The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx (25 page)

“With a gun in your hand?”

Plato passed the weapon to Uli. “That’s part of the deal. I’ll fix you up, inject you, then you find it and shoot the gun. It’s a flare gun, so I’ll be able to steer everyone else in the right direction.”

“What is
it
that I’m supposed to find?”

“I’m not exactly sure, but I came across a document that described an emergency escape route somewhere in the desert. Maybe it’s a phone or a dune buggy. You’ll know it when you see it, and that’s when you should shoot the gun.”

“You think you can see a flare in this heat?”

“The flare stays in the air for around five minutes and has a twenty-mile visibility. I’ll scan the sky every day just after sunset.”

Seeing no other recourse, Uli agreed.

Plato removed a syringe from his bag and injected Uli’s arm, then said, “Rest, eat, and drink before you start walking.”

“Where are you going?” Uli asked as the guy began heading off once again.

“Back—I still have a million loose ends to tie up.”

“Do you have any idea which way I should go first?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t need you, would I?” The tall black man marched off in the direction of the strange cellar door. Uli promptly fell asleep.

He woke up several hours later starving and thirsty. He drank down half the container of dark water and instantly felt a surge of energy. He chomped down some crackers and opened the Spam. The oily little tin tasted like filet mignon. It was already late in the afternoon, so he loaded the remaining water and crackers into a thin sack that Plato had left with him, slipped it over his shoulders, and took to his feet. Though the pond was still burning in spots before him, there was no sign of the black man. Whatever hallucinogens had been shot into his system, he didn’t feel or see anything odd. Just empty space eternally unfolding and an occasional breeze bringing little relief.

He decided to walk through the night. As the moon began to rise, he sat down on a flat stone and had a few more crackers followed by a mouthful of water. Just as he was beginning to wonder if the shot in his arm was merely some kind of placebo, he spotted something racing madly across the desert. At first he thought it was a coyote, but even in the moonlight he could see it was black, or shrouded in black. It was moving on four legs, but then it rose to two. With a hood, or long black hair, a woman was running hard. She abruptly vanished over a hilltop. He checked in his bag and verified that he still had the flare gun. He took a deep breath and followed.

42

A
fter seeing a Board of Education psychiatrist at 110 Livingston Street, Paul successfully filed for early retirement on a psychological discharge. He got less than a quarter of what his pension would have been, but he was able to secure additional Social Security disability payments.

“What’d they do to you at Bellevue?” Leon asked when he showed up at the scrapyard.

“Fried the pain out of my head,” Paul said simply. He paused before adding, “Now I can truly focus on destroying that highway.”

No longer working, his days were actually more hectic than before. Bea was back with him after having lived with the Mayers during his hospital stay. Between taking her to school in the morning and picking her up in the afternoon, he would visit the Midtown library and research various models of homemade bombs and improvised land mines.

One morning, after taking his little girl to school, he sat and had a chat with Lori. “You were the person Lucretia picked as godmother for Bea,” he began.

“Don’t you think I know that?”

“I just want you to understand that this was a decision Lucretia made after a lot of thought. She really believed that if anyone was qualified for the job, it was you.”

“It’s a duty I’ve never forgotten,” Lori replied.

“Do you know how old I am? I could drop dead at any moment.”

“Any of us could.”

“Well, I’m telling you this just to say that if, God forbid, something should happen to me, I want to rest assured that my little girl has a home with you.”

“Paul, please, you’re scaring me.”

“The reason I’m telling you this is that I’ve made you the trustee of what little assets Lucretia and I have. That includes the house, which is paid for in full.”

“I appreciate this, Paul, but I’m sure you’ll live a good long life and once you get on your feet you’ll be a great dad.”

Paul thanked her and headed back to the scrapyard. Baseball season was kicking off the next day and Leon wanted Paul’s help in selecting a new TV set.

