Blood Acre Read online

  Nathan considers his coffee, as though the cup itself holds the consequences of bribing a judge. "Tomorrow," he says again. He has taken liberties with judge Rodriguez only once, and even he would be hard-pressed to call it an actual buy: he'd given Rodriguez tickets to Madama Butterfly, his own coveted seat-eighth-eigth-row-center orchestra-in return for the small accommodation of rescheduling a hearing past the statute of limitations for a speedy trial, that magic date after which you fly as free as a bird But the business with Rodriguez was harmless, really, if not just. The defendant, a thief of petty sums in a neighborhood of crack dealers and junkies, an irritant to everyone, was set free on the condition of skipping town. Goodbye and good luck.

  Nathan's hands settle before him in an attitude of prayer. Down the window bar it is just the junkman now, moved on to a paper cup of beer. "I had this friend who once mentioned that he knew somebody who once mentioned he might be able to do something."

  "You still have these friends?"

  "My friends can become their friends, but what are the terms?"

  "Two-fifty."

  Nathan darts another took back at the family.

  "Don't look at them again. They don't eat on Mulberry Street and thumb their noses at the cops. They're in they're out, they'll slit your throat in broad daylight, bim-bam."

  "Two hundred fifty thousand," Nathan murmurs.

  "A rush job. They're anxious people, family people. Regular Waltons."

  "What's mine?" Nathan asks.

  “Fifty.”

  “Fif-”

  "Fuck you, Stein. You keep fucking up all over the place, you're stealing ball bonds, you have some real estate thing going on, this phone scam, your stock goes down not up, know what I mean?”

  "How do you know-”

  "Think of it as a temporary readjustment in your share price."

  Nathan swallows. "Pricing yourself out of a future, Krivit."

  Krivit's glasses have steamed over. "Look, you fuck. Don't you threaten me. I can get anybody. I'll get your bonehead partner. That schmuck. He'd sell his goddamn mother. He'd suck his own cock for twenty bucks. What's his name?"

  Nathan shakes his head. "He's not a partner. He works with Milton.

  "That's your problem."

  "Schreck. Oliver."

  "That's him. That fuck."

  Nathan does not often look at Krivit. He doesn't, for instance, even know the color of his eyes. Now he sees that they are light blue, almost pretty. Nathan smiles to himself. A song comes to his head, the climactic aria from last night's Figaro, the sweet soprano in the lead opening her mouth to the cavernous Met and setting free the birds. And Isabel, sitting beside him in a lovely red dress, a flowery print, and black hair swept back in a bun. Her hand in his, her fingers long now and talented. Nathan begins to hum, falsetto.

  "So why me?" he says between phrases. "Why not Milton?"

  Krivit scowls. "He's got bigger fish to fry." He lifts his shapeless arm and waves it through the air to the muddy floor, the barren streets, the abandoned Wonderwheel. The sneakers kicking at the wind. Fuck Whitie.

  "You're what I could get on short notice. You need- Will you just cut out that serenade?"

  Nathan stops. His eyes follow a squad car rushing up Surf Avenue, its headlamps blinking and emergency lights spinning. It takes a corner fast and heads for the boardwalk. Twenty years ago, Coney Island children came to the windows of Milton's Silver Shadow and offered pocket change for a ride. Milton took the pennies and nickels and came out of Famous's with a box of hot dogs for all of them. He lifted them and put them behind the wheel, laughing; they stretched over the leather and touched the true wood paneling, black kids all of them, good kids, kids with half a chance until tomorrow. Then he drove away complaining to Nathan with sweeps of his fat hand, Nigger this, Nigger that. Spic whores.

  Now in this neighborhood there are no phones. No one is calling. Across the street the carcasses of lesser cars sit charred and glazed with ice. Milton hasn't come down here in years. You sow too many seeds you end up with a jungle that swallows you whole.

  A second squad car emerges under the subway trestles and follows the first. Sirens wail in the distance, bending on the wind. Krivit cranes his neck, trying to see the boardwalk.

