you might say, as a courier. At night, I’d run from one striking mine to another, telling the miners the latest news, keeping everybody up to date on what was happening.” Here he’d paused, taken a draw on his cigar. “Well, I got caught one night, and some of the gun-thugs gave me a bad beating.” Here he’d waved his hand, dismissing it. “But I survived, and before long I was here in the city, working for the
Corman put the last of the dishes away and walked determinedly to his darkroom, as if it were a research laboratory on the rules of life. He sniffed the clean, sweet smell of the chemicals, peered at the soft red light, felt the way the room’s continually building heat gave him the sense of moving toward the core of something. Outside, the world seemed hopelessly diffused, but in the darkroom, it became concentrated, intensified, and the vast blur gave way to small rectangles of highly focused light. Sometimes, in brief visionary glimpses, the mosaic struggled toward a decipherable design. Coils and spirals disentangled, and when that happened, he felt as if he were edging not so much toward some great revelation, as just a small, faint suggestion of what life ought to be.
After a while he returned to the living room, snapped on the television, and collapsed onto the sofa in front of it. Lucy came out of her room a few minutes later and eased herself beneath his arm, her eyes focused on the flickering screen. An old black-and-white detective movie was playing, and in the film, a wiry little snitch had just handed a battered-looking private eye a picture. “See. See,” he told him excitedly. “Now you know.” As Corman watched the screen, bethought again of Lucy, Trang, his work, all the other imponderables, and it struck him that basically what everyone needed was a skinny little snitch just like the one on television, someone who could clear things up, get to the bottom of something, hand over a single exquisite photograph of what had really happened.
CHAPTER
NINE
IT WAS STILL very gray at midmorning, but the rain had stopped and the streets had begun to dry slightly in the brisk fall air. Corman had been up all night by then, with nothing but a short nap around dawn. But the nap had been just long enough to rejuvenate him, so he was able to feed Lucy her breakfast of cereal, then watch leisurely as she did her usual Sunday morning chores, cleaned her room, straightened her closet, folded the laundry he’d washed earlier while she was still sleeping in her room.
“I guess we can go to Uncle Edgar’s now,” she said when she’d finished.
“We’re not supposed to be there until the afternoon,” Corman reminded her.
Lucy pivoted one of her hips out melodramatically. “Well, can we at least go to the park before that?”
“It’s not a very nice day.”
“It’s not raining now,” Lucy said. “We could try it. We could meet them there.”
“Okay,” Corman said, giving in. “Get your bike.”
It was the usual time-consuming struggle getting the two bikes out of the basement storeroom and into the elevator. They were rickety affairs, with nearly treadless tires, rusty chains, handlebars that were slightly off center. They looked old the way people looked old, used beyond their days. Corman had hoped to buy Lucy a new one by summer, but now that seemed unlikely, and as he finally managed to wheel his own bike into the elevator, the pinched quality of his life overtook him once again. He thought of Pike, Groton, the kind of work that made your nights better because your days were worse.
Once on the street, they turned west, rode quickly to Tenth Avenue, then swung north toward the park, with Corman in the lead, Lucy close behind. The whole distance was a worry for him. Traffic sped by at high speed, half- clipping bikers as they passed, a far cry from the old city, when taxis had been electric, and all other cars had been limited to nine miles an hour and forced to warn pedestrians with a gong. And yet Corman had long ago realized that despite the danger, he didn’t have the patience to walk, dragging the bike beside him, and he knew Lucy didn’t either.
They reached 59th Street in less than fifteen minutes. From there it was only a short pull eastward to Columbus Circle. The air was still very heavy, and the fall chill had not lifted. A spectral haze clung to the upper reaches of the trees, floating through their dark leafless branches, giving the whole area an eerie, moorish look that Corman found vaguely unsettling. He stopped dead and stared out toward a particular line of trees. Only a few days before, a woman had been raped and murdered beneath them, and during the last minutes of her life, she had probably lain on her back and stared helplessly at the same bare branches that spread out before him now. As his eyes lingered on the trees, Corman suspected that every inch of earth contained similarly wrenching ironies, and that a thorough knowledge of them would inevitably create a different way of seeing.
“What are you looking at?”
Lucy had come up beside him and was busily zipping her dark blue parka more tightly against her throat.
“Nothing,” he told her.
“It’s colder than I thought,” she said when she’d finished.
“Put up your hood.”
She looked at him sourly. “I don’t like hoods. You know that.” Corman shrugged. “Okay, you ready?”
“I’ve been ready,” Lucy said.
She pressed down on the pedal, shot forward instantly, then headed down the gently curved road that led into the park. Corman followed along after her, pedaling slowly, careful to keep his distance so that she wouldn’t feel surveilled.
Within a few seconds she was almost out of sight. It was her favorite trick, and he began pedaling a bit more rapidly to stay closer to her. He could see her parka billowing out slightly as she raced ahead, but it was little more than a blur which darted in and out from behind the other riders. Once again, he speeded up until he was near enough to see her glance back at him with one of her teasing, “gotcha” smiles.
They made two complete rounds of the park, then glided into the large esplanade that surrounded a white band shell which the city had erected for some of its outdoor concerts. Green wooden benches lined the area, and Lucy quickly plopped down on one.
“I went fast,” she said as she unzipped her parka.
“Yeah,” Corman told her as he pulled up behind.
“It gets you hot,” she said. “Can I take it off?”
“You’ll forget and leave it on the bench,” Corman said. “You’ve done that before.”
“No, I won’t,” Lucy said. “Please?”
“Okay,” Corman told her. “Just make sure you remember it when we leave.”
“I’ll put it in my basket,” Lucy said. Then she quickly stripped it off and crammed it into the small wicker basket which hung from the handlebars.
“Can I get a hot dog?” she asked as she returned to the bench.
“Why don’t we wait for Giselle?”
“She’s probably already eaten.”
“I doubt that.”
“How about a pretzel, then?”
“All right,” Corman said. He fished a dollar bill from his pocket and gave it to her.
“Be right back,” Lucy said as she dashed toward the hot dog wagon at the other end of the esplanade.
Corman leaned back and stretched his long, slender legs out in front of him. Here and there other people lounged on the benches or walked quietly across the brick-covered ground. From time to time a lone bicyclist would glide nonchalantly by, sometimes nodding quickly, but usually offering only a brief, apprehensive glance.
Lucy came bounding toward him, a huge salted pretzel dangling like a bridle bit from her mouth.
