"Watch it, man-you wanna get yourself killed?" the kid asked.
"Thanks," Keith said, but found himself talking to no one; the kid and his friends were already several yards away, and it was as if he no longer existed. Turning away from them, he bumped into a burly man slinging a barrel of garbage into a truck. As oblivious to him as the kids now were, the garbage man hardly glanced at him, going on with his work as if nothing had happened.
By the middle of the next block, Keith found himself doing his best to ignore the people around him, concentrating instead on the sidewalk directly ahead. Twice he made the mistake of waiting for a light to turn green at an intersection, and was nearly trampled by the crowd that ignored it. By the third block he discovered the trick everyone else already seemed to know-if you don't look at the cabs, they won't hit you. In fact, the cabbies didn't even bother to honk or curse at him, but let him cross with the same impunity they granted the city's natives.
At the corner of Kenmare, he turned right toward Bowery and Delancey-the intersection where the accident had taken place. He wasn't sure what he'd been expecting, but the vague sense of letdown-almost of disappointment-he felt at the corner's normality told him he must have been expecting something.
The bustling Asian community of Elizabeth Street suddenly gave way to restaurant equipment stores, except for one restaurant that seemed to be left over from an era when the neighborhood had been mostly Italian. Window after window displayed commercial mixers and kitchen equipment, bar glasses and furniture, and more kinds of lighting fixtures than Keith had even thought existed. It was almost devoid of people on the sidewalk, and there were no apartments above the businesses.
No windows from which some early rising resident might have seen what had happened yesterday morning.
It was just another impersonal city intersection, the cars heading east into Delancey and toward the Williamsburg Bridge waiting impatiently as the streams of traffic on Bowery flowed north and south.
No sign of the accident at all, except for the boarded-up windows of the restaurant supply house the van had careened into after the car struck it.
No sign that someone had died here only a little more than twenty-four hours ago.
This morning, with the sun shining incongruously on the spot where the black van had burned, it seemed almost impossible that it could have happened, and he stood for a moment on the southeast corner, trying to picture the scene from early yesterday morning. The van would have been coming from the west, heading toward the bridge. The car that hit it must have been going north on Bowery, and very fast-Keith had a pretty good idea how heavy a Ford van was, but could only guess how much force it would take to smash in the door of a reinforced van and knock it all the way across the street and into the building's windows. After it hit the van, the car's momentum would have carried it farther north, though the deflection of the crash should also have sent it skidding eastward.
He crossed the street, and twenty yards to the north found a wall that looked as if a car might have rubbed against it, leaving flecks of paint on the deeply gouged surface. His fingers unconsciously tracing the marks the careening car had left, he looked back toward where the van had burned.
"Man, it was somethin‘," a slurring voice said.
Startled, Keith looked down to see a crumpled figure covered with enough ragged and filthy clothing that he was almost invisible, curled in the doorway of an empty store. He was peering blearily up at Keith through eyes so bloodshot their color was indistinguishable, and under the layer of grime that stained his skin, a vast network of ruined veins and scabrous sores spread over his features.
"Shoulda seen it, man-looked just like the fires of hell."
Keith's pulse quickened and he squatted down. "You were here yesterday morning?" he asked. "When the van burned?"
The man's lips twisted in a lopsided grimace, revealing the stumps of half a dozen broken teeth. "Where else am I gonna be?" His rheumy eyes fixed on Keith. "You got a couple'a bucks? I ain't ate in a while."
On any other day Keith would have walked away from the man, probably not even looked at him if he could have avoided it. In Bridgehampton, the man couldn't have stayed on the streets more than a few minutes before the police force-if you could really call Bill Chapin and his three deputies a force-would have hustled him onto a bus with a one-way ticket back to Manhattan. Certainly, he wouldn't have been allowed to roam the streets long enough for any of the town's wealthier citizens to have their weekend spoiled by stumbling across him.
But this wasn't an ordinary day, and Keith wasn't in the familiar confines of Bridgehampton, and instead of quickly standing up and walking away, he pulled his wallet out of his hip pocket.
It flipped open the same way it always did: to Jeff's graduation photo, taken almost a year ago.
Keith's stomach tightened as he gazed at the photograph. Taking out a five-dollar bill, he turned the wallet toward the man leaning against the building. "Did you see this person?" he asked. "Yesterday morning?"
The drunk peered at the photo. "Nah," he mumbled. "Who's that?"
"My son," Keith said. "He was-" He fell abruptly silent and flipped the wallet closed as the surrealism of the entire scene suddenly closed in on him. How had this happened? How could he explain to this man-this man whose own life had devolved down to sprawling in a doorway at ten o'clock in the morning-what he was doing here? Why would the man even listen, let alone care?
What was he even doing here?
Grasping at straws, just like Mary had said.
The drunk, his eyes glued to the five-dollar bill, said, "Onliest guy I saw was the one from the van."
Keith's pulse quickened. "The driver?"
The man shrugged. "Nah-who cares about him?" He frowned, then reached tentatively toward Keith's wallet. "Lemme see that pitcher again."
Keith reopened the wallet, but kept it just beyond the man's reach. The man leaned forward, squinting, and Keith winced as his breath-a combination of stale wine and tobacco- threatened to overwhelm him.
"I dunno," the man finally said. Keith moved the five dollar bill closer. "Maybe that coulda been him," the drunk went on. "But maybe not." Keith let him have the five. "They was over there-" He gestured vaguely in the direction of the fire hydrant. "-an‘ I was sittin' right here. An‘ I didn't get a real good look before they went down in the subway."
"The subway?" Keith echoed. "Who went into the subway?"
The man sighed as if explaining something to a child who wasn't paying proper attention. "I told you. The guy Scratch took outta the van." Something across the street seemed to catch the drunk's eye, and he struggled to his feet. "Gotta git to gittin‘," he muttered, but Keith grabbed his arm as he started away.
"Scratch? Who's Scratch?"
The man's eyes widened, then darted once more across the street. "I dunno," he mumbled. "I dunno what you're talkin‘ about." Pulling his arm loose from Keith's grip, he started shambling down the street, one hand clutching at the collar of his filthy jacket while the other hand, which held the five-dollar bill, was plunged deep into his pocket. As he shuffled toward the corner, Keith scanned the street to see what had spooked the bum.
All he saw were three homeless people-a woman and two men-moving along the sidewalk, the woman pushing a shopping cart that seemed to be stuffed with nothing more than a bundle of rags. The little group, making their way slowly along the sidewalk with their heads down, looked far more pitiable than frightening. Keith shook his head to rid himself of the pathetic image, and also because of a twinge of guilt that he was going to do nothing to ease their plight.