  Though standing still, at the sound of the sirens Nathan feels he is almost running, almost lurching. A trickle of sweat crosses the back of his neck. But there on the TV it's now the Eagles in white and the Packers in green. Though the game quickly dissolves into a local news update, a shot of a stormy Caribbean sea, the underside of a capsized boat. Bodies riding out the swells facedown, their hair and clothes puffing up and back, up and back. A wave breaks and they're gone.

  Noting his calm, laying claim to it, Nathan takes out his best gold pen and unfolds a matchbook from Gambone's Ristorante. He clears his throat. Dully now, with studied disinterest: "What's the charge?"

  But Krivit has seen something on the boardwalk and is on the balls of his feet.

  Nathan prods his arm.

  “Drive-by." Krivit brings his attention back. "When you come down to it Jews aren't any different from wops, just better at it. Who would have thought?"

  "Why are they keeping him?"

  "Fly risk."

  "Would he fly?"

  They both look outside. Across Surf Avenue, the El train screeches slowly through the Luna Park Houses at third-floor level, the third rail lighting up the towers with high strobe flares. By the time the tail-lights of the last car have pulled out of sight the platform's windblown vacancy feels permanent, as though the trains haven't come for years.

  "Wouldn't you?" Krivit says.

  Nathan puts down the pen. "Then he's gone."

  "It's not your problem."

  "What do they have?"

  "A kid in the car who says our boy pulled the trigger."

  "Did he?"

  Krivit wipes his forehead. "Sure. Why not. What's it to you?"

  Nathan coughs lightly into his fist, but he's stirred up the dirt in his chest. The cough screws deep, excruciating, and fighting it an immense weariness descends. If he didn't know better, he'd be thinking heart attack. Krivit has been going on about something or other, a litany of Nathan's indiscretions, his faults, like the plagues, blood, locusts, darkness, slaying of the first born…

  But his heart, he's been told, is drum tight; a vault with plumbing, as the doctor said, obviously grateful to be able to pass that little tidbit along.

  By the time Nathan is coughed out he feels kicked in the ribs. "And where's said witness?"

  "Building snowmen upstate."

  "And his last attorney?"

  Krivit, saying nothing, probes a molar with his pinky. Answer enough. Nathan nods once, slowly. The father puts down a halffinished hot dog and leads the family toward them. Nathan yanks off a leather glove and turns, extending his hand. The father reaches into his coat and tosses a brown paper package the size of two hardcover books onto the window bar and brushes by; the family follows and pushes one by one through the swing doors and out.

  Nathan watches them walk down the street. The boy-an argument, a planned escape-has bolted down an alley.

  Krivit slides the package out from under Nathan's hand, opens the end and peers in. A pink tip of tongue breaks through the seam of his mouth. He reaches in and prowls around with his fingers.

  "Hey, I got a good joke," he says. "You'll like this. There's this old wop and this old Jew sitting on this park bench. And this real babe walks by. I mean the real thing. Young, blonde, stacked."

  Krivit pulls his hand out of the package, for a moment forgetting the bricks of cash inside, as though remembering something of superior interest and proven benefit.

  “And the wop turns to the Jew and he points at her and he says, ‘I screwed that broad. I mean, I really screwed her.’ And the Jew nods and his eyes narrow and his mouth starts watering and he turns to the wop and says, 'Yeah, outta what?'”

  Laughing, Krivit bobs his head like a
bird. It is a lesson, practically a proverb. Nathan feels a brief, surprising surge of affection for this fat middleman. It is unearned, he knows, but there it is all the same, as fleeting as a light breeze that comes from nowhere and just as quickly leads nowhere, a mistake; and there it goes, going-after all these years Krivit is practically family-gone.

  He watches Krivit feel around in the paper package and pull out a smaller one the dimensions of a single brick. Krivit leaves it on the metal bar between them. He shoves the larger package between the flaps of his coat, then raises a finger, as though testing the wind. "Don't let the cunts get in the way of business.” His high strained voice reminds Nathan of his rabbi from Ozone Park: Stay the course, stay focused, you're slipping, Nathan, slipping-

  "Don't fuck this one up, Stein. They're not forgiving. And I know."

  "What do you know?"

  Outside, the Russians are abandoning their blankets and running for the beach. The Pakistani manager of Famous's pushes through the door to the street, his hands on his hips.

