The Christmas Kid

Footsteps

NYDIA GLANCED AT THE ceiling. “There,” she said. “Did you hear it?”

Ira blinked, his hands flat on the round oak table. She was cleaning away the dishes.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t hear anything, honey.” He forced a smile. “You sure you’re not getting paranoid?”

“I know what I heard, Ira. It was someone walking. Someone on the roof. I heard it.”

“Well, I didn’t hear a thing,” he said, abruptly rising and taking some of the other dishes to the sink. The room filled with the aroma of brewing coffee. He looked out the window at the darkness of the Brooklyn night.

“I heard it last night,” she said, rinsing dishes and placing them in the dishwasher. “When you were over at Fred’s…I heard it last week, too. Footsteps. Someone walking. And now again, just now. There’s someone up there, Ira.”

He whirled, a savage curl in his voice. “Well, what do you want me to do about it? Go up there and start shooting? If you’re so freaked, call the super! Call the cops! But stop whining!”

Her face crumpled. She turned off the faucet and hurried into the bedroom and closed the door behind her. He held the edge of the sink and breathed out heavily. Brooklyn. What a mistake.… He glanced around the loft, her stacked paintings, the new one on the easel, the cluttered table where she kept her paints. His own desk was piled with textbooks, yellow pads, red pens, the armory of a schoolteacher. It looked almost peaceful. And this loft, this space, was what they had wanted, what they had searched for through those grinding, humiliating months, wanting to live together in some civilized way. They had looked everywhere and at everything, at cramped one-bedroom places in SoHo, they’d trampled roaches on the West Side, badgered doormen on the East Side, and then had given up on Manhattan and crossed the river. They’d given up quickly on Brooklyn Heights, too, and Park Slope, and then they found the Factory.

“It was closed for a few years,” the real estate man said, “and then someone bought it and decided to make it into co-ops. That didn’t work out too well. So it’s a rental now.…”

The block-square building was a rambling nineteenth-century redbrick pile. It had one of those names invented by real estate developers, of course, but Ira soon discovered that the old-timers in the neighborhood still called it the Factory. And they talked about it in a sour, bitter way. Once, it had been a reason for the existence of the neighborhood, almost seven hundred jobs filling its floors, the workers living in the now-ruined streets around it, eating, drinking, growing old in the stores and bars along the avenue.

Then had come the big strike, the men picketing through a brutal winter, management treating them with iron indifference, and finally there was a fire. Dozens of strikers rushed into the fire before the engines arrived, trying to save the machines that had given them jobs and life for generations. Some of them died. And then the Factory itself died, the owners packing up the remains and leaving for Taiwan or Alabama, and when the Factory died, so did the neighborhood.

“You know what it meant when you people started moving in?” one old man said to Ira. “It meant jobs would never come back. Never. They were gone forever.…”

Still, the price was right, and there was space for Ira’s books and Nydia’s paints, and the subway was only three blocks away. Brooklyn. It would be all right. It was the best they could do. What a mistake, Ira thought, moving across the loft to the bedroom door with a cup of fresh coffee as a signal of truce. He knocked.

“Can I come in?” he asked.

He heard no answer and opened the door. She was lying facedown on the large brass bed. The picture of her father outside their old house in San Antonio was tipped over. “Here’s your coffee, honey.…”

She turned to him.

“Thanks, Ira. Thanks. But I’m just too tired. I took a pill, and…”

“Okay, I have some papers to grade.”

She just didn’t know how to live in cities, he thought, never mind the Factory. That was the problem. There were sirens at night, bottles breaking, shards of arguments, a hundred radios blending into jumble and din. In the summer, he bought an air conditioner, and sealed the windows, but that didn’t work. The sounds of the Brooklyn streets still came at her like an assault.

“I’ll never live in a quiet place again,” she said to him one Sunday morning. “I just know it….”

And he knew then that people from cities and people from the West had grown up in different corners of the universe. On that Sunday morning, Ira from the West Bronx was washed by a sense of peace; the trembling weekday urgency was mercifully gone, the streets as bare of tumult as paintings by Hopper. Subways were almost quiet. And yet Nydia, of the San Antonio suburbs, heard sounds that his New York childhood had edited away forever. That day, he doubted for the first time his vision of the rest of their lives.

Now thinner and tauter than when they moved to the Factory, her body poised like an exclamation point, she was hearing strangers on the roof. Ridiculous. He sighed and sat at his desk to begin the melancholy task of correcting essays.

Then he heard the footsteps.

Right above him. Someone walking slowly and deliberately. He sat very still, holding his breath. The footsteps described a small circle. And then stopped. Directly over his desk…His skin pebbled with fear.

He picked up the telephone and dialed 911, and waited, and then tried to explain to a female voice that someone was walking on the roof of his building, and the woman said, “Yes?” As if saying, this is not news. And then Ira felt foolish, and hung up the phone.

The footsteps moved again. Another small circle.

“Goddamn it,” he muttered, and got up, and went to the door, taking a ski jacket off a peg, thinking: It’s probably some dumb kids, fooling around on the roof, smoking dope or something. But it can’t go on. I’ve got to tell them. He went into the hall. A flight of stairs led to a door that opened out onto the roof. As he hurried up the stairs, adrenaline rushed through him, fueled by anger. Kids. It must be kids. But whoever the hell it is, they shouldn’t be prowling around the roof of the Factory at night. He turned the lock and pushed open the heavy metal door.

The roof was a black tar-paper field, from which jutted strange figures: chimneys, and cowled metal objects, and deep shadows cast by the smothered lights of the street. There was no moon. The wind made a whining sound. He stood for a moment, forcing his eyes to adjust to the darkness, but the far shadows were deep, blank, impenetrable.

“Hey,” he said loudly. “Who’s out there?”

The wind lifted his words and tossed them into the night. He tried to locate himself on the roof in relation to the apartment, to locate the spot on the roof that was above his desk. That was the street. That was the avenue. It should be…He walked out, and circled and knew where he was. Then the wind moaned, and he wanted to run. It was as if some gigantic figure loomed behind him, and he felt his scalp riffle, as if something were scurrying between skin and skull. But he couldn’t turn to look. He waited, glanced at the light from the street, warm and inviting. Suddenly there was a loud slam, metallic and final. The door.

He grabbed for the handle, twisted it, yanked at it, then pounded against its painted metal skin. But the door was firmly, solidly locked. For the moment, at least, he was trapped in the black terrain of the roof. He cursed now, blunt obscenities retrieved from his youth, the words like impotent weapons hurled at the wind and the darkness and his own dread. And then, far across the rooftop, he saw something move.

A man. In a T-shirt on this cold night. There were tattoos on his arms, and a bandanna around his brow, his skin a sickly white. “Who are you?” Ira asked hoarsely, across the distance. But there was no answer. Then he saw another figure, smaller, with Hispanic features, and then another, a heavy-bellied white man, and then a muscular black man, all of them emerging from the darkness.

He tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come, and he backed away, backed away, seeking light and escape, and still they came, more of them now, possessors of the roof and the Factory. He thought he heard the word “strike” once, then again, whispering at him in the darkness, “strike,” and then, at the lip of the roof, one final time, “strike,” before he plunged into the light.