The Havana Room

Three

Now, I assumed, the evening would taper painlessly into oblivion. I ordered another drink to go with my chocolate cake. The Havana Room was dark and comfortable, and the men moved to and from the bar or toilet slowly, enjoying, it seemed, their own gravity. The talk was measured. You could hear money in the murmur, you could hear problems being unbolted and taken apart. I listened hungrily, for of course I used to do these things, used to like being in the big messy heart of the action, shaving away complication, splicing in the fix, watching for the nod of group assent. In big law firms like my former one, there are basically two kinds of lawyers; the first is the glad-handing, business-grabbing opportunist, who accepts that men and women are fallen, wingless creatures, and is in it for the game and the money and the dense structures of connectivity that build up over a career; the second type, rarer, is the emotionally aloof scholar, more interested in the purity of the law than in the impurity of human beings. These same men (and they are usually men) could easily have been priests or research scientists, and might be disappointed not to be sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court. They are paid to compose legal structures (trusts, corporate ownerships, mergers) that open like tulips in the sun for the right person or entity but remain otherwise hidden, impermeable, indestructible. Both types of lawyers can be dangerous politically, and both have their flaws. The back-slappers and group-grinners tend to drink too much, fuck around on out-of-town trips, attract marginal clients with the wrong kind of legal problems, and die suddenly on the tennis court. The legal priests abhor the messy, repetitive work that is the firm's bread and butter. They can't be counted on to chat amiably at social events or conceal their fringy political opinions. They don't let profits stand in the way of righteousness. They tend to fall out of touch with the younger partners and live forever. I'd been the first type of lawyer of course, and let me admit that when a client came to me with the words "Bill, I need a little advice," or the like, I felt happy- grateful to be wanted, eager to be of use. This is, in part, why men enjoy hunching over papers and agendas- it makes them feel useful, or at least not use less; it lets them bounce in the net over the void. I'd enjoyed my little skirmish with Gerzon, the tangle over large sums, the unexpected sprint down overgrown thoughtpaths. I'd tasted a little of the old professional meanness, the venom of cleverness- it had tasted good, too.

In this better mood, I inspected the room, which had started to fill up, despite the late hour. A few men checked their watches, expecting something. But what? In the city of earthly delights, what could actually be new and unusual? And would it start without Allison?

Ha, the Chinese handyman, now stepped into the room, moving with such stooped humility that the men barely glanced at him as he made his way behind the bar. I waited to see if the waiter or bartender paid him any attention. They didn't. Nor did Ha appear to care; his face was a serene mask of wrinkles. Allison had said something about him being ready, and so here he was, in the room, fussing behind the bar, apparently right on schedule.

But I wasn't the only one watching Ha; he'd drawn the interest of a distinguished-looking man at the bar whom I recognized as one of the city's great literary figures of the past era. A youngish entourage accompanied the man, and each fame-licker had arranged himself in a posture he thought most advantageous to receiving the great one's attention. Had Allison invited them? I'd once admired the man; he'd been a brilliant skeptic and an energetic personality around town but widely dissolute in his personal habits, and with each year his original literary accomplishments became harder to remember.

"You sir!" he called loudly to Ha. "I'm here to see if you are a fraud!"

Ha made no response, not a blink.

"Which I suspect you are!"

The man had drawn the room's recognition, and he enjoyed it, nodding gravely at the others who saluted him from their seats. He was perhaps now most famously the author of his own self-destruction, known for his appearances at the city's watering holes, where, curled over his drink, he was to be seen telling forty-year-old tales to twenty-year-old wits. But he still looked good in a tailored suit, and spent heavily to maintain his teeth.

"It's a complete fabrication," he announced wetly, "a parlor trick, a circus act." He swept his hand threateningly at the room. "Which one of you dupes are in on it? Which of you are the ringers?"

The men in the booths, not unworldly themselves, heard hostility and saw alchoholism, and after they looked away, he directed his comments back to the smirking youngsters gathered around him, who no doubt delighted in their secret power over him, for he needed them far more than they did him. "Yes, yes, we will see!" came his voice in response to an unheard question. "We will witness the delusion of the human appetite!" He pounded his fist on the bar, as if to summon the hounds of inquisition, but in this action he was vigor mummified, he was satiation lost. And, in the deep and hideously thick coughing that resulted, he was also death, lingeringly foretold. But not yet. A fresh drink arrived into his hands and soon he was again waiting brightly, like the others.

Then I heard a commotion coming down the stairs.

"I invited myself!" came an angry voice. "Where is he?"

The figures in the room glanced up expectantly. A little man in a wool jacket appeared in the doorway, squinting through the cigar smoke. Snow dusted his watchman's cap. The men turned away in disappointment. Whoever they expected wasn't this person, and he was already arguing with the waiter, who pointed at me.

The man lurched stiffly forward, and then I was looking up into a red face of about sixty, but a tough sixty- battered and doggish.

"Good evening," I said in a mood of full-bellied indulgence, the night having provided already far more entertainment than expected.

"Where's Jay?" the man asked.

I put down my fork. "Not here."

The man stared accusingly at the plates on the table, the empty glasses. " Was he here?"

I told him yes.

"When? Just now?"

"Maybe half an hour ago," I said.

"Who're you?" he demanded.

"I come here a lot, I just met him tonight."

The man winced. "Come on, guy!" he said. "I got to find him!"

"I don't know where he is. He went out on the town."

The man examined my face, apparently concluded I was truthful, and, to my surprise, dropped down across from me in the booth.

"I'm just going to sit here a minute, need to rest. I was on the road for two hours." He pulled off his gloves, revealing enormous hands, their fingers crooked and swollen, almost painful to look at, nails packed with grime. "Jesum, I'm tired. Had to park on the sidewalk. Snow's coming out of the northeast, be bad soon." He pushed the dishes to the side, although not without eyeing a few soggy fries. "You got any idea where he is?"

"Not really."

He pulled off his cap. His hair appeared to be styled with motor oil. "How about where he's gonna be later tonight-" His face puckered to a leer. "You know what I mean?"

Probably Allison's apartment. "I might see him tomorrow, downtown."

"No, that's too late." He thumbed one of his teeth, as if it might be loose.

"You a friend of his?"

"Friend?" He shook his head. "Everybody calls me Poppy." He didn't offer me his hand, but instead glanced around the Havana Room. "Pretty swank, this place, full of assholes. Wouldn't let me in at first."

"You try to call him?" I asked, assuming Jay didn't want to be contacted.

" 'Course I did." Poppy noticed my uneaten cake. "You want that?"

I waved it toward him. He pulled the plate close and chewed diligently for a minute, then drained one of the water glasses.

At that moment, the barman approached. He nodded at me apologetically and addressed Poppy.

"Sir, this is a private room."

