Love and Other Ways of Dying (32 page)

You saw this big gash in the ice, smelled the sickening smell of jet fuel, and you—you, Lenny Skutnik, government clerk—could see bodies floating around, human hands and legs trying to hang on to the wrecked tail of the plane like toddlers without water wings, one moment hurtling down a runway, then suddenly thrown tumbling into this slushy water. It didn’t compute: your life, then these bodies. A bystander, a sheet-metal worker, was already down by the water’s edge, and people were trying to tie a makeshift line around him. One woman was taking off her nylons to add to some jumper cables—her naked legs gooseflesh in that silver light. The sheet-metal worker had his coat and boots still on, and he began to wade into the river, thirty-three-degree water, sucked in hard, walked up to his knees, thighs, waist, walking as if he’d suddenly become the Tin Man, but that’s as far as he got before a helicopter appeared and you all pulled him back in.

Now everything moved in horrible slow motion. More people were slipping and sliding down the embankment, maybe fifty on the shore, watching the helicopter hover over the dazed, iced bodies in the river. Up on the bridge, there were more people, throwing rope to yet another survivor, who was trapped beneath the ice, trying to punch up through it. Over the open water, near the plane’s tail, the helicopter dangled a lifeline with an open-noosed strap. There were three men and three women there. One of the men just seemed to disappear beneath the surface—gone. Another struggled to shore, and then another made it, too. But one of the women—you could tell she was in trouble. Somewhere on the river’s bottom were her husband and her newborn baby, and somehow she had popped up on the surface, completely lost and pale, with a broken leg and some dim understanding that she needed to keep her mouth above the waterline, though the
rest of her, that broken body of hers, just seemed to want to sink back down to her family.

The helicopter lowered itself, blowing everything sideways, bossing everything silver. Rotor blades shot wind under the skin of the wreckage and flipped the woman over with a piece of metal from the tail, flicked her like an insect. Flailing in that open water, wearing red, she reached for the lifeline, grabbed it, but then didn’t have the strength to hold on when the helicopter rose. Again and again, same thing. The pale woman somehow struggled up onto a slab of ice, wobbling, and the lifeline came down, and you saw her grabbing it in slow motion, excruciating, and her whole body dragged back in the water, her lame leg dragged behind her. But then she couldn’t hold on, let go with one hand, then two, and fell back in the water, in one pathetic, stonelike splash, washed under by the deafening sound of the chopper, which itself had become some kind of demented bird in this slow torture.

And suddenly, impossibly, out of nowhere—you! Her head underwater, fifty people gawking from shore, fixed in place, the sky spitting moon, and you just went. Like, outta here! Boots off! Reached down and yanked them off and tore off the puff jacket, just ripped loose of that thing, down to short sleeves—the same shirt as other days—and just leaped from the bank. Didn’t think, didn’t care. Just out of nowhere, roaring, skipping minutes, slicing between them, speeding time in order to get to this woman before she vanished, too. Out of nowhere, you, in the drink, in that slushie, windmilling like a sicko, a slashing fury of strokes. A blur. Fifty people standing there, and you, like, That’s it! Enough! She’s coming with
me.

You powered to her, six ferocious strokes through electro-cutingly cold water, got to her at the give-up point, the sayonara-this-life split second, her eyes rolling back in her head. She was gone, unconscious and sinking, and you just grabbed her. You
didn’t feel anything. Not cold—nothing. Claimed her, took her back from the river. Pulled her head up, then pushed her to shore, like water polo. Handed her off to a fireman who’d waded in. Dragged yourself to shore on your own. Stood up, soaking wet, breathing—yes, breathing!—looked back at the wreckage, and, once you knew everyone would get out, started up the embankment, picking up your puff jacket, looking around for your carpool, thinking: Time to go home. Let’s go.

But then some cops corralled you. Led you to an ambulance. You said, Is this gonna cost me anything? I don’t make no money. Free, they said. Someone put a hand on your back, and you got in. Noticed for the first time that your feet were cold. Missing your watch and a pack of cigarettes.

