The Old Turk's Load Read online

  After he recovered from the surgery that marked the end of his career, he took a part-time job at the Gloucester Historical Association. The imposing clapboard Federal-style building had been on the far edge of his route, and once he’d realized what a perfect retirement tit it could be, he’d begun to integrate it into his grand scheme, taking care to suck up to the staff, doing extra favors, ignoring their condescending ways. Over time the Yankee bluebloods who ran the place came to rely on his trustworthy, unexceptional presence. They missed him when he dropped the route, sent him flowers in the hospital, and hired him when he got his health back. They started him as a maintenance man. Once he began spending extra time in their research library, there was no reason to object. He offered to index files of letters and newspaper clippings—tedious, eye-straining work too taxing for the dowagers and dilettantes who volunteered there. Punctual, productive, invisible. Within a year he had his own set of keys and the run of the place.

  He’d discharge his janitorial duties in just a few hours, then work upstairs in the research library until the museum closed. He’d take dinner in his car, which required an hour’s chewing and swallowing—far beyond the time he’d have been allotted at L’il Earl’s or Ray-Joe’s Pizza. Anyway, it freaked people out to see him eating in public.The food had to be cut into teeny bits and chewed exceedingly fine so it wouldn’t strangle him. In the course of saving him from cancer, the docs had separated his esophagus from his windpipe. No more nose or mouth breathing. No nose blowing. If he got a cold he had to stuff a tissue up his snout. No more taste or smell.

  When dinner was over he’d return to the darkened building to pursue what had become his abiding passion. He’d begun, just for the fun of it, researching the history of Faye’s house on Church Street. When he discovered that it had been moved in the early 1800s from a few blocks away, he grew curious about the neighborhood. Using old maps, letters, newspapers, drawings, and documents, he reconstructed the history of the houses and families in that corner of his delivery route—back through the 1880s, when the fishing port had been in her prime, to the Civil War, the War of 1812, the Revolution, and beyond—down into that archaic era when every settler could be named, and thus each one loomed like a giant in history. He was certainly no historian—being only dimly aware that such a discipline even existed—but he had the instinct and, by some miracle, the passion. Building on his intimate physical knowledge of the city, the Mailman was re-creating it, street by street and family by family. Now when he walked the streets of his former route, he’d be just as likely to see it in 1767 or 1867 as in 1967.

  He told himself it was just a hobby, a balm to his lonely days. But not too far beneath was the awareness that he’d somehow gotten himself trapped in a present in which there seemed to be no hope, no possibility beyond grinding, stupid repetition.The past afforded the Mailman his only feeling of release. The small pleasures of its continued discovery got him out of bed each day.

  This depressing situation was enhanced by the unfortunate fact that, as a side effect of having his voice box cut out, the Mailman had acquired a nasty addiction to painkillers. With the help of his historical pursuits and his own fundamental toughness, he was managing it. But just barely. At the age of forty-two he was on his way to becoming a junkie.

  Let It Be, Leave It Alone!

  A

  lthough he’d spent most of his life in Manhattan, Walkaway Kelly emerged from his building as if he were landing on an alien planet. The rock beneath him and at his sides surged as he walked, in massive dizzying waves that disappeared when he stopped to watch them roll. Menace hung in the air, a sense of imbalance. He put his head down and trudged east on Fifty-Third, aware that something had seriously disrupted the invisible currents guiding him through the world. Probably that mess he’d gotten into with the transvestite hooker and the German tourist. It hadn’t felt right at the time, but events had swept him along and now he was on the other side, lying low, as if there were a chance of staying out of fate’s way.

  Eight days before, outside the Five Spot, a statuesque hooker and her john had brushed past.Tight dress, big hair, long legs, fuckme heels—perfect except for her Adam’s apple, but there was nothing to be done about that. When Kelly spotted the hooker at New Lefty’s later that night with another guy, he was curious enough, in an amused sort of way, to sit a few seats down the bar from them and listen, checking them out every so often in the mirror behind the bottles. The new john had a heavy accent and was seriously drunk. He was a head shorter than the impressive she-creature and kept putting his face into her chest as he spoke, trying to nuzzle her. They disappeared after a while. Not long after, Kelly paid for his drink and departed, figuring that was that.

