Love? If he didn’t watch out, her love would suck out his life.
She looked at him with proprietary affection, her hand on his shoulder. “I’m willing to go wherever you want to go,” she said. “If we need money, I can wire my father in Cleveland to send us some. He said whenever I needed anything to wire him. I feel, do you know, that we can make something between us.”
He was like stone. “After dinner we’ll go back.”
She wanted to argue but saw it would make no difference, kissed his eyes, which were open. They closed at her touch. “What are you feeling?” she asked.
He couldn’t answer.
“You’re not as bad as you think,” she said.
They were having dinner at Howard Johnson’s — fried clams. Christopher watching her eat, not hungry himself. Watching himself in her eyes. He had gotten larger, was no longer quite so deformed. Rosemary, smiling to herself, humming as she ate. Her pleasure unaccountable, infectious, dangerous. He had the idea someone else — someone innocent — was being punished for his crimes. Without a word he got up and walked away. On his way to the men’s room, as if an accident, looking to see if he was being watched, he slipped into the phone booth next door.
He asked the operator to get him the Brooklyn Police Department.
“If you want to find me,” he said, “just trace this call. I’ll be here for twenty minutes more.”
“Why should we want to find you? Hold on.”
He held on, heard voices.
“Hello. Why do we want to find you? Who is this?”
If they didn’t know, he wasn’t going to tell them. He hung the phone up. It wasn’t what he had to do.
SIXTEEN
PRESIDENT VOICES
HOPE AND CAUTION
REPORTS GAIN IN WAR
BUT PREDICTS NO EARLY END
He had to walk six blocks to keep his appointment. The weather threatening. The pain a great distance from where he was.
At the intersection between the second and third block the traffic was backed up, horns barking. A woman was standing, her arms out, in the middle of the street, talking to the cars. A lipstick mouth covering almost half her face. Dancing jerkily in front of a car that was trying to dodge her. “Come on. Come on. Go through me. What’s a matter with you things?” The car, a yellow Citroën, went on the curb to get around her. “Chicken,” she shrieked after it. Turned to block the next one. A red Buick. “Go through me. Come on. Go through me.” The Buick moving toward her. “Come on.” She held out her arms, swung her hips as if they were a weapon. “You’re all mama’s boys.”
“There’s never a policeman around when you absolutely need one,” a fag in a gray silk suit announced to a boy who was walking with him. The Buick bumped the woman to the side, knocking her down. The fag clapping. The boy with him, his white shirt half open, whistling.
The light changing, he had to run across, barely getting out of the way of a car. “I had right a way,” the driver, a middle-aged woman, called to him.
The fourth block. The sun gone. The sky swollen. Rumbling somewhere like bombs falling, or thunder. He told a girl with glasses, pushing a baby carriage, that it would be safer for her inside. Something was going to happen. She thanked him.
Christopher had started to cross between the fifth and sixth block when a faded gray car of indeterminate model, turning illegally, cut him off. He recognized the eyes looking at him, like something trapped, from the other side of the glass.
“Get in,” the driver said (the face with the familiar eyes), holding the door open. He, Parks, was wearing a gray seersucker suit, sucking on his pipe. The suit looked like it had been slept in for a week.
“We’re holding up traffic. Will you get in?”
He got in without saying anything. There was nothing to say.
They turned onto an expressway, the former peace marcher driving as if he expected to be shot at. His head down. He was wearing a gray hat.
“I haven’t seen you in a long time, Christopher,” he said after a while. “What’s new? How have you been?”
He started to tell him about some plan he had for the two of them but saw Parks wasn’t listening.
“On a nice day like today, I thought this would be a good way for us to have a talk.”
“It’s going to rain,” he said. “Look how dark the sky is.”
“We’re going to Coney Island,” Parks said, something else on his mind. “That is, if you have no objections, Christopher.”
He told him he didn’t know if he had objections.
“I’ll take that into consideration.”
The car edging, edgy, going no miles an hour like sixty. The closer they got to Coney Island, the more congested the traffic became, the slower they moved. The streets moving backward.
He noticed, not surprised, that his briefcase was in the back of the car.
Something frightening had happened at Coney Island. What he remembered — red, full of mouths. He said he didn’t want to go to Coney Island. If Parks wanted to talk, there were other places.
“OK,” he said. The car, barely moving, stuttered past another exit. The nose of the car melting in the heat, the streets like tar pools. The smell of carrion fish in the air, the rubbery smell of burning flesh. Parks humming to himself, the traffic barely moving.
“Can you smell it?” he said. “Take a deep breath. I was born a few minutes from the shore in Connecticut; my mother swam in the ocean up to a week before my birth. We moved to Hartford when I was five, but in my blood this is my home.” Gesturing with his head. “This is my turf, my home.” He took his hands from the wheel and extended them over his head like a victorious prizefighter.
“I don’t want to go to Coney Island,” the other said.
The car swerved slightly, veered toward the middle lane — Parks, his foot like a piston, slammed on the brakes. He was thrown forward, his head against the metal of the glove compartment.
He didn’t say anything, rubbing his head. Swollen like a thumb. Parks grinning like the horse in his living room. Glancing at his student when he thought he wasn’t looking.
“I’ve been fairly decent to you, haven’t I? When you needed a place to stay, I put you up, didn’t I?”
“I never said you didn’t.”
“I did more for you than any teacher of mine ever did for me.
He said he would repay him when he got the chance.
He said he had already been repaid.
There had been an accident. Some foreign car had gone into the guard railing, the front flattened in like the cat in a cartoon. A man, blood on the back of his head, slumped over the wheel. A bored-looking cop waved them on.
Christopher handed him his orders, a subway token Scotch-taped to the top.
Parks, reading, smiled like a child. “On my birthday. How do you like that?”
Absently, he put the letter in his shirt pocket. Christopher held out his hand. Parks returned the orders. “What are you going to do about it?”
“What do you want me to do?”
“What are you going to do? Nothing, I suppose. Go in like a sheep and get slaughtered. Or kill others, which wouldn’t bother you much, would it?”
“Would it bother you?”
The traffic had thinned out after the accident.
“Did I ever tell you about the time I went AWOL? It’s something I think would interest you.” He didn’t wait for an answer.
“I couldn’t get a pass,” he said. “The company, for some reason I forget, had been restricted to post for a week. And I wanted to see this girl who was staying at a motel about ten miles from the fort. It was a calculated risk since I was supposed to be on guard duty that night and had gotten someone at a price to stand in for me.”