Back in Rescue City, Uli had experienced a bizarre vision while visiting a hippie colony where he perceived bedraggled Armenian refugees being marched by soldiers from their villages to their likely deaths in the desert. He saw a young woman’s husband brutally murdered and her daughter stolen from her. Eventually, the woman was taken as a slave by one of the many marauding gangs. What the hell was she doing here in
this
hallucination?

Uli continued following this sad figure through the morning, but as the day wore on he slowed down a bit. She seemed to slow down with him. By noon, he was all out of water and most of his crackers were gone. Hot and dry, Uli swung one foot in front of the other feeling like his skull was going to crack open. At one point he spotted a plane overhead and wondered if it was headed to Rescue City.

When the sun finally went down, he was hit by a wave of deep exhaustion and had to stop, but she kept going. Uli made a mental note of which direction she was moving in and dozed off by a cluster of desert shrubs. It had to be about midnight when he awoke. The moonlight was strong enough for him to continue walking.
Tomorrow morning I’ll find shelter and wait out the heat,
he decided as he pressed onward through the desert. He walked for roughly eight hours, discovering along the way that even though he could discern her silhouette in the distance, the woman wasn’t leaving any tracks in the sand.

When the sun started rising the next morning, he told himself,
I must be at least twenty miles from where I started out. Shouldn’t I have found some means of escape by now?
A grouping of rocks offered some shade from the growing heat, so Uli curled up for a siesta.

Later in the afternoon, as the sun’s rays began dissipating, Uli resumed walking toward the spot where he had last seen the refugee. After half an hour, he hadn’t detected a single trace of her and began to fear that the drug he had been injected with was wearing off. He briefly considered returning to the clump of rocks where he had spied her the previous evening. Instead, he limped on a few thousand feet further before glancing up at what had to be a second hallucination. There appeared to be some kind of metal box, like a telephone booth for a midget, planted on a circular concrete foundation. Moving forward, he discovered that he was looking at a gated enclosure around a pipe sprouting from the concrete. A sign on the side affixed to the base said,
WARNING: Water Station 27, U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. Trespassing Strictly Prohibited!
.

Although there was a latch on the enclosure, there was no lock. Inside, Uli found a small hand-operated water pump. He immediately started working the metal handle. First it was just air, but then came a rumbling, and suddenly rusty water spat out. He dropped to his knees and stuck his sweaty head under the rush of water. He laughed aloud and drank as much as he could, then he just lay there as the increasingly cool water gushed over his burning head and body.

43

O
ver the next few months, Lori continued to help Paul look after Bea. At the end of each night, after putting his little girl to bed, Paul quietly drank himself into a stupor. Lori sat him down one day and told him that he really needed a maid. The old house was filthy.

“Can’t afford it,” he replied flatly.

She shook her head in dismay.

Paul kept hoping that with time their lives would stabilize, but things only seemed to get harder. When Bea started attending grade school, he found himself thoroughly overwhelmed and Lori began taking the girl four nights a week. In an effort to avoid his neighbor’s constant supervision, Paul would bring Bea down to Leon’s house, park her in front of the ballgame, and proceed to get hammered with his buddy. Frequently, they’d all pass out in front of the TV. On most Monday mornings Bea would wake him up late. He’d grab the keys to Leon’s pickup and hit the gas. Without even stopping at home for a new change of clothes, he’d deposit her directly in front of the school. Soon he started receiving letters from Bea’s teachers about her shabby dress, her poor performance in class, and her frequent arguments with other children. When he could put it off no longer, he visited the principal, introduced himself as a retired school teacher, and explained the tragedy of his wife’s death. He said he was still going through a rocky period of adjustment, but promised that things were slowly improving.

Eventually, someone filed a complaint with Child Protective Services. An attractive young woman, Honora Agnes Burke, was assigned to Bea’s case. The young social worker routinely visited the house to inspect the living situation. She’d open the fridge and find that vital foods and other requisite household items were missing, then she’d notice the garbage piled up around the house. A thick layer of dust covered everything. Paul would apologize and make some lame comment about missing a shopping day, and she’d just scribble notes into her small spiral pad.

