. Groups of police
were waiting at the bridge's other end. They were all looking at
Joe expectantly. The sooner he got started, the sooner they could
finish and get out of the heat.

By this point, Alan had managed to weather
the last remnants of cigarette smoke. He stood quietly for a
moment, and then managed to fix Joe with a calm smile.

"You are a disease," he said, almost
pleasantly.

"...I might say the same about you."

"No more bullshit, Lombardi. Quit wasting
time and start your little magic act. You know, where you fool
everyone into thinking you're actually a cop."

"Grow a pair, Alan. It's been all of five
minutes."

"It's been more. It's been more minutes than
I can possibly believe."

Joe turned back toward the water. Alan was
maybe right.

"Tell me then," Joe said. "What exactly is
the problem?"

Alan frowned. "The problem? You've been
fucking standing on it."

"Excuse me?"

"Barge crew, coming upriver -- they spotted a
body dangling from the bridge, from a crossbeam. It's underneath
us."

While Joe processed this, Alan impatiently
clicked into motion. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and
carefully placed it on the bridge railing, so he wouldn't have to
touch the rail directly, then he threw a leg over and got his foot
on the metal ladder that led down to the riverbank. "Are we going
to do this?" he asked.

"That depends," said Joe. "Is there anything
you're not telling me?"

Alan, still straddling the rail, quickly
proceeded to tell Joe a great number of things: how Joe was
pathetic, a disgrace, and an embarrassment to the badge. It was the
same thing Alan had been saying, in one form or another, and at
every possible opportunity, for a couple of years now. And Joe had
yet to grow any less tired of hearing it.

Joe, who had been watching Alan cling ever so
tightly to the handkerchief, fastened one of his hands atop Alan's.
And Joe's hands, by his own admission, were sink traps, feral and
coarse.

Caught mid-speech, Alan's voice made a sharp,
and gratifying, leap. "What the fuck!" he shouted, hastily pulling
his hand free. He then spent several seconds examining the fingers,
looking for signs of rash or atrophy, presumably.

"Clumsy of me," said Joe.

"Go fuck yourself," grumbled Alan. He began
descending the ladder. "And some soap, while you're at it."

As he disappeared under the bridge, Joe
waited, closing tight the collar of his coat. He'd have stood here
all night if they'd have let him. Until maybe they forgot he was
there, or until he fused with the bridge, to become invisible, to
become landscape. Because he didn't want to do this.

But unfortunately, that was what they kept
him around for. Because he was the only one who could make these
kinds of sacrifices. Joe sighed, exhausted. Then he grabbed onto
the railing and followed Alan over the edge.

He climbed down to a patch of gravel than ran
alongside the bridge, to the water. He could just make out the
flywheels and cables, part of the bridge's machinery. They were
standing in the clearing where the bridge was pulled on its rails,
to be parked. Alan took out a small flashlight.

"No," said Joe. "No light." Alan ignored
him.

Joe proceeded toward the river, careful in
the gloom. The problem was that you had a manmade waterway with
negligible current and only a vestigial connection to the sea. The
water, like the neighborhood, went nowhere. Although that hadn't
always been the case, there was in fact a flushing tunnel that,
when operational, had pushed the unclean water out and brought
fresh water from the harbor in. But when the canal's future as an
industrial waterway died, so did the tunnels funding. That was
almost 25 years ago.

While the tunnel may have stopped, the sewers
never did. Every drain that serviced this corner of town, that
begged at the back door of every brownstone and take-out joint and
back alley gutter, they all led here. And what went in, stayed in.
The canal was like the world's greatest library of scum --
archived, compiled and preserved. An enormous sum total of
putrefaction that, from the beginning, had begun paying some
particularly weird dividends.

There had been rumor of a sewage treatment
plant being built, probably in a bombed out crater somewhere, a
huge assembly of smog shrouded tanks and vats that would chug
through each days bounty of discharge, turning it sparkly and
clean, with a mountain fresh scent. But Joe knew this would never
happen -- talk about the future just didn't apply to the canal.
Here the future was as dead as the water. Nothing was going to
change because nothing could change. The canal wouldn't let it --
it had been left too long to its own devices, it had gotten too
mean.

Joe rested his foot on the curb of timber
that marked the brink of the river. The water crawled just a foot
below. A dead rat, blackened and bloated as huge as a beach ball,
drifted nearby. Wouldn't want to go in there, probably. That water,
it was a toxic hatchery. The perfect medium for insane pathogens
and much, much worse.

