Outerbridge Reach (52 page)

She paused for a moment on deck and then went down into the main cabin. It seemed to her that the interior still held a sullen male smell that suggested violence. She felt it was more than just imagination. She found the innumerable fiberglass patches around the mast step and the splintered bulkheads.

On the flight back to New York, she had nothing to drink but cried unashamedly. The other passengers were mainly Brazilians on their way to Miami. The Brazilians were young, chic and good-humored; many of them appeared to be gay men. A middle-aged lady seated across the aisle from Anne watched her cry, approvingly. Back home, sitting alone in her living room in Connecticut, Anne decided to get some advice regarding Strickland and the film in his possession. That night she called her father.

“So,” Pamela said, “it turned out
really
interesting. They were like doomed.”

“They put it all in one boat,” Strickland agreed.

He was just back from Brazil, having spent a night in Miami en route. The two of them lounged side by side across the great bed, which was covered in a quilt and piled with notebooks. It was an hour or so before dawn and they had both been drinking. “And you like found love.”

He looked at her in dull exasperation.

“I bet you're not so cynical now,” Pamela said, “about love and all.”

“It definitely makes the world go round.”

“But it's all over, right?”

“All over.”

“She hates you, I bet. I bet she hates herself too."

“No doubt,” he said.

“But you're sitting pretty. You have like this
superb
movie.”

“Not yet,” said Strickland.

“I bet it will be
so
good.”

“The potential is there. There's very little on the stuff he shot out on the ocean. The best stuff is him. And the logs.”

“Hey, you can do it, Ron!” said Pamela.

“The logs are astonishing,” Strickland mused. “I have to find a way to get them in. I mean, he quoted Melville. ‘Be true to the dreams of your youth.' He wrote that in.”

“Wow,” she said. “The dreams of your youth?”

“Melville!” Strickland exclaimed.
“Moby
fucking
Dick.
" “Yipes.”

“It's all there,” Strickland said. “I think. But I don't know if I can pull it off.”

He slept briefly, then got up to run the tape again. The blue of the ocean was marvelous. The Owen Browne who appeared on the monitor was a different entity from the tame Connecticut citizen who had set out from South Street. The man on the monitor had blazing eyes and a lupine grin. At first Strickland thought it might actually be another person. The quality of the sound was poor and he could hardly understand a word of Browne's occasional monologues. What little he could make out led him to conclude that Browne had been speculating on weighty matters. The Big Picture.

He began to think about which section of the logs to match with which footage. This would entail a limited degree of deception, since the association between the words and pictures would be arbitrary and imposed from without. It would be in a good cause. While he was deliberating the phone rang. Freya Blume was on the line.

“You may have some legal problems,” she told him. “Widow Browne is claiming the tapes as her property. I think she's going to sue you.”

“She's out of her mind. I mean she's actually gone bonkers. Maybe I can still talk her around.”

“Better watch it.”

Freya had seen difficult times, to say the least, and Strickland was inclined to trust her instinct for trouble.

“Coming into Manhattan?”

“Yes, this afternoon,” she said.

“Come for dinner. I'm going to make duplicate tapes. I can do it on my television. I'll give you a set.”

It occurred to him then that he ought to make duplicates of his copy of Browne's log books. The security of his building was generally good. Nevertheless.

He took the logs and set out for the nearest copy shop, which was at Forty-seventh and Eighth. When the logs were copied he stopped at a grocery to buy penne and mozzarella for dinner with Freya. He was thinking of penne primavera.

Walking west again, he thought he might as well put the duplicates in his storage locker and get it over with. He walked as far as the river.

In the block between Eleventh and Twelfth avenues, a stretch limousine went past him at high speed and someone in the limo seemed to whistle at him. It was a peculiar New York moment. When he got down to the storage building beside his garage on Twelfth Avenue, two young men were engaged in a shoving match.

“You guinea prick, ya!” one of the young men said.