  But it wasn’t. As he passed the alley outside, he heard a noise that stopped him because it was not the noise that would’ve been made by a German tourist with an ampoule of amyl nitrate in his nose being blown by a good-looking transvestite who’d already slipped his wallet out of his pocket and was figuring how to peel off his Rolex while he came. It was a squeak of mortal terror.

  Something different was going down. Instantaneously Kelly had the image of the other guy, the first john he’d seen with her, no john at all. The two of them were working the German over, going for the hotel key, passport, and traveler’s checks. It seemed perverse to Kelly, using violence where sex would do. It called out for correction. He turned down the alley and found the hooker in front of a Dumpster with the now-limp German in a headlock, blood running from his nose. Her partner was going through his pockets.

  The hooker saw him first. “Fuck off, asshole.”

  The other guy turned to face him. Kelly was in the groove now, and events were proceeding in slow motion, like the beginning of a car crash. He could see the punk trying to make him, trying to decide if he was a cop or not, and rendered that question moot by kicking him in the groin.The hooker dropped the German and came around in front of Kelly with a knife. She was headed for the end of the alley and slashed at him to clear her path. He stepped out of the blade’s way, but the other guy rolled under his knees and Kelly fell back on the cobblestones, knocking his head

  18 GREGORY GIBSON

  so hard little stars came out. He knew he might go under. Then they’d do him.

  That was when it dawned on him that he should have let it be, left it alone. The whole intervention had been a result of too much time on his hands; this was the kind of thing that happened when you forced matters. He pushed fast with his arms and legs, crabbing himself across the alley on his back. But they didn’t come after him. The hooker and her buddy were long gone. He realized he was yelling, “Hey! Help! Hey!” like a human car alarm. People were gathering.

  It took another hour to get the German sorted out. He was a businessman named Kramer, over here on some kind of real estate deal. Kelly gave him his card, and on the back he wrote whom to call at the cop shop, in the unlikely event the guy wanted to report the incident. Then he took a cab back to his place. His jacket was shredded, his shoulders were raw, his head was pounding, and his left ankle hurt.

  He went to sleep for a couple of days, took hot baths for a couple more, then engaged in some light work at the gym. The ankle tended to get sore when he was on it for a while, but things were nominally okay. It just felt like he’d lost the beat, as if one unfortunate episode had knocked him off the wave.

  Now he was headed for Sammy’s Undersea Lounge,walking to get the ankle back in shape. The click of his heels on the pavement took on a reassuring rhythm and his surroundings reconstituted themselves as the known world. At Sixty-Second and Lex he ducked into comfortable darkness. Nets festooned the ceilings and the walls were hung with giant lobster claws, crab shells, sawfish bills, and stuffed octopus tentacles. A long aquarium behind the bar flooded the place with soothing blue light. Walking in there was like diving from the storm-tossed surface to the ocean’s bottom.

  He stood in the sawdust, waiting for his cherrystone clams, and watched th
e hands of Norbert, the burly man behind the bar. Forty years’ immersion in cold water had turned them orange and pink, and prying shellfish apart had humped layer upon layer of muscular gristle over the joints. To Kelly the hands seemed like malign clams bent on destroying their brethren. With an instant’s fatal pressure they’d slip the edge of the knife between the two halves of the shell, slit the muscles that held it together, scoop the quivering body loose, and flip the empty upper lid into the trash. After this operation had been repeated a dozen times, the hands set the platter of clams on the bar.

  “Something the matter?” Norbert asked.

  “Man’s inhumanity to clam,” replied Kelly.

  And Her Name Was G . . .

