Flagged Victor (23 page)

It seemed possible, in that moment, that they were waiting to see if we’d leave the country before arresting us. I could no longer breathe.

Nah, Chris said. Crossed my mind for a millisecond. But that would be a little above and beyond the call of duty, I think.

I tried to calm down.

How do you know they’re Dartmouth police? I asked.

Let’s see. Because I’ve seen two of them at the Billy Club at least seventeen times. And the third guy is Drury. You know, the cop who lives up on the Horseshoe.

I almost—but caught myself just in time—said, You mean the one who showed up when we chainsawed the tree house?

Drury, I said. And felt the weight bearing down.

Evidently, they spotted Chris, because he suddenly nodded, smiled, and lifted his beer glass in cheers. Then he went back to drinking.

They’re packing up, Chris said. See? Nothing to worry about.

Then the three men stood before us. One of them, whom Chris called Officer Green, asked Chris what he was up to. It was a friendly question, a make-conversation question, but there was malice to it, as far as I was concerned, cop-like suspicion.

Pulling rickshaw, Chris said, making a little coin before school in the fall.

You still applying to the academy? Green asked.

Yes, sir.

Dartmouth City or RCMP? the second cop asked.

Chris didn’t answer, just grinned.

What do you think? Green asked his colleague.

A low snicker of laughter all around.

Well, if you don’t make RCMP, we’ll probably take you, the second one said.

They took you, didn’t they? Green said.

Then Drury spoke up. Where are you boys headed?

Drury didn’t do small talk. Drury did cop talk. Suddenly, I was sitting in the back of his car, holding a towel to my chin, answering every little thing he asked. Did he remember me?

But Chris didn’t blink. Just waiting for a friend flying in. Where are you fellows off to?

New York, the second cop said.

I almost passed out.

LaGuardia? I asked suddenly.

They all gave me a funny look.

We’re going to catch the Yankees-Jays series this weekend, Green said.

Have a blast, Chris said.

And they were gone, though I swear Drury gave me the extra-long stink eye.

Shit, shit, shit, I said. There goes New York. They got to be flying the same flight. They just fucking got to be.

Calm down, Chris said. We’ll work it out.

Jesus, Chris. You told them we were waiting for a friend. If we show up on the plane too, they’re going to get suspicious.

He sat for a moment, rocking on his seat, then said, I got an idea.

We raced to the terminal before the boarding call started. Chris explained to the attendant that I had a disability and needed boarding assistance. I began to sway and twitch like I was mentally retarded. This was something we could all do, when needed, since making fun of retarded people was second nature. But I had never needed to sustain the act under such scrutiny and pressure and for so long a time, and the hilarity of it soon changed to shame and desperation. Our seats were the last two on the airplane, by the bathroom. Chris figured that if we boarded first and deboarded last, the Dartmouth cops would never see us, unless they used the bathroom. Knowing they’d had a few beers beforehand made this all but certain. So we pretended to sleep the whole flight with our jean jackets over our faces. Somehow, lulled by the jet engines and the alcohol in my system, I actually managed to get a few winks.

We
had no idea where LaGuardia was, or how it fit in relation to Manhattan. But there were more cabs lined up outside the terminal than I’d ever seen in my entire life. We got in one. The driver was a princely looking Pakistani guy not much older than us with photo booth pictures of his six or seven kids stuck on his dash. Man, you must fuck a lot, Chris said, immediately grooving with the whole New York thing, and the driver laughed and asked, What else when you have no money?

He asked us where we wanted to go. We mentioned Times Square, mostly because it was the one place other than Central
Park either of us had heard of, and we figured sleeping in the park was probably out. The taxi hit the highway hard and got immediately swallowed up by traffic, everyone gunning, surging, stopping, and honking in a clusterfuck of pointless rage.

The driver asked us what hotel and we said we didn’t know.

We’re in your hands, Chris said.

I got you, the driver said. A very good place.

It was shabby and unremarkable from the outside, but there was a doorman in a red uniform out front and that looked promising. The driver jumped out and spoke to the doorman for a moment. I saw something pass between them, and then he was back to Chris’s door, letting him out.

