All I Did Was Shoot My Man

4

I took the stairs up to the main floor of the transportation hub. The station was alive with activity. Hundreds of travelers were coming in and going out, waiting patiently for their time to leave or talking on cell phones. Some were conversing with their travel companions. Tourists and homeless persons, businessmen and businesswomen, prostitutes and policemen, all there together, proving that the melting pot was not only a reality but sometimes a nightmare.

It was Monday, late morning, and now that Zella had cut me loose I had things to do.

My blood son, Dimitri, was moving out of our apartment that day. And I had a fever to assuage.

At a news kiosk I bought a little packet that contained two aspirin for fifty cents and a bottle of water for two ninety-five. I stood there, a squat man amid the throngs of citizens and denizens, swallowing my medicine and feeling low.

“Leonid,” a man said.

It was like the public building was hosting a private party with all my old and new friends invited.

He walked up to me. A slender man, tall and light brown, wearing a dark yellow suit with a navy dress shirt.

“Lemon,” I said with insincere emphasis. “How are you, man?”

“Walkin’ the streets with no day in court on the horizon,” he said. “I had a good breakfast and still got a twenty-dollar bill in my back pocket.”

There was something unusual about his choice of words and images, but I didn’t care.

“How are you, LT?” Sweet Lemon Charles asked.

“Fever’s goin’ down.”

“You been sick?”

“For quite a while.”

“Nuthin’ serious, I hope.”

“Nothing that death won’t settle.”

“Wow, man. That sounds bad.”

Sweet Lemon was around fifty but he had a boyish look to him. He must have had a given name but no one knew what it was. He was a grifter who dealt in information about the goings-on on the street, kind of like a low-level version of Luke Nye, the pool shark, who knew almost everything going on around the shady side of New York and its national, and international, environs.

Lemon had a cheery disposition. You imagined him smiling through a hurricane.

A pair of cops about thirty feet away noticed us. One of them pointed in our direction and the other one glared.

“What you doin’ here?” I asked the street-level answer man.

“Makin’ the rent and dreamin’ about better days up ahead.” Again his words were peculiar — askew.

“Mistah?” a woman said.

It was the pale child from downstairs. I was somewhat relieved that she really existed.

“We’ve already done this dance, girl.”

“Hey, Charlene,” Lemon said.

“Hi, Sweetie. What’s news?”

“They found Mick Brawn down around City Hall. He had an awl wedged in the back of his neck.”

“An awl?”

“Yeah. I guess they don’t sell ice picks too much anymore.”

“Mickey, huh?” the prostitute lamented. “And he was so nice too, gentle as a lamb.”

“When he wasn’t on a job,” Lemon added. “I hear that he was enforcement on some pretty big ones.”

“Man can’t help what he has to do for his family,” Charlene said. I was sure she said those words often.

“Well, he’s dead now. His cousin Willoughby caught it last week in Jersey City. Seems to be goin’ around.”

“Uh-huh,” Charlene said. She was looking off to her right, where a chubby man in a faded gray business suit was stopping to drink from a bottle of Coke Zero.

“Excuse me?” Charlene said as she drifted toward the halfhearted dieter.

“She’s a real trooper,” Lemon said as we watched her go.

The police still had eyes on us.

“What you up to, Lemon?” I asked. The fever was just beginning to abate. For the moment I was enjoying standing there among my fellows.

“Poetry,” the con man replied.

“Say what?”

“I’m studying poetry.”

“Reading it?”

“No... I mean, yeah, but writing it too.”

“You’re a poet now?”

“Not exactly.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, not exactly?”

“I’m what my teacher calls a literary conduit.”

“Am I supposed to understand that?”

“It’s not too complex. You see my auntie, Lenore Goodwoman, raised me along with twelve other children in a shack next to a tobacco plantation down South Carolina. Every word she ever spoke seemed like it came from on high. She believed in God and nature and what she called the bottomless wells of the earth. She’d sit us kids down and lecture us on the deep meanings of every cloud and breeze, scent and tragedy.

“All I do is remember what she said or the way she said things and write it down and bring it to my poetry workshop. They eat that shit up like it was tapioca puddin’.”

“So it’s some kinda scam?” I asked, my strength returning.

“Life is a scam, LT. From the president to the prisoner, they all got the wool to pull over our eyes.”

I saw Charlene and the chubby businessman headed for the up escalator, probably going to the janitor’s hopper room, and thought that Lemon might be making sense.

“I got poems published in three different literary quarterlies,” Lemon was saying, “and a twenty-nine-year-old girlfriend that keeps me writing and even got me doin’ public readings here and there.”

“No shit?”

“I think I done found my callin’, man.”

“Well, good for you, Mr. Charles. I wish you the best.”

I was ready to leave. The fever was on its way down, my mind clearing with the cooler head. I was still guilty but maybe an inch or so closer to the light.

“Hold up, Leonid,” Lemon said then.

“What?”

“I heard from Luke Nye that you lookin’ for a dude name of William Williams.”

I became as still as a Mohawk scout who hears a branch crack in the woods after midnight.

“Is that true?” Lemon asked.

“You better have something to say, Lemon. This is not a joke with me.”

“Shit. I know better than to fool with Leonid Trotter McGill. You a serious mothahfuckah — we all know that. It’s just that Luke mentioned Williams, and I was talkin’ to somebody about it, and Morgan said that there was a famous twentieth-century poet named William Carlos Williams. So I figure that if Willy is usin’ that particular fake name, maybe he’s into poetry or sumpin’, and I could look around to see if somebody on the poetry circuit fits the bill, so to speak.”

“So what are you tellin’ me, man? Did you find somebody?”

The fever was coming back. Lemon became very aware that I was leaning toward him.

“No, no, no, LT. I just heard it from Luke when I was by there droppin’ off these books he wanted. Then when I seen you I remembered what he told me. I’m just askin’ if you want me to ask around.”

“Sure.” I said the word as if it were a threat.

“How old is he?”

“Old.”

“And if I find him does he know you?”

“Oh yeah.” Tolstoy knew me all right.