City on Fire (48 page)

It wasn’t long before Valentine’s Day that one of his p.m. rambles took him downtown—and that he realized the two New Yorks had flipped. Punk had picked all the locks, sluiced out into the grid. Tatterdemalion kids crowded St. Mark’s Place, their clothes held together by dental floss and wishful thinking. And from all around, rooftops and stoops and passing cars, came that other adhesive: the music. Had music not delivered Richard, too, on more than one occasion, from a life he’d believed himself trapped in? The tempos had changed, but that almost didn’t matter. The point, now as then, was to tune in to something bigger than yourself, and to feel around you others who felt as you did.

He ended up at a record store on Bleecker Street. It was where he’d bought nearly every long-player put out by Blue Note Records in the 1950s, and countless Stax/Volt sides in the ’60s. Where he’d acquired the collected works of Hank Williams and all those bubblegum 45s that twanged his auditory sweet tooth. Highway 61 Revisited, the day it came out. Let It Bleed, the day it came out. But now face-out on the wall were sleeves he didn’t recognize. At the counter, a furry young man rang him up. Let’s see. Rock n Roll Animal. Agharta. “Anarchy in the U.K.”?

“I’ll take this other forty-five, too.”

But any perplexity the clerk felt at Richard’s choices dissolved when he saw the credential. He was from Missouri, he offered, unbidden. He’d come here to study photography. He held up one of the records, flipped it over to reveal a black-and-white shot of three guys in leather jackets and a woman a head taller. Backed up against an alley wall somewhere, they looked ready to take on all enemies and not fight fair. “Used to hang out with this one here a little bit, actually,” the clerk said, tapping the smallest of the four, who shot the camera the bird. “Billy Three-Sticks.”

It was the other kind of name that had come up in Samantha’s fanzine: Rotten, Vicious, Hell & Thunders, like some firm of malign lawyers. But the devotional context had made Richard forget that the musicians these handles attached to had lives independent of her needs. Maybe you were supposed to forget; maybe this was the point of a pseudonym. Apart from the fact that Billy Three-Sticks had fronted her favorite band, Richard hadn’t thought to find out the first thing about him. Until now.

“Well, far as I know,” the clerk said, “he’s still living up in Hell’s Kitchen. Hell, my boss probably owes him some dough for these records. I could scare up an invoice, if you want.”

THE PLACE IN QUESTION WAS A SOOTY FACTORY in the old industrial district west of the Port Authority; from street level, you could see the tops of rusty letters spelling out Knickerbocker Mints welded to a scaffold on the roof. As with the surrounding buildings, there was nothing to suggest that it had gone residential, or was in use at all, save for a pair of gleaming Harleys on the sidewalk out front, the only vehicles in sight still in possession of their chrome. Indeed, the cars lining the street seemed not so much parked as aborted. All this Richard took in through the sheer plastic sheeting hung from a bodega awning on the corner of Tenth Avenue to protect the flowers underneath. Or rather, the empty flower pails. He’d walked straight up from the Village in the cold, stopping only here, at this last outpost of civilization before dystopia began. Theoretically, he was waiting for the coffee he’d bought to warm him up, but it was equally possible he just wasn’t ready to discover that there were no buzzers in the vestibule, that it was bad information, and so surrender once more the sense of higher purpose now flowing through him. And if there were no such purpose, then why, within minutes of his watching, did a small, pale man who was unmistakably the one on the record sleeve emerge from the building’s entrance and head this way?

Richard half-expected him to tack across the street, to enter the bodega and walk right up and put out a hand, but there were no course corrections. Billy Three-Sticks must have been headed toward the subway. There was something furtive in his gait. Richard tossed the rest of his coffee back and was just about to go accost the subject when another figure, similarly furtive, appeared on the near side of the street: a black man in ill-fitting coveralls. This second man moved rapidly, keeping the lines of cars between himself and Billy Three-Sticks, yet glancing over at him frequently. What the hell was going on here? Richard shivered. He was a layman in the wings of a vast cathedral, waiting for his cue to step into the light. When he did he could see Billy Three-Sticks and the black man reach Ninth Avenue. Were the police running down the same lead? Unlikely. Anyhow, the way you knew an undercover was by looking at his shoes—and the pursuer’s, when Richard drew closer, were authentically battered, the canvas upper peeling away from a heel covered in ballpoint pen. Stenciled onto the coveralls was a stick figure washing a window. The man’s watchcap was riding up in back. Some tonsorial mishap had befallen the hair there; was it green? Before Richard could decide, though, hair, shoes, and coveralls were tailing Billy Three-Sticks around a corner onto Eighth Ave. And by the time Richard had caught up, both men had melted into the crowds around the bus terminal. So why did he feel like rejoicing?

