The Old Turk's Load (16 page)

He didn’t have much.Worse,the distance to the water increased as he went on, and his bad habits overhauled him. Fluids gurgled up from his stomach and a gummy deposit accumulated at the back of his mouth. Waste products churned through his body where blood should have been. He could hear cursing and crashing behind him. He tried to increase his pace, but his legs had stopped taking orders.

He saw the shape of the branch that had fallen across the path, but he couldn’t bring his lead foot to step over it. His shoe hooked neatly around it and the rest of him sped forward, plowing a six-foot furrow. His head came to rest against a rusting wheel rim.

He gathered himself, drove forward, and fell a second time, gaining a body length. He picked himself up, tried to run, and fell— again and again, deeper into a haze of pain and fear. Nothing was broken. In a few days he’d be fine. Right now he was counting his time in minutes. At this rate, he was only saving them the trouble of carting his body to the river.

Kelly stumbled into the ditch of sewer water beside the train tracks, wanted to huddle there, curl up, slip beneath the mud like a turtle, and not come up until spring. The flashlight beam was closing in behind him. His ankle didn’t hurt anymore. He wallowed across the ditch and clambered up the embankment, rolling across the tracks so as not to give them a profile to shoot at. Soon nothing would hurt, ever. As he got to the other side he looked toward his feet and saw an incredibly brilliant light bearing down. His death. A warming, pleasurable surge swept through him. He stood, in the rush of brightness and noise, to meet his end.

The stubby switchyard diesel huffed past at a labored pace and Kelly unthinkingly threw himself onto the utility car that rolled along behind it, snuggling down amid jackhammers and compressor hoses. It was, he thought, so strange and weird to die. Nothing like he’d imagined it. He pulled his coat around him and wished he were back at Sammy’s.

loria knew Roth wasn’t scared. He didn’t
get
scared. His hasty departure was simply a sensible move, one she should emulate. She took a cab up to the Westchester house, did a little packing of her own, then blasted off in the Starship—a black, two-door Olds F-85 with the V-8 engine and a jet-age instrument panel. Her father had bought the car for her and at first she’d hated it. But in fact it was exactly her style—fast and understated—and now she bonded with it as never before. She made Rhode Island as the sun was coming up, and New Hampshire by mid-morning, turning on a whim down a small coastal road that wound east to Hampton Beach, then north over a humpy wooden bridge into the lovely little backwater of Wallis Sands.There was a restaurant called the Lobster Pot next to the creek, a parking lot paved with clamshells, and a rambling old two-story house with apartments on both sides, up and down, front and back. A sign said vacancy. It seemed a good place to lay low for a spell. She went in to investigate.

A deeply tanned woman with ropey muscles and steel-wool hair came to the door. Gloria, giving her voice just the right amount of girlish trepidation, inquired about the vacancy and was promptly installed in the front apartment for a week. Cash changed hands in advance at Gloria’s insistence. She brought in her bag, stretched out on the freshly made bed, and listened to the slap and rush of surf across the road. It smelled faintly of summer cottage mildew, reminding her of beach stays from childhood.

She thought about Daddy and their long struggle. How seeing him hurt in the hospital had so suddenly changed her feelings for him but
not
her determination to get her hands on the contraband. She thought, too, about Irene and Harry, and the stash’s so-called rightful owners. She and Harry had missed grabbing it, probably just by minutes. But they were still alive and safe, and now Kelly had the stuff, which was almost as good. All she had to do was hang tight, keep her eyes open, and be ready to make her move when the time came.The family in the apartment next door was getting ready to go to the beach, and the children were making happy, excited noises, sending her drifting back again to memories.

When she woke it was late afternoon and she felt as fresh and clumsy as a newborn. She went out on the porch and sat, inhaling the soft, fragrant air. The woman came out of her office and sat in the chair next to Gloria’s. Her name was Maddy. Her husband was the burly fellow hauling lobster pots out of a tar vat; his name was Harold. He was a plumber over to the Wentworth Hotel, but he was also a lobsterman. She, Maddy, baked pies. Gloria told Maddy she went to school in New York and was taking a little break. Maddy had the strangest ocean-colored eyes. Gloria could feel their pull.

