Down the River unto the Sea

16

Even with waking up that late in the day, the afternoon was almost normal. Aja made phone calls and filled out checks for me to sign after she was gone. I looked down on Montague Street, thinking about Effy pretending that she was a hooker in order to give me what I needed and Mel flying out of hell in the guise of a scarlet bird to be my guardian angel.

I intended to use Willa’s money to pay for a full investigation into Stuart Braun’s case on A Free Man. But first I had to make a little headway on the frame certain elements in the NYPD had hung around my neck.

“Angles and Dangles,” a woman with a deep and raspy voice answered on the fourth ring. It was six thirty and Aja was packing up to go.

“Let me talk to Marty Moreland,” I said.

“Who?”

“My friend Marty said he’d be at the bar and I could call... at six sharp.”

“To begin with,” the woman said, peeved, “it’s six thirty. And even if whoever you said was here, you got to call the pay phone you want to talk to a customer.”

She hung up and I smiled.

“What’s so funny?”

Aja was standing there looking at me from the doorway.

“I like my job,” I said.

“You working on that thing for Miss Portman?”

“I surely am.”

“You scared Coleman the other night.”

“Oh really?”

“Him and Mama been talkin’ about it every night after they think I’m sleep. She’s wondering what he did that you could catch him on.”

“What does he say?”

“I can’t really hear what he says. He whispers mostly and she shouts. But you know what, Daddy?”

“What’s that?”

“I think you should find out what he did and turn him in.”

I looked closely at my daughter, at the dark place in the light of my life. She turned her head in a pose of absolute seriousness and came in to take one of the ash clients’ chairs.

She wanted me to know that she wasn’t kidding.

Something about the gravity of her gaze lightened my mood by half.

“I can’t do that, baby.”

“Why not? You know Mama get all mad about you and that woman, but she was seein’ Coleman when you were still married. I saw a letter from him to her that was written a year before they put you in jail.”

“She had good reason,” I said, admitting my own sins without naming them.

“But it was him who told her to leave you in jail.”

“How do you know that?”

“One time when she said that she felt sorry for the time you were in jail, he said that they had talked about that when it happened and she made the right decision to cut the cord.”

That almost got me. I might have done something if I didn’t know that Monica needed no help abandoning me.

“Are you spying on your mother, A.D.?”

“She did it to my computer. She go through my stuff all the time.”

“Well... I don’t want you to do that anymore,” I said, managing to put some weight into the words. “And I would never send a man to prison. Not unless it was my job.”

“But what if he deserves it?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Why?”

“Because I been there. I know what it’s like and I’m just not that evil.”

She sniffed and looked at me, learning as she did so what her father valued and what she might be.

“I’m goin’ to Melanie’s house tonight,” she said after a long lag in the conversation.

“Studyin’?”

“Just to get away from that house.”

“Your mother knows?”

“She mad too. She mad at you and now at Coleman. All she ever wanted was a life like they live on the TV. And all she ever got was the front page of the Post.”

It was something I said from time to time. I laughed and she snickered. We got up at the same moment to hug each other good-bye.

Angles and Dangles was a dilapidated bar about eight blocks from the old navy yard. There were a few small neon signs in the dirt-caked windows provided by defunct beer companies. Inside, nautical knickknacks like life preservers and big oak ship wheels hung, leaned, and sat on shelves here and there.

Some of the men who drank at the bar and the few tables along the walls might have been seamen at one time or another; the rest had been dockworkers. The woman behind the bar, Cress Mahoney, was the heavy voice that had hung up on me. She was faded but still lovely at almost fifty. Her graying hair had been brown. Her blue eyes had a spark to them.

Everybody was white in there and they all noted my skin color.

“You still make that grog with lemon juice and water?” I asked Cress when I bellied up to the bar.

“Do I know you?” she asked with a sandpaper larynx.

“I only ever ordered from Pop Miller before today.”

