The Intruder (17 page)

John G. stops in front of Jake’s house, matter-of-factly opens the gate to the front courtyard, and starts going through the garbage cans as if he’s the owner of this home.

“Get the fuck away from there!” Jake calls down. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

John G. squints up at him, smiles, and goes about the business of looking through all three aluminum cans. When he’s done, he deliberately knocks each one over with a loud crash. Then he bows like an arrogant Flemish fop and leaves the courtyard without closing the gate.

“Did I tell you I’ve been missing some more tools from the van since the weekend?” Philip asks.

“No.” Jake is still shaking with outrage. “What’d he take this time?”

“A tack gun and a Black & Decker power saw. How many vials of crack you think you could buy with those?”

John G. crosses the street and starts menacing an old lady with a walker. He blocks her on the left, blocks her on the right, and then starts walking directly behind her, like a malevolent suitor.

“I swear sometimes I’d like to kill him,” Jake says, wincing as he puts weight on the bad leg.

Philip moves up close behind him. “Forgive me, but have you thought about what I said before?”

“What’s that?”

“About you and me paying him a visit with a baseball bat.”

Jake just looks at him. Everything seems very still. The Broadway traffic noises have faded away. Even the birds seem to have stopped singing. The only sounds are John G.’s distant cursing and the dull thud of Philip’s sash weight hitting the obstruction.

“I’m a lawyer,” Jake says quietly.

“I know you’re a lawyer.”

“So I can’t go around whacking people just because I have a problem with them.”

“Who said anything about whacking anybody? I’m just saying we should have a talk with the guy.”

“A talk.” Jake turns his head and looks sideways at the sky.

“Yeah.” Philip shrugs
fuhgedabout it
-style, shoulders back, palms up, as if all they’re talking about is a paint job. “I mean, he can’t be that crazy, he keeps coming right up to the line without crossing it. I say we go over to where he lives, try to talk some sense into him.” He wraps the rope around his knuckles. “You know where to find him, right?”

“He’s out every night by seven-thirty, begging for crack money on Broadway. By ten o’clock, he’s hollering under our window.”

“Minchia,
if they could get somebody to run the subway that regular, it’d still be a beautiful city.”

Jake decides to let that go.

“Look, what are your options?” asks Philip, pulling up his sash weight and mopping his brow. “You already been to the police and you been to the doctors, and basically no one else gives a shit. What are you gonna do? Sit back and wait ‘til this miserable fuck kills someone?”

“So you’re suggesting we go seek him out for the purpose of intimidating him?” Jake’s head wags from side to side.

“Listen, if you don’t want to do it, you don’t wanna do it,” Philip says, putting a brotherly hand on Jake’s shoulder. “To me, it’s no big deal. I was over in Nam. I know how to handle myself. I’d bring my cousin Ronnie and we’d have a talk with the guy. Not busting heads. Just letting him know we don’t appreciate the way he’s acting. But if that’s too ... I don’t know, heavy, for you, then forgive me for saying it. I just know that where I come from, a man can’t go too far to protect his own family.”

Jake stands quietly for a moment. He thinks about his wife
staring out the window and his son standing by the door, hesitating before going out in the morning. He thinks about the long silences at the dinner table and the ways their lives have gotten smaller and smaller, hemmed in by apprehension. And he thinks about the pair of headlights coming right at him on Seventy-ninth Street.

“Supposing I decide to go along with this, up to a point,“ he says to Philip. “What if I got a bad feeling along the way? Would you be willing to pull back?”

“It’s your call, Counselor. I’m just here to help.” Philip gets ready to drop the weight again. “But let me tell you, you gotta draw the line somewhere. The guy stole my tools, not once but twice. If you’re not in with this, maybe me and Ronnie will handle it on our own.”

The sash weight goes down and Jake hears something breaking in the chimney. He sees another six feet of rope get swallowed up. Then the weight stops again.

“Ah shit,” says Philip.

“What’s the matter?”

“You got another obstruction.”

“Is that bad?”

“There’s only two ways you deal with a blockage.” Philip gives him a hard, serious look. “You try to destroy it from the top, and if that doesn’t work, you have to reline the whole chimney, chop into the walls on every floor of your house, and break the mantels over the fireplaces. And then you live with a terrible scar on every floor.”