“My boyfriend . . .” she murmured. “We broke up.” Maddy clucked sympathetically.
Presently they strolled across the parking lot to the restaurant

and Maddy showed her around—fryolator, steamer, grill, picnic benches. It was all spotless. Maddy had a pet seagull named George, in honor of her first husband who, she believed, had come back as this bird. He’d had a stroke that crippled his left side and another that killed him. The bird showed up a while later, half dead, with a broken left leg and a damaged wing. Once she’d nursed him back to health he’d never left. Maddy stood on the restaurant deck that overlooked the creek and screeched “JAWGE!”almost like a seagull herself, and tossed a bit of pie in the air. George swooped out of nowhere and gobbled it on the fly.

Gloria ordered strong black coffee, a lobster roll in a toasted hot dog bun, and a piece of Maddy’s heavenly blueberry pie. Lateafternoon marsh grass perfumed the air. Where would a guy like Kelly go with a suitcase full of heroin?

It had to be Lloyd, Kelly’s own private stool pigeon and nosecandy connection. So maybe she could get Helen Chamberlain in on the deal.There was a pretty tough cookie. She’d dealt with Lloyd and his bullshit all those years. Maybe she was tired enough of him to help put the proceeds to a more positive use.

After dinner Gloria walked half a mile down the road to Philbrick’s General Store and poked around the sleepy, sandy place, chockablock with fly swatters, hula hoops, mousetraps, bins of sneakers, and the most comprehensive display of penny candy she’d ever seen. If the stash wasn’t at Lloyd’s, Harry would find out from Kelly where it was and lead her to it. Then, who knew? She could mobilize Leo and Harry, maybe even Julie, to get the drugs back from Kelly. Or maybe they’d go partners with him.

At six thirty p.m. she went to the phone booth out front and called, as they’d arranged, the number in New York on which Irene took her calls from fugitives. Gloria gave her the New Hampshire pay phone’s number and Irene called her back.

“Fine. No problems. It’s going to be a mellow week. Any sign of DiNoto’s guys?”
“Leo stopped by your place. He said it had been destroyed. Must’ve been them.”
“What about Juan?”
“We got him to Montreal.”
“And you?”
“I don’t like any of this.”
Gloria lifted a page from Roth’s book—full disclosure jujitsu. “I know you don’t like it. But if I don’t do something, that drug money will just go to the Mafia. I want it for our work. Give it a chance to redeem itself.”
“It’s tainted, Glo.”
“As if our brothers and sisters haven’t been tapping drug funds in the struggles in Latin America and North Vietnam. Money’s money. It’s what you use it for.”
A long conversation ensued. It took everything Gloria had to win Irene over. In the course of the argument she discerned that her friend had gotten serious about Harry Jarkey. Gloria deployed this information to gain Irene’s conditional acceptance.
“So you and Harry have been talking?”
“He says he wants to help.”
“Oh, he’ll be helping, all right.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“Kelly’s already got the stash. Maybe Harry leads us to it.”
“How happy do you think he’ll feel when he finds out he’s being used?”
“He’s in with us already. With you. Why don’t you ask him how he feels?”
“Come on, Gloria. He wouldn’t shaft his detective buddy.”
Irene was losing it, Gloria thought. But all she said was, “So maybe Kelly comes in with us, too. Maybe we hire him. Maybe Harry makes him see it’s the right thing to do. Anything could happen. It’s still evolving.”
Walking back to Maddy’s after they’d hung up, Gloria thought hard.There were so many possibilities, and she had to be open to all of them. Considered that way, though, it quickly became exhausting. So, with the beautiful certainty of innocence, she refused to think of it that way any longer. She tried to read a little more of
The Confessions of Nat Turner
but was fast asleep by the time the blackout hit Manhattan.

lackness passed into dreams of suffocation and falling from high places. It was funny, the ideas you got. Kelly knew he was dead, traveling through dimensions to begin life in a new form, possibly continuing the same life in other realms. Each jolt was the passage of a universe. He had perished and come back in a piece of metal. He was a molecule of the Triborough Bridge. The roar and clatter around him was the noise of others just like him. Molecules, all of them. How long would this last? How long had it lasted?

