The Deed (40 page)

Painstakingly, the cars followed one another around a broad, dark curve. “Here’s where I get out,” said Jones as the South Ferry northbound station came into view up ahead. He smacked his lips. “Much obliged for your hospitality.”

“Pleasure’s mine,” said Jason, feeling oddly as if he shouldn’t let him go. “Jones, can I…can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“Are you homeless?” he asked bluntly.

Jones looked him up and down. “Is it obvious?” he said sadly, paused, then cracked up laughing. “What a bold question. Finally. Yes, I am indeed rootless, my friend, if that’s what you mean.”

“No offense.”

“None taken. But why do you care?”

“What’s it like?” said Jason.

The car sidled slowly into the South Ferry station, and Jones rose. “Well, why don’t you try it out for an hour or two? Come on with me.”

Jason laughed and shook his head. “No thanks,” he replied, and declined the proffered hand. Behind Jones, the doors slid open wide and hung there. Jones shrugged, still staring at him. The offer was still open, and the doors seemed in no great hurry to close.

“All right, let’s do it,” said Jason, surprising even himself.

Jones beamed. “Glad to hear it, boy. Maybe there’s something to you after all.”

SOUTH FERRY
, 3:15
A.M.

They were walking side by side along a broad avenue between rows of trees, a brisk graveyard-shift breeze at their backs. Behind them, the city was well lit but silent; above, a canopy of stars beamed through fast-moving, but patchy clouds.

“So what do
you
imagine it’s like?” said Jones. “Being homeless.”

Jason pictured all he’d ever heard: the crowded, filthy shelters, being awakened by the smack of a nightstick, relentless cold and filth and hunger. “To be honest?” he said. “It sounds like hell.”

Jones smiled. “Well, ‘hell’ is a mighty strong word. There’s upsides.” He tossed the empty Cuervo bottle into an open garbage can. “You do get to do what you want—don’t answer to nobody. You don’t call no man boss, ever, and that’s a powerful thing. You walk where you want, say what you want, do what you want, all the time.”

“Within the limits of your budget,” said Jason.

“Well, everybody’s got a budget,” Jones replied. “It don’t take long at all to get used to living without fancy clothes and dessert.”

They emerged from the trees and came up to the old Battery fort, facing the Hudson, as it had done for hundreds of years.

“It’s nice right now,” said Jones, looking at the stars. “Spring is the good season. Look at the two of us, out and about with no coats. Now, winter’s the worst. You can’t imagine what winter’s like. You ever been real, real cold, Jason?”

I used to think so,
thought Jason. “No.”

“Well, let’s see…Imagine going out in your underwear to get the mail on the coldest night of the year. Only when you get back with the mail, there’s no house there.”

They crossed the plaza, skirting the great circle of the fort; from here Jason thought he could hear the waves lapping against the shore beyond. It occurred to him that it had stopped raining.

“So…does it balance out?” Jason asked tentatively, hoping the question wouldn’t offend. “The freedom versus the…the discomfort?”

Jones laughed. “How cold would you have to be to wrap a smelly, piss-stained, ratty old dog blanket around you all night?” he asked. “How tired would you have to be to try to sleep on the floor of a bus station men’s room? How hungry would you have to be to beg people for food money, knowing they’re paying you just to get you the hell out of their sight?” He grinned. “No, Jason, it don’t quite balance out.”

Rounding the far side of the fort, the pair made their way down a paved, handrailed esplanade that capped, more or less, the southern tip of the island. The indifferent starlight revealed only the whitecaps against the dark sea, but the sound was soothing, eternal. The World Trade Center towered behind them, lit up like a postcard; it was a sight to behold. Looking out across the water they could see other night lights: the Verrazano-Narrows bridge, Governor’s Island, New Jersey. It was a 360-degree panorama of dizzying beauty.

“I come down here a lot,” said Jones.

“This is incredible,” said Jason. “Look at those lights.”