"The door was unlocked."

"The door was closed, sir."

"I opened it."

"Sir, they're telling me that there's a big truck full of potatoes parked on our sidewalk."

Poppy nodded. "That's mine."

"Sir, they're asking you to move it."

"I will." He smiled at me, teeth smeared with dark cake. "When I'm ready."

"Sir, it's very inconvenient for-"

Poppy swiveled. "It'll be very inconvenient if I dump those potatoes in front of this place, don't you think?"

"Sir, I expect that we'll need to call the police."

"Fine, call them."

"Sir?"

"But don't expect them to pick up something like nine thousand frozen potatoes."

The barman eased away.

"You got a pen?"

I did. He slid an embossed HAVANA ROOM napkin in front of himself and tried to write. "All right, I'll-" The napkin tore.

I handed him another. He tried again.

"What's wrong?"

"Circulation's gone. This one"- he held up his right hand, wiggled the fingers stiffly-"got run over by a loader sixteen years ago, which lemme tell you hurt like the devil." He lifted the left. "And this one- I got the repeating motion thing. Tendons all gummed up. Got no power, no grip."

With the second napkin, Poppy was successful, moving the pen slowly, like a boy carving his initials into a tree. His eyebrows lifted with each finished letter. "Here. Give this to him."

"Can I read it?" I asked.

"I ain't stopping you."

The napkin said:

JAY- We got a probelm w/Hershul amp; the cat. Its not my faullt. Get out there quick. I cant do nothing. I'll wate all night.

Poppy

He pulled his cap back on, stood up. "I can trust you to get it to him?" he asked.

I slipped the note into my pocket. "I'll see what I can do."

He swiped a handful of cold french fries and slipped them into his coat pocket. "You'll try, right?"

It was then that I noticed the beautiful black woman I'd seen before in a blue evening gown at the other end of the room. The men looked alert now. Was she the one they'd been waiting for?

"You'll try, right?" Poppy repeated.

I looked back at him. "Sure."

"I mean tonight, fella," he coughed. "As soon as goddamn possible."

"Yes, sure," I mumbled. The black woman, so tall and elegant, was greeting each patron with a handshake and warm smile. The literary man had slipped forward off his stool in anticipation.

"Hey, hey, I'm talking to you!" said Poppy. "I got this feeling you can find him, see, like you know his girl, where she can be found. They told me she ran this place." He pointed at the napkin. "Jay'll understand that, he's got to."

I nodded. "Okay."

He was wary. "I can't explain it all to you. It's one hundred percent confidential."

"I get that, yes."

"Tell him I had to go back."

The woman listened to the literary man's banter. He felt himself to be very drunkenly clever, I could see, but he fumbled his cigarette onto her shoes and she glided away, ready to greet others.

"I have to get back, I said."

"Right."

"Because of the snow." Poppy zippered his coat, eyeing me, and seemed already hunched against the cold outside. "If you don't tell him, it's all on you. He'll know. He'll find out."

I didn't like the sound of this.

"And tell him I don't know how it happened."

"Okay." Ha, I noticed, had set a rolled white cloth on the bar. He unrolled the bundle and lifted a flap. Something gleamed from within the folded cloth.

"I still got coffee in my truck."

"Okay, Poppy," I said.

"You got to get the message to him."

Now Ha was filling a plastic bucket with water in the sink behind the bar. "I will."

"You tell him it involves Herschel."

The elegant black woman knew almost every man in the room, I realized. "I said I would."

Poppy saw my distraction. "I had to go back, he has to understand that. When he sees what happened, he'll understand."

"Right."

"He's probably going to need to bring someone to help. My hands are no good. It's a big problem, you got to say that, too."

"Okay."

"You look like a decent guy. I'm trusting you."

Poppy stood and left, but not before noticing the bowl of nuts on the bar, which he sampled liberally. I read the subliterate napkin message again, unable to make sense of it. How could I get it to Jay? If he and Allison had gone out to celebrate, they could be anywhere. Both probably had cell phones, but I had neither number. But I could call information. She'd said her home number was listed. She had to be, when you thought about it, needed to be reachable if the restaurant burned down in the middle of the night.

"Listen," I said to the waiter, "I'll be right back. I need to use the pay phone upstairs. Hold my table here, okay?"

He shrugged. "I'd make it real quick, pal."

The comment seemed unnecessarily rude, but I ignored it and hurried toward the Havana Room's hunched doorway, past the literary man, who had just been forcibly presented with his check by the bartender. I climbed the worn marble stairs, my shadow rising in front of me. In the foyer, while calling information, I noticed Tom Brokaw arrive for a late bite. Impressive man, Brokaw. Smooth, articulate, reassuring, deeply American in his persona. Bet he never killed anybody with a glass of milk, either. Allison was listed, and I left a perfunctory message about Poppy and hung up. The phone rang back almost instantly.

"Oh hell-o- ho, Bill," came Allison's voice- amused, silky, relaxed.

"That was fast. You know the pay phone number?"

"Of course. Got it on speed-dial, too."

"You're at home?"

"No. I have this fancy phone thing that rings me wherever I am."

"I called your apartment."

"I know."

"But you're not there?"

"Oh, no. I'm with Jay. In his big, masculine SUV. You can pronounce that suv, which is provocative, don't you think?"

"I need to tell Jay-"

"Like, let's suv. Or maybe you'd like to come up for a quick suv. Or, like this, all they did was suv, just constantly."

"You a bit inebriated, Allison?"

"Sort of. We're headed back there right now. I'm running late. But the men will wait. We just went for a spin."

"Things seem about ready to start."

"Not without me," she said. "We'll be there in three minutes. Here's Jay."

He came on the line. "Hey guy," he breathed. "I want you to come to my office tomorrow so I can settle up, show you-"

"That's not why I'm calling."

I told him about Poppy, and the potatoes as well. He asked me to read him the message.

"Oh, shit," he muttered, then muffled the phone. I thought I heard a tone of female argumentation. Then the open static returned, the sound of traffic. As I listened I noticed an elderly woman in a long fur waiting to use the phone.

"I don't own a cell phone," she told the maitre d'. "My sister had one, gave her brain cancer."

The maitre d' nodded at her good sense.

I kept listening. "Thanks a lot," came Allison's voice away from Jay's phone.

"Bill?"

"Jay, I think I should have a look at some of that paperwork tomorrow. At the deed history in particular."

"Sure." He wasn't listening.

"Good night, Jay." I wanted to get back into the Havana Room. "Congratulations again."

"Bill, you got plans tonight?" Jay said.

"I plan to sleep, eventually."

"I've got some kind of a problem. I need a hand."

"I'm a tired guy, Jay. Really. It's almost one."