  S

  he thought Gallagher was going to come but he pulled out and went down on her, so she faked a second orgasm, thighs slamming his ears. Then he got back inside her and worked the furrow in long rolling waves.

  She was balling the well-known revolutionary Kevin Gallagher, but he was fucking Gloria Mundi, the millionaire’s daughter, and he was giving it a lot more effort than she. Gloria let him toil away. She thought of broken glasses, coffee grounds, the beach and blue ocean, her far-away sisters in Southeast Asia or Latin America—on their backs for grunting imperialists and revolutionaries alike, all their lives somehow keeping that marvelous, quiet dignity. Wholeness. You could see it in their eyes. She thought of a lioness glimpsed in a scraggly zoo somewhere, not Central Park, but where else could it have been?

  She’d been fourteen, just walking through, when she’d come across the lions doing it, the lioness a wiry, scrawny thing—just as Gloria had always thought of herself—behind black bars, getting down. The lion got his rocks in ten seconds and walked off to lick himself, but the she-lion kept rolling in the dust, ribs showing through like cage bars, no quid pro quo, no obligation to any king of beasts, or anything other than her own pleasure. Gloria recognized the absolute integrity of that creature. It made her insides tighten.

  The swashbuckling Gallagher had come on to her as a savvy veteran of the culture wars. Like many rich kids, Gloria had been raised by predators and opportunists, and was an expert manipulatrix. She had little trouble getting him to escort her to the front lines of the battle, where she gained intimate access to the marches, demonstrations, confrontations, and endless fiery meetings aimed at bringing the established order down. She felt it was important to be doing something, to have agency.The world was changing and she wanted to be a part of that change. Besides, it felt glamorous.

  That was also when she started getting tight with Irene Kornecki, an acquaintance from SDS meetings. Irene had been a law student when Gloria arrived at Columbia as an undergrad; now she was a lawyer, nominally a member of Kevin’s inner circle, but more like an observer. She catered to conscientious objectors and movement people and was, in her careful way, as dedicated to change as any of them.

  In the course of her dealings with Gallagher and his small band of activists (whom he called, in hip Latin American style, the foco), Irene began to engage Gloria’s native intelligence. Soon she had her younger friend questioning the entire scene.Was it all about Vietnam? Okay, let’s get out of there. But what happens then? Do we really want to “bring the war home”? Did Gloria really want murder in the streets? Had she ever killed anyone? Had she ever actually thought about it? Imagined the feel of hot blood on her hands? Had she ever wondered where Gallagher’s rabble rousing would end? Ever stopped to consider that there might be different

  22 GREGORY GIBSON

  ways to introduce change into a hidebound system? And what was the system? Surely more than a bunch of white old farts— Johnson, McNamara, Hoover. What was its true nature? How had it ingrained itself so deeply?

  As an inevitable consequence of this line of inquiry, Gloria began also to question her relationship with Kevin Gallagher. She’d naively assumed that she’d seduced him into granting her access to a secret and exciting world. But now she was beginning to realize that the only thing Kevin ever really did was run head trips on the people in the foco about who was the most committed revolutionary. It was all about power with him, which was all that the sex was, too. He was as big a bully as any of her father’s thugs—worse, in fact. At least some of them supported families.

  She’d already run her personal finances to the limit, posting bail for protesters and helping Irene research the cases of the most important political prisoners, and had felt fine doing it—a part of something larger than herself. But Kevin kept insisting on the need for funds, which forced her to have to keep explaining, in front of the others, that her own access to family capital was years away. It was humiliating. That was when she began to feel the first tug of a strange sense that grew stronger over the months.

  There’d been many group discussions about money. Gallagher was all for stealing what they could from Mundi Enterprises. Gloria pointed out that the assets of her father’s company consisted primarily of slums in Newark, New Jersey, which would be difficult to steal. So he switched tacks and went on a toot about kidnapping for ransom, an approved revolutionary tactic in Latin America and one much discussed of late in radical circles. He kept pressing her, digging for information about her father as well as certain company employees. When she told him that Julius Roth was the one man the company couldn’t do without, Kevin got excited.They’d abduct Roth, he announced, and hold him at a remote spot. Maybe they’d kill him, maybe not. Gloria informed Gallagher that Julius Roth would be much more likely to kill him, and when Kevin actually got a look at the formidable Roth the idea quickly evaporated.

  However, in the course of doing groundwork for a possible heist at Mundi Enterprises, Gloria found out about Daddy’s windfall. This brought matters into focus.

  Roth had spoken of the old Turk’s load only generally, as an unanticipated situation over in Newark with huge potential and much risk. Her subsequent questioning of Seamster convinced her that Mundi Enterprises was holding something big. When he let it slip to her that the Mafia was posing a problem, Gloria figured it had to be drugs—what else would’ve belonged to the mob? Money or jewelry, maybe, but something that easy to convert would be gone already. Pot and acid weren’t valuable enough.That left heroin or pills or coke. The bummer was that, full of pride at her own brilliance, she’d bragged about the Newark score to Kevin.

  Now she was almost at the end of the long process of realizing how badly she’d been fooled by his square shoulders and intense eyes. He’d tricked her in some fundamental way. Used her, when all along she thought she was using him. Gloria was just beginning to understand how angry that made her. But it wasn’t until she remembered the lioness that she understood the feeling that had been building inside her all these months. It wasn’t anger. It was shame.

  Kevin climbed off and went to lick himself. Gloria regarded him with intense distaste. Irene was getting inside her head.

  The Situation with Kelly

  N

  orbert was a keen student of human nature. He knew it wasn’t enlightenment that made Kelly the way he was. Although he sometimes took on the amnesia of the habitual drunkard, Kelly’s condition, in fact, predated his alcohol habit. His father, a journeyman welterweight called Irish Johnny Kelly, had prepared for his only child’s birth by getting falling-down drunk. When the doctor handed over his newborn son, Johnny dropped him. Norbert knew the family, and that much was a matter of record. For the rest, he had developed a theory.

  Norbert considered it likely that, after sliding headfirst through his father’s slack grasp, the infant Kelly landed on the part of the brain that believes it knows what’s going on and is always talking, talking, trying to get control of things—the part that most people listen to when they think they’re thinking.This normally dominant chatter center could have been damaged by the fall, so the other, quieter part of the brain that is constantly in communication with the rest of the body—guiding it down the street, recording details it does not see, causing the hair on
the back of its neck to rise for no apparent reason, flinching at a muzzle flash—that part could have assumed the functions of the conscious mind. This, in Norbert’s estimation, might explain why Kelly spent so much time in the state of concentrated attention that precedes thought and so little in thought itself.

  Certainly helpful in escaping the knives of enraged transvestite hookers (the story related in detail to Norbert over Bloody Marys), but of little use when dealing in any nonphysical way with those of his own kind. For Kelly, there were moments when the human universe was a distant galaxy.

  What fascinated Norbert was how his friend had compensated. Shunned as a young man for his strangeness and ignored by both his parents, Kelly found solace and companionship in his father’s pulp magazines and trashy novels. From Hammett he’d learned to present himself with unflinching directness. Chandler taught him how to crack wise while doing so. Cain presented sex as a sadomasochistic rite preferably enacted with distant relatives in abandoned churches. Spillane didn’t teach him much of anything but gave him an ideal of womanhood, the beat-up dame. Further study of these masters provided Kelly with a store of scenarios—the jealous husband, the rebellious son, the too-greedy boss, the crooked official, the weak man brought down by his own vices—a thin array of archetypes for almost any human situation. A few empty years— echoing his playground isolation—on the police force in Bayonne had taught him how to maintain and operate a sidearm and keep his shoes shined. By then he’d grown into a light heavyweight version of Irish Johnny in his prime—cat-quick and possessed of a thunderous right. His education was complete.