“That’s Governor’s Island,” said Jones, pointing it out. “Governor don’t live there anymore, though.”

“This is really something,” said Jason appreciatively. “Look, you can see the Statue of Liberty.”

“Liberty Enlightening the World,” said Jones.

“How’s that?”

“That’s her full name,” said Jones. “Patron saint of the homeless, you see.”

Jason nodded silently, watching the tiny green figure and its pinprick torch, keeping eternal watch over the harbor. “‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,’” he recited, feeling competitive.

“That’s it,” said Jones. “See, now that statue
means
something to me. I reckon I’m living as free as a man can be.”

“But you pay a price.”

Jones rubbed his palms on his stubbled cheeks. “Well, here’s my theory. I figure a fella’s born about as happy as he’s gonna get. Your circumstances don’t change that. You can win the lottery and still feel like killing yourself.”

“True.”

“So if you’re a naturally happy person, you go through life finding reasons to be happy. And if you’re naturally unhappy—”

“You’ll always find something to complain about,” Jason supplied.

“That’s right,” said Jones. “Now me, I get beat up a lot. Kids, cops, all kind of crazy fuckers. Bad, sometimes. I’m in a hospital two or three times a year.”

Jason was staring out into the bay, elbows on the handrail. A long barge was slowly knifing southward through the dark waters, trying to find its way out of the harbor.

“Sleeping’s the tough end,” Jones continued. “You go to the shelters, someone steals your shit. Or you catch the TB. You lay your weary ass down in the wrong place, and you get moved on, or some drunk kids might light you on fire. And the worst of it, by far, Jason, is that people hate to fucking look at me. Can you imagine that?”

Jason turned to look at him. “No, I can’t.”

“On the other hand,” Jones said, smiling, “when I wake up in the morning, I got nothing to do, nobody to answer to, no place I have to go. It’s like all Creation just rolls out in front of me brand-new every day.”

Jason nodded, returning his eyes to the bay; the ferry was almost out of sight now. “Where I come from,” he replied, surprised by his own voice, “there are just laid-down ways of doing things. You go to high school, and then you go to college, and you find a wife and you get married, and you have kids, and that’s just how it seems to go. Nobody ever really asks:
Do I want this?
”

“The things of the world are very alluring,” said Jones. “It’s no sin to want them. You can always choose my way, you know.”

“It would be tough to leave it all,” said Jason. “I’m not the ascetic type. If I were home right now, I’d have aspirin, a glass of juice, a warm bed waiting for me.”

“Come on, cast aside your worldly things and follow me!” said Jones, laughing. “I am freedom, Jason. I’ll show you the ways of the street and the art of survival. Bright white guy like you would
thrive
out here. People’d be falling all over each other to give you their hats.” He laughed. “I’m just kidding, of course. You stay put, son.”

Jason nodded; he was checking out Lady Liberty again, pale green against the night sky, in a bay awash with stars.
Liberty or prosperity—which do you want?
he mused, with just a touch of bitterness.
Make your selection at any time.

Seeing the object of Jason’s view, Jones nodded slowly. “I think of her as kind of a fertility symbol, her being green and all. She represents the land of milk and honey.”

Jason shrugged. “It’s the corrosion,” he said absently. “She wasn’t meant to be green. Maybe that’s a symbol of corruption.”

“What’s that now?”

“That’s why the statue’s green,” said Jason, intentionally fuzzing his vision, blurring his focus until he could just see the torch, flaming like another star in the sky. “It’s made out of copper, only it’s been corroded by the salt in the—”

He fell silent.

“The sea breeze?” suggested Jones.

“Holy
shit,
” said Jason, putting both hands to his mouth.

“What’s that?”

“That’s where it is.”

“Where what is? Boy, what in the holy hell are you talking about?”

Jason was giddy with sudden delight. “The red god’s fire,” he said excitedly. “Jones, I’m sorry…I…I gotta go.”

“What? You kiddin’ me? We were just gettin’ friendly.”