"Wait, wait, hold on-"

I heard muffled noises, Allison saying something, arguing perhaps, rushing static. Around me people were still arriving at the steakhouse, despite the hour. The great old literary man, however, was being escorted with his entourage from the Havana Room by the waiter. "But the night is still young!" His knees buckled with each step. "Everything's about to begin! I saw the knives!"

"Bill," came Jay's watery cellular voice in my ear again, "I really need a guy to go out to Long Island with me and help with something. It's like three or four hours… I might need a guy to help hold stuff, a pair of hands, is what it is."

I'd yanked an extra quarter million bucks from the universe for him only hours before and now he needed me to be a farmworker? But I was polite. "A pair of hands?"

"Yeah, Poppy's are no good."

I saw the door to the Havana Room closing. "Give me the number, I'll call you back."

I walked the nine or ten steps across the foyer. The door was shut now. I tried the old porcelain handle. Nothing. The yellow card had been removed from the brass plate.

"Closed," announced the maitre d'.

I felt cheated. "Hey, but it was open a second ago."

"Yes," he said, not looking up from his reservation book. "It was."

I tried the handle, shook the door. It was surprisingly firm, with no vibration to it, as if the handle were merely bolted to a wall.

"Sir!" he called sharply.

"I was just in there, I have food on the table!"

"I'm sorry," he said, with no sympathy.

"I was taken in there by Allison Sparks," I said.

"Yes," he responded, "but you left. And the door is closed."

"I don't get it," I protested.

"I must ask you to move away from the door," he said.

"It's not busy, it's not-"

"Please, sir," he said, his voice ominous.

Now the woman in the fur coat had the pay phone in both hands.

I retrieved my coat and stepped outside into the cold, irritated and disappointed, watching the snow fall. Allison had said she'd be there in three minutes, but it was longer, more like ten. I noticed several potatoes in the gutter. The winter wind off Sixth Avenue slaps you around, sticks a cold finger down your collar, wakes you up. But it doesn't remind you that you are fallible and foolish. Finally a green sport utility truck pulled to the curb, flashing its lights, wipers pushing away the swirling snow. Allison jumped out wearing a big hooded coat and ran up to me in the snowy light outside the door. Her hair was not quite combed, her makeup smudged and forgotten, cheeks flushed.

"I don't get this guy sometimes, I really don't."

I glanced at Jay's shadow behind the snowy window of the truck cab. "I thought the evening was going so well, the real estate deal and everything."

"It was. We were having a great time. He was fine ten minutes ago, fine."

She didn't seem as drunk as she'd been on the phone and I wondered if it had been an advertisement of happiness. "What happened?"

Allison leaned close to me, hunched in her coat. "Your phone call, Bill."

"Did he say what the problem was?"

"No, but he got upset after you called. I could see it."

A blast of snow cut down the street and we huddled closer. "He wants me to drive out to the East End of Long Island with him."

"Will you help him?" she asked. "I'm worried about him driving alone."

"I was hoping you'd get me back into the Havana Room, see the circus trick or whatever goes on."

She blinked at the snow in her eyes. "Who says it's a circus trick?"

"What happens? Ha and the black woman do something?"

Allison frowned in disgust. "It's real kinky, Bill, yeah." She checked her watch. "They must have started without me. Ha must have gone first."

"I want to go back in."

"If you've missed Ha's first part, then it won't be any good."

"I don't understand."

She nodded. "I'll get you back in, don't worry."

"When?"

"Another night. Soon." She glanced back at Jay's truck, its hazard lights blinking, as if waiting for me. "He says he's driving out there no matter what."

She was appealing to me to help Jay for the second time that evening, and I could not help but hope that this commended me to her. I looked into Allison's face with frustration and unexpectedly sensed her own. The whole evening was a piece of unfinished sexual business to her. With the snow pattering softly on her hood, there she was, lungs and lips, eyes and breasts, and she wanted, she wanted very badly, she wanted him or me or it or everything, and that desire made me want her, too. "Please, Bill?" she whispered. "Will you help him?"

"I should go home to bed. I'm tired."

She studied me a moment. "You don't look tired."

"I am. Tired and old."

"Girls have been known to like old men," Allison said. "They find their wrinkles interesting."

I thought of Judith and Wilson Doan, his strange eyes, standing in a black coat at his son's funeral. I thought of this and it reminded me of other things and I found myself thinking of Timothy in a Tuscan villa, kicking a soccer ball against an old stone wall by himself. I hoped that his stepfather was good to him, loved him, wasn't too caught up in how to spend three quarters of a billion dollars. I needed not to think about this, however, anything but this, and the prospect of a late night errand to Long Island had new diversionary value.

"Okay," I muttered. "I'll do it."

"Thank you."

"But you'll get me back into the Havana Room?"

"Promise."

"I really want to see what-"

"I know, yes. I promise, Bill."

"Then it's a deal."

"Please drive safely," she said. "For both of you." She leaned up and kissed me on the cheek. "You'll come by tomorrow?"

"Sure," I said.

"Good. I'd like that."

And then Allison was gone, swirling through the door, the snow following her.

There was still time for me to open the truck's door and make awkward apologies to Jay, but I didn't. Instead I just stood there under the steakhouse's awning feeling the wind slap my cheeks. I've had reason since then to wonder why I resisted the correcting action, the prudent retreat. I was tired, and I should have gone to bed. Certainly I'd responded to Allison, sensed something genuine in her voice, some muted distress call perhaps. But the reason I walked through the gathering snow to Jay's truck is more than that, and it doesn't reflect well on me: I sensed animal weakness in Jay, and I wanted to find out what it was. To be more precise, I sensed a problem, and not necessarily the one that was worrying Poppy. I sensed edges and change and conflict. A real problem wanting a solution. A solution requires a stratagem, and a stratagem means a game. I'd once been good with problems and stratagems, as I'd proven earlier in the night, and something in me welcomed another challenge.

In this I was a fool. I'd forgotten that any true game is played versus an opponent, or even two simultaneously, against the indifferent backdrop of chance. Who has won and who has lost is often difficult to know, or undecided, or, at the last, reversible. As Wilson Doan Sr. himself had learned, for one. Yes, I'd forgotten all this, and so I walked around to the passenger side of the truck and opened the door. Jay had on the same good coat and suit he'd been wearing a few hours earlier. He looked up at me, his eyes a little dull, I thought, his hands hanging on the steering wheel.

"Really appreciate this," he breathed.

I settled in, and noticed a baseball on the dash. I picked it up. A baseball always feels good in the hands. "Not what I expected to be doing tonight."

"That makes both of us."

The box of cash was behind his seat. "Sounded like you were having kind of a great drive with Allison. Sorry I interrupted."

Most men would have smiled in reply, either in embarrassment or pride. But Jay blinked at the thought of it, lips closed. I had the distinct impression that Allison was not the kind of woman he preferred. He pointed to the glove compartment. "There's a little thing of pills in there. Would you hand it to me?"