  Again, Krivit cranes his neck. "I hear things," he says. "Weird things." He taps his ear. Not bothering to turn to Nathan he produces a fat manila envelope and leaves it on the counter. "Here's the history, docket number, the rest. Don't forget, Stein.Tomorrow."

  Tomorrow, fifty thousand, tomorrow, fifty thousand. Nathan weighs the options. Options but no choices. And no questions. It's fifty G's and tomorrow's tomorrow's tomorrow-

  He slides over the last hot dog to Krivit. "You should think about losing some weight," he says.

  Krivit shoots him an angry glance. "Fuck you." "Look at me."

  The corners of the fat man's lips lift in a gradual smirk: "Yeah, look at you."

  The drunk, led back into the fold, has not stopped at the waterline. Instead, extending the plastic trumpet in a kind of fascist salute, he goosesteps calmly into the slush. The other swimmers hop on the beach, prancing back and forth at the water's edge. Some, closing their eyes, throw out their arms martyr-like to take the full force of the sub-zero wind. As though redemption lurks somewhere between agony and humiliation. One young girl, hugging herself, cries ohgodohgodohgodohgod. Then someone declares, "Time," and the members of this club, many looking as though they're hoping for second thoughts but are too dazed to find them, kick their way in. The water, a pebbly slush only a few degrees and a couple minutes from solid ice, barely budges at their waists. Undeterred, they lock hands in a circle, firing up and down in their places like pistons. The drunk has not stopped. His shoulders go under.

  He cries, "Come on, losers!" His bluish hand breaks the surface and groggily waves them on.

  "One! Two! Three!" they bellow, and go down, vanishing without a ripple. They emerge seconds later, blue-faced, eyes pinched, unable to scream, like tardy babies funneled through the womb and fired out, misshapen, slimed.

  "Stupid fucks," says someone safely on the beach. A Korean in a cheap parka hammers his palms together. A photographer kneels and snaps away, catching the bathers in attitudes of stoicism and madness.

  All that can be seen of the drunk: a patch of red hair, a flap of his shorts, his heels, a lip of orange plastic trumpet.

  “Goddamn it, he's done it again," a bather complains. Two wade out to retrieve him while the others leap and pirouette and scream in the refrigerated air, searching up and down the beach and across toward Jersey as though for the purpose for what they've done. Others strike a pose for the photo-journalist.

  Then a true scream, a woman's ringing shriek.

  No one knows what is happening. Someone yells, "Shark?" People are running in place, knees high in the harbor. Someone points toward the floating drunk. A sluggish swell passes through him. He hangs in a dead man's float and looks to have been decapitated. No, not him, but past him a second pair of heels breaks the surface. Someone grabs the drunk and shoves him like a piece of driftwood toward the beach. Two hookers waiting there cross their arms with sudden interest as someone goes back waist-high, reaches in and tows back the corpse and leaves it face up, half in half out of the water. Hands clawed, mouth open, it lies between two flaps of ripped red cloth like a food offering; part torment, part repose.

  The hookers approach the corpse like cops, without issues. One toes the ribs. "She's pretty."

  "She was."

  "Know her?"

  They consider her.

  "Black," the first says. "Or Chicano."

  "How can you tell? She's all fucked up."

  5 p.m.

  A motionless string of red brake lights humps all the way to Queens over the Kosciuszko, traversing the dark below. The dashboard, blinking 5 P.m., sets an underglow off Claire Proffitt's chin as the bridge bounces disconcertingly beneath. Opposing headlights are massing for miles. An ambulance behind surges forward a few inches at a time. No one is moving, there is no place to go; the ambulance's siren falls silent, its emergency lights go dark. Ahead, a haze of yellow construction lights; Rikers Island, just a few miles away, will be an adventure.

  At a full stop, Claire glances at the newspaper on the dashboard, folded back at a two-inch filler column on page seventeen:

  REFUGEE BOAT SINKS; 40 DIE

  A boat crammed with Dominicans trying to slip into the United States capsized and sank in icy, heavy seas, killing at least 40 people. Many more are missing and feared dead.

