The skies were clouded over and where the streetlights had burned out it was pitch-dark. In the small brick row houses the older folks were turning in for the evening, their upstairs rooms lamped with bed-table lights or the colder flicker of television, the cast beams striping the tiny front yards and walks as if they were a miniature tabletop landscape, all of them stitched together by the line of mature if stunted trees growing in the median and the parked cars fitting exactly on the block in a serendipitously bespoke measure. It was mostly serene save for the droning air-conditioning units and the hidden cadres of urban locusts, whose competing songs on certain unbearable nights felt more like waves of heat than sound. On the main avenue there was disco music and thumping jungle-like music and the reports of traffic and people calling out of cars toward the grimy storefronts, where neighborhood youth accosted in fair share one another and the indifferent beat cops and the young immigrant couples in love, the bums rooting in the wire trash barrels for the dregs of beers and take-out food, all of them content in the now fast-cooling air. And had they carefully regarded the broad-shouldered man in the white T-shirt and dungarees stepping into the overbright bodega, his scarred, battered hands selecting from the shelves the fruits of this most modest human errand (the kind he’d avoided for decades), they might still have agreed that he was indeed cut from an antiquated cloth, this long-lost bolt of hero blue.
But of course he wasn’t.
After he paid for the jams and some fresh hot fried bread he went to the liquor store across the street and spent what was left, and when he stepped outside again, laden with her morning repast, the briefest light rain drifted down. Then it was gone. The warmed, dampened sidewalks reminded him of certain sweet hours of childhood-well before he was much of a man, well before anyone (the neighborhood girls, the married women, the barmen) had found him out-when the summer torrents would interrupt the furious play of the street and they’d have to wait beneath the sagging porches for its sheets to roll past before they skipped back out, the smell of the damp concrete enveloping them in an odor earthen and stony but still creaturely, alive; he would have the sensation that he was on the broad back of an immense being, as unregistered as any sated flea, and he felt the same way now, virtually bodiless, happily ignored, free to go his unsung way.
ELEVEN
A TAP ON THE CAR WINDOW roused June; it was the drawn, dour face of Clines, come back out from the diner. She found herself braced against the throbs sharply echoing through her. The pills were not working. Or maybe she had spit them up; there was a shiny patch on the vinyl upholstery of the door panel. She felt as if someone were walking through the house of her body with a crate of porcelain vases and systematically entering each room and rearing back and smashing them against the walls. Clines got into the driver’s seat and asked what they should do, and through gritted teeth she answered that they would keep going, taking two more pills in the hope that they would give her some relief.
But before they had any effect Clines informed her that they had turned onto the street where Hector Brennan lived. Twilight had just passed into evening but she could still make out the character of the neighborhood, the rows of squat one-story houses with properties separated by chain-link fencing and narrow driveways. The houses were in generally poor condition and Hector’s apartment complex was even worse, decrepit and badly in need of painting, its front yard peppered with household junk and broken toys. The trees were gnarly and unkempt. A trio of unattended dogs ran about on the sidewalk, garrulously barking at one another. So this was where he lived. She thought of all the elapsed years and the other grubby details that Clines had found out about him and she wondered if this was a life that had befallen him or whether he had sentenced himself to it, as people sometimes do, in punishment right or not.
Clines parked and came around to help her out of the car. She was about to tell him not to bother in case Hector might see her needing assistance (she wanted no pity) but was instantly glad when Clines took hold of her shoulder and arm, as she might not have been able to lift herself from the deep, soft-cushioned seat.
“Which apartment is it?”
“Number sixteen, I think just there on the right. Will you be all right, Mrs. Singer?”
“Yes. I’ll be fine.”
But she didn’t feel fine, for if stable and straight to the outward eye she was as good as gone; Clines somehow saw this and caught her arm when she lost her balance and nearly toppled. Despite an appreciative tingle in her chest she tried to shrug him off. Clines was insistent and walked with her, gripping her tightly enough that she could believe she was tugging him along. Some large tree branches were strewn about the scraggly, patchy lawn and she saw herself as the dead limb of a tree, at once ponderous and fragile, barely appended over the hard, unyielding ground. With the next good gust. Just before they reached the entryway she pushed away from Clines and bent over and gagged, nothing coming out of her except for a curdled slick of bitter, chalky spittle. The pills. It was as though her body were refusing amelioration, steadfastly denying her any comfort in order to make her cease, but rather than give in, June scolded herself and stood up straight, ignoring the shocks firing up and down her spine. She was still a relatively young woman, and if she had to die she was going to die on her feet, in beat of her own march.
Clines grasped her arm and she pulled it away.
“I’m fine.”
“We can’t do this, Mrs. Singer. I thought it when we first met but I’m absolutely sure of it now. There’s no point. This man Brennan isn’t the issue anymore. It’s you. You’re not capable of doing this. How much more obvious does it need to be? If you insist on flying out with me I may have to quit.”
“Then quit,” she said sternly, wiping her mouth. She tried to swallow the awful taste on her tongue. “Give me the files you have, and the plane tickets, and I’ll pay you for what you’ve done so far.”
“You’ll accomplish nothing over there,” he said. “You’ll waste precious time. You won’t be able to find your son quickly enough, if at all.”
“I’ll find him with or without you. I know that. You know how much I’m proposing to pay you, so you should decide right now whether it’s worth your trouble. Or your daughter’s, for that matter. Now, what are you going to do?”
Clines looked down stiffly, his eyes narrowed with a palpable anger. But he spoke to her calmly. “Okay, Mrs. Singer. We’ll follow your wishes. I won’t bring this up again.”
“Good. Thank you.”
“But please know this. While I will do everything that I can to do the job, it will be you who directs me. I will make recommendations, but it’s your responsibility now. You’ll determine our success.”
She nodded. He asked if he should wait in the car and she told him that was fine. But as he turned she felt unsteady again and then completely parched and she asked him if he had any water in the car.
“No, but I can go and get some. There was a gas station on the main road.”
“Okay. Go get it and then come back and then wait for me,” she told him. “I’ll see if he’s here now.”
Even though it was only one step up, she had to pause to catch her breath on the exposed landing for the apartments (they were set off in pairs), the thirty or so yards they had traversed feeling like three hundred. The landing itself was littered with cigarette butts and crushed beer cans and reeked sharply of cat spray. Gnats ticked nervously about the weak entryway bulb. Behind her, out in the street, Clines drove off, and for a second she wondered if he would in fact return. Perhaps he would decide to abandon her here. The metal door of number 16 was scarred and dented and there was nothing at all to indicate that anyone lived on the other side, or ever ventured out. She looked for a buzzer but there was none, nor a push-bell or clapper on the door. She tried to knock, but as with the rest of her joints, her knuckles and fingers felt like spun glass and so she rapped softly with the flat of her hand. There was no answer or any sound from inside and she tapped again.