I opened the compartment, found an unmarked container.

"Thanks." He shook out three pills and swallowed them. Then he slipped the container into his breast pocket.

"You want me to drive?"

"No, it's all right."

And it was. By the time we'd crossed through the tunnel into Queens, he was sitting up straight and driving with crisp aggression.

"Those pills are pretty good," I noted.

"They are."

"You all right?" I asked.

"I'm fine, man, just tired."

He wasn't interested in talking, so I let it rest. The Long Island Expressway, always a dragway of insane drivers, becomes genuinely otherworldly on a snowy night, and to stay with the traffic we popped up to eighty, flying east past the billboards and shopping centers and exit signs, Jay seemingly noticing none of them. His eyes showed no sign, in fact, that he'd inked a real estate deal that evening or had to break his celebration with Allison, and I found myself remembering the oddly deadened sadness I'd seen in his face when he'd embraced her. In the pin-light darkness of the truck, his mouth was set, his gaze fixed on the road, and I thought I recognized in him a certain kind of man, a man who is damaged and yet unflinching. I've met a few. Because he has taken pain, such a man knows he can take more. In fact, he expects it; suffering, so far as he sees, is in the order of things, the logic of the universe. Usually such men are hard, even self-punishing workers, capable of long periods of isolation or aloneness, and suffer bouts of crippling melancholy. They refuse to take antidepressants, they refuse to talk too much; instead they wait and wait, with the patience of a cat, for the mood to turn. They drink coffee alone in the morning, they smoke cigarettes on the porch. Jay was like this. Such men believe in luck, they watch for signs, and they conduct private rituals that structure their despair and mark their waiting. They are relatively easy to recognize but hard to know, especially during the years when a man is most dangerous to himself, which begins at about age thirty-five, when he starts to tally his losses as well as his wins, and ends at about fifty, when, if he has not destroyed himself, he has learned that the force of time is better caught softly, and in small pieces. Between those points, however, he'd better watch out, better guard against the dangerous journey that beckons to him- the siege, the quest, the grandiosity, the dream. Yes, let me say it again. Quiet men with dreams can be dangerous.

The highway became more desolate as we passed the edge of Long Island's suburban sprawl and into the last thirty miles of farmland. Although far outside the eastern edge of Queens, we were still well within the city's dominion. The money on Long Island, tip to tip, is always, in some measure, New York City money, either coming from or going to. It has to be that way, because, except for potatoes and power boats and fresh fish, everything appearing on the island- every washing machine, every stick of lumber, every carton of orange juicecomes through the city on the way east. Eighty miles out, the island forks north and south, and with the South Fork already filled up with vacation houses and Hamptony attitudes, the North Fork was next; once off the highway we passed signs announcing new golf courses, condo construction, and wineries. I knew a bit about the land game. The idea, of course, is to get hold of an enormous piece of property, preferably with as little cash down as possible, subdivide it "tastefully," which is to say in such a way that it attracts wealthy buyers, and then sell out the whole thing. If the buyer plays cleverly, his leverage can be extraordinary.

"You see what's going on out here," Jay muttered. "It's a gold rush."

"Why did you decide to get rid of the land now?"

"The time was right," he said cryptically.

If able to be subdivided, a big piece of land like Jay's could be worth quite a bit more than he'd exchanged it for. Zoned at an acre per lot with greenbelt set-asides, a developer could still get perhaps seventy lots out of it, with twenty of them on the water. You'd have to drop in a million for water, roads, zoning applications, and sending the politicians to Bermuda, but even so, someone smart and energetic might be able to triple his money in five years. "You try to subdivide?" I asked.

He shook his head silently, made a series of turns, then stopped in the darkness at a chained dirt road that headed directly toward Long Island Sound. He got out and left the chain on the ground. I noticed a real estate broker's sign: HALLOCK PROPERTIES. Jay pulled it up and flung it into the grass.

"This the land?"

"Yeah."

"No longer yours, now."

"Not technically, counselor," he said, sitting down again.

"You gave Gerzon the key, I thought."

"I kept a copy." He nosed the truck ahead. "Always keep a copy, you know?"

The road passed through a stand of spruce trees, then opened up, wide to either side.

Jay hunched close to the windshield. "Where is he?"

I could see in the snowy dark that we were passing through an old farming operation. Massive outbuildings, a couple of abandoned tractors. Jay maneuvered around ruts and holes. "They haven't been keeping the road up."

"You know this land?"

"I grew up here, man."

"Right here, on this land?"

"Exactly," he said. "Hey, look for tracks."

But I saw nothing. The land lay to either side of the road in wide flats. We passed irrigation engine sheds, piles of piping, three ancient trees in a line, leafless yet magestic. The snow slapped against the car.

"The water is close?" I said.

"Quarter mile."

At the end of the road, a deep-bellied farm truck had pulled to the side, beyond which I could see the phosphorescent expanse of Long Island Sound. The truck was a big one, double sets of wheels on the rear, and about the size of a municipal garbage truck except that the container end was a steel trough filled high with potatoes. The truck also appeared to be missing its driver's door. At our approach a figure stepped out. He pulled his hat low and came straight up to Jay's side. It was Poppy, drinking coffee.

"Where's Herschel?" yelled Jay.

Poppy shook his head at the futility of the question. "Come on, it's bad."

I felt sick at the sound of this. We got out and followed Poppy directly to the edge of the sea cliff.

"Watch it there," said Jay, holding my shoulder. "It goes down two hundred feet."

The wind was coming hard off the ocean and pushed up the face of the cliff, so that where we stood snow flew into our faces even as we looked down. Poppy pointed his light at two wide tracks that dropped straight off the cliff. "Went right over."

Jay peered over as best he could. "Is he dead?"

Poppy shrugged. "If he was working in daylight, then he's been there eight hours anyway." He kicked at the sand. "Fucking snow made it hard to see the edge, I guess."

"When'd you find him?" Jay asked.

"Maybe ten o'clock tonight."

This made sense to me, for Poppy hadn't appeared in the Havana Room until after midnight.

"Was he alive?" I asked in terror.

"I don't know," snarled Poppy. "He could have been. But he wasn't moving."

"You didn't go down there?"

"No, no way. Not with my hands."

"You call the police?" I said, shivering now.

Poppy looked at Jay in fury, and despite Poppy's small size I took a step backward.

"Bill, hang on," said Jay. He nodded at Poppy. "All right, so you didn't go down."

"No way."

I peered over, couldn't see much.

"Don't get too close. The sand is shifty, there's no clean line."

Contrary to my expectation, the drop was not sheer but gradual. I edged forward. "There!"