He sat up. A dull pain rose from the base of his spine and came to rest between his ears. Molecules didn’t have ears.
He was on a train.
In a tunnel. Under the Hudson to Jersey.
As the diesel came out of the tunnel and moved slowly into a yard full of tracks and cinders, Kelly rolled off the flatcar and clambered with little difficulty over a chest-high concrete wall. Apparently the ankle hadn’t been hurt so badly. Fear had cramped it up, was all. He walked down the street toward the river with hardly a limp.
Except the river wasn’t there.
The world was dark. Apartment buildings stood against the night sky like thunderclouds.There were no traffic lights, no streetlights, no lighted store windows, no neon signs over restaurants, no floodlights under movie marquees. Garish automobile headlights bounced off walls at street level and lit the heights with a reflected, dreamlike glow.
Kelly stood in a daze, leaning into the same tumbling dizziness that marked those first morning moments after a night’s drinking. Then he blinked the scene into place. The train had gone down the west side rather than under the river. He was in the city.
People moved up and down the street, headed for dinner or carrying groceries. All proceeded as if they had somewhere to go. As if it weren’t pitch-black everywhere. A glow of alcohol emanated from a bar. Kelly went in. It was stuffy, with candles in beer bottles on the bar casting a dim, claustrophobic light. He ordered a double shot of Wilson’s and a beer. The man beside him was talking to himself in a quavering voice. Just as Kelly was finishing, his double the man turned to him and said, “You stink.” Kelly moved down the bar.
A transistor radio next to the whiskey bottles blatted out good cheer. Everybody was keeping half an ear open for the news. There was no news. The whole world was dark and nobody knew why, but there was nothing to worry about. It was 10:56. They played “Twilight Time” and a drunk began to sing.
The bartender stood before him, displaying a stern expression arranged around a nose that had been broken once or twice. “Another shot, huh? And a beer,” Kelly told him.
The man leaned across the bar and talked out of the corner of his mouth, more confidential than tough. “Listen, bud. Some of the customers are complaining.”
“Huh?”
“The smell, you know?”
As a matter of fact, Kelly did smell something. Something sweet and slightly rotten, with a hint of steaming viscera. Something he’d soaked up in the ditch by the railroad tracks. It was ripening in the warm air.
“I stepped into a sewer. Can’t even get home to change. Isn’t that something?”
“Sure.” The bartender took a bottle of Wilson’s off the shelf and waved it at the end of the bar. “Mind stepping down by the men’s room?”
Kelly did as the man suggested. It was less crowded there, and smelled as much of Pine-Sol as he did of sewer. A dead candle stub sat in an ashtray.The bartender set a glass beside it and poured another double. “No hard feelings, huh? This one’s on the house.”
Kelly downed it and pulled a soggy dollar out of his pocket. “Here. Buy yourself one.”
The bill left an oily spot on the counter when the bartender picked it up. He wiped the spot away and poured them both another. On the house.

loyd hadn’t planned on making one last suicidal train wreck of a speed run; it just turned out that way.
He and Kelly had done a few more toots after seeing the Mailman off, then gone up to the Zebra on First Avenue still sky-high from the rush of their giddy bullshit plans. Later, back at Lloyd’s place, Kelly began to crash. Lloyd fed him a Nembutal, put him to bed, then wandered up to the Brooklyn Bridge in hopes of hearing the badass sax player rumored to hang out there, spinning his wild soliloquies into the night. He thought about Hart Crane and Walt Whitman, and, in the absence of any manic music, about doing another toot. Then another.

Dawn was gorgeous as it spread out before him—
his
dawn, opening like Helen in the old days. Oh, the rotten, vile, bitch.Where
was
she, anyway? He commenced a heated conversation with her in his head, in the course of which he remembered she was at a Zen retreat in Vermont for a few days, which was why she wasn’t home. Or was it?

He’d seen so little of her lately. He’d sensed she had the hots for Kelly.Why was he putting up with
that
? The conversation moved away from Helen, turning into a spirited debate among himself and the various sub-units of that self—angry Lloyd, righteous Lloyd, Lloyd the victim—made manifest in his over-chemicalized brain. Answering the voices out loud, he shuffled the bridge’s length and back. Later he took part in an actual argument in a deli over spilled coffee and the payment for his egg sandwich.

Returning home for some downers to ease him through this increasingly troubled end of his adventure, he found Kelly passed out on the couch. He got distracted, did more speed—instead of downers—then became furious with himself as it hit, realizing he was losing control of the day.Then increasingly furious at the world in which this whole fucked-up mess was taking place—Kelly snoring all the while behind him—he conceived of a mission to score some mescaline, certain it would be an excellent antidote for what, he could see, was only, after all, a minor disturbance. Like taking a few aspirin when you have a cold. Gulping calming breaths, he put this sudden inspiration up as a shield against the voices that swarmed around him like a cloud of gnats.