“You no-good Irish asshole,” replied the other.

They were in his way. Both men were smiling foolishly as they quarreled and seemed to have been drinking. Strickland steered a wide course around them, entering the building through the garage entrance. The gasoline smell of the first level of cars brought back to him some childish recollection. He tried to bring it up to consciousness. Long-finned, chrome beauties lined up in a carnival parking lot somewhere. Some field on the edge of a smoky copper town out west on a muddy spring night. A film he had never made, never would.

A middle-aged security guard with a sick pale face and long oily hair stood by the steel door that connected the garage to the storage rooms. The guard simply walked away as Strickland approached the door. It was unlocked. There was no one at the lobby desk to sign in with.

The light in the elevator in which he rode to the next level was defective and the space was lit only by its red emergency sign. The door was slow to open. He got out into the narrow corridor short of breath. Banks of storage lockers stretched to within a few feet of the spongy cement ceiling. There were flaking sprinklers overhead and bare-bulbed lights in wire housings. It was impossible to walk facing forward; he had to ease sideways, clutching the envelopes that contained the logs, to avoid the filthy locker doors. Passing down the first corridor, he felt irritated and depressed, then increasingly anxious. It occurred to him that the logs contained the essence of things. Behind him in the cement room, the old elevator rattled into action. At the first turn of the tier he stopped and looked both ways down the silent rows. The left-hand corridor ended at a blank brick wall. The aluminum sign indicating section numbers was missing and for a moment he could not remember which way to turn. The elevator door rang in the distance. People came out of it. He was momentarily relieved.

Strickland shambled toward his storage locker like a child lost among the attractions. A great sadness had settled on him. It had to do with the woman and the film; he understood that much. Stress and the pains of love. It would be necessary not to drink too much, to exercise and concentrate the empty hours in work. The work would have to make up for a great deal. In his anxiety, he clutched the logs, together with the cheese and pasta, close to his body. A ghostly telephone rang somewhere in the building.

For a moment, Strickland paused in his passage. Regret and longing ached in his throat. They did not suit him. Apparently, he thought, it would be worse than he could ever have imagined. Never had he contrived so strenuously to impress anyone, to beguile and entertain. Certainly he had never sought to be understood before. Quite the opposite. Now, having had her beside him, a companion, bending to his wit and lust and will, he could not forget what it was like. For the first time in his solitary life, Strickland felt himself alone.

“Dumb bitch,” he muttered softly. Immediately he was aware of other voices on the same floor. They seemed to converse in malignant whispers.

At the river end of the building, the storage spaces were larger, divided into sections by metal walls that were scratched with graffiti. Each section was a few feet off the main corridor, approached through a tiny three-sided room. The spaces were protected by a single heavy metal door secured with a combination lock. Strickland hurried on, feeling vaguely frightened and not altogether well. It occurred to him that the security provided was inadequate. When he got the logs out, he decided, he would go to a bank and rent a safe-deposit box. He had never stored anything so at risk before. The distant telephone stopped ringing.

Finding his cubicle, he stood just outside it without switching on the light. The logs were clutched under one arm, the groceries under another. Two men were coming down the corridor; one of them was softly whistling a one-note ditty between his teeth. Strickland experienced an impulse toward full flight. He stayed where he was.

The first thing Strickland noticed about the two men who came up to him was the smell of alcohol on their breath. Even before one reached up and switched on the cubicle light, he knew they were the pair who had been shoving each other out on Twelfth Avenue.

One of the men had thick black hair, brush cut with a lock down the back. Although Strickland had no way of knowing it, the man was called Donny Shacks for his gallantry with the ladies. The second man was fair; confronted with his long lashes and huge irises, Strickland was reminded of his own phrase: “the eyes of a poet.” The poetically-eyed young man was called Forky Enright, from a nasty incident at a New Jersey picnic. They were with an out-of-town local.

“Open it, you fuck,” Donny Shacks said to Strickland. Forky seized the logs from under his arm.