“You knew Pop?” She was doubtful.

“Knew? Is he dead?”

The question hurt Cress. She loved the old guy.

I liked him myself and hadn’t heard of his passing. The only reason I called the bar was to make sure that it was still there after so many years.

“Heart attack fishin’ out on his rowboat,” she said. “They didn’t find him for three days. He’d floated half the way to Delaware.”

“He left you the bar,” I stated.

“What do you know?”

“That ‘Cress Mahoney is the finest woman on the Eastern Seaboard. She could gut a fish or spear a shark better than most’a yer so-called seamen.’” I approximated his accent well enough to convince her of my half-truth.

“What’s your name?”

“My father named me Thor after a comic book he read one time.”

She’d never heard of me but still smiled at my imagined christening.

“And what do you want here?”

“Grog.”

I knew her lover, Athwart “Pop” Miller, and more about her history than I was willing to say.

I had turned Pop into my CI when I found out about a regular marijuana delivery that he ran down at the docks. I didn’t interfere but instead made him identify and then report on Little Exeter Barret. Pop didn’t like Exeter because he dealt in heroin. I had a deep interest in the ferret-faced runt because he could lead me to the biggest bust in New York City history.

I only ever came to the bar after hours, so Cress was unlikely to know my face or anything about me.

“I don’t recognize you,” she said.

“Pop an’ me used to play Go after he closed,” I said. “He told me that his clientele wouldn’t like a man of my shade playing Chinese checkers at his bar.”

“Atty tried to teach me,” she remembered aloud, “but I just didn’t get it.”

“They say Go is harder than chess. Pop said he picked it up on a tour of Southeast Asia in the merchant marines.”

“And why you think I own the place now?” she asked. “He’s got three kids and two ex-wives.”

“But only one lusty wench,” I quoted, “that he wanted to be marooned with in the South Pacific.”

The tension went out of Cress then. I could see in the mirror behind her that her clients were losing interest in me. America was changing at a snail’s pace in a high wind, but until that gastropod mollusk reached its destination I had a .45 in my pocket and eyes on all four corners at once.

Cress served the sweet rum drink and I savored it.

I was reading an iPad version of the story of Joan of Arc, looking up now and then to see the denizens of an old way of life bring their world back for a night.

There was an old-fashioned jukebox that hadn’t had its contents swapped out for thirty years... Brandy was a fine girl and she’d have made a good wife but his woman was the sea.

Maybe two hours later a man said, “Hey, mister.” He’d installed himself on the barstool to the right before I looked up.

“Yeah?”

“Do I know you?” His skin was wizened and burned brown from oceangoing sunlight. The eyes might have had a color other than brown, but he squinted.

I smiled and turned Joan off.

“Why do you ask?” I replied.

“Never seen you here before, but you look familiar.”

“You’d remember if you knew me.”

“You that bad?”

“I’m just a sucker for real grog is all, my friend.”

“Now we’re friends?” he asked. Sitting up straight he was still a small man.

Two hours and all I knew was that Joan was a pivotal event in the culmination of the Hundred Years’ War. She had saved France and been betrayed by the king she’d crowned. They said she was a virgin, but I reserved judgment.

I’d already decided that Angles and Dangles was a bust when the runt sailor had drunk enough to try to pick a fight. Two hours wasted with sixty seconds of value tacked on to the end.

I raised my hand to get Cress’s attention, intending to pay my bill and leave. But then the door opened and Little Exeter walked in.

“Yes, Mr. Thor?” Cress asked while I watched the little rat wade through the crowd to a far table.

I looked at Pop’s barmaid lover and said, “Give my friend a triple of whatever he’s drinkin’.”

“Johnny, are you beggin’ drinks again?”

“Hell, no,” my newest best friend proclaimed. “Make that rye, Cressy.”

“We were talkin’ sea stories,” I lied. “He’s a good guy. You can bring me another grog too.”

