York businessman had found him, and so quickly. This was the way international business should be done, with a token of respect and graciousness. He would find out who this Martz was and whether the man was worth any of his time. The gift of the bull suggested the answer was yes.
18
Every city has bad places. And this is one of them, Ray thought as he drove right into the Victorious Sewerage yard, the smells of excrement and diesel exhaust coming in his window. He hopped out of his truck and walked up to the construction trailer set in the back. The sign said, BEWARE OF DOG. He pulled open the door. A middle-aged secretary looked up. She had a lot of makeup on, considering where she worked.
'Hey, I'm looking for Richie,' he said.
'Haven't seen him.'
'But he works here.'
'I don't know where he is. Let me call.' She picked up the phone. 'Victor, there's a man out here… looking for Richie.' She nodded, hung up. 'What's your name?'
Ray didn't answer.
The secretary didn't like this, he knew. She picked up the phone. 'Victor, maybe you should get out here now, you know?'
The door behind her desk swung open and out stepped a man taller and older than Ray, muscular and lean, a thumb inside his belt. He had thick black hair and was chewing cinnamon gum. 'Yeah?' he said to Ray.
'I'm looking for Richie.'
'He ain't here.' He stopped chewing, frowned. 'You call earlier?'
We're recognizing each other, thought Ray. That's what's happening. 'No. Where is he?'
'Don't know. Should have reported to work.'
'You know a girl named Sharon?' Ray ventured.
The receptionist watched Victor's eyes anxiously.
'Mister, we're busy here and it's time for you to leave.' Victor took a step forward. 'What's your name again?'
Ray shook his head. 'Can't give you that. But I can tell you Sharon says she had a great time with Richie the other night. A great time. Hot. A smoking hot time.'
Victor's mouth was frozen. He didn't blink, studying Ray, his body, his stance.
'What d'you mean?'
'Richie will know. Ask him.'
Victor twisted his head as if looking at a bad TV picture. Ray watched as his chest rose and fell more quickly, the subtle enlargement of his pupils, his brain juicing him up for a fight.
'One more part of the message, if you don't mind.'
'Yeah?'
'Tell Sharon's boyfriend he needs to work on his golf game.'
Victor nodded coldly. 'I see.'
'Just tell him that.'
Ray gave the secretary a polite smile and stepped quickly out of the office, alert to any movement behind him, and opened his truck. In the rearview mirror he could see Victor standing in the trailer window, talking into a walkie-talkie. Almost immediately a man stepped out of a shack nearby and hopped into one of the huge tank trucks. A blast of diesel smoke shot from his stack as he started up. But Ray was too quick for him, already had the pickup truck in third gear and gunned it across the gravel, slamming over the ruts, toward the turnout to the avenue. The green truck bolted for the same spot, but Ray got there first, even as the truck's bumper crushed the back panel of the red pickup, kicking it sideways. Ray fishtailed forward through the gap into the avenue, almost hitting an ice cream truck tinkling its mechanical ditty, and moments later was way down the avenue, gone but not forgotten.
He dropped the truck at his father's and walked to the subway with his old fireman's equipment bag. The train would be the fastest way to get to the East Side of Manhattan this time of day. Sitting in the rocking car, he studied the subway map, his eyes drawn to the World Trade Center site. It always made him feel strange taking the subway so close to what had happened. He'd never gone back, never stood at the site and thought and remembered. Something about the ceremonies and political speeches had made him uneasy. The pile had burned for one hundred days. A lot of the firemen and construction workers who worked the site were getting sick now, had breathed in all sorts of terrible stuff, pieces of plastic and bone tissue and chemical compounds no one had ever seen before. I don't think I've dealt with the whole thing, Ray thought. Maybe I just ran away. Maybe I felt guilty about Wickham. Things got a little foggy after he was released from the hospital. His memory wasn't even perfectly coherent. He'd lost weight, some of the skin grafts had to be redone, and his leg hurt still. He'd taken a leave from the fire department. And also attended forty-six funerals, some of them with his father. He felt guilty for not going to work; the department told him that he would always have a job. The FD desk shrinks made him come in six times, handed him a lot of printed materials. His personal shrink was a woman in her fifties with tired eyes. She wore no makeup. 'Frankly, I feel like just drifting away,' Ray finally told her.
'Why don't you?' she said.
'Well, the guys-'
'The guys will understand,' she said. 'And if they don't, who cares?'
He sat there in silence.
'Let me tell you something, Ray Grant Jr. I've read your whole file, of course. The FD doesn't want you back right now, not like this. You're deeply traumatized. By 9/11 itself, then by being trapped, then by having your partner die on top of you. Yes, I know about that. We don't know if you're a busted fireman. We don't know what you're going to do when it comes right down to it. And you know what? Neither do you. You don't know much right now. My suggestion is that you go on official indefinite leave. You're not disabled, although we could probably get some kind of mental health exception, though I don't recommend it. You could take a leave and when you felt you could come back, you could take the physical again, retrain and recertify, then get assigned to a company. The union will make sure that happens. But you need to drift away, as you put it.'
He nodded uneasily. 'You've seen a lot of guys like me?'
She shrugged. 'Everyone is different.'
'Yeah, but in general. Burns, falls, accidents, cave-ins… a lot of guys?'
The lady shrink nodded. 'Couple of hundred, anyway.'
He didn't know how to respond.
'Listen to me. Being a fireman is a macho thing. Sacrifice, heroism, the whole deal. Very male. But it doesn't allow for emotional nuance, for ambiguity. You got hit hard. Maybe you should accept that, not resist it. Let the hit carry you somewhere. Ever consider that?'
'My dad always told me I should be a cop.'
'He was wrong, in my opinion.'
'Why?'
'You interested in power?'
'Not really.'
'Justice?'
'That's tougher.'
'Something more basic. More elemental?'
'Life and death, yeah.'
'Then go find it, Ray. You found some death, go find life.'
She stood then. They were done. She gave him a direct look, like a mother to a son, woman to a man. Firm. With a profound human authority. He remembered it. She'd been right. Go find some life.
Within a week, he was on the other side of the world, everything he needed in a rucksack. In a little town in Indonesia. Unplugging. No cell phone, no Internet, no newspapers, no CNN. He met a skinny German girl, and they
