stomach. A headrush of sparkles blotted out vision. I felt myself losing balance, losing sense of up and down. Not sure where I was, what I’d been doing or what I was going to do next. I sucked in deep breaths to keep it all together, to look normal, blend in.
I rode out the nausea, until my vision cleared again and I discovered I was still standing on my feet, but that was the only welcome news it brought me.
It was a clear, too-bright September morning, quarter to ten, at a busy Lower Manhattan intersection. I had a dead man at my feet and plenty of people—witnesses—all around.
Pedestrians, shopkeepers, deliverymen, and tourists, who’d been frozen in the shock of the sudden accident, but now were thawing out and beginning to creep closer.
I looked to see if anyone had seen what I’d done, but none of the naked looks of horror were directed at me.
The car, the one that must’ve struck him making its right turn onto Second, was pulled over to the curb thirty feet down the avenue. It was a livery cab, a black Lincoln towncar with a small dent now in its right front side panel as innocuous as a dimple in a bowler hat. The driver, a gray-bearded Sikh in a lavender turban, stood neck-high in the wedge of his open car door, his eyes unblinking, unbelieving.
Diagonally across the intersection was a traffic surveillance cam mounted far up on the wall of the corner building, the seven-story apartment building with the giant yellow pig painted on its blank side. The camera was a narrow box-like affair trained on the intersection. The spot where Owl lay would be just out of frame.
As more people converged, I eased into reverse. I had to go, I couldn’t stay. No, I had to go.
Barefoot, no I.D., and I’d just rolled a dead guy. Not a reaction I could easily explain, not even to myself, let alone any authorities. I didn’t know what I was thinking, maybe even calling it
Bottom-line: I hadn’t seen—only heard—the accident. There was nothing I could tell the cops that wasn’t self-evident. An old man had stepped off the curb and been hit by a car still at the scene. Open and shut.
Except, that meant Owl had been going away from my door.
I shook it off, like a lingering effect of dizziness.
Maybe he’d had some sort of seizure, or gotten confused and wandered heedlessly into the road. No way to know for sure. Relating my share in the tragedy would only cloud the situation, and add to it more tragedy, my own.
Getting into the sights of the cops has never boded well for me. I’d done nothing recently, nor was I afraid they’d fit me up out of whole cloth. However, the police have a lot of open cases in their files and they’re like seasoned off-the-rack salesmen, always measuring you with their eyes. “What are you, 34 medium? I got something looks like it was made for you. Sexual assault in NoHo—fit you like a glove. Here, try it on.”
And why? Because they’re corrupt, evil, or lazy? Nope, it’s just every time they close a case, an angel gets its wings.
Frenzied sirens gibbered five, six blocks in the distance.
One last look down at Owl. Would that be me someday? Dying in harness? Nah, I’d never last that long, not in this business at least, I was already on my way out. But not as out as Owl, he was well out of it. I still had lumps coming.
I made a hasty sign of the cross, turned to go, and—
There was this blond kid staring right at me.
Kid about fifteen with bangs the color of varnished oak hanging down over his eyes. He was dressed in baggy drab pants full of pockets down both legs and a white Mickey Mouse t-shirt, the mouse in his famous red shorts with big white buttons. Leaning against the corner building, balancing a skateboard on the toe of one sneaker, the kid kept staring right at me, or maybe just beyond, it was hard to tell because of his bangs.
I didn’t try, I got going. And didn’t stop at my building, but shuffled past. If that kid, or anyone else, had seen me going through Owl’s pockets, the last thing I wanted was to be traced back to my building. Maybe if I’d had my keys on me I would’ve chanced it, but without them I’d have to buzz my upstairs neighbor and hope she was in. It wouldn’t do to hang around waiting to find out.
A police cruiser pulled up to the curb and I continued putting distance behind me. Until things cooled down, it was best I had a little walk around. But that also presented a problem: nothing else for it, I needed shoes.
On the sidewalk were pulpy brown smears, broken beer-bottle glass, syrupy yellow puddles, Con Ed metal plates possibly live with stray voltage, rusty old screws. I had to watch my step; this was New York City and I was in trouble again.
Just like that. An odd mixture of emotions vied in me: exhilaration and repulsion, like when handfeeding a reptile.
I headed for the far end of the block.
The surge of traffic on Second Avenue registered as a steady throb against the soles of my feet, and when a flatbed truck ran over a pothole, the shudder traveled up my skeleton and rattled my back fillings.
I heard the EMS van arrive behind me—doors opening, radios squawking—but I didn’t look back. At Eleventh I turned right round the corner and let myself breathe again when I was out of sight.
This stretch of East Eleventh was a residential side street, apartment buildings and three- and four-story brownstones with garbage barrels lined up in front.
I began lifting lids, looking for a pair of shoes roughly my size. I pick through garbage on a semi-professional basis, so I made short work of it, but without success.
Gingerly walking on down the block, I passed under a sidewalk tree, a ginkgo. Its pink cherry-size seed pods, fallen to the ground and mashed underfoot, stunk of vomit. Stepping on them felt like I was walking over open eyes.
I needed shoes. Comfort aside, if anyone had seen what I’d done and was now telling the cops, I didn’t want to fit their A.P.B. description of “barefooted man seen leaving.”
But not to worry, this was the East Village, there’d be shoes. Time was you couldn’t turn a corner in this neighborhood without coming across a tossed-out pair of two-tone loafers, or snakeskin cowboy boots, or zebra- striped high-tops, or glittery platform pumps. Things couldn’t have changed that much.
This is the East Village, I told myself, there’ll be shoes.
Unless, of course, the neighborhood
Your neck of the woods, Owl had said. Yeh, ’cept these weren’t my woods anymore, and now there was only my neck.
I passed a walkdown basement entryway beneath a building’s front stoop where years ago I’d been beaten up by three guys.
Maybe I’d never known the city all that well to begin with.
I cautiously rounded a shattered fluorescent tube.
Ahead of me, lined up along the curb for collection were a discarded computer monitor, a VCR, what looked like a scanner/printer or maybe it was a fax machine, even a miniature satellite dish. A decade before on this block, the danger would’ve been stepping on a junkie’s discarded needle, not stubbing a toe on obsolete tech.
I lifted more battered lids, but the closest I got was finding a collection of old neckties all knotted in a jumble, like a hive of silk. There weren’t any shoes.
A young goth couple with matching raccoon eyeshadow approached me and clomped by in black buckled combat boots which I watched pass near my toes with equal parts fear and envy.
And then I looked up and there they were, sitting atop the lid of the next garbage pail over. A pair of black leather men’s dress shoes.
I pounced, snatching them up as if away from rival hands.
Size ten or eleven, with dusty tops and slightly curled toes. I turned them upside down, knocked the heels together, shook them, undid the laces, shook them some more, then peered inside. All clear, nothing creepy was living in them. Yet.
I leaned against a lamppost, getting a glimpse at the bottoms of my feet, already jet black.
I tried on the shoes. A loose fit, but better than too tight. I did up the laces, then took two steps. Their backs bit into my naked ankles like angry lobster claws, but their bottoms crunched nicely over a bit of broken glass.