It was almost two in the morning when three unsteady patrons staggered out of Angles and Dangles.

I’d left the bar just short of an hour earlier and set myself in the shadows of a doorway across the street.

Little Exeter was among the staggery crew. They parted company half a block away.

I followed my quarry for three blocks, sticking to the opposite side of the street, keeping my distance.

The streets were dark and lifeless except for rats running around the edges and a window light here and there. One heavily bearded homeless man pushed his overflowing shopping cart down the middle of the street proudly; one of the last humans in the world who had survived the holocaust of humanity.

Little Exeter was reeling, teetering, and stumbling, but now and then he’d stop and perform a near-perfect dance step that revealed a completely different man from the one I’d stalked a decade before.

I didn’t care.

When I was sure there was no one around I moved quickly, coming up and knocking him senseless with a fist bolstered by a roll of nickels.

Dragging him into a little alley, I let him fall on his back and then squatted down so he could see my face, illuminated by an automatic prowler light put there to scare potential burglars.

“Who you?” he said.

I took out my pistol and pointed it at the center of his forehead.

“I do sumpin’ to you?” he demanded.

“I need a name, Mr. Barret.”

“Huh?” He didn’t know whether to be drunk or afraid.

“Who in the police did you answer to fourteen years ago when you were running aitch outta the docks?”

His little eyes became big and he blinked like some kind of rain forest creature looking for a way out.

“Um, um, um... Cumberland,” he said. “Hugo Cumberland.”

That was the first time since Rikers that it came upon me in full force.

It was dark and dank, bug infested and rank from the odor of maggots in that alley. And I was, once again, a murderer-in-waiting, now with a gun in my hand and a man I yearned to kill prostrate before me.

It’s not that I wanted to pull the trigger; it was just that I was going to pull it and he was going to die. There was a powerful revelation in that burgeoning reality.

I think Little Exeter must have seen his death in my eyes and so the fear drained away, leaving only the seriousness of the last moments of a wasted life.

That look on Exeter’s face reminded me of Aja somehow. This brought to mind her asking for Coleman to be scuttled, for me to destroy him and her mother. If it hadn’t been for her, Exeter would have died in that filthy passageway.

I stood up quickly and ran.

When I got to my car, five blocks away, the pistol was still in my hand.

“Hello?” she said sleepily. “Is that you, King-baby?”

“Yeah,” I said after a short pause to catch my breath.

“What you doin’?”

“Sittin’ in a car down near the old navy yard.”

“What you doin’ there?”

“When I was in Rikers they broke me. Broke me like a china plate.”

Effy knew when to be quiet.

“They tore me down,” I confessed. “I thought I was tough, but everything I knew and believed in just slipped away.”

My face was going through all kinds of gymnastics to avoid crying.

“What you doin’ in that car, Joe?”

“I was looking for a name. There’s someone down here I thought might have it.”

“Did he tell you?”

“He did.”

“Did you kill him?”

There was something so intimate about the question that for a brief span of seconds I didn’t feel alone. And because of that epiphany I realized that I felt alone almost all the time — when talking to people, walking down crowded avenues, even when I was talking with Aja.

I was alone because no one else seemed to know what was in my heart. Only Mel to a certain degree and now Effy, whom I had had all kinds of kinky sex with. None of that mattered because in order to truly be with somebody you have to be in their mind.

“Did you, Joe?” she asked again.

“No,” I said, “I didn’t.”

“Did you do anything to him?”

“I knocked him down.”

“Did he deserve that?”

“About a hundred times over.”

“He’s still alive?” Effy asked.

“He is.”

“You a good man, King Joe,” she said. “In any country, language, religion, or wild place — you a good man. You knew me when I didn’t know myself.”

“Thanks,” I said, then I disconnected the call.

I put the pistol in the trunk and drove home at a snail’s pace; that same snail that was bringing humankind to a new understanding of the same old shit.