Joe glanced at Alan. Alan's eyes were
watering from the fumes -- they at least honestly perspired. Alan
pointed the flashlight beam across the water.

"There it is," he said. "Hanging."

Obscured in the shadows at the far end of the
bridge, Joe could make out a pair of arms and legs, reaching almost
to the water. The body was slung over the crossbeam at its waist.
It looked charred, a grisly crimson, the bone and tendon showing
white like marble.

"Christ," said Joe. He had been right -- Alan
hadn't told him everything. "There's no skin."

"...Ta-daa."

Joe moved swiftly, blocking Alan's
flashlight. "I don't need you here, Alan. Get back on the bridge.
And nobody comes down here until I'm through."

"I'm not going anywhere. We're out of
time--"

"Listen to me, you...you--" Joe was trying to
formulate, he needed in this one moment to express perfectly what
he was feeling, and desperately. "Listen, you fucking shit. Get up
on the bridge and leave me the fuck alone. Nobody comes down until
I'm through!"

He watched as Alan tried to react. There was
plainly so much anger and frustration in the man, waiting to come
out. But it...it went away. There was a hard twitch, a wavering in
the eyes, and then Alan tucked everything back inside. It maybe
went where the sweat went, some deep reservoir, back in the
attic.

"Whatever you say," said Alan, coolly,
studying Joe with freshly summoned contempt. Then he wordlessly
retreated back to the ladder and began heaving himself up onto
street.

Joe dug a cigarette from his coat pocket.
Maybe now he could actually accomplish a few things.

As he smoked he mused on corpses and canals.
The body couldn't have been lowered from above; someone would need
to be in the canal, or on it, in a boat, in order to reach the
bridge. A wall lined the opposite shore of the canal. At its center
was a brick ringed sewer outlet, issuing a steady stream of body
rot. If you were standing in it, right on the lip of the outlet, if
you really stretched, or had something to hang on to, you could
just barely hang a body under the bridge. Of course, that was a
little risky health-wise.

Joe took a farewell suck on his cigarette and
pitched it. He looked up at the bridge, shading his eyes against
the lights. He didn't see anyone. Might as well get this over with.
He got to his knees, the gravel digging in.

"Here's to good living," muttered Joe. Joe
tried to think of what that might entail. Playing the lottery? Was
that good living? There were also those buffets at the casinos, so
much food, although Joe had never been. Maybe ice skating. Or maybe
not.

God, he hated this.

There were people, people like Alan, who when
they approached a thing like this, they apply some common sense.
They reconstruct a sequence of cause and effect. Ideally, you want
to be able to hone in on what's pertinent to the case so you can
write it down, or do a diagram. Alan loved to do diagrams.

But not Joe. Joe had done diagrams once, but
that was too long ago to even matter. Here and now though, in the
moment, he was strictly non-diagram. Strictly non-anything.
Coincidentally that's what gave him his edge. Here at least --
below the bridge, next to the canal, here his lack of effort and
accuracy had always been amply rewarded, time and time again. He'd
earned a reputation even, a near legendary one. Anything in the
canal -- that case became Joe's case, because he solved them all.
Every single one. The canal, it was his thing. It was his curse.
Because he did what needed to be done.

Like now, grimly rolling up a sleeve. He
stretched his hand over the water. He felt an invisible pressure
coming from the deep, hints of cholera, bubbling in the syrup below
like viral fireflies.

He held his breath, and in went his hand.

*

Even Alan had once been in awe of Joe's
record on the canal beat -- imagine, everything: solved. To Alan,
there was no higher purpose or greater goal. When he was first
partnered with Joe this made it easy to overlook the general
misfire that was the man himself: the tenacious stink of stress and
tobacco that hovered around him like an entourage, or the coats he
always wore, with their primordial stains, including the alarming
ones near the crotch.

But Joe was quick to cure Alan of any
misguided goodwill. Although, even Alan had to admit, maybe this
was partly his own fault. Because in the beginning, Alan had asked
a lot of questions. And these questions, sometimes he wasn't so
much asking you as he was, basically, mauling you with them,
wielding them as if they were lengths of heavy chain. But this
couldn't be helped. As a rookie Alan had felt shamefully (and yes,
exaggeratedly) unprepared. And this feeling, as sometimes happened
with Alan, it became tangible, this shame, manifesting itself as a
dust, a repulsive green spore, that collected on him, on his body.
No one else could see it but Alan. And in this instance, nothing
could remove it, no amount of washing, except for one thing:
information.