“What happens if you just leave it there and don’t do anything?”

“The exhaust from your boiler backs up and you can slowly choke to death on the carbon monoxide.”

24

At quarter to eleven two nights later, a man with a Burmese mountain dog walks past the baseball diamond at the south end of Riverside Park. Sodium vapor lights cast an eerie glow over the batting cage. Philip Cardi and Jake stand in the shallow part of the outfield, staring at the hole in the fence they just saw John G. go through.

After a couple of minutes, Philip’s cousin Ronnie, a swarthy Italian kid in enormous black shorts and a Snoop Doggy Dogg T-shirt, comes down the hill carrying a couple of aluminum baseball bats.

“Were they in the trunk like I said?” Philip grabs one from him and takes a practice swing.

“In the back.”

“Hey, what do we need these for?” asks Jake nervously.

“We need them so we don’t have to use them,” says Philip, resting the bat on his shoulder. “You understand what I’m saying? Where we’re going, we don’t want anybody to get the wrong idea about messing with us.”

For the last couple of hours, they’ve been following John G. from a discreet distance. Stopping at a coffee shop while he rummaged through cans in front of Gristede’s. Watching from a corner bodega while he tried unsuccessfully to buy crack on Amsterdam. But now that he’s disappeared into the mouth of the tunnel, they’re hesitating.

“So we’re really gonna do this, huh?” says Jake, looking back at the hole in the fence some fifty yards away.

“Why, you got a problem with that?”

Philip turns slowly. Jake can feel the potential for disappointment coming up like a wall between them.

“I’m just starting to wonder if this is still such a good idea.”

Ronnie windmills his bat like a charter plane’s propeller. Jake notices his black sneakers have blinking red lights in the back.

“So where’s all this coming from?” Philip says. “We’re not breaking any law here.”

“I know we’re not breaking the law. It’s just, you know, I have a bad feeling about it.” Jake looks away. It’s like he’s punking out of a street fight in front of Sweet Tooth’s.

“A bad feeling? What’re you, afraid of a railroad tunnel?” Philip takes another swing. “Forget about it. I was on one of the crews that helped clear out the tracks a few years ago. I know my way around there better than most of the bums. We had kids coming down there all the time, trying to ride in our geometry cars. We hadda shoot them with salt pellets, make ‘em go away.”

“But what if something goes wrong? How would I explain it to my family?”

Ronnie and Philip look at each other. Then Philip spits on the grass and hands Jake the bat he was swinging.

“Here, hold this a minute.”

He bends down to tie his shoe.

“Jake,” he says, “you and me, we’re men of the world. Am I right?”

“I guess.” Jake feels his palms and fingers sweating on the taped bat handle.

“I mean, we’ve both been around—even if you weren’t in Vietnam. We see how things operate.”

Philip stands up and Jake gives the bat back to him. “You could say that.”

Philip smacks the ground with the bat. “So one thing we understand that women and children don’t understand—that most
people
don’t understand—is that nothing important in life is ever accomplished without risk. Okay? There’s always a chance somebody’s going to get hurt.”

Jake stares hard at him, knowing it’s true and wondering how Philip can know him so well. For every significant achievement in his life, there’s been an underlying threat of emotional or physical violence: standing up to his father, destroying his best friend, Joe Loehman, during moot court in law school, regularly eviscerating witnesses on the stand. His guilty secret, which he’s never admitted to anyone, including his wife, is that success has always come at the end of a dagger pointed at someone else’s heart.

And now he sees that in order to protect his family he has to be willing to do it again.

“So all right already, where’s the opening to this goddamn tunnel?” he asks Philip. “I don’t want to stand here all night.”

“Good man.”

Philip pats him on the back and they cross the outfield toward the wrought-iron fence. Philip’s flashlight quickly finds the opening they saw John G. go through and the three of them squeeze between the bars. They make their way along the ledge and then drop down, one by one, onto the tracks.

The first thing that strikes Jake as he struggles to get his flashlight working is that it’s the darkest place he’s ever been. Even by shutting his eyes, he’s never experienced such blackness. Philip’s flashlight illuminates a foot or two of track before them and Ronnie’s sneaker lights blink faintly behind them, but otherwise there’s nothing. Not even vague shapes or nuances. This must be what it’s like inside a coffin.

