His face shining with drink, his ragged arms flailing at the air, the young man howled with manic glee, kicked at the newspapers heaped up round him and finally had to clutch his ribs tight to stop the laughter. He laughed till he began to cough, and he coughed till he brought something up and spat it on the floor. “You are out there, Bird,” he said, straining at each word, and the laughter seized him again. “You are really out there.”
So: he was lost. It had happened to him before, two or three times at least. A trick of the mind, that was all, one little mistake — getting off at the wrong stop, turning right instead of left — and the world became a strange and unfathomable place, terrain to explore all over again. He didn’t mind. They’d come for him, Leverett and his wife, sweet girl, really, and the grandchildren, they’d find him. But then a little wedge of concern inserted itself along the fracture lines of his psyche, and it became a worry. Who was this man if he wasn’t from the Geographic Society, and what did he want? And what was this place? Newspapers. Drifts of them, mountains, a whole continent, and all it was was newsprint.
He took the bottle when it came to him and he took a drink and passed it back, and there was a third member of their party now, another hand interposed between him and the young man who wasn’t from the Geographic Society. Matted beard, nose like a bird of prey, eyes frozen into his head, and he didn’t know him, not at all, but why did he look so familiar? He felt himself drifting. It was cold, damnably cold, for what — October, wasn’t it? “Early winter this year,” he murmured, but no one uttered a word in response.
The next time he noticed anything, it was the candle. He must have dozed. But there it was, the candle. A light in the wilderness. The bottle came back to him and the feeble light leapt out suddenly to illuminate the new man’s face, and he knew him, knew him as well as he knew his own son and his own father. “You,” he said out of the void, “I know you.”
There was a low cackle, a dribble of hard-edged laughter from two ravaged throats. “Yeah, we know you too, Bird the Third,” the young man said, and his voice had changed, the tone of it, till everything he said sounded like a school-yard taunt.
“No,” the old man insisted, “not you…I mean”—and he looked the newcomer full in the face—“I mean you.” The inspiration had flared in his brain, and he knew the man even after all these years, a great man, his father’s equal almost, the only other man in the world who’d been to both poles and back again. “You’re Roald Amundsen.”
The laugh was ugly, almost a bark. The man showed the stubs of his teeth. He took his time, drinking, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “Shit, man, sure I am,” he said, and the other one was laughing again, “and this here, your friend with the bottle, this guy’s Santy Claus.”
· · ·
Roger was on a tear. For a full week, seven whole days and maybe more, he didn’t know where he was. He hadn’t had this much money, all at once, since he’d left New Jersey, when he was a kid living in that lopsided trailer with his mother and stocking the shelves at Waldbaum’s. The whole thing with the old man had been unreal, the sort of score everybody dreams about but never makes, never. Oh, sure, zombies like Rohlich would tell you they were hitchhiking once and Madonna gave them a lift or some high roller in Atlantic City handed them a C-note when all they asked for was a quarter, but this was unreal, this happened. Those five twenties alone could have kept him flying for a month or more, but of course they’d disappeared, dropped down the hole where all of it went sooner or later — usually sooner. He didn’t know where he’d been or what he’d done, but he ached all over, so it must have been good, and he needed a drink so bad he could taste it. Or couldn’t taste it. Or whatever.
And shit, it was cold. Too cold for this time of year. Cold and drizzling. When he woke up an hour or so ago he’d found himself on a wet slab of cardboard out back of the fish restaurant the yuppies flocked to — Cicero’s — and he didn’t know how he’d got there or what he’d done the night before, and his pockets were empty. No loose change. No nothing. He’d wandered over to the mission and passed a short dog around with the black guy they called Hoops, and now he was wet through to the skin and shivering and looking for a benefactor so he could invest in the Gallo Company and warm up where it counted most. He remembered the old guy’s watch then, the black Movado, and felt around in his pockets for it. It was gone. He had a further — and dimmer — recollection of pawning it and getting ten bucks for the thing and being all pissed off about it, but then he wasn’t so sure — it might have been another watch and another time.
He stayed on the street for a couple hours, it got a whole lot colder, and all he came up with was ninety-two cents. By then, his thirst was driving him crazy, so he bought a can of beer and went over to the warehouse to see who was around and maybe trade up for a hit or two of wine. He saw that somebody had tried to hammer the crease out of the door and that they’d moved a whole shitload of papers out and a whole new shitload in, but other than that nothing had changed. There was nobody around, so he made himself a little igloo out of bundled newspaper, drank his beer in two swallows and tried to stop shivering for a minute at a time.
At first he didn’t hear it — or it didn’t register. The place was cavernous, with a ceiling you could fly planes under and walls that went on for a block, and it was noisy, middle of the day, trucks rumbling in and out of the South Street entrance with cans and bottles, and Mr. and Mrs. Nice driving up with Sis and Bud to deliver their neat foursquare string-tied bundles of newspaper. It was noisy and he didn’t hear a thing but the muted rumble of all that activity, and he wished five o’clock would come and they’d shut the place down and go home and leave him in peace, but after a while he became aware that somebody was there with him, just up the next aisle, muttering to himself in the low sweet singsong tones of the crackbrained and hopeless. Another bum. Somebody he knew maybe. A man with a short dog and maybe a bite of something scavenged from the top of the bin out back of the supermarket. He felt his spirits lift.
He pushed himself up, keeping an eye out for the watchman, and slipped up the next aisle. The papers had fallen in drifts here, sloppily stacked, and he fought his way through them in the direction of the voice, his harsh ragged breath crystallizing before him. There was a nook carved out of the wall, and he saw the back of a white head, the old withered stalk of a neck, and there he was: Bird the Third.
He was amazed. He would have thought the guy would be long gone, would have found his people, his keeper, whatever. But still, there he was, and for a moment Roger felt a surge of hope. Maybe he had something on him still, something he’d overlooked, some piece of jewelry, a pair of glasses — hell, his clothes even. But then he saw that they’d already got to him. The old retard’s suit was gone, and his socks and shoes too. Somebody’d switched on him, and he was dressed in a puke-green janitor’s jumpsuit and was missing a shoe — or he’d found a shoe somewhere, a torn greasy old Nike sneaker with the toes ripped out. He was pathetic. A mess. And he wasn’t worth anything to anybody.
For a long while, Roger just stood there watching him. The old man was shivering, his arms wrapped around himself like coils, the bare foot discolored and bad-looking. He had that thousand-mile stare on his face, the same one you saw on some of the older guys, the Vietnam vets and whatnot. Roger’s brain was working hard, and for a moment he saw himself taking the guy along to the police station and turning him in like a hero and maybe getting a reward from the guy’s family or whoever. They had to be looking for him. You don’t come from that world, with your haircut and your suitcase and your Movado watch, without somebody looking for you, especially if you’re a little soft in the head to begin with.