“I’m truly sorry, man, I just…Oh, my God, it’s such a long story. I wouldn’t know where to start. I’ll find you again, somehow, I promise. Here,” he said, fishing out his wallet. “You want some money after all?”

“Now you’re just insulting me,” said Jones, waving him off with a hand. “Where you running off to?”

Jason grinned. “I gotta go wake up my girlfriend.”

Bells jangled hard against the glass as she walked in through the door of the coffee shop, and Jason smiled in spite of himself. The flannel shirt and sweats, presumably what she’d worn to bed, looked soft and inviting, and he felt another pang of regret. But it was all going to be all right now.

She found him easily, as he was the only customer, and ambled over warily, her face stony and impenetrable, emotions at bay. That she’d come at all told the whole story anyway. An oversize leather bag swung from one shoulder, as he’d requested.

He imagined what he must look like to Amanda: soaked to the bone and shivering, wet jeans squeaking on the cracked vinyl of the bench with every weight shift, slick hair raining beads all over the Formica. He raised the coffee to his lips—bitter and awful, some of the worst he’d ever tasted, but still an improvement over the puke and tequila on his palate—and drew in its warmth as she walked over.

“Thanks for coming,” he said with a flash of B-movie cool, then cleared his throat as Amanda wordlessly dropped the leather bag on the table and slid into the booth across from him. His excitement threatened to burst all the stops; he had to fight to remain appropriately somber.

Amanda reached into her purse and quietly withdrew a box of cigarettes, tapped the box into the heel of her hand until two bounced out into curled fingers. “No small talk, okay?” she said at last, laying the smokes out carefully on the table.

“Don’t still be mad,” he replied. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what, exactly?” she said a little too easily: a test.

But he was ready. “I’m sorry for leaving when you told me to,” he replied. “I should have demanded that you let me stay so we could work it out. I’m sorry for letting you think for a minute that my interest in you was casual enough to be dismissed like that. Let’s see. I’m sorry for the mess I must look and smell like to you right now. Most of all, I’m sorry for being a general dickhead control freak who loves hearing himself talk so much that he doesn’t know when to shut up.” He shrugged. “That’s all I can think of right now.”

A ghost of a smile creased the corner of her lips, and he knew he had her; her eyes flickered once toward the cigarettes on the table, then back to his eyes. “Not bad,” she said. “You must find yourself apologizing to women a lot.”

He dipped his head in supplication.

“But you
did
forget ‘sorry for dragging you out of bed at four in the morning.’”

Jason shook his head, allowing himself a moderate grin. “
That
I’m not sorry for. If you still feel that way in five minutes, I’ll go away and you never have to see me again, I swear.”

Amanda turned, tried to make eye contact with the waitress. “Can we get—” she began, but he put a restraining hand on her arm.

“I took the
liberty
of ordering for you,” he said. “You and I have a ferry to catch.”

She protested weakly, hating the loss of control, or perhaps just loath to let him escape justice so easily. But this, too, he’d foreseen. Her pride, though considerable, was no match for her curiosity, and they both knew it. In all their time together, he’d never been in charge like this; everything was falling together exactly as he’d imagined. She even looked just as he’d pictured: sleepy and warm, soft sweats encased in an exoskeletal rain jacket, lips partly open. No bra, from the looks of things…right out of bed at a dead run, then.

And so he gently coaxed her back into the comforting fold of the mystery, not to assure her participation—he already had her—but as a gentlemanly gesture to help her justify setting aside her righteous anger. He described the preceding night, that curiously backward chain of events that started in her bed and ended with a wrong-way subway ride to the wrong end of the island—as having been the most amazing night of his life. He painted the tale boldly but with surreal swirls, all the while conscious of time melting away; they had less than an hour to get downtown, and still a stop to make. But it had been a long time since he’d felt so in control, and he frankly didn’t feel like rushing.

