The Old Turk's Load Page 14

  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.

  “Did you get out of town all right?”

  “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.

  One More for the Road

  B

  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.

  The Bridge

  L

  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.

  The serious bugs didn’t arrive until later. Not until after he’d gotten in the fight with Bruno, who had no mescaline to offer, but with whom he did a few lines of coke.The problem was it turned out to have been bad shit, cut with something searing and horrible and causing him to threaten Bruno’s life. Bruno got his back up and his knife out, and this was scary. Frightened, suddenly—crying, for Christ’s sake, because everything was jolting in and out of blackness—he started to freak when the bugs tunneled into the skin on his forearms. He knew that if they reached his brain, it was going to be a very bad scene.

  Somehow he made it home again, dodging menace at every corner. The moment he opened the door he realized the place had

  184 GREGORY GIBSON

  been trashed. He grokked right away that the bad guys had done this, that they were after the smack. They’d probably nabbed Kelly. Had he been asleep on the couch when they showed up? Where was Helen? He knew he needed downers. Took a slug of the rye he’d gotten out for Kelly the night before. Retched. The bugs were all over him now.

  All of a sudden his clothes caught fire. This got him to the tub, where he furiously ran the water, got in, and began scrubbing at the bugs. Then the bath went cold and he pulled the plug. But before he could reach for his towel he had a seizure—though what it actually felt like was the deepest sensation of cold, as if his core had been injected with slushy ice. He was overcome with violent shivers, teeth-clacking shudders, and he hunched in the fetal position there, in the tub, just trying to take his next breath.

  Which was when the power went off. The blackout plunged him and his speed-wracked psyche into a darkness so profound, he could feel it pressing down upon him, then into him. It evacuated whatever had been there before, replacing it with pure emptiness. Against which the thought of the Mailman, the heroin, Kelly, the Mafia, his ruined apartment, his life with Helen—the whole panorama suddenly seemed no more than an illusion. A mental trick. In a piercing, soul-rending insight it came to him: THIS was the true reality. He was the brain.This was the jar.He was the brain in the jar.

  He whimpered, empty and trembling in the bottom of the tub, too weak to resist. He was the receptacle, what it all was rushing into. All the signals from the other computers, the ceaseless clatter of money being transferred, of airliners being routed, stocks traded, trains switched. Endlessly, with no rest, ever. The orders from ’Nam, calling in fire, dispatching more stainless steel choppers. The mangled bodies, oozing brains. Firebombed babies. Napalmed Cong. Grunts in death agonies. Saigon whores in micro-miniskirts freebasing, going up in flames. It was the drugs.The drugs were the circuits pinning him here. Now he understood the trap he was in, the true nature of the jar. He writhed in his tub. The core of him was twisted so tight, and it kept getting tighter. It hurt so bad. He was so thirsty.

  The Bank Street Dream

  I

  t was just past midnight. The blackout still held Manhattan in its grip, but traffic was beginning to clear up. Kelly, fueled by half a dozen shots of Wilson’s, was walking again, pounding down Hudson. Where to go? A passing headlight illuminated the street sign for Bank and he took a left. He was riding the current now. Gloria’s place, south side of the street. Flash of sitting in the car with Jarkey, outside the apartment, Jark explaining things.That seemed a long time ago. Then it didn’t seem like time at all, just jumps. He went up the stoop and stood at the building’s main door. First this reality, then the next, then the next.The door was mangled around the lock. Almost looked right, but . . . He pushed against it and it opened. Same with Gloria’s apartment door. Someone had been there before him.

  He held his Zippo aloft, scanning first her big front room, then the hallway, bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. No bodies, but the place was a wreck. Just as the lighter started to burn his hand, he spotted two candles amid the kitchen mess. He lit these, stuck them on plates. If you thought about it, a proper search required method. It didn’t look as if that had been part of the game plan here, though. He suddenly flashed back to his captors placidly driving him to where they could torture and kill him. He understood he was now safer here than he would be walking around.

  In the bathroom he cleaned himself up until the hot water was gone from the tank. He’d come through pretty well, with only a few cuts on his shoulders and right forearm. His coat was shredded, but overall, he wouldn’t stand out in a crowd. Why did they package so many women’s bath products in milky-white containers?

  Suddenly weary, he took the candles into the bedroom, put the mattress back on Gloria’s bed, and cleared a space around it. In the course of this activity he discovered an old letter file, a flip-top cardboard box covered in green patterned paper, whose contents were on the floor. Letters, of course and—hmm—two college yearbooks. Both Bryn Mawr, 1964 and 1938. Sure enough, one was Gloria’s and the other belonged to her mother. The letters were from Agnes to Gloria, and from a friend named Ruth Warfel, a ’38 classmate. She’d become Dean of Women at Bryn Mawr and appeared to be writing to Agnes about Gloria. Other letters from Agnes to Warfel. Family crises and fond recollections. Kelly realized he’d hit the jackpot, if only he could decipher it.

  Then he thought about the bathroom window, which opened onto an alley behind the apartment. He took a candle into the bathroom and made sure the window was unloc
ked, and whether this way out of the building would be available if he needed it. He returned to the pile of letters, eager to read them more closely, and immediately fell asleep.

  In his dream Kelly was heading downtown. Instead of wearing him out, the whole wild night had jolted him into preternatural alertness. The Wilson’s pulsed through him like high-octane fuel. Even the sewer stink, now in full bloom, was a part of his power. The oncoming stream of pedestrians parted in front of him.

  He reached Lloyd’s apartment, his head on fire. Someone had jammed the downstairs door open with a newspaper. He went up the two flights and knocked.

  “Who is it?” Helen’s voice.

  “Me. Kelly. Let me in.”

  “Kelly!”She opened the door, flashlight in hand.“What’s that

  awful smell?”

  He stepped inside. “The Mob tried to kill me tonight.” She stared at him for a second, disappeared into the darkness,

  came back with a bottle of rye. He took a long swig and immediately felt calmer, stronger.

  “How’s that.”

  “An improvement.”

  “Can you be moved?”

  “Maybe. Why?”

  “We’ve got to get you cleaned up. That smell is unbearable.”

  “Twenty-Four Hour Protection. Hey, better than Dial. They can’t get close enough to shoot me.”

  “Come with me.” She helped him to the bathroom. Looking around, it was clear the goons had tossed the place when they nabbed him. “There’s a fresh towel on the rack. I’ll see if I can find some of Lloyd’s clothes for you.”

  When he came out she was cooking something by candlelight in the kitchen. “I hope you like hamburger.”