  One survivor said 107 people were crammed aboard the Saint John, a refitted 30-foot fishing trawler, which sank five miles off Cape Engano, the easternmost point of the Dominican Republic…

  Exhausted already, Claire leans over the wheel, myopic in the snow flurries, watching the blinking lights of planes gathering in their landing patterns. Planes dropping out of the darkness, gliding low overhead into LaGuardia. She is mere days from her week's vacation to-she's already forgotten the name; perhaps she never knew it, doesn't need to know it. She'd simply given her travel agent her orders: heat, loneliness, blind stupor. Picking her lane out of the sky, she again has her vision of her equatorial sea infinite and pure, the long waves marching on a white beach, crashing in clear sheets over the sand, the spent breakers racing back to do it again, while behind her, the exhilarating piles of mountain heaped on mountain-

  Easing down the bridge, the four lanes of traffic pour grain by grain into a half-width of shoulder swept clear of rubble. Police cruisers and highway crews. A circle of flood-lit pavement: strewn shards of metal, a door, a wheel, bolts and screws. Cops with orange slickers and neon batons. She reaches for the tape player. Still that old tape of Nathan's,

  Herbie Hancock's first album that he liked so much. The two of them together always had a soft spot for first albums, first books,first movies, the first blush, the courage and safety in anonymity, nothing but possibility and raw hope.

  … Thousands of Dominicans try to enter the United States each year by crossing the turbulent 90-mile Mona Passage between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico in rickety wooden boats. The Border Patrol has captured over 8,182 this year alone.

  Through and gone, the cars cavort like liberated animals over the four empty lanes. Streets and row-houses give way to long unlit slopes peaking and rolling toward other streets, more highway, then more water. An endless clutter of headstones back to back and wing to wing, obelisks, virgin marys boxed in by com peting apostles and multiple replications of the savior Jesus Christ himself. Airborne haloes tossing in the night like legions of Frisbees. More row-houses, more foundries, more cemeteries, Jewish this time, the stones lower, roomier, less of a crowd, ironically enough less of a push. In death, she thinks, they change their tune: composed, patient, they grant everyone around them a wide berth.

  An off-ramp into a street of two-family duplexes with windows flickering blue with TV light. A neighborhood of cops and firemen; of plastic-sheathed sofas bearing cats; young sons spending their lives leaning over engines and hiring themselves out to the parents' friends.

  Stopped at a zebra-striped gate, a guard box beyond which a narrow causeway humps
over the water to Rikers Island, Claire is recognized. The guard, a woman, looks disappointed. "You," she says, and puts her finger to her watch. "What," she asks, "is your problem? "

  Claire offers her the grin of the guilty but ever-loved child, then a look of commiseration, then disbelief. "I'm backed up. I'm bored. I have no life."

  Anybody with style and grace this night will get what she wants. The guard lifts her eyes toward a passing plane and summons for Claire a look of motherly aggravation. "Don't be long. Don't be outside. Something's coming. I heard it on the radio."

  In the waiting room of the Rose M. Singer ward for women, a guard in blue sits investigating her long clawed fingernails painted alternately pink and indigo. Her holster is empty. Outside this cubicle, two more women armed and large peer down from an elevated watch desk behind a slab of bulletproof plexiglass. No one has moved since Claire was last here. And no man in sight. When she first left law school she thought that a plus. Women in the cells, women holding the guns, sweeping the floors, calling the shots. All around Claire nothing but women. But today she smiles stiffly, taps her toes, very nervous: the place is vibrating, teetering on the edge. The women's ward at Rikers Island looks like anyplace else-dirty and bare and hard, a laboratory of unhappiness.

  In the cubicle window, Claire focuses on her own reflection, touching her cheek, her face fine and ruddy, as though permanently lashed by wind and sun, suddenly afraid, as though the voyage already has been made -

  A girl enters in prison grays, blurry-eyed and groggy; coppery skin and the flat, sloped face of the interior tribes, wrapped in a shy quiet that seems to have ancient origins. Her coal black eyes never rise above knee level. And she is pregnant, well into it, and seventeen, if that.

  She lifts her cigarette, inhales deeply, closing her eyes in ecstasy.

  Claire lowers herself into a chair across from her. "Regina Nunez," she reads off the docket folder. "You know any English?"