There’s a shivering sound, like an electric current snaking through the tracks.

Jake takes his first steps carefully, trying to figure out where the third rail might be. His left leg still hurts a little from the bicycle accident and he has the uneasy feeling that people are watching him.

“Freaky deaky,” Ronnie mumbles.

But Philip’s flashlight is already pushing on ahead, challenging them to follow. Something passes lightly over Jake’s left foot, and a second later, he realizes that it might have been a rat. Every nerve in his body is straining, telling him to go back home, fix himself a drink, and snuggle up in bed with Dana. But if he leaves now, he’s a coward. Not just in Philip’s eyes, but in his own. He
finally gets the flashlight working and moves to catch up with Philip.

The tracks begin to curve around to the left and Jake smells leaves burning in the distance. The smells of September. After a few seconds, he catches a glimpse of fire.

Philip’s beam moves toward it quickly, lighting up sections of track, old hubcaps, and stray garbage along the path. The flame is about forty yards away, under a rounded stone archway. A wild orange light throws shadows of crude housing against the walls.

“Welcome back to Planet of the Apes,” says Ronnie.

The sound of rolling tin approaches. Closing in from the right.

“Stop your mouth,” says Philip.

He swings his flashlight beam toward the noise, splashing Jake’s face with light before he finds a short one-armed man with a shopping cart full of cans. He’s like some kind of drugged-out troll with his ripped clothes and burnt-looking scalp.

“Ow, my eyes. What’re you doing, man?”

“Where’s the other guy?” Philip says.

The man shields his face with the one arm. “Who?”

“We’re looking for John Gates,” Jake speaks up. “The white guy who wears the MTA shirt.”

“John G.?” says the troll, making the name sound like a curse. “He lives over in the suburbs with Rat Man.”

He points to the fire under the archway on the left. “Hey, Abaham!” he calls out. “Company! Man wants to talk to John G.”

A black man’s voice answers from somewhere under the archway, but the words are lost in the rumble of West Side Highway traffic overhead.

Philip’s flashlight beam moves toward the sound but finds only a flaming oil drum.

“Abraham, come the fuck out, man!” the troll yells. “These people came to see youse guys.”

More rats scurrying. The shivering sound again. Jake glances behind him and sees that the lights at the south end of the tunnel are gone. There’s no easy way to turn back.

“Who’s that calling out my name?” Abraham shouts.

Jake raises his flashlight and sees a tall black guy in a baseball cap stepping from behind the fire. As he comes toward them, dreadlocks swing like a ragged curtain around his head.

“Yo, get that shit outta my eyes,” he says. “You tryin’ to blind me?”

Jake moves the beam away from his face and sees a second shadowy figure emerge from behind the fire. Bony hips, lopsided walk. There’s no mistaking John G.’s silhouette.

“Yo, whatchoo you looking for, man?” says Abraham, moving out of the light’s beam as he approaches. “This is my tunnel. Who invited you down here?”

As Philip moves past him to confront Abraham, Jake catches a sour tart odor with a sting on the end of it. House scotch. It takes a couple of seconds to fully register that his new friend has been drinking. He suddenly has a vision of himself tied to a huge rock rolling down a steep hill.

“We’re not interested in you,” Philip says to Abraham. “It’s your friend we wanna talk to.”

“Well, he’s with me,” says Abraham. “You wanna talk to him, you talk to me.”

Jake hears the tap of metal on metal to his right. Ronnie touching one of the rails with his aluminum bat; he better watch it, or he’ll catch six hundred volts. A train horn blares.

Philip raises his flashlight again and shines it in Abraham’s eyes.

“Whaddya, deaf, asshole? I just said I don’t wanna talk to you. I wanna talk to your friend.”

“Yo, what’d I tell you, man, about keeping that light outta my eyes?”

Jake moves his flashlight beam around until he finds John G. standing a little bit behind Abraham, wobbling and squinting as if he’s just waking up from general anesthetic.

Again, he seems so vulnerable. Jake has to remind himself that Gates almost caused him to get hit by a car the other night.