Forty feet down the slope sat a bulldozer, treads right side down, held in place by a stand of leafless trees. A man lay sprawled in the cab. He didn't move. The machine appeared to have slid backward down the irregular slope and come to a stop undamaged. The big bucket on its front rested in the sand, and the hinged arm of the backhoe was tucked in behind the cab.

Jay squinted into the snowing darkness. "Hey Bill, I got a legal question."

"Yeah."

"How easy is it to undo a real estate deal?"

"If both parties agree, and the deed hasn't been recorded, easy."

"If the guys from Voodoo saw a dead guy on their property tomorrow morning, could they undo the deal?"

I thought for a moment. "Yes. They could say a crime may have been committed, that they bought under false pretenses. They could tie it up with a court order. They could try to stop payment, freeze accounts. They could do stuff."

"I wouldn't get my building."

"No," I said.

He studied the bulldozer. "I think we can pull it up."

"You're crazy," said Poppy.

Jay shook his head. "We got to get him out of there."

"How?"

"Drive that thing up. Slope's not too bad. It's made it up grades sharper than that."

"Oh, you pecker!" spat Poppy. "You'll kill us."

"You're moving a dead body?" I asked. "You can't do that."

"And if the slope's okay," insisted Poppy, "why didn't he drive it up himself?"

"I don't know, because he had a heart attack, maybe."

"You don't know that," said Poppy.

Jay ignored him. "You still have that big cable in the barn?"

"Yeah, but so goddamn what?"

I listened to their conversation with mounting fear.

"I saw the forty-five hundred is loaded."

"Won't work," Poppy announced.

"Yes it will, if I can get the Cat started."

"You'll kill somebody. Not me, but somebody. Probably yourself. Cable will snap and whip back and cut off your head."

"Thank you, Poppy, thank you very fucking much."

"Then your girlfriend won't have nobody to suck on her tit."

"You're a gentleman, Poppy. Always have been."

"Guys, you can't do this," I insisted. "Call the police. It's their business."

Poppy pointed at me menacingly. "Why did you bring him, anyway?"

"You got somebody else for me at three in the morning?"

Poppy shook his head, no fight left. "I been waiting, Jay, is all."

"You did a lot already," Jay said in a softer voice. "Now we've got just one more thing to do. Go get the cable."

Poppy grunted, climbed in his battered truck, and drove off.

Jay headed down the slope, and despite my misgivings, I followed him, slipping my way down the crusty sand. The bulldozer looked like a yellow toy tossed carelessly within a giant sandbox, but up close it was enormous and in notably poor repair. Its yellow body paint was pocked with rust, its hydraulic lines wrapped with duct tape. The driver, Herschel, was a heavyset black man in a plaid work shirt who sat in the seat fallen backward, feet spread wide, chin up and eyes upon the heavens. He might have been fifty, he might have been seventy. The storm had iced his head and body. He was quite dead.

Jay scrambled alongside the bulldozer. "Oh, Herschel," he moaned. "What're you doing out here?" He climbed up the side of the machine and knelt next to the dead man, his forehead touching the man's hand. "You told me you were done last week! Why did you come out here?" He slumped against the giant treads of the dozer, head down. "Oh, Herschel, oh, man…"

I was intruding, so I retreated into the darkness, wondering what Herschel had meant to Jay. The two figures were a study in contrasts- white and black, young and old, alive and dead- but Jay's ease next to the dead man suggested an intimate history. Finally he stood and climbed into the cab. He wiped one of the gauges, examined it, then turned the key in the ignition. Nothing happened. He gave the frozen body a firm push but it didn't move. The dead man's gloveless hand was draped on the shifter knob, not clutching it but making incidental contact.

He pushed and pulled but the hand was stuck fast. "Frozen."

"Don't tear the skin," I called.

"Yes, fuck it, I know!" roared Jay into the snow, his long coat whipping behind him. "Bill, come up here!"

"What?"

"Get up here, I need you."

"For what?"

"Come on!"

I climbed awkwardly to the cab, feeling bad about everything.

"Christ, Jay, I'm supposed to be in bed. Not standing here!"

The dead man's face gazed upward into the storm. Snow had crusted over the surface of his eyes. He wore a digital watch, the tiny red seconds-light blinking as if its owner would consult it at any moment. I noticed he was not wearing socks and that his shoes were low carpet-paddlers, not work boots high over the ankle.

"Just put your hands on his, try to start warming it."

"You crazy?"

"Yeah, I am."

"I'm not holding hands with a dead man."

"I can't move this thing otherwise."

"Why not just call the police?"

"I can't, counselor," he said in a low, determined voice. "I just can't do that."

It occurred to me that I could hike up the sandy cliff, get in Jay's truck, check to see if he left the keys in it, take out the box of cash and put it on the ground, then drive away. Back to Manhattan, drop the vehicle in a lot, walk straight to my apartment. Up the stairs, key in the door, jump in bed, good night moon, and dream about Salma Hayek. I could do that. I could do that now.

But I didn't. Instead I placed my two warm hands around the large cold one, which was frozen solid. I counted to thirty, then clapped my hands together for warmth and tried again. After several tries, my hands were numb and Herschel's hand was unchanged. Holding hands with a dead man was not why I went to Yale Law School, not why I worked seventy-hour weeks for ten years in my twenties and thirties, not why I said yes to Allison. It was crazy. But despite myself, my mind was working on the problem, figuring it. "Poppy has coffee," I remembered. "In his truck."

"Right!" Jay shouted.

A moment later he had scrambled up and down the slope and was pouring coffee from Poppy's large Thermos onto Herschel's hand. Steam lifted through the glare of the flashlight. "This is going to work," he said, shaking the gearshift violently. He poured more coffee out. "It's- there."

Jay moved the shifter to the side and now the hand stuck straight into space. "Let's see if we can get this started."

There wasn't much room between Herschel's frozen gut and the steering wheel. Jay wriggled into a crouched, half-standing position, his rear against the dead man's groin. "Herschel, man, I'm sorry about this," he muttered. " 'Course if you weren't so fat…" He turned the key. Nothing happened. He tried again. I heard a faint clicking.

Jay climbed down from the cab and lifted the toolbox lid incorporated into the bulldozer's bottom step. "Probably left the lights on. Battery's almost drained." He pulled out what looked like a can of spray paint, leaned up onto the engine hood, and sprayed into the chimney-shaped metallic funnel protruding from it. "Ether," he said. "Right on the starter. Get a hell of a spark."

Jay tossed the can back into the toolbox, then fished inside and pulled out another, smaller can, and staggered through the soft sand around the front of the bulldozer, keeping his hand on the toothed top edge of the huge bucket. Despite his youth and clear physical vitality, he seemed to be laboring. He unscrewed the fuel cap that protruded through the steps on the other side of the cab and upended the can against it, banging it. Then he fingered out a glob of something that looked like blue butter and wiped it into the fuel pipe.

"What's that?" I called.

"Gel." He wiped more of it into the pipe. "Warms diesel fuel."

He threw the can away into the gloom and climbed atop the cab. The controls for the backhoe and the hydraulic pads sat at the rear, downhill side of the cab, and the controls for the bucket and for the bulldozer itself on the uphill side.

"Get me a stick," Jay hollered. "With a Y on the end."

My feet were cold and I had sand in my shoes but I looked around and saw a dead tree a few yards off. I broke off a three-foot branch and lurched back to Jay. He took the stick from me. "Usually you can swing around in the seat here."

This time he sat down on Herschel's lap. Instinctively I looked at the man's face to see what it felt like to have Jay sitting on him. But his stony mask didn't change, of course. Jay turned the key. The engine clicked, turned over, and caught. The bulldozer vibrated loudly. I felt a sort of worried joy. Sand started trickling from behind the dozer. Jay twisted backward and pushed at the hand controls with the stick. One of the huge hydraulic pads descended slowly, settling into the sand. Jay switched off the engine.

We climbed up the slope. Poppy had returned with the cable and was sitting in the large truck. A work glove was taped to its steering wheel like a disembodied hand, and I assumed that Poppy slipped his ruined fingers into it for a better grip. He hopped down to the ground and he and Jay pinned both ends of the thick cable to a tow ring on the rear of the truck. They dragged the loop end of the cable down to the bulldozer, where Jay attached it to a ring in the top of the bucket. I could follow his movements by the swinging arc of his flashlight. Meanwhile Poppy dragged a thick log out of the bramble and set this parallel to the cliff edge and draped the cable over it, so that the cable would ride smoothly across the log and not cut into the sand. They knew what they were doing, and moved with very little communication. When they were done the doubled cable from bulldozer to truck lay lightly on the log.

"Guys, this is fucking crazy," I called. "You're about to break the law, okay? Jay, you should just leave it there, let the police deal with it. Look, I'm a lawyer, take my advice!"

"This is how I want to do it," Jay said. "Poppy, you start the truck. Keep the emergency brake on. I'll start the Cat. When I hit the horn, I'm ready. Then I'll shift forward easy and you do too. Keep it in low. I'll be going very slowly, if I go at all. I don't want to snap the cable- I'll fall backward. But don't let the cable get slack, either. Tight. Bill, I want you standing right here with the flashlight. Poppy won't be able to see anything and neither will I, but I can see you and so can Poppy in the rearview mirror."

"This is crazy. I don't-"

"Bill, I'm doing this whether you help or not."

"I'm not helping- I'm not."

"Then stand back, okay?" He stuck out his hand. "Thanks for everything earlier tonight. If something happens to me, it was nice to know you."

"What?"

"Hey, if the dozer falls backwards, I'm fish bait, man. Hundred and fifty feet, rolling over and over, then right down into the ocean. It's high tide down there. Like I said, fish bait."

And with that he scrambled down the sea cliff in his good shoes. "Hey!" called Poppy after him. "Don't run around so much."

But before I could ask why, Poppy retreated to the truck. I was miserable but shined the light up to the cab as instructed. Poppy gave a slow wave. From my position on the edge of the sea cliff, I could see both men. I signaled to Jay. He'd climbed atop Herschel and started the bulldozer again. He lifted the stabilizing pad and then the big front bucket so it wouldn't catch on the upward slope. A short blast on the horn followed. I signaled Poppy, and the truck lurched forward two feet. The cable snapped tight. The dozer didn't move. Then the treads shuddered and rotated a foot, sand crumbling behind the dozer. I signaled Poppy to pull ahead hard. Jay was shifting the gears with one hand, steering with the other. The dozer began to climb, one foot, then two, the snow shaking off it, the treads biting the frozen dune grass. Diesel smoke filled my nose. I could hear the truck engine grinding. The cable was tight. Now the truck was throwing back ice and mud, tires spinning. But Jay moved upward anyway. The cable slackened. Then the truck kicked forward four or five feet, delivering a jolt to the bulldozer. Both machines moved in sync then, and the dozer reached the top edge of the sea cliff, dragging a couple of small branches with it, and instead of breaking up and over the crest, the dozer crushed the crest beneath it, nearly throwing Jay forward, spinning a thirty-foot rooster tail of dirt and sand and snow backward until the thing was safely ten feet from the edge. I swung the light back and forth, and the truck stopped.

Poppy jumped down and came running back. "It worked!"

"Damn right!" said Jay, sitting atop the dead man. He let the dozer idle and climbed down.

Poppy stood before the corpse, getting his first good look. The stiff hand extending into nothingness seemed to fascinate him most. "Getting too old for this shit," he muttered. Then his natural poison flowed through him again. "I don't want to fucking drive into New York City every time there's a problem, you know?"

"There aren't going to be any more problems," Jay said. "We got rid of the only problem tonight." He reached into his pocket, pulled out a wad of bills, peeled off five fifties. "Here, Poppy, for your time and everything."

Poppy held the money. It was more than he expected. He pointed at the truck. "I think the drive train just got fucked, though."

"Will the truck move?"

"First gear, ten, fifteen miles an hour maybe."

"Take it back to the barn."

"I will. What you going to do with him?" He jerked his thumb at the corpse.

"I want you to move the Cat over to the blue barn."

"Onto the old property, you mean."

"That's what I mean, Poppy, yes. And park it."

Across a property line. Why, I wondered. "Hey, wait-"

Poppy understood the plan. "Like he was just kind of parking the dozer near the barn when- right?"

Jay breathed heavily. "Sure. Make sure the shifter is back under his hand, too, make sure it's perfect. Let a little snow accumulate on the dozer tracks. Maybe go up and down the road in the car a few times. Say you just got home."

"I was out, I was doing something."

"Then call nine-one-one and say you found him."

"Okay."

"I'm not part of this," I told them. "You're way out of bounds here. Way out. Jay, either drive me back to the city now or take me to a train station. Get me out of here."

But he was still instructing Poppy. "You're going to have to take the fence down and put it back up."

"I know."

"We got that straight?"

"I mean, Herschel died already," said Poppy, running through the logic again.

"That's what I'm saying. You just found him out there on the Cat, and you called nine-one-one."

"That's true. He looks the same, nobody moved him."

"I'm not part of this."

"Nobody is asking you to be." Jay turned to Poppy again. "Once you go through the fence, take the dozer down straight to the east road- you have to watch out for the drainage gully on that piece where we used to put in cabbages, and then cut over on that dirt road until you pick up the main driveway to the blue barn. Keep it on the main driveway, because we'll get a lot of drifting. Snow'll pretty much cover the tracks in half an-"

"Also anybody coming in and out of there, ambulance, whatever, is going to go right over anything that's left. Tracks'll be covered up that way, too."

