We Are Pirates: A Novel (27 page)

“It’s still me.”

“Hello?”

“Still me.”

“Mother
fucker
!
” she screamed. “Hello?”

It was still Phil Needle. They hadn’t moved.

“Hello! Hello!”

Phil Needle had no choice but to surrender and hang up, hoping that would help. “Disconnected,” he excused himself, to Levine.

“Disconnected,” she repeated. She’d been zonked the whole ride, just the occasional echo like a wet, weary parrot. “I want that,” she said now. “I don’t want to be connected, you know? I don’t want to be part of a team. I don’t want to be in your crew. I don’t want a network. I don’t want to pitch a story and have somebody buy it in a hotel room.” She blinked at him, Alma Levine, almost in time with the wipers. “I’m sorry,” she said, “and I know it’s an emergency for you right now, but it’s an emergency for me, too. I look at you and I don’t want to be it. Everything in me says, you know, I’m out of here.” She blinked and blinked and blinked. “I just sit wondering,” she said, “where there is someplace I can go that isn’t this.”

Phil Needle hated, just
hated
, how familiar it was, the blinking and the desperation both. It was him in New York again, sad and hopeless with drugs and the small, stuffy microphone booth. “Is it that you’re drunk?” he said. “A good deal of the time?”

Levine sighed and reached into a pocket in her dress. Out came a tiny and empty bottle of vodka.

“Did you take that from the plane?”

“The hotel,” she said. She tipped the bottle over, but it stayed right in her hands and didn’t go anywhere. Maybe he could be a resource for her, he thought, instead of whatever it was he was.

“Look, let me tell you a story.”

“You’re pitching me something?” Levine asked, with a small smile.

“Right,” Phil Needle said. “Take our minds off.”

Levine closed her eyes. It was a story he told a lot, and it had all the outlaw elements that made a story great, or so said Leonard Steed, who had told it to him. The elements included Leonard Steed, a train, a blues artist, and a cotton gin that journeyed at the end to the big city. The story was authentic, and not just because it was true. It was a story that began with a chance sighting of an item that forged a link with the American past and carried it forward into an outlaw future. But in this stormy weather, the story didn’t stay on course, or the course turned out to be drawn wrong and unworkable. Levine kept frowning and asking questions, and soon the story didn’t seem like anything at all.

“So it wasn’t the cotton gin in ‘Cotton Gin Blues’?”

“Well, nobody knows. It could have been.”

“But there’s no reason to think so.”

“Leonard Steed thought so.”

“But why did he think so?”

“Look, he always loved Belly Jefferson, and he turned his love of that kind of music into the kind of radio professional that he is. And not just radio. The label, the franchise—”

“But he just
took
a cotton gin from a field and put it in a building in Los Angeles.”

“You don’t have to say
took
like that.”

She took another empty bottle from her pocket and leaned it against the first one so they were praying together in her lap. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“He had a plan and moved forward. The story is that you move forward with a plan and—”

“But the plan is bullshit.”

“It’s not
bullshit
!” Phil Needle cried, and the steering wheel rattled. “It’s a different plan! It’s off the map! Outside the box!”

“It must be,” Levine said, “because I don’t understand it at all.”

Phil Needle took his eyes off the road. She blinked back. Maybe that was the story: that all errands, every noble voyage, are ridiculous and impossible. He vowed he would never talk about the cotton gin again. “Levine, you have a problem.”

She looked at him, with a cold, cold heart. “Look at you,” she said, and look at Phil Needle, look at himsel
f
! He was so meager, he thought. He tried, he really tried, to count his blessings, but he always lost track after things like health. It was easier to catalog his wrongs and broken promises, promises Phil Needle had often made only to shut people up. Occasionally Phil Needle thought God was watching him, but it was always when he was alone and nearly always when he was high. This time he knew. God had put Gwen someplace in order to slap him, Phil Needle, around. Phil Needle wasn’t a good person, in a what-a-good-person-you-are sort of way, but he was good, somehow, surely. He was merciful. He stepped on wounded bees. He did good, and when he did bad it wasn’t his fault. It was a mistake. He was
so sorry
, behind the bumper sticker, for whatever and everything it was he had done.

HATE TRAFFIC?
was what the bumper sticker said. It was illustrated with pictures of bicycles. YOU ARE TRAFFIC
.
And the exit was Treasure Island, where no one would go. The cars were so slow that Phil Needle could get out and walk, the road rivering and pedestrianless, and hunch over to peer into every window and check. Every driver dim through the wet glass, in the same traffic, connected on the bridge like listeners to a show, and
not one of them would be Gwen.

Someone blew a horn, and then everyone did, hideous racket, like a crowd’s loud ovation. Levine stared drowsily away from the window. “Oh,” she sighed, “I hate this.”

You
are
this, Phil Needle wanted to say, but instead went with “
Just wait a fucking goddamn minute
!
” He screamed the last of this behind him, in reply to the mad horns. “
I’m fucking trying you fucking assholes!
Go around me if you can find a fucking way you fucks! Think for a fucking minute about why I’m fucking stopped in the middle of this asshole bridge! Do you fucking idiots think I’m goddamn here for a fucking picnic on Treasure Island
?
”

“I quit,” Levine said.

Phil Needle’s fists hurt from pounding on the dashboard. “What?”

“It was wrong what you did. You took advantage.”

“You’re fucking lying.”

