Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (2 page)

2
The Hole in the Floor

“Y
ou must have a lot of clout,” Robinson said.

“I haven't any clout. My uncle has clout. He's a friend of the Commissioner.”

“We never had anyone in the back seat before.”

“Except a perpetrator,” said Robinson, grinning. He was a black man with a round face and an infectious smile.

“If I had a brain in my head,” McCabe said, “I would be a writer and not a cop. There's this guy out in the L.A. police force, and he's a writer. He wrote this book and it became a best seller, and he's loaded but he still wants to be a cop. Beats the hell out of me. I didn't read the book but I saw the movie. Did you see the movie?”

“I saw it.”

“Good movie.”

“It was a lousy movie,” said Robinson.

“That's your opinion. L.A. isn't New York.”

“You can say that again.”

“You been to L.A. ?” McCabe asked me. He was older than Robinson, in his late thirties and going to fat, with a hard, flat face and small, suspicious blue eyes. I like the way he got along with Robinson; there was an easy give and take, and they never pushed each other.

McCabe took a call, and Robinson stepped on the gas and turned on his siren. “This is a mugging,” McCabe said.

It was a purse snatch on 116th Street, involving two kids in their teens. The kids had gotten away, and the woman was shaken and tearful but unharmed. Robinson took down the descriptions of the kids and the contents of the purse, while McCabe calmed the woman and pushed the crowd on its way.

“There are maybe ten thousand kids in this city who will do a purse snatch or a mugging, and how do you catch them, and if you catch them, what do you do with them? You said you been to L.A.?”

“A few times, on and off.”

“This is a sad city,” Robinson said. “It's hanging on, but that's the most you can say. It's just hanging on.”

“What's it like?” McCabe wanted to know.

“Downtown it's like this, maybe worse in some places.”

“But in Hollywood, Beverly Hills, places like that?”

“It's sunny. When there's no smog.”

“What the hell,” said McCabe, “no overcoats, no snow—I got six more years, and then I think I'll take the wife and head west.”

We stopped, and Robinson wrote out a ticket for a truck parked in front of a fire hydrant.

“You go through the motions,” he said. “I guess that's the way it is. Everyone goes through the motions.”

“You ever deliver a baby?” I asked him.

He grinned his slow, pleasant grin and looked at me in the rear-view mirror.

“You ask McCabe.”

“We did seven of them,” McCabe said. “That's just since we been together. I ain't talking about rushing them to the hospital. I'm talking about the whole turn, and that includes slapping them across the ass to make them cry.”

“One was twins,” Robinson said.

“How did you feel? I mean when you did it, and there was the kid crying and alive?”

“You feel good.”

“High as a kite,” said Robinson. “It's a good feeling. You feel maybe the way a junkie feels when he can't make a connection and then finally he's got the needle in his arm. High.”

“Does it make up for the other things?”

There was a long pause after that before McCabe asked me, “What other things?”

“One son of a bitch,” Robinson said slowly, “he put his gun into my stomach and pulled the trigger three times. It don't make up for that.”

“Gun misfired,” McCabe explained. “Three times. A lousy little Saturday night special—happens maybe once in a thousand times.”

“It don't make up for being black,” Robinson said.

We cruised for the next ten minutes in silence. Possibly it was the last thing Robinson said; perhaps they resented having me in the back seat. Then they got a call, and McCabe explained that it was an accident in a house on 118th Street.

“It could be anything,” Robinson said. “The floors collapse, the ceilings fall down, and the kids are eaten by rats. I grew up in a house like that. I held it against my father. I still hold it against him.”

“Where can they go?”

“Away. Away is a big place.”

“You can't just write about cops,” McCabe said. “Cops are a reaction. A floor falls in and they call the cops. What the hell are we supposed to do? Rebuild these lousy rat-traps?”

We rolled into 118th Street, and there were half a dozen people standing in front of one of the tenements, and one of them told us that it was Mrs. Gonzales who put in the call and that her apartment was in the back, four flights up.

“What happened there?” McCabe wanted to know.

“Who knows? She don't let us in.”

We started up the stairs, McCabe and Robinson pushing their coats behind their guns, and myself allowing them to lead the way. A couple of the men outside started to follow us, but McCabe waved them back and told them to clear out. We climbed four flights of stairs, walked to the back of the narrow old-law tenement, and Robinson knocked on the door.

“Who is it?”

“Police,” Robinson said.

She opened the door to the length of the safety chain, and Robinson and McCabe identified themselves. Then she let us in, through the kitchen, which is where the door is in most of the old-law tenements. The place was neat and clean. Mrs. Gonzales was a skinny little woman of about forty-five. Her husband, she told us, worked for Metropolitan Transit. Her son worked in a butcher shop on Lexington Avenue. She was all alone in the apartment, and she was on the verge of hysteria.

“It's all right now,” McCabe said with surprising gentleness. “Just tell us what happened.”

She shook her head.

“Something must have happened,” Robinson said. “You called the police.”

She nodded vigorously.

“All right, Mrs. Gonzales,” Robinson said, “so something happened that shocked you. We know about that. It upsets you, it makes you sick. You feel cold and feel like maybe you want to throw up. Do you feel cold now?”

She nodded.

Robinson took a sweater off a hook in the kitchen. “Put this on. You'll feel better.”

She put on the sweater.

“Anyone in there?” McCabe asked, nodding toward the other rooms.

“No,” she whispered.

“Got any brandy—whiskey?”

She nodded toward a cupboard, and I went there and found a bottle of rum. I poured a few ounces into a glass and handed it to her. She drank it, made a face, and sighed.

“Now tell us what happened.”

She nodded and led the way out of the kitchen, through a room which served as a dining room, clean, rug on the floor, cheap ornate furniture, polished and loved, to the door of the next room, which had two beds that served as couches, a chest of drawers, and a hole in the middle of the floor about three and a half or four feet across.

“Goddamn floor fell in,” said McCabe.

“The way they build these places,” said Robinson.

“The way they built them seventy-five years ago,” I said.

Mrs. Gonzales said nothing, stopped at the door to the room, and would go no further.

“Who lives underneath?” McCabe asked.

“Montez. He is a teacher. No one is home now—except the devil.”

Robinson entered the bedroom and walked gingerly toward the hole. The ancient floor creaked under his feet but held. He stopped a foot short of the edge of the hole and looked down. He didn't say anything; just stood there and looked down.

“The building should be condemned,” said McCabe. “But then where do they go? You want to write about problems, here's a problem. The whole goddamn city is a problem.”

Still Robinson stared silently into the hole. I envisioned a corpse below or the results of some unspeakable murder. I started into the room.

“Take it easy,” McCabe warned me. “The floor's rotten. We don't want you down there. What do you think?” he asked Robinson.

Still no answer from Robinson.

I moved carefully in on one side of the room, McCabe following on the other side. We both reached the hole at the same time. Robinson was in front of the hole, his back to the door. McCabe and I stood on either side of him.

Even before my eyes registered what was down there, I was conscious of the smell. It reminded me of the odor of jasmine, yet it was different. It was something I had never known before, as indescribable as it was different, and it came on a slow current of warm air that I can only think of as silver. It's not possible to explain why a breath of air should evoke the image of silver, but there it was.

And then I saw what I saw. I saw what McCabe saw and what Robinson saw, so I did not dream it and I did not imagine it. About ten feet beneath the hole was a grassy sward. Its appearance suggested that it had been mowed, the way an old English lawn is mowed, yet something about it argued that the thick, heavy turf grew that way and had never known a mower's blade. Nor was the grass green the way we know green; it appeared to be overlaid with a glow of lilac.

No one of us spoke. No one suggested that this might be the floor of Mr. Montez's apartment and that the teacher specialized in horticulture; we knew it was not the floor of Mr. Montez's apartment, and that was all we knew. The only sound in the apartment was the gentle sobbing of Mrs. Gonzales.

Then Robinson crouched down, sprawled his huge bulk back from the edge of the hole, and let his head and shoulders hang over, bracing himself with his hands. The rotten floor creaked under him.

“Watch it!” McCabe exclaimed. “You'll be down there on your head.”

He was wonderful. He was what only an old New York City cop could be, possessed of a mentality in which there was neither the unexpected nor the impossible. Anything could happen in New York, and it usually did.

“What do you see?” I asked Robinson.

“More of it. Just more of it.” He drew himself back and stood up, and he looked from my face to McCabe's face.

“We're four stories high,” McCabe said bleakly, his universe finally tilting on edge.

“A lot more of it,” said Robinson.

“I'll phone it in. I'll tell them there's a cow pasture on the fourth floor of an old-law tenement.”

“It's no cow pasture,” Robinson said.

“Then what the hell is it? A mirage?”

“I'm going down there,” Robinson said.

“Like hell you are!”

Robinson's round face was no longer jovial, no longer the easy, controlled face of a black cop in New York, who knows how much to push and just when to push. He looked at McCabe, smiling a thin, humorless smile, and he asked him what he thought was down there through the hole to teacher Montez's apartment.

“How the hell should I know?”

“I know.”

“My ass, you know!”

“What's down there?” I asked Robinson, my voice shaking.

“What did you see?”

“The other side of the coin.”

“What the hell does that mean?” McCabe demanded.

“Man,” Robinson sighed, “you been white just too goddamn long.”

“I'm going to call in,” McCabe said. “You hear me, Robinson? I'm going to call in, and then I'm going to get the keys from the super—if there is one in this lousy rat-trap—and I'm going to go through Montez's apartment and I'm going to look right up your ass through that hole, and we'll see who grows grass four stories up. And until I do, you don't go down there. You understand?”

“Sure, man, I understand,” Robinson answered softly.

Then McCabe pushed past the sobbing Mrs. Gonzales and slammed the kitchen door behind him. As if his slamming the door had created a current, the perfumed air rose out of the hole and filled the bedroom.

“What did you see down there?” I asked Robinson.

“Have a look?” Robinson suggested.

I shook my head. Nothing on earth would persuade me to lie belly down on that creaking floor and hang over the edge the way Robinson had before. Robinson was watching me.

“Afraid?”

I nodded.

“You know what's going to happen when McCabe gets the super and they go into that apartment under us? Just like he said—he'll be standing there looking right up my asshole—then it'll be some kind of optical illusion, and two or three weeks—man, in two, three weeks we won't even remember we saw it.”

“It's an illusion,” I agreed.

“Smell it!”

“Jesus Christ, you're looking at something that isn't there!”

“But you and me, mister, and that lady over there”—he waved one arm in a circle—”that's real. That's no illusion.”

“That's real,” I said.

He stared at me a long moment, shook his head, then sat down on the edge of the break in the floor, slid down, rolled over, hanging on by his hands, and then dropped, landing in a crouch on the turf. He brought himself erect and turned in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circle, his eyes sweeping over what he saw. Like the grass he stood upon, he was bathed in a kind of violet sunshine.

“Robinson!”

He didn't hear me. It was obvious that he didn't hear. He raised his face to where I should have been, his dark skin bathed in the lilac sunshine, and whatever his eyes saw, they did not see me. The strange light turned his dark brown skin into a kind of smoky gold. He looked around again, grinning with delight.

“Hey, man!” he called out. “Hey, man—you still up there?”

“I'm here. Can you hear me?”

“Man, if you're still there, I can't hear you, I can't see you, and you better believe me, it don't bother me one bit!”

Mrs. Gonzales screamed. She screamed two or three times and settled for sobbing.

“Tell McCabe,” yelled Robinson. “Tell McCabe to take his prowl car and shove it up his goddamn ass! Tell McCabe—”