36

MERCER USED TO PASS THE TIME, during his post-grad months of flipping burgers out on Route 17, by polishing his opinions on life and literature for that future date when they would grace the pages of The Paris Review. For an interviewer, he always pictured the same person: a tall, graying white man, neatly but casually dressed, with expressive eyebrows that offset a certain coolness of voice. He looked, come to think of it, like a bearded, less chesty Dr. Runcible. As Mercer imagined it, he sat in a folding director’s chair, notepad in lap, leg crossed at the knee. Whenever Mercer expressed an idea of particular promise, the knee would begin to jiggle up and down. Mostly, though, the pen raced over the paper, as if under its own power, hurling lariats of shorthand at the unfettered brilliance of America’s Preeminent Man of Letters—a title Mercer humbly disavowed.

Q: Your work seems to represent a qualitative break with some of the minimalist tendencies coming into vogue among younger writers at that time. Some might even call it old-fashioned.

A: “Well, we lived, people of my generation, in an age of uncertainty. A whole set of institutions we’d grown up trusting, from the churches to the markets to the American system of government, all seemed to be in crisis. And so there was a fundamental skepticism about the ability of any institution, even one like the novel, to tell us anything true.”

Q: But it sounds like you’re almost in sympathy with the opposition, Mr. Goodman.

A: “I see that as my job, basically. To be in sympathy. But I’ve long felt, perhaps perversely, that when you hold theory up to experience and they don’t match, the problem must be with the theory. There’s the critique of the underpinnings of these institutions—justice and democracy and love—and then there’s the fact that no one seems able to live without them. And so I wanted to explore again the old idea that the novel might, you know, teach us about something. About everything.”

Later, though, when Mercer’s manuscript fell into neglect, his imaginary interviewer disappeared. And by the time he resurfaced, this January, he’d changed. For one thing, he was no longer content to remain in his chair, in the otherwise featureless studio of Mercer’s head. So strong now was the sense of someone hovering nearby, amassing footage of the loft and the world beyond, that Mercer had once or twice found himself peering out the front window for cameras on the street.

For another, the questions had grown uncomfortably personal. A month had passed since the Deputy Inspector had produced, as if by magic, a bag of heroin from the Coat of Several Colors. Mercer’s putative reason for not confronting William about this—that he was too traumatized by everything else that had happened that night—had meantime come to seem like an excuse. This wasn’t to say that when he closed his eyes at night he didn’t still see on the backs of his eyelids a bloody form spread-eagled in the snow. But a week had passed since he’d last jolted awake before sunrise with a gunshot in his ears and a sheen of fresh sweat on his skin. So why, his interviewer wanted to know, did he not now say something?

Well, for one thing, how would he explain to William what he’d been doing on the Upper West Side in the first place? For another, did it logically follow that if 1) the coat was William’s, and 2) the drugs were in the coat, then 3) the drugs must have been William’s? Because what if, in a crowd somewhere, someone had slipped the dope into William’s pocket? It happened all the time in movies. Or what if William had been carrying it as a favor for … for Bruno Augenblick, or … for his old bandmate, Nicky Chaos, whose new act he’d gone to see that night? In fact, hadn’t he claimed this was why he’d quit the band in the first place? That he couldn’t afford to be around a bunch of junkies?

Or maybe those hadn’t been drugs at all. Police on TV were not uniformly opposed to faking evidence when it suited them. Maybe the little cop with the crutches was looking for leverage; maybe he was going to call at some point in the near future and force Mercer to confess to everything he knew about the Hamilton-Sweeneys.

And here was yet another reason for Mercer to keep his mouth shut about the drugs: it would have been unfair to add to William’s burdens. Not that they ever talked about his father’s case, but he could hardly have missed the updates on the news, and he’d been behaving oddly (even for William) since the arraignment. Ah, but did this not corroborate … ? Fine. Yes. Mercer’s phantom interviewer, who was proving to be fucking tenacious, had gotten it out of him: lately, William had been acting more and more like a junkie.