“It’s not me you should apologize to,” Mrs. Burke snapped at him one day. “I have milk and eggs and bread in my fridge, and my house is spotless. It’s your little girl who suffers.”

One cold night that spring, he fell asleep with an electric heater running. He woke up to the smell of smoke—a stack of old
New York Times
newspapers had caught on fire. He quickly put it out and first thing the next morning went across the yard to see Lori.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, seeing the misery on his face.

“It takes every bit of effort I have just to keep from killing myself.”

“Please don’t say that.”

“Whatever I was, Lucretia made me. It’s as simple as that. I didn’t want marriage and certainly not children. It all came from her. You saw it. I wouldn’t have even become a teacher … Anyway, last night I almost burned the house down.” He couldn’t look up. “That goddamned social worker is coming by all the time and it’s just a matter of time before she starts trying to take custody of Bea. I can’t put her through that.”

“Paul, I have a husband and a little girl myself,” Lori replied. “I can’t do any more.”

“Bea loves you like a mother and Charity like her own sister.” He took a deep breath. “I want you to adopt her and give her a real family.”

Tears came to Lori’s eyes.

“By doing this,” he continued, “at least I’ll still be able to see her and be a presence in her life.”

The next day, after Paul dropped Bea off at school, Bill and Lori came to the house and explained that much to their regret they had to decline his request.

“Bea loves you guys and I thought you felt the same way.”

“Of course we do,” Bill said. “Hell, we even
want
more children. We just don’t have the space. Our place is really just a living room and bathroom. Charity’s room is tiny.”

“How about this,” Paul countered. “You guys move in here. This place is over twice the size of yours, and I fixed it all up a few years back. You can check the plumbing, electricity, and paint job—I did it all myself.”

“This house was Lucretia’s pride and joy.”

“And her daughter will still be living here.”

They thought about it for two more days before they consented. Two weeks later, Paul located a lawyer who would charge a reasonable fee to do all the paperwork. Before the month was over, Paul had thrown out all of Lucre-tia’s clothes and knickknacks that he knew they wouldn’t want. He had already brought most of his own things over to Leon’s home.

The Mayers moved into Lucretia’s house soon after Paul had vacated. They kept possession of their own house and decided to rent it out if they could find some nice tenants.

Keeping busy to avoid the inevitable anguish of giving up his daughter, Paul carefully read and reread the diagram on one of the fluoroscope boxes. Apparently, each time the button on the box was pushed, a coiled spring flipped open the small lead cylinder holding the radioactive pitchblende and an X-ray of a foot in the shoe appeared on the screen. With much sweat and concentration, Paul was able to extract the cylinder from the bottom of one of the old machines. It looked like a small brass pipe with a panel on the side.

He was delicately removing the cylinder from a second machine when Leon walked up to him in the scrapyard and said he was worried. He had just read a frightening newspaper article: Ebbets Field was so rundown that it could no longer be filled to capacity.

“I could’ve told you that twenty years ago,” Paul said, wiping his brow.

Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley was seriously looking to move them to some nice new stadium that he could finance on his own. Before Leon could say another word, he noticed Paul holding the cylinder and asked, “Is that the radioactive stuff?”

“Yep, and until I figure out how to assemble a bomb, I need some sort of lead-enforced chamber to safely store it in.”

“Hey, I know where we can get a small lead-lined vault.”

“That’d be a great start,” Paul said.

The next day, Leon visited another scrap iron yard where he knew the owner had a collection of old broken safes. The strong box he remembered seeing was roughly three feet tall and three feet deep, with three inches of lead and steel insulating it. Leon traded his friend twice the safe’s weight in copper piping for it. Then he and Paul hauled it back to his yard and dropped it to the earth right near the fluoroscope boxes.

“Let me ask you an unusual question,” Leon said to Paul. “Is there any way we can detonate this stuff that might somehow further our cause
and
help the Brooklyn Dodgers?”

Uli chuckled, but then realized his pal was serious. Though he said nothing, the question compelled him for the first time to consider the idea of establishing multiple targets instead of just the highway.