Thank you, my man, Chris said, palming him a fifty.

The doorman took our shitty little bags.

The lobby carpet was worn to the floorboards; the front desk had a Mason jar of plastic flowers.

This is a shithole, I said to Chris.

Who gives a fuck? Chris said. We didn’t come here to sleep.

We got our room, two single beds and a coin-operated television, dropped off our stuff, and hit the street again.

What didn’t we do? Central Park was a jungle of forest, lake, and boulders with suspicious-looking men in jean shorts offering come-hither glances. We walked all the way down the West Side to the very end of Manhattan, stopping at a half dozen bars along the way. We crossed on the ferry to the Statue of Liberty and climbed into her piss-smelling head. We slept on the ferry back, and only woke up when a heavy-set cop kicked our legs and told us no loitering. We wandered into Lower Manhattan, passed graveyards and old churches, and found Wall Street,
which, it turned out, was an actual fucking street, and went on to the World Trade Center towers. We paid for the double elevator ride, and went up first one tower, then the next for two distinctly identical views of Manhattan and the world beyond. Face against the glass, I felt as though I were on the mast of the largest schooner in history, plowing the vast ocean at tremendous speed.

We stared at sex stores and street vendors and sidewalk peddlers. We gawked at high-booted, short-skirted women and enormously Afroed black men. We found ourselves in the general vicinity of the Empire State Building and went up that too. We agreed that the view from this vantage point was somehow more special than the World Trade Center, but conceded the possibility that it was the night sky and all those amazing lights that made the difference. New York looked clean and magical from above. On the street, it was jungle warfare, all leeches and gnats.

But to me, there was something enthralling about it. Gazing down, I realized this is where I wanted to live and die, churned into bits by the discordant, complicated, electron-like hum. I vowed someday I would return, then I actually screamed it into the darkness as I shook the protective cage. I shouted that New York had not seen the last of me. Chris nodded. Yeah, I can see how a guy like you kind of belongs here.

Back near the hotel, Times Square had become a radiance of neon and hookers. We found ourselves in a strip bar where all the women wore cowboy hats. One stood before us with her tray, naked, but for her Texan. Then I noticed something gold and glinting near her vagina, like Frodo’s ring.

What the fuck is that? I asked.

She told me it was an earring.

An earring for what?

For my clit.

Does it hurt?

She laughed. Not anymore.

Can I touch it?

Sure.

So I reached forward and gave it a little bump with my finger. It was the closest I’d come to a pussy all summer. A wonder my hand didn’t explode.

I thanked her and tipped her, and she touched the brim of her hat in acknowledgement and walked off. Moved by some sensory need, I tapped my teeth for signs of life, and they seemed wooden, making me aware of just how exceptionally drunk I’d become. I looked for Chris and realized he was gone. Had he even come to New York? At some point, an old bearded man had sat next to me, looking a bit like Walter Huston in
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
I asked him how he was doing. He said he was doing well enough. I could tell he was homeless, or close to it. There was a way he gripped his drink. I bought us both another round the next time cowgirl came by, and asked him if he ever got tired of looking at strippers.

Not yet, he said.

You seen any Dartmouth City cops around town tonight? I asked after another round.

He laughed and muttered something about no cops showing their faces here.

Good, I said. Those Dartmouth ones are motherfuckers.

He pulled something bushy and black out of his jacket pocket. It looked like a rabbit’s foot, except nine inches longer.

What you got there? I asked, watching him stroke it.

Squirrel’s tail, he said.

I was impressed. It sure as hell was a squirrel’s tail. Big, bushy, and black. I wondered, Did squirrels’ tails fall off like lizards’ tails? Did they shed? Then, blearily, I noticed a red nubby stump at the end of the fur, and a sober understanding came over me.

You ate that, didn’t you.

Walter Huston gave a secretive chuckle. Spent the whole day lying on a park bench with a noose and a peanut, pretending to sleep.

A noose and a peanut, huh.

