The Waste Lands (30 page)

“If you’re afraid of what might be on the other side of the doors, maybe bouncing off the walls seems safer,” Susannah said.

Eddie nodded. “Maybe so.”

He worked slowly, trying to see the shapes in the wood—that little
s
-shape in particular. He discovered it had become very dim.

Please, God, help me not to fuck this up,
he thought, but he was terribly afraid that he had already begun to do just that. At last he gave up, returned the key (which he had barely changed at all) to the gunslinger, and curled up beneath one of the hides. Five minutes later, the dream about the boy and the old Markey Avenue playground had begun to unspool again.

JAKE STEPPED OUT OF his apartment building at about quarter of seven, which left him with over eight hours to kill. He considered taking the train out to Brooklyn right away, then decided it was a bad idea. A kid out of school was apt to attract more attention in the hinterlands than in the heart of a big city, and if he really had to
search
for the place and the boy he was supposed to meet there, he was cooked already.

No problem-o,
the boy in the yellow T-shirt and green bandanna had said.
You found the key and the rose, didn’t you? You’ll find me the same way.

Except Jake could no longer remember just how he
had
found the key and the rose. He could only remember the joy and the sense of‘ surety which had filled his heart and head. He would just have to hope that would happen again. In the meantime, he’d keep moving. That was the best way to keep from being noticed in New York.

He walked most of the way to First Avenue, then headed back the way he had come, only sliding uptown little by little as he followed the pattern of the WALK lights (perhaps knowing, on some deep level, that even they served the Beam). Around ten o’clock he found himself in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue. He was hot, tired, and depressed. He wanted a soda, but he thought he ought to hold on to what little money he had for as long as he could. He’d taken every cent out of the box he kept by his bed, but it only amounted to eight dollars, give or take a few cents.

A group of school-kids were lining up for a tour. Public school, Jake was almost sure—they were dressed as casually as he was. No blazers from Paul Stuart, no ties, no jumpers, no simple little skirts that cost a hundred and twenty-five bucks at places like Miss So Pretty or Tweenity. This crowd was Kmart all the way. On impulse, Jake stood at the end of the line and followed them into the museum.

The tour took an hour and fifteen minutes. Jake enjoyed it. The museum was quiet. Even better, it was air-conditioned. And the pictures were nice. He was particularly fascinated by a small group of Frederick Remington’s Old West paintings and a large picture by Thomas Hart Benton that showed a steam locomotive charging across the great plains toward Chicago while beefy farmers in bib overalls and straw hats stood in their fields and watched. He wasn’t noticed by either of the teachers with the group until the very end. Then a pretty black woman in a severe blue suit tapped him on the shoulder and asked who he was.

Jake hadn’t seen her coming, and for a moment his mind froze. Without thinking about what he was doing, he reached into his pocket and closed his hand around the silver key. His mind cleared immediately, and he felt calm again.

“My group is upstairs,” he said, smiling guiltily. “We’re supposed to be looking at a bunch of modern art, but I like the stuff down here a lot better, because they’re real pictures. So I sort of . . . you know . . .”

“Snuck away?” the teacher suggested. The corners of her lips twitched in a suppressed smile.

“Well, I’d rather think of it as French leave.” These words simply popped out of his mouth.

The students now staring at Jake only looked puzzled, but this time the teacher actually laughed. “Either you don’t know or have forgotten,” she said, “but in the French Foreign Legion they used to shoot deserters. I suggest you rejoin your class at once, young man.”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you. They’ll be almost done now, anyway.”

“What school is it?”

“Markey Academy,” Jake said. This also just popped out.

He went upstairs, listening to the disembodied echo of foot-falls and low voices in the great space of the rotunda and wondering why he had said that. He had never heard of a place called Markey Academy in his life.

HE WAITED AWHILE IN the upstairs lobby, then noticed a guard looking at him with growing curiosity and decided it wouldn’t be wise to wait any longer—he would just have to hope the class he had joined briefly was gone.