For example? Well, for example, he’d been spending inordinate amounts of time up at his studio in the Bronx, returning hours after midnight. Sometimes when Mercer peeked up at him undressing in the moonlight, or in the light pollution that passed for it, he could swear William was wearing sunglasses. And in the morning, William would be dead to the world. He’d never been an early riser, whereas on work days Mercer had to be presentable and reasonably conscious by seven a.m. But lately he would come home near sunset to find William still in his bathrobe, watching soaps or sports and slurping pastel-colored offslew from a bowl of the pre-sugared cereal he now moved through at a rate of five boxes per week.

So fine; start over. The real reason Mercer didn’t ask if William was shooting up again was that he was scared to confirm it was true.

What made it worse—what made it, yes, since you asked, even harder to ignore—was that Mercer had seen all this before, when his brother got back from Vietnam. He remembered how Pop had asked if he wanted to ride down to the bus depot the Saturday after C.L.’s discharge, and how he’d jumped at the chance to get out of the house. Mama had already cleaned every room three times by that point; if he stuck around, she was liable to start vacuuming his shirtfront with the hose attachment.

It had been high summer then. Pop had let him drive, which is how you knew his mind was elsewhere. “Hard to believe in less than a month I’ll be at U. Ga.,” Mercer said, for the sake of having something to say. Pop, in the passenger’s seat, stayed silent, except for the faint or imagined noise of his hands rubbing the thighs of his trousers. The knuckles were like hardened magma: black, swollen, craggy from having worked the land for two decades, making it safe for the pigs and the chickens, for the towering green corn that rose around them in every direction, staining the sky beige with its exhalations. Mercer’s own hands, at ten and two on the wheel, were an infant’s, comparatively speaking.

Since his brother had left for basic training, Mercer had developed an idea (based partly on a Maxwell House commercial) that C.L. would return reformed. He’d be waiting for them in pressed olive drab, his bag over his shoulder, his face shaved down to handsome planes. He would crush Mercer’s hand and snap off a salute for the old man and then commandeer the wheel, and Mercer would fall asleep in the bed of the pickup, watching those dirty Georgia clouds barely move while peaceable man-talk drifted back from the cab.

The depot had been empty when they arrived, however, and the person who climbed off the bus fifteen minutes later had in common with Mercer’s imaginings only the canvas bag. He wore a dingy tee-shirt. His hair was a clot of wool; a beard half-clouded his face. Pop, himself a veteran of both the Second World War and a lifetime of shaving bumps, was visibly steamed (or scared, it now occurred to Mercer), though, to his credit, all he said out loud was, “Get on in the back, then.” Climbing over the tailgate, C.L. looked distant, passive, almost dreamy. As he would three years later, the morning Mercer found him buck naked in the north field with a machete in his hand, blood on his face like warpaint, standing over a throat-slit shoat.

William wasn’t yet at the point of blood atonement—and who knows, maybe it wasn’t drugs so much as preexisting instability that had landed C.L. in a padded room in Augusta—but he’d had that same shell-shocked look lately. He, too, had grown a beard, claiming that his Yuletide contusions, still unexplained, made it hard to shave. When Mercer observed that he was losing weight, he said it was because he was going vegetarian. Then one day Mercer fished a White Castle wrapper out of the trash. “I said going vegetarian,” William said. “I didn’t say I’d got there. And what are you doing rooting through the trash?”

What Mercer was doing was looking for some final bit of proof, some casus belli. He still wanted to imagine he could outrun the Goodman family legacy, the mistrust and fear layered densely as phloem beneath a tree’s tough bark. But wasn’t this all William’s fault, for keeping things from him? (Assuming William was keeping things from him? (Which he definitely was?)) Mercer was going to have to just come out and say it. He opened his mouth. “Let’s go away together.”

“What?”

Mercer hadn’t known this was something he’d been considering, but evidently he had it all worked out. “You’ve been working awful hard. We both have. Presidents’ Day is a three-day weekend.” William hesitated for a moment. He would have to say no; how would he be able to last three days without a fix? And then Mercer could lob his accusation. But instead came a shrug that made Mercer wonder if he still somehow had everything backward.