Then I yanked him tight but good.

What’d he taste like? I asked, though I already knew the answer

Chicken, he confirmed.

He asked if I wanted to smoke up with him. I was surprised and touched. We were on the street soon, sparking up.

I couldn’t tell if there was actually any hash in the hash, but pretty soon there were three others with us, all women. Then Chris joined. I’d forgotten about him. My cowgirl waitress was with him, in her clothes and out of her hat.

I asked her how work had gone, how long she’d worked there, where she lived, what her name was. She had a squeaky voice and a bit of acne on her nose, and probably was around my age. She was my sweet and grimy princess.

Chris pulled her away and proceeded to talk to her, arm over
her head, holding up the alley wall, her giggling, shrugging, nodding, staring up into his eyes with a certain bemused invitation.

You motherfucker, I thought. You move in on anything I even look at.

But it turned out, he’d made a deal for me. And that’s how I got laid in New York City.

We
had twenty-nine dollars between us when we got back to LaGuardia, and spent it on an I Love NY T-shirt for Susan, a bottle of Tylenol for me, and a pack of Juicy Fruit for Chris, the gum closest to a nutrient-supplying fruit or vegetable. We did not see Dartmouth City cops on the return flight, and I’m not sure they would have recognized us regardless.

That
Friday afternoon, Chris strode down the mall corridor and into the bank of our childhood with a large duffle bag. He was wearing a motorcycle helmet, a leather bomber jacket, a pair of acid-washed jeans, and a bright white pair of running shoes. The motorcycle helmet belonged to someone from the shed, left behind because of a sudden downpour and forgotten. Chris snagged it because of the tinted visor. It was not unusual to see someone in a motorcycle helmet walking through the mall. Guys who parked their bikes outside to make a quick purchase did that all the time. The bank was so busy on this Friday that the lineup for the tellers extended twenty feet into the mall, and this made Chris smile as he walked past them. He loved it when an element of planning turned out even better than expected.

He had never felt so calm. He had never felt so strong and sure.

The manager’s office was next to the entrance, across the lobby from the tellers. Chris walked in and saw the manager smile, despite his confusion. Chris reached into the duffle bag and pulled out the hand cannon, the rubber-gripped .357 Magnum, kept it low at his side and spoke calmly.

You know why I’m here. Open all the tills.

The manager paused only a moment to hang his head and close his eyes, then rose from his desk and walked into the lobby. In a voice loud enough to be heard by all of them, he told the tellers to open their tills and step back. Chris leaped niftily over the counter. He waved them all farther back with the water cannon and walked past each teller in turn, scooping out the large bills and shoving them into the duffle bag hanging over his shoulder.

It took about sixteen seconds.

Chris walked by the bank manager.

Thank you, he said.

In the corridor, he broke into a run.

I
sat in the brand-new black Fiero Chris had leased for the occasion, and waited. I was parked along the side of the woods, on the other side of Somerset, but less than a mile from our own neighbourhood. I was parked downhill, emergency brake on, because it seemed that gravity would give us an advantage that way.

The eternity of waiting diminished my sense of time. I was content to sit in a black Fiero forever.

When the thing, the creature, crashed out of the woods twenty or thirty feet down the hill from the car, I did not know what it was. It flailed and struggled through the thick brush like a sasquatch. The head was enormous and bulbous, and it dragged one leg behind it, a dark stain on the hip. I saw the thing reach up and remove its own head, and there was Chris looking wildly about, wet haired and pink cheeked. He saw me and grinned. All this took less than four seconds. I responded to that grin by popping the car into gear, releasing the emergency brake, and surging forward, stopping curbside next to him. He opened the door, threw the duffle bag in, and hissed, Go.

So go I did.

Our
plan had been to hit the highway and disappear into traffic, but there were sirens speeding toward the mall, cutting off our exit. You never quite forget your first siren. The quickest way home was to turn around and head back over Somerset Hill, but I did not want to draw attention to such an odd three-point turn. So I hurtled the car left instead, into the neighbourhood above our old elementary school.