That’s when it began, that’s when the other Lenny Skutnik was born, when you realized what you’d actually done. Then found out it had been captured by a camera crew on the bank. At the hospital, they gave you a warm bath and some food, and as you were getting ready to go, they asked if you would answer some questions from the reporters. The story was out, the lead already written: In the nation’s capital today, a blizzard and a plane crash. Seventy-eight dead. A gaping hole in the ice, and debris floating in the water. Helicopters circling, looking for survivors. Rescue crews waiting on the shore to rush the victims to the hospital. The media already had that part down, had their victim, too: Priscilla Tirado, the woman in the water. Now they needed their hero.

So you answered a few questions: Why’d you do it? Something just told me, Go in after her. Would you do it again? Yes, I’d do it again. Simple stuff. Obvious. Time to get home.

But no one would let you go. There was just this great, gaping need for you—not the Lenny you, the brick-subdivision guy, the government functionary; no, they wanted the hero you, the part of you in them that they most needed to see and touch and
believe in. The part of them that went diving into that icy water with you. On
Nightline
, Ted Koppel told you, It’s not only courage—there has to be a certain kind of magnificent insanity about it all. You said, Something just told me to go in after her.

The morning shows, newspapers, magazines paraded into your living room. They made you into a soap opera star. Lenny and Priscilla, Priscilla and Lenny. Hero and victim, victim and hero. They hauled Priscilla’s father-in-law, father of her dead husband, into your living room and tried to film him crying in front of you. You said, Wait a minute! Wait! Took him away from that camera, back into the bedroom. You wanted to beat the hell out of that network guy.

When people heard you lost your watch, you were offered a hundred new ones—then trips to Hawaii, Canada, Puerto Rico. President Ronald Reagan invited you to his State of the Union address, seated you and your wife up there in the balcony with his elegant wife, Nancy—nice, nice woman. President went drifting off on some yabble about American heroes, suddenly mentioned your name, and the whole place erupted. Democrats and Republicans leaped to their feet. Hear, hear! Lenny!

You got two thousand letters, some running deep with emotion. People wrote and said they were jumping up and down in their living rooms in front of their televisions, crying, screaming, watching that girl drown, saying, Do something! Do something! Some told you they had always been terrified to express their true feelings about anything in their real lives. Then suddenly they were jumping up and down in their living rooms, screaming, blubbering at the television. You came out of nowhere, dove into that dark river for them, pulled them out, too.

So that was it—you became public property, a character in your own life. Without wanting any of it, you were shot from a cannon, along the Icarus arc of American hero-hood. Didn’t matter
that every day, today even, there are people out there pulling bodies from some wreckage. That there’s someone taking a bullet right now on some school playground. Seventy-eight people died in that crash. Hard to think of heroes when an image plays in your mind of that one survivor who surfaced in the wrong place, couldn’t break through; people on the bridge saw his face pressed against that ice, alive, guppy-mouthed. And then he was gone.

No, the sweetest thing about that day wasn’t the name they gave you—no, that seemed more like a joke—but when the day actually ended, when you got back to Lorton at about 2:00
A
.
M
. Nearly seventeen years later, you remember it as if it were last night. Awesome tired. A little stiff. Everything in your brick subdivision was absolutely still and glittering with ice, strung yet with some Christmas lights, just solidly, beautifully there, and you started up the walk. Shoes crunching on the snow.

Never forget that: the clean smell of winter, the mysterious dark in all of those houses, and, inside, these men and women, your neighbors, drawn together, wrapped in each other, in their bedrooms sleeping—these mothers and fathers having begotten children who would one day beget their own children, and all of you wrapped together. Cemented together like these brick buildings. A light was on in your brick house, you remember that. A woman in the kitchen and a newborn kid. Your family, Lenny Skutnik. And the moon—it just kept falling, kept swirling down on you. It was suddenly as if you were drawn by a fast-moving current, reaching for a lifeline, moving toward some deeper place. And then you were up the steps, through the door, lost in that hundred-watt light. Home.

Now melt the snow, put the leaves back on the trees, recandle the sun to an unholy burn, turn up the heat. Home is this weltering
hole called Tamarind Avenue. Home is a cyclone of red dust rising off this dirty concrete, this slow-motion manifestation of the devil. This oven of junkies and prostitutes and gangbangers in West Palm Beach, Florida—all of them stumbling between the street and their shotgun-shack shooting galleries. Down on Tamarind Avenue, it’s a war between good and evil.