He looked at his wristwatch, put an expression on his face that he hoped looked like
Gosh! Look how late it’s getting!,
and trotted back downstairs. The class—and the pretty black teacher who had laughed at the idea of French leave—was gone, and Jake decided it might be a good idea to get gone himself. He would walk awhile longer—slowly, in deference to the heat—and catch a subway.

He stopped at a hot-dog stand on the corner of Broadway and Forty-second, trading in a little of his meager cash supply for a sweet sausage and a Nehi. He sat on the steps of a bank building to eat his lunch, and that turned out to be a bad mistake.

A cop came walking toward him, twirling his night-stick in a complex series of maneuvers. He seemed to be paying attention to nothing but this, but when he came abreast of Jake he abruptly shoved his stick back into his loop and turned to him.

“Say-hey, big guy,” he said. “No school today?”

Jake had been wolfing his sausage, but the last bite abruptly stuck in his throat. This was a lousy piece of luck . . . if luck was all it was. They were in Times Square, sleaze capital of America; there were pushers, junkies, whores, and chicken-chasers everywhere . . . but this cop was ignoring
them
in favor of
him.

Jake swallowed with an effort, then said, “It’s finals week at my school. I only had one test today. Then I could leave.” He paused, not liking the bright, searching look in the cop’s eyes. “I had permission,” he concluded uneasily.

“Uh-huh. Can I see some ID?”

Jake’s heart sank. Had his mother and father already called the cops? He supposed that, after yesterday’s adventure, that was pretty likely. Under ordinary circumstances, the NYPD wouldn’t take much notice of another missing kid, especially one that had been gone only half a day, but his father was a big deal at the Network, and he prided himself on the number of strings he could pull. Jake doubted if this cop had his picture . . . but he might very well have his name.

“Well,” Jake said reluctantly, “I’ve got my student discount card from Mid-World Lanes, but that’s about all.”

“Mid-World Lanes? Never heard of it. Where’s that? Queens?”

“Mid-
Town,
I mean,” Jake thought. God, this was going north instead. of south . . . and fast. “You know? On Thirty-third?”

“Uh-huh. That’ll do fine.” The cop held out his hand.

A black man with dreadlocks spilling over the shoulders of his canary-yellow suit glanced over. “Bussim, ossifer!” this apparition said cheerfully. “Bussiz lil whitebread ass! Do yo duty, now!”

“Shut up and get in the wind, Eli,” the cop said without looking around.

Eli laughed, exposing several gold teeth, and moved along.

“Why don’t you ask
him
for some ID?” Jake asked.

“Because right now I’m asking you. Snap it up, son.”

The cop either had his name or had sensed something wrong about him—which wasn’t so surprising, maybe, since he was the only white in the area who wasn’t obviously trolling. Either way, it came to the same: sitting down here to eat his lunch had been dumb. But his feet had hurt, and he’d been hungry, dammit—
hungry
.

Instead of reaching for his wallet, he reached into his front pocket and brought out the key. He held it up to the policeman; the late-morning sunshine bounced little coins of reflected light onto the man’s cheeks and forehead. His eyes widened.

“Heyy!” he breathed. “What you got there, kid?”

He reached for it, and Jake pulled the key back a little. The reflected circles of light danced hypnotically on the cop’s face. “You don’t need to take it,” Jake said. “You can read my name without doing that, can’t you?”

“Yes, sure.”

The curiosity had left the cop’s face. He looked only at the key. His gaze was wide and fixed, but not quite empty. Jake read both amazement and unexpected happiness in his look.
That’s me
, Jake thought,
just spreading joy and goodwill wherever I go. The question is, what do I do now?

A young woman (probably not a librarian, judging from the green silk hotpants and see-through blouse she was wearing) came wiggle-wobbling up the sidewalk on a pair of purple fuck-me shoes with three-inch heels. She glanced first at the cop, then at Jake to see what the cop was looking at. When she got a good look, she stopped cold. One of her hands drifted up and touched her throat. A man bumped into her and told her to watch where the damn-hell she was going. The young woman who was probably not a librarian took no notice whatever. Now Jake saw that four or five other people had stopped as well. All were staring at the key. They were gathering as people sometimes will around a very good three-card-monte dealer plying his trade on a streetcorner.