“I’ve been thinking about it
this whole time
and it’s true.”

“You fucked your other boss, Levine. You don’t know when to stop, do you? You should absolutely be at my fucking service.”

Alma Levine was crying. Phil Needle had never thought such a thing was possible to see. In some versions of this history he was crying himself. He could not look at her, and so out the window was where he looked instead. “I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I don’t know what I mean.”

Belly Jefferson interrupted in the raining car.

“I’m out of here,” she said. She opened the door and walked right out into the noise and rain, squeezing by the car and going back the way they had come. Phil Needle would think of her all the time, what had happened to her, and open the last drawer in his desk at home, where, beneath folders of nothing and old letters he didn’t want Marina to see, he kept her bag and her clothes and things in it, which she had left behind. She had vanished and he could not find her. (The answer was, Alma Levine would join up almost immediately with a man she met on the road and take his name and for a few years find joy and purpose in continuing to appall her parents by unsuitably marrying and quickly birthing two fat sons who looked all, not just half, Haitian.)

But now he looked at these things for only a second, and then at his phone. The storm stayed furious. The traffic wanted to kill him.
I wish everything was over,
he thought, and pressed the button.

“Yes?”

Hic-hic-hic
.

His father must have known about Gwen. That was why he’d been calling all morning. “Dad?”

Hic-hic-hic
, “David?”

The connection was bad. “Not David,” Phil Needle said. “This is your
other
son, Dad. I’ll call you later. Gwen’s going to be fine. I’m getting in the car right now, I can’t talk.”

Hic-hic-hic
, “Gwen?”

So it wasn’t that. “You know I can’t take it when you’re like this, Dad.”

Hic-hic-hic
. Phil Needle hung up. His father, he remembered, was a racist. And David, his brother, was dead. For years it was a problem he had, wondering where it was his brother was, what space there was for him in the world. And then he had it, sad but certain: he was dead. He could not come to the phone. Phil Needle kept scanning the road. A blur went by in the window, bright like a tropical bird. There was a space for everything, is what the story was, alive or dead, cotton gin or bumper sticker, wherever she was. Wasn’t that true? Surely nothing was gone forever. Surely everything—and at this moment, in this version, he
was
crying—could eventually be found.

Chapter 11

Every wall in the police station had posters taped everywhere on it, and in the center was a guy at a desk behind thick, smudgy glass and crisscrossings of metal, with small holes poked into it like an old telephone receiver. It looked like buying tickets to a dangerous movie. The man in front of Phil Needle was giving a long, vague description of a pickpocket while holding his wide-eyed baby away from him, as if he were about to drop it into a vat. The baby kicked and lost a sock. Marina picked it up and starting crying again. Her grip tightened on Phil Needle. He gave the sock to the father. The baby, swear to God, rolled his eyes.

“Can someone help us?” Phil Needle asked. The pickpocket victim headed for the door.

“Yes,” the guy said, and nothing else.

“My daughter’s name is Gwen Needle,” Phil Needle said.

“Oh, yes. You’ve heard nothing?”

“They told us to come here,” Marina said, on tiptoe to talk through the holes.

“That’s not necessary,” the guy said. He was in his mid-fifties and his eyes couldn’t help slipping to a bag of leftover Mongolian beef that his buddy had brought him. The smell was cheery and spicy, and he gestured for Marina to stand down. “I mean, you’ve heard nothing from your daughter.”

“Yes, no, we haven’t.”

“Okay, the investigating officers are here. Please have a seat just for a minute.”

There was a crash, a loud crash, off to the left someplace. People look around when something falls, even when it’s nothing they should worry about. “Sorry about this,” the desk guy said. Desk
sergeant
, Phil Needle remembered, the sergeant in charge of the desk. “We’re a bit off protocol tonight. The media is pouncing on us with a story about this showboat that somebody stole, and three missing children. I’m very sorry. It’ll just be a minute.”

“Okay,” Phil Needle said.

“I have kids myself,” the guy said, and looked someplace—at a bag, Phil Needle saw.

“Okay,” Phil Needle said again. He had a bag himself, in his hands, a bag from the drugstore that he’d gotten from a bag of bags under the kitchen sink. He could feel the corners of the framed photograph of Gwen he’d grabbed on their frantic way out of the condo. The guy walked out of view. Phil Needle and Marina were now in a room alone, sitting down. Two cops walked in and past Phil Needle to buzz themselves through a door. He glared straight ahead at a poster on the wall, one he had seen thousands of times. It had been taped up back at the radio station in New York, and in offices all over. You could see this everywhere, and Gwen was knocking around unmoored, running loose and unfound. It was worse than the bumper sticker. A row of four identically drawn men were in different poses of hysterical laughter. One of them was laughing so hard he was on the ground.

Marina leaned her head on him and sniffled. It was common in this day and age, when waiting someplace, to look around at your involuntary companions and imagine that you were trapped with them someplace more dire: a hostage situation or a building on fire, something requiring teamwork and survival. Could you build the camaraderie promised in movies about such times, or would you fall apart? Phil Needle looked around and realized, quietly but sharply, that he and his wife would not survive this. Gwen’s disappearance would slaughter them.

YOU WANT IT WHEN?
was the caption on the poster. It was talking about office work, and the sad fact, true at the time, that people want things right away and that other people don’t care about that. The poster reminded people that it didn’t matter what you wanted. Where was she? Where did somebody put her? