Absent Friends

PHIL'S STORY

Chapter 10

Sutter's Mill

October 31, 2001

The phone again. Goddamn it. There might be something to be said, Phil thought, fumbling for the damn thing in his pocket, for a city where the phones don't work.

“Constantine.” More of a threat than a greeting, but screw whoever it was if they couldn't take a joke.

“It's Kevin.”

Shit. Good going, Phil. Courtroom technique, swift softening of voice: “Hey, Kev. How're you doing?”

“You need to come out here. I need to talk to you.”

“I've been wanting to. But your mother—”

“Mom doesn't want to see you. We'll meet somewhere. You and me.” Kevin was on edge, his voice tight and cold, but at least he was calling.

“Wherever you say.”

“I'd come in—”

“No, no problem.” Come in, Kev—on the crutches, with the pain pills every four hours. “Where's good?”

“There's a bar called the Bird.”

“I know it. On Main Street?”

“That reporter's dead, Uncle Phil. I need you to tell me what's going on.”

“Kev? Kev, I don't know.”

“The paper says someone killed him.”

“I saw that.” And was just told it, by a girl not much older than you are, who's sure it's true and wonders if it was me.

“Did they?”

Do you mean, did I? “There's no evidence he didn't jump, Kevin.”

“Evidence? Oh, fuck evidence! What the fuck does that mean, there's no evidence? You think you're talking to a jury, you can just throw words around and convince me?”

“I'm not trying to convince you of anything.”

Kevin's anger fell back, a quick blaze that flared itself to embers. “What's going on, Uncle Phil? What does it have to do with Uncle Jimmy?”

And there you had it. The way it had always been: Uncle Phil and Uncle Jimmy. One weaving through the world the other came from, like the wind, everywhere in it, never part of it; the other a shining light so bright his glow had colored that world long after he'd left it. Now he was gone from all worlds, Jimmy McCaffery was, but his radiance was still blinding.

“Kev . . .” At a loss for words. Phil Constantine? Amazing, incredible. Thou who dost not believe how much the world has changed, check this out. Finally, with colossal effort: “I'll meet you. I'll tell you what I know. But it's not much. Kev, how's your mother?”

“Mom's . . . yeah, Mom's fine. When can you come?”

Yeah. Mom's fine. “I'll take the next boat. Half-hour, forty-five minutes at the outside.”

“Okay. The Bird. See you there.”

The end. Click off. Rise, tell Sandra to cancel appointments. Tell Elizabeth you'll be in touch about Mrs. Johnson.

Tell yourself, at least Kevin's calling.

Phil rode the boat in his usual spot, outside, facing the Brooklyn waterfront and the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. The day was calm, but not on the ferry. (On the ferry it never was.) Wind churned up by the boat's single-minded rush for the opposite shore slapped his jacket around him. He tugged off his tie (always wear a tie in the office, always look ready) and folded it into his pocket. Clouds slipped along the sky escaping east, out to sea, away from entangling treetops and tall buildings. Poetic but inaccurate: clouds only got snagged on trees on the peaks of high mountains, where the earth reared up to stab the sky. And among buildings, few were tall enough to touch them.

The towers had been.

Phil had never been a regular at Windows on the World. The food was good, the drinks were big, but the scene at the bar was relentlessly social. Investment bankers on the make. Talkative tourists standing locals a beer. Hand-holding, starry-eyed couples glancing over each other's shoulders to the door in case something better slouched in. But once or twice, walking home at night from Battery Park after letting the ferry go, he'd looked up to find the towers' tops lost in mist. Before he thought about it, he was stepping off the huge, silent elevator and ordering a scotch. He'd turn his back on the room, on the piano trio and the strangers anxious to become his friends. He'd stand, looking out the narrow, tall panes of glass at nothing. No: at almost nothing. Here and there, no matter how thick the clouds, a pale light reached him through depthless gray. He never could tell, once the clouds had dropped this low, where the lights were coming from.

His visits to the bar had been rare. But often, in the middle of a workday, in the course of crisscrossing Lower Manhattan—especially if the day were clear, with a breeze clipping along, and he'd just come from seeing some client in a windowless holding cell, someone who would not be free for a long, long time—Phil had hopped the elevator in the south tower to the observation deck. He'd grip the rail and just stand in the wind and the sun. From a height that extravagant you could feel the endless miles not just left and right, front and back, but above and below, too. And every now and then, leaning on the rail 110 stories up, Phil would find himself swept back to his childhood, and he'd laugh. If he stared hard enough at the towers of Manhattan below, he could see, almost, Spider-Man swinging between them. And see himself as Spider-Man, the way he had as a kid, long-limbed and skinny and bringing justice to New Yorkers threatened with all kinds of evil. Yeah, Phil, he'd think, yeah, you need a break, guy. Take a vacation, get out of town. He'd given himself that order, but he'd never obeyed it. The deck at the top of the tower had always been enough.

The boat docked. Phil went indoors, as you had to, to reach the ramp, to get back out. He took the train, quicker than a cab in the middle of the day. The car was half empty, but he didn't sit. Holding the rail, he watched out the windows. First rooftops, then the train cut, blank concrete walls racing by. This was a view of nothing, too, he thought. Different, but the same.