half of her, keep me guessing about the other half. Her fingertips, with nails bitten to the quick, snaked around the door. I felt pink and fleshy, conspicuously healthy and well nourished beside this woman who was all right angles, hard luck written on her body in the form of scars and track marks. I searched my memory for her name. Had Ace even told me?
“I haven’t seen him in a week,” she said.
I listened to her voice, listened for sadness or worry. But it was flat, emotionless. I searched her half face. I’m not sure for what. For something I could relate to, I guess. But her face was a mask of distrust, her eye narrowed now and hard. It told me that she expected everyone she met to abuse her; it was only a matter of how and how bad.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
She hesitated and then said, “Ruby.” Something about her seemed to soften then, and she opened the door a little wider. I looked past her into the apartment but saw only darkness.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, ridiculously.
“Yeah,” she said. “You, too.”
We stood there awkwardly for a minute, regarding each other.
“If you see him…?”
“I’ll tell him you’re looking for him.”
I wrestled with the idea of giving her some money. I had a couple of twenties folded in my pocket. But something about her made me think it might insult her, as much as she might need it. So I nodded and turned around, walked toward the stairs feeling uncomfortable, guilty as if I were leaving the scene of an accident. I heard her close the door softly and I jogged down the stairs and headed toward the light. Outside, the fat guy had left his perch and stood at the corner with a couple of other thugs who all turned to look at me. He smiled, cruel and wolfish, as though he saw something that confirmed a judgment he’d already made. I turned from him and walked toward home. I squinted against the bright sky and saw Ruby’s eye, how hungry it had been and how tired.
nine
I stepped from the cold into Five Roses, the pizzeria in my building owned by my landlady. The heat offered relief to the red and tingling skin of my face. There were a couple of cops sitting at a corner table eating meatball Parmesan sandwiches, dripping sauce and cheese onto paper plates. The sight of it made my stomach grumble. I’d been walking for hours and the day was fading.
The place was homely, badly decorated, but made glorious by the aromas that wafted from Zelda’s magical kitchen. Dreadful faux wood paneling edged the wall, dark and pocked with holes. Fluorescent lights flickered from the sagging water-stained ceiling, casting the space in the worst possible shade of white. There were rickety tables covered by the perennial red-and-white-checkered tablecloths, surrounded by brown vinyl chairs with tufts of foam showing through gouges. A Pepsi cola clock hung crooked above the door. Hundreds of creased, aging photos were taped or thumbtacked to the wall behind the old cash register. My personal favorite was of Zelda beaming up at Robert De Niro, who draped an arm lazily across her shoulders. He smiled that
I walked over to the counter and Zelda didn’t so much as acknowledge me as she shuffled back and forth. She took a pizza out of the oven with one of those giant wooden trays and slid it effortlessly, perfectly into a waiting box. Then with the same quick efficiency, she plucked two slices of Sicilian from a pie underneath the glass case and put them in the oven. I was so predictable, I didn’t even have to order anymore. When that was done, she looked up at me.
“That it?” she asked.
“Yes, thanks,” I said, and handed her a five. She pressed in digits on her ancient cash register and the drawer opened with an excited
Zelda was a petite woman with fragile, bent shoulders and small, hawklike features. All the light that I witnessed in the photograph had drained from her, leaving her to sag and go gray. She moved with an aura of resignation, as though her life was no more than forcing herself to put one foot in front of the other. I always imagined that if it were a matter of sheer will, she could lift a ten-ton block of concrete onto those shoulders and carry it as long as she had to. She impressed me as one of those people who saw her life as a prison but wore the key on a chain around her neck.
I used to try to make conversation with her, but some years back I’d given up with no hard feelings. So I stood, waiting for my pizza and staring off into space until she surprised me by talking.
“A man,” she said, her beady brown eyes edged with blue fatigue and a million tiny lines, her lips thin and pressed into a straight line. “He look for you.”
“Who?” I said, keeping my voice sounding casual as a hole opened in the pit of my stomach.
She shrugged. “I dunno.”
“What did he say?”
“He said to call. He said you had the number.”
I suppressed the urge to spin around and examine the faces of people on the street. A feeling of dread wrapped itself around me as I noticed that the cops had left. Zelda handed me my pizza in a white paper bag.
She looked at me sideways. “No good,” she said with a definitive shake of her head. “He was no good.”
Her words made me go cold inside, and as I left the pizzeria and walked out onto the street, I felt vulnerable and alien. People moved past me, carrying their dry cleaning and briefcases, their backpacks. Someone slid by on Rollerblades; a homeless guy slumped on a stoop across the street. First Avenue was a sea of traffic, honking horns and quick stops emitting brief shrieks of rubber on concrete. The light flashed DON’T WALK. Everything was normal, as it always had been. Except for me.
A little more than a week and a half since standing on this corner and seeing Justin about to get hit, everything about my life had changed, everything about me felt different. I had walked the few feet from the pizzeria to the door of my building about a million times and never been so aware of the scene around me. I looked at the faces of strangers and envied how they bustled about in their lives, secure in the knowledge of who they were and where they were going…or at least where they’d come from. And I sensed a menace beneath the surface of the street noise, as if something dark was waiting, hidden behind the facade of the innocuous scene before me. I felt watched. I moved quickly to the door of my building, opened it with my key and moved inside, feeling the breath of danger on my neck. With the metal clang of the door slamming, I felt a shudder move through me, as if someone was walking on my grave.
Much later that night, when the phone jangled me from an uneasy sleep, I knew it was Ace before I answered.
“I heard you were looking for me,” he greeted me, sounding distant like a stranger on an overseas line. “Bad idea, Ridley.”
I didn’t say anything, just hung silent on the line. I thought it was funny, though not in a ha-ha way, that my junkie older brother thought he had better ideas about how to handle things than I did.
“What’s wrong?” he said after maybe a minute.
“I have to talk to you.”
“So talk.”
No, I needed to see his face, look into his eyes. He was bad on the phone, anyway. I could never get a sense of him, what he was thinking, feeling. Not that I had much luck with that in person, either.
“I need to see you.”
More silence. I could hear him breathing. I could hear the street noise that told me he was on a pay phone. I looked at my caller ID display; the word