“I have a proposition,” he offered. “What do you say we agree to set everything between us aside, just for six hours? We’ll know what we’ve got by then, and we’ll have the rest of our lives to be pissed at each other.”

“Fine,” she said, nodding acquiescence. “So what’s your theory?”

He took a last sip of his coffee, daring himself to drag it out a bit to protect the secret, the revelation of which might sap his newfound strength. But his internal tussle was pathetic; he simply couldn’t deny those impatient almond eyes that clearly weren’t going to look away until they saw what he’d seen.

“It’s in the Statue of Liberty,” he said abruptly. Glancing around self-consciously, he saw the waitress headed toward them with their food, packed in to-go bags as he’d requested. “Up in the torch.”

“No, it isn’t,” Amanda replied, irritated:
We’ve gone over this.
“It’s got to be somewhere on the island.”

“Says who?” he shrugged. “I’m gonna prove it to you. Can I see the clues, please?”

Amanda reached into her bag and withdrew both the map and her mom’s translation, as he’d instructed, in a distracted way that made it clear her mind was racing. She held them out and flipped them over and back, looking for direction as to which side he wanted up, and he set the map faceup on the table with the translation on top.

“‘I dream beneath the red god’s fire,’” he read. “That’s the red herring, you see. Imagine if it had said ‘green god’s fire.’ You’d have said, ‘Oh, Statue of Liberty. Got it.’”

“But it
isn’t
red,” she replied slowly, not sure which one of them was the idiot.

Jason smiled. “It
was,
” he replied. “That statue’s pure copper. If they’d had color photography at the time, you could see a picture. Probably took years for the salty sea air to green it up.”

He could see the truth starting to dawn on her. “Amanda,” he went on, “you always said you thought it would be on the island, and I believed it, too, right from the beginning. You were right about so many other things. But it makes sense, doesn’t it? You don’t keep the deed to your house
in
the house—you find a safe external place.”

She was staring at the table, digesting this, with one hand over her mouth in a way that exaggerated whatever shock his theory had legitimately excited in her.

“Let me lay it out for you,” he said gently. “It’s important to me that you be as convinced as I am.”

She looked at him again and nodded assent, taking a long, slow sip of her coffee.

Jason rubbed his hands together. “Okay. Let’s think about where we think the deed’s been hidden. The old fort, the church, the reservoir building.” As he spoke, he tapped the relevant spots on the map. “These places are about more than just keeping it safe—your ancestors could’ve stuck it behind a brick in the Columbia University Library and never risked moving it. But they didn’t. Why? Because these places are also symbolic places of strength, pillars of the city. You with me so far?”

She nodded, and he went on. “Those symbolic pillars of strength keep moving as the city changes. A pain in the ass to keep moving the deed, but that’s the game. Now picture what the Statue of Liberty must have looked like going up in the 1880s,” he said. “To your people. The head-dress. The masculine face. Honestly, Lady Liberty’s the most
unladylike
statue you ever saw: strong jaw, no tits. I think that whatever the statue meant to my people, to yours it must have looked like Manahata himself.”

He paused; the leading edge of her coffee cup was on the verge of dripping onto the map. Softly, without breaking eye contact, he tilted her hand and cup back up to horizontal.

“Picture your great-great-whatever-grandmother, watching that statue go up,” he continued, rolling up the map for safety and to hasten their departure. “It’s clear it’s going to be there permanently, watching over the city, and it’s obviously hugely symbolic. It’s liberty, freedom—everything your people lost. It’s what recapturing the island would return to them, right?”

He’d never seen her at such rapt attention, and he smiled, remembering their very different roles at their first meeting. “So to recap, an enormous, glistening copper-red statue of an Indian figure rises in the harbor, right about where white men first appeared to
her
ancestors. For someone who felt her race had been kept alive specifically to watch and wait for the return of her God, this would be one hell of a sight, no? How could this construction
not
have been ordained by Manahata himself? It certainly seems to symbolize the fulfillment of his promise.”