"Yes," Jay said quietly.

Poppy rubbed his hands against each other vigorously.

"Guys," I began. "You're-"

"Hey!" Jay interrupted me. "He was already dead, okay? Herschel had a terrible heart. I asked him if he was up to it. He was supposed to be done with his grading a week ago! When it was still warm! I told him I'd do it myself."

I stood there then, snow in my face, feet cold, dumbfounded by the arc of the evening.

"It's just bad luck," Jay explained. "Okay? He was supposed to do a little grading to get the property ready. Smooth out the old ditches, as a courtesy." He stared at me, mouth open and eyes unblinking, and I wondered if there was violence in the man. "He called me and said he was done, but I guess he wasn't, I guess he lied to me."

"So, Poppy, why did you find him?" I asked. "Were you going for a stroll?"

"I saw the dozer. Wondered what was going on."

"Hey, it doesn't change anything for Herschel," Jay said. "Also, you've got people walking the beach in the morning. Get a couple of kids climbing on that thing, who knows what happens? Poppy is calling the police. I can't lose the deal, man. I mean what fucking difference does it make whether Herschel died over here or over there?"

I could have said that clearly it made a large difference to Jay himself, since he'd driven out of the city in the middle of the night and a snowstorm to move the body, but I saw nothing to be gained by the comment. I wanted out of there, plain and simple.

"Look," said Poppy. He pointed toward the main road. Car lights were coming our way.

"Take the truck," Jay ordered Poppy. "I changed my mind. Go without your lights to the barn. I'll take the Cat myself."

They hurried to their respective vehicles. Poppy unhooked the cable from the back of the big potato truck, leapt into the cab where the door used to be, and rumbled slowly down the road. Jay, meanwhile, unhooked the cable from the dozer, pulled it hand over hand into the bucket, climbed up, again sitting atop the frozen belly of Herschel, and, wind whipping his hair and coat, turned the dozer parallel to the shoreline, keeping the lights off, and rumbled into the dark, the dozer pitching sideways across the uneven ground.

Which left me there with Jay's truck. The lights continued toward me. Across the field lay only darkness, both vehicles having already disappeared. I hurried over the snow, knowing the truck would be spotted. Twenty yards away I hopped over the edge of the sea cliff and lay down, pressing my chest against the snowy sand, the wind raw against my legs.

The car approached, slowed. A police cruiser, its flasher bar off. It turned in a slow circle, lights catching Jay's truck, then stopped. If they found a cardboard box with two hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars in it, then things would get interesting. A handheld flashlight beam shot directly at the driver's window, illuminating the falling snow, moved to the passenger side, found nothing, rubbed over the ground, rested on the license plate. I expected a figure to emerge and inspect the vehicle, but instead the police car crunched forward in its turn, wheels biting the road again, and disappeared the way it had come, red lights getting smaller.

I stood up anxiously, wanting to escape. Where were Poppy and Jay? Maybe the police car had encountered them along the road. I considered stumbling my way down the sea cliff then walking along the shore. But it was bitter cold, the wind from the sound whipping upward behind me. Jay's truck would be warmer, and maybe he'd left the keys in it. I ran over the frozen ground to the driver's door and threw myself inside. Drag your ass out of here, Billy-boy. The keys weren't in the ignition. I checked under the seat. Nothing. In the glove compartment I found an owner's manual, another heavily scuffed baseball, an insurance document (which showed that Jay's coverage had lapsed), an empty ammunition box, and, strangely, a schedule of winter sporting events at one of Manhattan's private schools, with every Thursday night girls' basketball game circled. Random, useless things. I put them all back and huddled miserably in my seat.

Then a figure emerged out of the darkness. Jay in his long coat. I opened the driver's door.

"You see the car?" he asked.

"Yeah, Jay, it was the police."

He sat down in the driver's seat, his face pinched by the cold.

"Why would the police roll up, Jay?"

Instead of answering he closed his eyes and seemed to be pulling deep breaths into himself. "Okay… just a second here."

"You all right?"

He nodded and pulled the keys from his pocket.

"Should I drive?"

"I'll be fine."

"You need more of those pills?" I suggested.

"Let me just-" He got out of the truck, opened the rear door, then lay down.

"Jay?"

"I'm fine," he said. "I got this under control… Do me a favor and don't tell Allison."

I reached back and grabbed the keys from him. "I'm taking us out of here."

I guided the truck back the way we'd come, away from the water. The snow had already started to obscure the police car's tracks, and was piling in drifts on the westerly side of the road in fragile crests and valleys. As we passed the large barns, I noticed something I'd missed before, a modest farmhouse set back from the road, a snowy mirage almost, windows unlit, front porch drifted with snow. Someone had lived there once.

At the gate to the main road, the police car was waiting for us, parked craftily so that any escape attempt would land the truck in the drainage ditch. I pulled to a stop and cut the engine, keeping the lights on.

Colin Harrison

The Havana Room

"What's happening?" asked Jay.

"Cops."

He groaned and fell back into the seat.

The policemen opened their doors and walked toward the car, hands on guns, flashlights held up like spears.

"Who's that?" demanded one.

I lowered the window. "Hi guys," I said, worrying about the box of cash behind my seat.

"You taking a little drive?" One of the cops shined the light into the backseat. "Who you got there?"

"This is my friend," I said.

"This ain't lovers' lane, buddy," the cop said. "This is private property."

"It's not like that."

He smiled with a happy sadism. "What's it like, then? I always wanted to know."

"Hey, hey, is that Dougie?" Jay called from the darkness of the rear seat.

"Who you got in there?"

"Dougie," bellowed Jay, "you married that girl yet?"

"Who's that? Jay? Jay Rainey?"

Jay sat up and opened his door, and practically fell into the snow. "Who do you think?"

The cop shook his head, laughing. "Jay, we thought you was the big-city boy now." He shook hands with Jay, then motioned at me. "Who's this?"

"This?" Jay answered sloppily. "This is my lawyer, boys."

"Lawyer?"

"Up town, man. The best money can buy."

The cop shoved his light at my face, making me blink. "You been drinking, too?"

I shook my head. Snow was blowing into the truck.

"You don't mind if I check you?"

"Nope."

He came over, gave me a perfunctory sniff. "You were drinking but it was hours ago, and you had dinner and somebody was smoking cigars or something."

"That's right," I said. "Pretty good."

The other cop laughed. "He can fucking smell pussy in a swimming pool."

"I gotta get back in the car," Jay announced.

Dougie helped him and closed the door. Then he held out his hand. "You got some ID?"

I showed him my license.

"You got something that tells me who you are, I mean?"

I fumbled with my wallet. "This is my old business card."

