The Railroad (5 page)

“I want to take a walk,” I told Barbara.

She stared at me questioningly. I saw her eyes stray back to the television. For some of us, it had become a lifeline to something. It was as though watching the coverage of the search for survivors allowed each of us to accomplish something; to fix things. For me it was slightly ghoulish. “What’s outside?” she asked.

“The world. Reality. That,” I said, pointing at the TV,” is a rehashing of the same shit. It’s become unreal.”

She stared at the TV sadly. “Let’s be alive,” I said, trying to get her attention. “That’s what counts.”

In the end she went with me, though grudgingly. We made our way southward toward Union Square Park. Like everyone else around us, we paused to read almost every handout. I was appalled to realize that I was recognizing almost all of them as ones I’d seen before. Certain of them had planted themselves in my mind’s eye; the young pretty girl with the Italian last name who seemed like someone I might have known; the happy looking Latino man whose family missed him; the elegant older man who’d obviously been a power broker in one of the investment firms in the Trade Center.

That day the park was a totally different animal. The first thing I noticed was that there were more people there than I’d ever seen. The second thing was that the fences had been trampled and people were sitting on the sacred young grass that was usually off limits. Like naughty children, a hundred people had violated the rules we’d all lived by.

“Oh God,” Barbara whispered at my back. I turned and followed her gaze to one of the many statues nearby. A stone man rode a stone horse, his sword raised in defiance. I had passed him a thousand times but, this time, beneath him, were what looked like a hundred small memorials. Pictures crowded each other for space. On the ground in front of each of them was a candle. Candle wax was everywhere, flowing in pools around small shrines dedicated to people whose lives had been ended pointlessly. Interspersed with the photos were small messages with personal thoughts about war and terrorism and death.

We spent a half an hour in the park; I was starting to feel overloaded by all the misery.  “This is depressing. I think I’ve had enough,” I told Barbara.

She stared at me strangely; it seemed she’d been in mid-rant and I’d cut her off, having stopped listening to her quite a while before. I’d been through enough arguments with here to know that it was something her father had done all through her childhood and that it was crime in her eyes.  She walked stiffly behind me as we made our way west, back to my apartment. I found myself trying to think of excuses to get rid of her, but nothing plausible came to mind. As we passed the entrance to the subway, I saw a carefully hand-lettered sign hanging from one of the park walls:

If peace were our only option, we’d all be speaking either Japanese or German.

I laughed, treasuring the cleverness of the writer, though I might not have agreed a hundred per cent with the pat philosophy. Barbara studied me quizzically but I found I didn’t care to share the joke with her.

*

That night I watched the news; a bad idea considering I was doing my best to put everything out of my mind. I’d managed to gain a certain sense of stability with the help of some single malt scotch.

As I watched I began to get annoyed. I had already gotten tired of seeing still another shot of the towers falling, the interviews with the families hoping to hear from their loved ones. As time went by it had come to seem like someone
had
to cover the story until it played itself out. The coverage was repetitive, the analysis vague and speculative.

There was one story that was conspicuous for its lack of connection to the towers. A car had been found on a side road in Rockland County, empty of passengers. It had been registered to a Sally Brodman who recently had been involved in a custody battle with her husband. Skid marks seemed to indicate that the car had been forced to a stop. There was no evidence of what happened to Sally and her daughter Taylor, except that the numbers 4, 5, and 1, separated by dashes, had been written in what looked like blood on the left rear door of the car. Her husband was being questioned though no suspects had been officially named.

It had just the right eerie ring to bring my hard won sense of calm crashing down on me. It seemed like the perfect post 9/11 creepiness. More than I wanted to think about just then. I went and made myself another drink.

*

“You have to come out drinking. It's Saturday night. Stop being an asshole.”

Dennis was my best friend and the only one who could have shaken me loose from my self-imposed exile. Since my walk in the park with Barbara, I’d avoided her and everyone else. I felt something like a virulent flu growing in my insides; though it wasn’t physical, it felt just about as bad. I suppose I could have taken an easy out and called it Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. A diagnosis makes everything easier.

After a couple of weeks of my not calling him, Dennis decided that he’d had enough. He worked on me for ten minutes on the phone before I saw the wisdom of his words: I wasn’t being me and I wasn’t being healthy; only getting back on the horse would help. I wasn’t sure that I believed him, but I wanted to. So I went a few blocks over to the “Isle” as we called it. I had always felt a strange pride in going there; it was a real New Yorker’s bar, unknown by most of the yuppie swarm, old, and in its own low-life way, exclusive.

The ceilings were genuine old New York tin, the floors tiled and the booths separated by glass partitions. There was nothing interesting around it worth speaking of, inhabiting, as it did, a block of warehouses and wholesale businesses. It probably had looked much the same since it was built.

I was keenly aware of the churning in my guts that had been my constant companion for the last few days as I made my way down the floor between the bar and the booths. I found Dennis and another man in conversation halfway along the bar itself. Dennis smiled. “I saved you a stool, dude.”

He  signaled the bartender. “I thought that drinking together would help you remember what you do for fun.”

I snorted, and then nodded at our bartender. Colm was a typical New York Irish bartender; half friend and half server. After a couple of years of coming to the Isle, we’d established a good rhythm. Colm poured with a free hand, charged us almost nothing, we gave him ridiculously generous tips and everyone was happy. I had even availed myself of his services as temporary therapist on a couple of nights when Barbara was too much for me to handle.

“How’re you doing, Mike? Haven’t seen you for a few days, can you believe this shit?” He nodded at the television above the bar, blaring 9/11 news like some infomercial.

“I don’t have any choice but to believe it,” I told him.