He paused to drain the rest of his coffee, now quite lukewarm, and awaited her response.

“Okay, it’s good,” she said at last, picking up one of the two cigarettes off the table and rolling it around in her fingers.

“You bet it is.”

“But that doesn’t mean it’s
there,
” she said, snapping the cigarette in half. “Everything you’ve said would make just as much sense if it isn’t there.”

“But it
is
there, Amanda,” he replied. “I know it with every fiber of my being. I know it’s there just in the way it was revealed to me, if nothing else. I’m telling you, something happened to me last night, something…extraterrestrial. Gotta have some faith, here.”

The waitress poked her head in. “Anything else?”

Get this,
thought Jason, looking around at the empty diner,
she needs the table.
“No, we’re going to get out of here. Thanks.”

The waitress shrugged, and walked away.

“She’s pissed,” said Amanda.

“Wait till she sees her two-hundred-dollar tip,” he said, grinning, standing up to peel the bills out of his wallet.

Amanda finally cracked a smile; he’d breached the wall, and he could see the old enthusiasm rushing in like a torrent. “Jesus Christ, Jason. You really think you’ve got it.”

“No,
we’ve
got it,” he corrected.

“We need my books,” said Amanda. “We need to see what the statue looks like inside.”

But Jason shook his head again. “We can get all the info we need off the Internet. My place is closer, and we need some tools. You print while I pack.”

“What’s the big hurry? It’s four in the morning.”

“Haven’t you ever been to the statue?” he said, grabbing his coat and handing her her bag. “I went with my mom and dad once. You and I are going to be standing in line literally for hours. And if we don’t catch that very first ferry, we’ll never make it up the steps—we’ll have to go back tomorrow,” he continued. “And I don’t think either of us wants that.”

UPPER WEST SIDE
, 5:00
A.M.

“There’s a complication,” said Amanda, at the computer.

Jason was in the bedroom end of the apartment, staring into the empty hull of a flashlight and trying to figure out which way to load the batteries, wishing he had another flashlight with which to peer into the murky depths. His briefcase, disemboweled of papers, lay open on the bed; he was haphazardly filling it with a selection of tools. “What’s that?”

“The torch is closed to tourists,” she replied. “Arm and everything. Has been since 1916—traffic-flow problems.”

“I know that,” said Jason. “In fact, I’m counting on it. And we’re not tourists, anyway—we’re the owners.” Suddenly realizing he’d been agonizing for minutes over a problem with only two solutions, he picked an orientation at random and dropped the batteries in.
Sleep would help,
he said to himself.

The soothing thrum of the printer accentuated the relative silence. “So, how are we going to get into the arm, MacGyver?” she called. “It’s sealed off.”

“I won’t know till we get there. But when I do get in, at least I know I won’t have tourists crawling all over me.” He tested the plastic slide button:
Let there be light.

Amanda’s clicking and clacking resumed. “There are one hundred and sixty-seven steps in the pedestal,” she said after a pause, “and another hundred and sixty-eight from her feet to the observation platform in her crown.”

“Print, don’t read,” said Jason. “And call us a cab, too.”
Crescent wrench, hammer, screwdriver.
“You get the ferry times yet?”

“The ladder has fifty-four rungs. Not yet.”

He made a final check of the briefcase, but it was absurd; he had no idea what he’d encounter, if he could even get in there. He whirled through the room, evaluating possible additions on the fly. The Swiss Army–style utility knife from his top drawer? Definitely—one of those twenty-seven tools ought to be good for something. Map of New York? Sure, why not. Remembering something else, he headed out into the main room.

Amanda was staring into the printer, trying to coax out the last page. “Here,” said Jason, tossing her a bundle of cloth, “borrow a real sweatshirt.” He knelt at the coffee table and unzipped her bag. “I’m gonna hide your mom’s map over the microwave for safekeeping, if that’s okay,” he continued.

“You’re just trying to get me to come back to your apartment,” she accused.