“You drunken moron, give me those!” Strickland shouted.

“Open it,” Donny Shacks repeated.

Strickland bent to open his locker. It was empty. He straightened up again. He was angry and alarmed.

“Those aren't worth anything!” he explained. Forky smiled and began to sing. Donny Shacks looked up and down the corridor.

“Ireland was Ireland before Italy got its name,” Forky sang plaintively. “Ireland is Ireland and Ireland it remains!”

Strickland stared wide-eyed at the minstrel, who sang louder still.

“We're all Roman Catholics! We all go to Mass!

And all you guinea bastards can kiss my Irish ass!”

Donny Shacks reached up and switched out the light.

“Help!” Strickland shouted, without much conviction. “I'll call the p . . p . . p—” He failed to get the word out.

One of them punched him in the face. Strickland flung himself forward in a rage. He had been raised by a woman of genteel pretensions, and violence, although he had experienced a fair amount of it, always opened new and terrifying doors in his psyche. He was resolved to fight for the logs. Only at the last minute did he see the shadow of the implement coming at him. Just in time, he raised his clenched, embattled fists in a defensive posture and felt half a dozen of his knuckles shatter like Christmas ornaments under the blow. It was a baseball bat, hence the land from which no film maker returned. He dived and covered up and took one bad blow at the back of his ribs and a lesser but painful blow across the spine. Most of the others were glancing, aimed generally at his legs, because Forky was quite drunk and out of breath. Donny Shacks had broken Strickland's nose with the first punch.

“P-p-p-p-p . . . pop? P-p-p-p . . . poop?” Forky stood over him in the darkness, leaning on the bat, sputtering like a half-wit. “You better not say cops, you fuck. You was gonna say police? You better not, you fuck, you.”

“All right,” Strickland said from the cement floor. “Take it.”

“You got no fucking respect,” Donny Shacks said to him. “That's the trouble with you.”

When they were gone, he struggled to his feet and found that he could neither straighten out his back nor close one of his hands. His pain felt serious. He stepped over his splattered grocery bag and slowly dragged himself down the ramp that led to the garage. When he got in sight of the street and saw the traffic, he leaned against a guardrail and shouted.

“I'll make it anyway! I'll make it! Anyway!”

The strange thing was that although the garage section was active, with dozens of people coming and going, no one paid the slightest attention to Strickland. Bloody-faced, bent double at the waist, cursing, his crippled, broken left hand supported as in supplication by his right, he made for his car under the unseeing gaze of busy passers-by. It took him prodigies of effort to release the lock of his car and get the door open. Safely behind the wheel, he passed out briefly.

Reviving, he felt irrationally responsible for his own appearance. He wanted not to walk the streets and be ignored. Painfully steering the car with the heels of his hands, he drove down the ramps and pulled up in front of the cashier's station.

The attendant in the booth was the same Latin youth who had been on duty when he returned from Central America. When he handed over his monthly rate ticket, the young man did not return it. Instead, he picked up his clipboard and went out to frown down at Strickland's license plate.

“You can't park here no more,” the boy told Strickland.

“What are you talking about?”

The youth, incensed, grew immediately hot-eyed. “What I said, man. You can't park here no more. 'Cause the space ain't available.”

Strickland looked at him for a moment and said, “I see.” There was no use in arguing.

Wearily and carefully, in the same heel-handed style, he drove across Twelfth Avenue and east on Forty-sixth Street, to park illegally in front of his loft building. He went in slowly, putting one foot in front of the other deliberately, bent-backed. He regretted alarming the pedestrians hurrying by and understood their situation. Not half a block away, three men had been shot down dead for interfering in a duly arranged murder.

Upstairs, he found Pamela chatting with Freya Blume. They were talking about furniture. Both women rose to their feet when he came in.

“What on earth?” asked Freya.

Strickland leaned against one wall and managed to speak. “I think I want a bath.”