“Mike was down there when it happened,” Dennis told anyone who happened to be listening.

“Oh shit!” Colm commiserated. “I’m sorry, man. My brother-in-law was down there and he told me it was horrible.

I felt some eyes boring into me. “It was. But right now I’d like a drink.”

“Certainly, Mike. What’re you having?”

I looked up at the rack to see if
it
was there and Colm smiled. “We just got some in. I kept it under the bar for you.” He reached down and lifted up a greenish bottle, the seal still over the cork.

Dennis grunted. “Not that again, Mike.”

Colm held it under his nose. “When I was little the old folks by the coast still would burn this stuff to heat their houses. This brings back memories.”

“It brings back my lunch,” Dennis mumbled.

Colm poured me a stiff one, making a show of it. There’s nothing like being treated like you’re special in an Irish bar; for a moment I forgot what was eating at me.

“What did they burn?” Dennis asked. “Whiskey?”

“No. This is a single malt from the Isle of Islay. They burn peat moss to give it its special flavor.”

He read the label. “La Phrug?” he said, butchering the name. “Sounds French.”

“It’s Laphroaig, like
boy.
”

Colm poured my drink and I raised my glass. “To New York,” was all I could think of at first. “Liver ho!” I added, to Dennis in particular.

“Yeah,” said a man down the bar who I’d never seen before. “To the ones who died”. A few other glasses were raised and the toast completed.

“Oh god!” Dennis screamed, holding up his glass and studying it. “This is awful.”

“What’s liver ho mean?” someone asked.

Colm snorted. “It’s their own language. No one knows what it means. They won’t say.”

Dennis drained the water that Colm had placed in front of him. “Okay,” he said, fixing me with his best glare. “What’s been with you lately? You don’t say anything when I call you, you don’t come out.”

I wished he hadn’t asked me anything; the feeling in my gut was back. “You ever get into a car accident?” I asked him.

“You’re going to tell me about the subway.”

“I
can’t
tell you about the subway. There’s no way to tell you.”

“Come on, Mike! This is me. This is Dennis."

I had to laugh. He was drunk and he was saying the deep things that drunken people say. “Maybe I should talk about this later. All I can tell you is that it was something so different than what I’ve experienced as Mike the systems analyst that it can’t really be put into perspective in the Emerald Isle.”

Dennis looked crestfallen; I couldn’t blame him; I was essentially shutting my best friend out of a part of my life. But he couldn’t have been part of it. I put my hand on his shoulder. “Dennis. I’m going to come out of this. That’s why I mentioned the car accident. I remember a friend of mine who spun out of control when he was getting on the Long Island Expressway. He spun a couple of times and missed another car by a few feet. For a couple of days everything was different for him and he couldn’t really make anyone understand.”

“So you’ve had your couple of days,” Dennis countered. “It’s time to come out of it.”

“It’s different when the car accident is all around you.”

He stared at me. Then he ordered another Laphroaig. I guess it was as close to expressing solidarity as he could get at the moment.

The drink came and we both sipped. I watched Dennis make nasty faces as he tasted the whiskey. Then a man walked out of the back room. He was of medium height and he walked like a bantam cock, all full of anger and bullshit. I’d seen him somewhere before.

“Oh shit!” whispered Colm.

I looked over. “That’s Sean, the owner’s son, fresh from the army,” Dennis told me. “He’s feeling his oats I guess.”

“He wasn’t a lot of fun before and now he’s worse,” Colm added.

Sean pulled his drink from the bar and stood, legs spread wide, staring up at the TV. I had attempted to ignore the talking heads on the screen, though most of the people at the bar were transfixed. A commentator was discussing the deployment of the Al-Qaeda terrorists and how the entire attack on the Trade Center had been planned over years. Every once in a while Sean would scowl at the screen and scream some obscenity, making an already nervous crowd jump in their seats.

Colm sighed. “He’s been this way since he was a lad. Now it’s worse.”

“Why doesn’t his father take care of his patrons and tell his son to shut up?” Dennis asked.

“Declan is up in the Bronx tending to his other bar. Believe me; if he was here he’d kick the boy’s ass. Tonight, he’s in charge.”

We watched as one of Sean’s friends tried to calm him, gesturing toward a chair. “I’ll buy you a drink,” I heard his friend say.

Sean rounded on him like he was a terrorist himself and screamed, “Shut up! I’ve got my bayonet at home and I know what I’m going to do with it!”

His friend raised his hands to calm him further but Sean ignored him, turning his attention back to the TV. Colm raised his eyes to the ceiling and turned away to serve another customer.

They switched to a picture of some Al Qaeda generals. With no warning Sean leaned back and spat at the television. We watched in horrid fascination as his spit oozed slowly down the front of the television screen, finally falling into an ashtray at the edge of the bar.

A man stood up. “Why don’t you sit the fuck down? Things are bad enough without you making people nervous.

Sean banged his fist on the bar and turned to the man. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

“I’m a patron at this bar. I’m someone who makes you and your dad money. I love coming to this place and I hoped that I’d be able to come here tonight and let the stress of the worst time of my life go away for a while. That’s who I am.”

Sean’s face turned red. “Listen shit-for-brains. Why don’t you get the fuck out of here if you don’t like the fact that I’m an American and you’re not."

“I was born here and I was in the Army when you weren’t even alive. You ever see action?”

“That’s not the point! I…”

“Junior, I want you to stop making my friends nervous. I need a night away from this shit. I’m as pissed as you are. And I’ve known your father for twenty years and he’s gonna come kick your ass tomorrow when he hears the way you’ve been acting. So sit the fuck down!”