But he'd turned away. 'Just take care of him, okay?'
'You got it,' I said, eager to get going.
The cop car backed over the snow, then pulled away in front of us. I let the truck roll forward. 'Jay?'
He didn't say anything.
'Jay,' I announced anyway, 'you need another lawyer.' I waited for an answer. I remembered to hang the chain back up behind us and close the lock. I turned the truck onto the main road and watched for on-coming traffic. Ninety minutes back to the city. 'I mean, this is not what I do, not what I used to do, not what I want to be doing.' I looked over to see his response.
He had none. He was gone, curled asleep against the seat likewell, like a boy.
It was late now, past 4 a.m. The evening seemed impossible, scenes in a strange, cold dream. From the moment I'd stepped into the Havana Room five hours earlier, nothing had made sense. I drove west, toward the lights of Manhattan, running the heater and wishing the cop hadn't kept my business card. He hadn't needed it, right? I glanced back over the seat. Jay was completely gone, his breath entering and leaving his nostrils noisily, coughing thickly now and then. From time to time he muttered in his sleep. I didn't like what had happened, I didn't like my complicity. Certainly Jay had enjoyed the right to move the bulldozer up over the sea cliff because it constituted a danger to anyone below. That much was justifiable. The rights of the living trump the rights of the dead. And my own assistance in this discrete action seemed more or less defensible. But moving the body farther from its absolute point of true death was loaded with problems. Of course, Herschel, being deceased, never knew that his body was being transported over the frozen farmland a few hundred yards away. But his very unknowingness constituted part of my objection. Surely the dead have the right to be properly discovered by the living- that is, to be preserved in the circumstances of death so that their families may reckon with death, may complete the narrative, compose an ending. The principle of the undisturbed body derives from the basic needs of society and tribe. Moreover, I'd not told the policemen what we'd done. I'd lied to his face, despite the fact that policemen are often quite interested in lies, especially as they pertain to bodies moved in the night.
All this gave me a bad feeling that I was falling, again, falling even further from my old life, further from Timothy. And I missed him so, missed the soft flop of his head against my chest when he was a baby in my arms, lips pooching and puckering in his sleep, missed the errant burps and innocent fartings, the blond duckling softness of his hair after his bath, drowsing, the soft breathing weight of him on my chest. Years removed, as I drove through the night, this memory pierced me again and again. Where was he? In misery I almost said it aloud. Where was my son? The boy who sat on my shoulders and steered me by pulling on one ear or the other, the boy who was reading the sports page when he was five years old, the boy who left streaks of toothpaste all over the bathroom, the towels thrown across the floor, wet footprints stamping down the hall? The boy I kissed good night each evening at nine sharp. My boy, where are you? In another land, in the arms of another man, in a place far away and waiting for your father to come and get you.
I pressed forward through the snow. Given the hour, we moved quickly. Arriving from the east, New York City is a sequence of subtraction and addition. First comes dark, pine-barren nothingness that gives way to exurb tract housing and new office buildings, and they in turn fill into traditional suburban sprawl. Soon the yards shrink as the borough of Queens approaches and the buildings become squat and dense, crowding each other, semidetached houses changing to row homes. Meanwhile the road surface becomes worse, the exits more frequent, the drivers more insane, and then you are in Queens proper, facing the sheer wall of Manhattan, a thousand-foot stone tapestry hung from the sky, and then you're whizzing downward under the East River into the halogen-mad tunnel, daring and dared by the other vehicles to pass at eighty miles an hour, then up onto the island proper, the city that night a muffled village of snow. Behind me Jay slept. At the first stoplight I glanced back at him; his face was slack, almost as if he were the second dead man of the evening, but then he gave a grunty cough and lifted his head.
'You konked out,' I said.
'Yeah.'
'I'm driving to my place and then you can go on.'
'Sure. That's great.'
'I'll check on your deed tomorrow, like I promised.' I let a snowplow rumble past me. 'But then I'm out, Jay. Don't consider me your lawyer.'
I turned on Thirty-sixth Street. The sky was starting to lighten, and in an hour the sun would start to drop along the eastern face of the buildings. 'We're here.'
Jay didn't seem to notice my miserable neighborhood.
'I've got to go upstairs and sleep,' I told Jay. 'Can you drive? I can call Allison.'
'No, no,' he said, pulling himself up. 'I can drive.' He opened his door. 'Cold out there.'
I didn't like the way he looked, but I got out anyway, leaving the driver's door open for him. 'You all right? Remember you got a box of cash with you.'
'Sure, sure.'
I waited for some kind of thanks, or recognition of the extremity of the evening. But none came. I hopped up the steps into my building and let the door swing shut. Then, perhaps out of worry, I lingered behind the glass and watched him.
For a moment nothing happened, and I considered going back outside to insist that I drive him home. He looked barely able to stand. But then he pulled himself out of the truck and made his way unsteadily to the rear hatch. He popped it open, looked up and down the street, then bent over into the rear. I couldn't see what he was doing but he was busy with his hands. I glanced at what looked like a thick plastic tube, but it disappeared. He stood bent over for a minute or so, a vulnerable position given the hour and the location, and I remembered the Puerto Rican guy who prowled the neighborhood looking for a fight. But Jay stood up and shut the back of the truck. It took him two tries. How could such a big guy be so weak? He shuffled toward the driver's side, almost slipping once, and reached the door. Then he stood with his arms on the roof, like a winded runner.
I was just about to go outside when he slid in his seat. The driver's door closed, the truck rolled forward. I stepped out to see if he made the left-hand turn onto Eighth Avenue, which would be the logical action if he was headed to Allison's. He didn't turn, and instead continued east on Thirty-sixth Street. Maybe he was going crosstown and then up to her neighborhood. I stepped out into the street and watched Jay's taillights two blocks away. At Seventh Avenue, he turned south. He definitely wasn't headed to Allison's apartment. No, Jay Rainey, whoever he was and whatever his condition, was on his way somewhere else.
Four
Herewith, an abbreviated history of Manhattan real estate: a mountain range of stone, ancient as the moon; twelve thousand years of pulverizing glaciers, which, receding as recorded time began, left behind an island of bedrock buried over with gravel and sand, as well as a wide river flowing into a protected bay; unbroken expanses of oak, maple, elm, and chestnut; infinities of oysters, clams, fish, deer, beaver, rabbit, and fox; Algonquin Indians and their leafy footpaths; Henrik Hudson and the Dutch East India Company; Peter Stuyvesant and his bowerie; improvements in the construction of sailing vessels; King Charles II and his kid brother, the Duke of York; the 1720 riot by black slaves, which accelerated the segregation of their housing; the 1763 Treaty of Paris, in which all of North America was ceded to England; the adoption of the largest Algonquin trail as a 'broad way' north and south; a lovely buttonwood tree on Wall Street under which men in beaver hats traded securities; Robert Fulton and his spluttering steamboat, which improved trade upriver; the great fire of 1835, which destroyed the business district; the Erie Canal, which connected Manhattan to the continental interior and allowed immeasurable amounts of lumber, rye whiskey, livestock, and farm produce to float downstream into the digestive maw of the new city; further extension of Broadway up the length of the island; the potato famine of 1846, which flooded the city with cheap Irish labor; the failed Revolution of 1848, which flooded the city with cheap German labor; the shantytowns in the center of the island, which contained such pestilence, crime, and shocking immorality that the city fathers decided to clear the land for a central park; the willingness to fill in coves along the banks of the Hudson River with oyster shells, bottles, dead horses, cannonballs, leather shoes, and anything else; the Civil War, which made
