Down the River unto the Sea

31

“Mr. Makepeace,” I said when he answered the phone.

I was seated in the last row of the bus in a solitary seat across the aisle from the toilet.

“Who is this?” a man said. “How did you get this number?”

“Lana wondered if you had gone to see Cecilia.”

“Who is this?” William Makepeace demanded.

“A friend of A Free Man.”

I imagined that in the barrier of silence Billy was wondering if he should just hang up.

“Tell me who this is.”

“I want to know if you’re willing to testify against two dead men, set the mother of your child free, and maybe keep an innocent man from getting executed.”

Another spate of silence.

“Whoever you are,” he said, “I am an officer of the law and your threats constitute a crime.”

“Not if you know about a private graveyard maintained by Officers Valence and Pratt. Not if there’s even a shred of a suspicion that you knew what they were up to.”

“Who is this?”

“Like I said, a friend of Manny’s.”

“What about Lana?”

“She asked me to ask you about your daughter when I said I wanted to know why she wasn’t dead like the rest of her friends.”

“I don’t know anything about what you’re saying,” he said flatly. Then he hung up.

I pulled up the window and threw the phone onto the highway.

There’s a liquor store five blocks from the underground bunker on Seventy-Third Street where I was hiding. There I bought a liter of Hennessy, extra old, and then I made my way into the sleeping crypt.

On a shelf in the studio I found a turquoise plastic drinking glass that held maybe three ounces. I filled it with cognac, drained it, then filled it again.

After four drinks, my lips and fingertips were tingling. I stumbled up the stairs and out of the hideaway into the street.

I walked, almost without a misstep, down to the Theater District, where I found an electronics store that sold disposable phones. I bought three of these.

At a popular coffee shop chain store I ordered a huge cup of dark-roast coffee, which I had no intention of drinking. I jiggered one of the temporary phones to life and started making my late-night calls.

“Hello?” Aja-Denise Oliver said in a tremulous, sleepy tone.

“It’s me.”

“Daddy.”

“You okay?”

“Uh-huh. Tomorrow we’re gonna go to Disney World and Coleman says we could all go fishin’ if we want.”

I was relieved that she was so far away.

“You aren’t calling your friends, are you?”

“No.”

“Nobody?”

“This one guy I met at the roller rink in Dumbo called my real phone. I told him I was down with relatives in D.C. for two weeks. Nobody knows I know him, though.”

“I love you, girl.”

“Mama’s here. She wanna talk to you.”

There was a rustling sound and then: “Joe?”

“Hey, Monica.”

“Are you all right?”

Rage sparked at a place very near my dinosaur brain. There was a time when my wife could have shielded me from the terrors of Rikers. She could have put up the money and I might have escaped the brunt of my late-night terrors.

“Joe?” she asked again.

“I’m fine.”

“Can you tell me what’s going on? Did my call really bring all this down?”

“Not completely. I mean, I could’a become a plumber,” I said. I just didn’t want her angry with me. There was no need to torture her, no matter how deep my pain.

“Why are you calling?” she asked.

“Because my little girl’s voice is like penicillin for my wounds.” I felt a little eddy of giddiness twist through my mind. The alcohol was increasing its hold.

“We’re fine,” Monica said. “Coleman is protecting us.”

I sent two texts after saying good night to Aja. Twelve minutes later my temporary phone rang.

“Hey, Effy.”

“Joe?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What’s this phone?”

“I’m in a little trouble.”

“You need me?”

There was something in the tenor of her question that sent a chill through me. It was something beyond love all the way back to when humanity was a group animal connected by experience deeper than any memory.

“I been thinkin’ about you,” the cognac in me said.

“What?”

“You don’t owe me anything, Ef.”

“Only my life, baby.”

I stood up from the small table and walked toward the front door of the coffee emporium. People, I felt, were staring at me. I think I was able to walk in a fairly sober fashion but the liquor was getting stronger.

“Maybe so,” I said into the tiny receiver. “But you kept me from crash and burn whenever I called. I needed a woman to be there and there you were.”

She was silent for a moment or two, and I was trying my best to walk a straight line up Eighth. People were moving in sober gaits all around me. I was worried that some cop might see me and bring me down.

“Where are you?” Effy asked.

“Nowhere.”

“Do you need me to come there with you?”

“I love you, Effy” was all I could say.

She gasped over the airwaves and into my soul.

Damn, I was drunk.

It took four blocks to explain that I wanted a new relationship; that I loved her and maybe we could be friends. She told me that at first I saved her from prosecution and then, when I let her in when I was down, she was able to use me like a life raft through her own troubles. Together we had navigated into safer waters.

We disconnected when I got to the front door of my hideaway.

Ensconced in the apartment, I poured another glass of cognac and drank it at the sink. Then I served up another and went to sit on the single-mattress cot that passed for a bed.

The ceiling of the underground room was low. I could feel it pressing down on my head. The room was spinning, but that wasn’t too serious a problem; I could ride that whirlwind too. But there was a certainty in my mind that I was going to die in the morning or maybe the day after. Someone was going to kill me.

I remember feeling nauseous. I thought I was going to throw up and tried to lurch from the bed. But instead I fell sideways into an unconsciousness that contained entire scenarios of me shot, killed, drained of blood, and bunged into a coffin.

The ringer on the temp phone started at a note in the lower register and then climbed higher and higher for sixteen tones. The last, and longest, chime was a little piercing. I know the musical scheme so well because it rang three times somewhere after 4:00 a.m.

The first series of notes reminded me of a stream making its way across the floor of my underground cave. There were fish in there and a mountain lion somewhere above looking to take me down if I tried to drink water.

The second call was a shimmering wall of lights that resonated with the tinkling sounds.

Halfway through the third attempt I sat up straight, snagged the phone from the floor, and cried, “Who the fuck is it?”

“How’s it comin’, King?” Melquarth Frost murmured in my ear.

“Mel.”

“You okay?”

“That might be a little optimistic. But I’m not dead.”

“How’s the room?”

“I expect a big red devil to bang the door down and take my soul any minute. Why are you calling me?”

“You the one texted me your number.”

“It couldn’t wait till the sun came up?”

“I was working on this spring-driven wooden clock from the seventeen hundreds when it hit me.”

“The clock hit you?” I was just talking, trying to keep from throwing up.

“If you crossed the line and the cops are after you I got a plan.”

“Plan for what?”

“For you.”

I thought about standing, realized I couldn’t, then leaned back against the cold brick wall behind the bed. The chill went some way toward rejuvenating me.

“Talk on,” I said.

“Man is dead no matter what way you look at it. And the police department is never gonna admit to cops as bad as Valence and Pratt. Neither will they admit to framing you. You’re a bug to them, and we all know what happens to a bug when he get between a rock and the hard place.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a plan, Mel.”

“I know a dude down in Panama could make a whole baseball team disappear. All I need is a plane and that’s just some money.”

We talked longer, but I don’t remember what was said. I hadn’t been that drunk in a very long time. And I hope never to go that far again.