The cop pinched it from my fingers. "Hey, I even heard of this law firm. You don't work there no more?"

"Uh, no."

"Disbarred?"

"What?"

"Only joking."

"I wasn't disbarred."

"Just want to make sure that you're giving Jay here proper representation, Mr. William Wyeth." He nodded at his partner. "Okay, since the car is not stolen, and since you are not drinking and since the owner of the property is with you, although apparently rather incapacitated, then I don't think we have a problem." He slipped my card into his pocket, however. "We saw lights from the main road, thought people was messing around." He looked at me. "What you guys doing out here this late, anyway?"

"He was showing me the land," I said. "He had kind of a big night and wanted me to see it."

"I heard Jay was selling it." He bent and addressed the backseat of the truck. "Jay, you come back here before the city eats you up, hear?"

No answer came. "Get the local boy home safe, okay?" he said softly to me. "Jay and I go way back. Played some ball together before-" He stopped.

"Before-?" I prompted.

But he'd turned away. "Just take care of him, okay?"

"You got it," I said, eager to get going.

The cop car backed over the snow, then pulled away in front of us. I let the truck roll forward. "Jay?"

He didn't say anything.

"Jay," I announced anyway, "you need another lawyer." I waited for an answer. I remembered to hang the chain back up behind us and close the lock. I turned the truck onto the main road and watched for on-coming traffic. Ninety minutes back to the city. "I mean, this is not what I do, not what I used to do, not what I want to be doing." I looked over to see his response.

He had none. He was gone, curled asleep against the seat likewell, like a boy.

It was late now, past 4 a.m. The evening seemed impossible, scenes in a strange, cold dream. From the moment I'd stepped into the Havana Room five hours earlier, nothing had made sense. I drove west, toward the lights of Manhattan, running the heater and wishing the cop hadn't kept my business card. He hadn't needed it, right? I glanced back over the seat. Jay was completely gone, his breath entering and leaving his nostrils noisily, coughing thickly now and then. From time to time he muttered in his sleep. I didn't like what had happened, I didn't like my complicity. Certainly Jay had enjoyed the right to move the bulldozer up over the sea cliff because it constituted a danger to anyone below. That much was justifiable. The rights of the living trump the rights of the dead. And my own assistance in this discrete action seemed more or less defensible. But moving the body farther from its absolute point of true death was loaded with problems. Of course, Herschel, being deceased, never knew that his body was being transported over the frozen farmland a few hundred yards away. But his very unknowingness constituted part of my objection. Surely the dead have the right to be properly discovered by the living- that is, to be preserved in the circumstances of death so that their families may reckon with death, may complete the narrative, compose an ending. The principle of the undisturbed body derives from the basic needs of society and tribe. Moreover, I'd not told the policemen what we'd done. I'd lied to his face, despite the fact that policemen are often quite interested in lies, especially as they pertain to bodies moved in the night.

All this gave me a bad feeling that I was falling, again, falling even further from my old life, further from Timothy. And I missed him so, missed the soft flop of his head against my chest when he was a baby in my arms, lips pooching and puckering in his sleep, missed the errant burps and innocent fartings, the blond duckling softness of his hair after his bath, drowsing, the soft breathing weight of him on my chest. Years removed, as I drove through the night, this memory pierced me again and again. Where was he? In misery I almost said it aloud. Where was my son? The boy who sat on my shoulders and steered me by pulling on one ear or the other, the boy who was reading the sports page when he was five years old, the boy who left streaks of toothpaste all over the bathroom, the towels thrown across the floor, wet footprints stamping down the hall? The boy I kissed good night each evening at nine sharp. My boy, where are you? In another land, in the arms of another man, in a place far away and waiting for your father to come and get you.

I pressed forward through the snow. Given the hour, we moved quickly. Arriving from the east, New York City is a sequence of subtraction and addition. First comes dark, pine-barren nothingness that gives way to exurb tract housing and new office buildings, and they in turn fill into traditional suburban sprawl. Soon the yards shrink as the borough of Queens approaches and the buildings become squat and dense, crowding each other, semidetached houses changing to row homes. Meanwhile the road surface becomes worse, the exits more frequent, the drivers more insane, and then you are in Queens proper, facing the sheer wall of Manhattan, a thousand-foot stone tapestry hung from the sky, and then you're whizzing downward under the East River into the halogen-mad tunnel, daring and dared by the other vehicles to pass at eighty miles an hour, then up onto the island proper, the city that night a muffled village of snow. Behind me Jay slept. At the first stoplight I glanced back at him; his face was slack, almost as if he were the second dead man of the evening, but then he gave a grunty cough and lifted his head.

"You konked out," I said.

"Yeah."

"I'm driving to my place and then you can go on."

"Sure. That's great."

"I'll check on your deed tomorrow, like I promised." I let a snowplow rumble past me. "But then I'm out, Jay. Don't consider me your lawyer."

I turned on Thirty-sixth Street. The sky was starting to lighten, and in an hour the sun would start to drop along the eastern face of the buildings. "We're here."

Jay didn't seem to notice my miserable neighborhood.

"I've got to go upstairs and sleep," I told Jay. "Can you drive? I can call Allison."

"No, no," he said, pulling himself up. "I can drive." He opened his door. "Cold out there."

I didn't like the way he looked, but I got out anyway, leaving the driver's door open for him. "You all right? Remember you got a box of cash with you."

"Sure, sure."

I waited for some kind of thanks, or recognition of the extremity of the evening. But none came. I hopped up the steps into my building and let the door swing shut. Then, perhaps out of worry, I lingered behind the glass and watched him.

For a moment nothing happened, and I considered going back outside to insist that I drive him home. He looked barely able to stand. But then he pulled himself out of the truck and made his way unsteadily to the rear hatch. He popped it open, looked up and down the street, then bent over into the rear. I couldn't see what he was doing but he was busy with his hands. I glanced at what looked like a thick plastic tube, but it disappeared. He stood bent over for a minute or so, a vulnerable position given the hour and the location, and I remembered the Puerto Rican guy who prowled the neighborhood looking for a fight. But Jay stood up and shut the back of the truck. It took him two tries. How could such a big guy be so weak? He shuffled toward the driver's side, almost slipping once, and reached the door. Then he stood with his arms on the roof, like a winded runner.

I was just about to go outside when he slid in his seat. The driver's door closed, the truck rolled forward. I stepped out to see if he made the left-hand turn onto Eighth Avenue, which would be the logical action if he was headed to Allison's. He didn't turn, and instead continued east on Thirty-sixth Street. Maybe he was going crosstown and then up to her neighborhood. I stepped out into the street and watched Jay's taillights two blocks away. At Seventh Avenue, he turned south. He definitely wasn't headed to Allison's apartment. No, Jay Rainey, whoever he was and whatever his condition, was on his way somewhere else.