You’re doing a great job of being inconspicuous, he thought. Oh yeah.
He glanced over the cop’s shoulder, and his eye caught a sign on the far side of the street. Denby’s Discount Drug, it said.

“My name’s Tom Denby,” he told the cop. “It says so right here on my discount bowling card—right?”

“Right, right,” the cop breathed. He had lost all interest in Jake; he was only interested in the key. The little coins of reflected light bounced and spun on his face.

“And you’re not looking for anybody named Tom Denby, are you?”

“No,” the cop said. “Never heard of him.”

Now there were at least half a dozen people gathered around the cop, all of them staring with silent wonder at the silver key in Jake’s hand.

“So I can go, can’t I?”

“Huh? Oh! Oh, sure—go, for your father’s sake!”

“Thanks,” Jake said, but for a moment he wasn’t sure
how
to go. He was hemmed in by a silent crowd of zombies, and more were joining it all the time. They were only coming to see what the deal was, he realized, but the ones who saw the key just stopped dead and stared.

He got to his feet and backed slowly up the wide bank steps, holding the key out in front of him like a lion-tamer with a chair. When he got to the wide concrete plaza at the top, he stuffed it back into his pants pockets, turned, and fled.

He stopped just once on the far side of the plaza, and looked back. The small group of people around the place where he had been standing was coming slowly back to life. They looked around at each other with dazed expressions, then walked on. The cop glanced vacantly to his left, to his right, and then straight up at the sky, as if trying to remember how he had gotten here and what he had been meaning to do. Jake had seen enough. It was time to find a subway station and get his ass over to Brooklyn before anything else weird could happen.

AT QUARTER OF TWO that afternoon he walked slowly up the steps of the subway station and stood on the corner of Castle and Brooklyn Avenues, looking at the sandstone towers of Co-Op City. He waited for that feeling of sureness and direction—that feeling that was like being able to remember forward in time—to overtake him. It didn’t come.
Nothing
came. He was just a kid standing on a hot Brooklyn street corner with his short shadow lying at his feet like a tired pet.

Jake discovered he didn’t have the slightest idea.

ROLAND’S SMALL BAND OF travellers reached the crest of the long, gentle hill they had been climbing and stood looking southeast. For a long time none of them spoke. Susannah opened her mouth twice, then closed it again. For the first time in her life as a woman, she was completely speechless.

Before them, an almost endless plain dozed in the long golden light of a summer’s afternoon. The grass was lush, emerald green, and very high. Groves of trees with long, slender trunks and wide, spreading tops dotted the plain. Susannah had once seen similar trees, she thought, in a travelogue film about Australia.

The road they had been following swooped down the far side of the hill and then ran straight as a string into the southeast, a bright white lane cutting through the grass. To the west, some miles off, she could see a herd of large animals grazing peacefully. They looked like buffalo. To the east, the last of the forest made a curved peninsula into the grassland. This incursion was a dark, tangled shape that looked like a forearm with a cocked fist at the end.

That was the direction, she realized, in which all the creeks and streams they had encountered had been flowing. They were tributaries of the vast river that emerged from that jutting arm of forest and flowed, placid and dreaming under the summer sun, toward the eastern edge of the world. It was wide, that river—perhaps two miles from bank to bank.

And she could see the city.

It lay dead ahead, a misty collection of spires and towers rising above the far edge of the horizon. Those airy ramparts might have been a hundred miles away, or two hundred, or four hundred. The air of this world seemed to be totally clear, and that made judging distances a fool’s game. All she knew for sure was that the sight of those dim towers filled her with silent wonder . . . and a deep, aching homesickness for New York. She thought,
I believe I’d do most anything just to see the Manhattan skyline from the Triborough Bridge again.