So he waits. And waits. Surely, she’ll come back. But then he notices the tightness has moved down his shoulder to his arm now. Where’d she go?
“Hello?” He presses the talk button, knowing she couldn’t have forgotten about him. “Are you still there?”
He can almost feel a waft of cool air issuing through the speaker holes.
“For God’s sakes, at least make the call for me,” he pleads, trying to get her back. “Tell them there’s a little boy lost on the Coney Island F train…”
He’s wasting his time, he realizes. The deal is off. She doesn’t believe him either. No one could be that irresponsible, that criminally negligent, to just leave a child on a train, could they?
He runs for the corner, remembering a bodega there, one of those cramped little twenty-four-hour groceries, where cats chase mice around the produce and disenfranchised men hang around the pay phone outside. The dull pain in his shoulder has become a kind of tourniquet-like tightness. The only thing that matters. I have lost the only thing that matters. All the world could die now and he wouldn’t care.
He arrives, gasping for breath, his thighs in flames from rubbing together. But somebody is already at the phone. A trim young man upholstered with muscles, wearing a white silky do-rag and a gold capped tooth that makes him look a little like a pirate. And with him, a girl. But not just any girl. A little sex grenade in a skimpy top and jeans low enough to reveal the jut of her hipbones. The very girl. Sussman realizes, with a sickening clench, he was ogling when Ben got on the train without him.
“Yeah, yeah, but what happened to my tape, son?” The pirate is ranting. “That was my tape, yo… Don’t be playing me cheap…”
It’s a performance — Sussman sees that right away. The boy is displaying his plumage, showing the girl that he is tough, a defender of his own rights, a man not to be trifled with.
“I’m a kick his ass, he tries to bite me. I’m serious, dawg…”
“Excuse me.” Sussman stands before him, gulping, still trying to catch his breath. “I need to use that phone.”
“What do you mean, you’ll get back to me?” The pirate ignores him. “When does my copyright run out?”
How can anyone be so blindly selfish, Sussman asks himself, so wrapped up in themselves? How can anybody be so unaware there are other people in the world, going through their own private dramas? How can he just automatically assume that his needs are paramount and more urgent than anyone else’s?
“I need that phone. My son is missing.”
“Say it again, man.” The boy turns his back. “Some asshole was trying to talk to me.”
Sussman stares at a spot between his shoulder blades, not quite believing what he’s just heard.
Force of will, he tells himself. Nothing gets accomplished in this world, without force of will. He sees that every day in sales. Some people just won’t move or react until you start to push.
Before he knows what he’s doing, Sussman finds himself reaching over the boy’s shoulder and pushing down on the pay phone’s hook.
“What the fuck?” The boy spins around.
Sussman sees the girl flinch as the boy’s gold tooth catches a glint of sun and he knows he’s gone too far.
The gray receiver slams into the side of his head. His brain rings as he staggers sideways from the blow. But within the pain, there’s something small, hard, and rightful. He knows this is what he deserves.
He clutches at the boy’s forearm, to try to keep from falling, but it’s too late. His muscles have lost their organizing principle. The back of his head hits the sidewalk. A flashbulb explodes inside his skull.
And in the fading light of the dying filament, he sees Ben alone on the train, drawing that picture of that stick-figure man chasing the wheel, as the Wonder Wheel looms into view against the gray ocean backdrop. It’s over now. He’s tried, given it everything he had, but he never got ahead of that wheel. It just kept spinning faster and faster, so that he could never catch up with it. And if the boy somehow survives this, his father wonders if he’ll just end up chasing the same thing.
“Hi, Mrs. Sussman, you don’t know me, but I have your son.”
The woman in dreadlocks and flip-flops is talking on a cell phone while keeping an eye on the two small boys as they steer toward each other with the bumper cars, blatantly ignoring the safety sign on the wall.
“Yes, he’s fine. I just gave him a hot dog and put him on one of the rides. He gave me your number and asked me to call. Apparently, he got separated from your husband on the train.”
She watches the cars crash head-on as the kids jerk back convulsing with laughter.
“Well, I don’t exactly know how it happened, but your boy’s a real trooper,” she says, holding the phone away from her ear a little as the voice on the other end turns sharp. “Some hairy puke started to bother him on the train so he got up and sat next to me because he saw I had a kid. There’s grown men don’t have that much sense.”
The cars skitter and thump across the scuffed floor, barging heedlessly into one another’s paths and slamming their front ends together again with joyful abandon.
“Don’t worry about it, I’ll keep him with me until you get here,” she says. “The only thing is, he doesn’t know what happened to his father. Maybe you ought to send somebody out to look for him.”
Lawrence Block
Keller’s Double Dribble
From Murder at the Foul Line
Keller, his hands in his pockets, watched a dark-skinned black man with his shirt off drive for the basket. His shaved head gleamed, and the muscles of his upper back, the traps and lats, bulged as if steroidally enhanced. Another man, wearing a T-shirt but otherwise of the same shade and physique, leapt to block the shot, and the two bodies met in midair. It was a little like ballet, Keller thought, and a little like combat, and the ball kissed off the backboard and dropped through the hoop.
There was no net, just a bare hoop. The playground was at the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Third Street, in Greenwich Village, and Keller was one of a handful of spectators standing outside the high chain-link fence, watching idly as ten men, half wearing T-shirts, half bare-chested, played a fiercely competitive game of half-court basketball.
If this were a game at the Garden, the last play would have sent someone to the free-throw line. But there was no ref here to call fouls, and order was maintained in a simpler fashion: Anyone who fouled too frequently was thrown out of the game. It was, Keller felt, an interesting libertarian solution, and he thought it might be worth a try outside the basketball court, but had a feeling it would be tough to make it work.
Keller watched a few more plays, feeling his spirits sink as he did, yet finding it oddly difficult to tear himself away. He’d had a tooth drilled and filled a few blocks away, by a dentist who had himself played varsity basketball years ago at the University of Kentucky, and had been walking around waiting for the Novocain to wear off so he could grab some lunch, and the basketball game had caught his eye, and here he was. Watching, and being brought down in the process, because basketball always depressed him.