Yeah, the devil is loose here—devouring your people, these good brothers and sisters. Every day, you wake up dressed for the war. You shave your head clean, wear a Tut beard. You batten black fatigues over this six-foot-three, three-hundred-pound mountain, this massive, immovable muscle that is you. You wear scuffed black army boots purchased at a military surplus store, hang an old African coin around your neck. Same likeness as you, see? You walk with a wooden staff, stride manfully among the masses, speaking your version of the Word: Who’s up? God is up. Who’s up? The Lord is up. Who’s up? We up. Plain and simple. You’re the pure-brother street preacher, known in these parts as Mr. Samuel Mohammed, the dude who shot one dope pusher four times at close range, then later burned down the neighborhood crack house. As you see it, both were acts of mercy. Yeah, mercy, my brother. Add that mercy to some TV face time, and it makes you what they call a folk hero.

But you’re not anything as earthly as a hero. You see yourself as the messiah. The one that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., implied would lead the people to the Promised Land. The commander, see? The cosmic commander. Plain and simple. Out here, there’s an affliction called urban psychosis. It’s like guinea worm—it starts on the inside, in your belly, then eats its way out through the flesh. A murder a day. Rape and AIDS. The candies of choice: crank, horse, crystal meth. Makes for tremors and itchy trigger fingers; turns people into needling, screwing, wanting animals—dogs. Live down here on Tamarind Avenue, and you’ll see bodies
laid out like starfish under a purple sky after another drive-by, see bawling families doing a Saint Vitus’ dance around their dead. Live down here, and you’ll have some junkie roll you for five bucks, a SIG .45 pressed to your temple.

When you first came to Tamarind Avenue, you went to work at a laundromat, a place not far from the railroad tracks. You were college educated, played football at Jackson State, got a black belt in jujitsu, worked as a bodyguard for all of these big stars: Whitney, Boyz II Men, Luther. It was your job to suss out the succubus and incubus, to laser-beam the lowdown, petty psycho-freaks who gain celebrity by taking out a celebrity. It all fell to you, the big-boy gatekeeper, the pulling guard, the black-belt ass kicker. And now you, Mr. Samuel Mohammed, made change for the old ladies at the laundromat, turning their dollar bills into quarters, which were like tiny, silver pennies in your huge hands. But then you were preaching the Word, too: Watch it now! We comin’ up! Victory must be ours! Constellations of sweat spread over your smooth head from the heat of clothes dryers as you were railing against social injustice, the bureaucracy, and fleshly, human weaknesses. Time to pick ourselves up, hear! Ain’t no one gonna do it for us—no politician or white man, no one living in a mansion! Yeah, talk is cheap—chitter chatter, blither blather, politicking and overlooking! Plain and simple. Don’t need no fleshly promises; we stand here on high ground, on the promises of the Almighty!

The day you shot that teenage dope dealer, well, that had been brewing for a long time. Next to the laundromat was a grocery store, and that’s where, in broad daylight, these drug lords were cussing and selling crack and pushing prostitutes. You, Mr. Samuel Mohammed, sat with the old ladies as they washed and dried their pinafores and undergarments, their blouses and socks, talking to them about the Scriptures. And these old ladies, most
of them were too afraid even to go to their mailboxes to get their Social Security checks, so when you heard the profanity outside, you approached these drug lords. One of them mouthed off—the boy was strung out, deep-fried—and there was a confrontation. A few days later, he came back and nailed you with Mace. And that’s when he threatened to kill you, kill the messiah.

On Tamarind, a threat like that is as good as having done it. And the next time he found you at the laundromat, he was waving a gun. That was his mistake, my friend, for instantly he was disarmed of his weapon, and without thinking, you turned it on him. Four shots that took him off his feet, blew him right parallel to the ground, floating up in the air and down again. Left him lying there leaking his own blood like thick oil. Then you prayed for him. On the very spot where you shot him, you prayed for him. Prayed to your Father. And so the boy lived. The Father heard the prayer of his only begotten Son and let the boy live—your first miracle. They took him away in an ambulance, and you never got charged. Cops didn’t see it as mercy but self-defense.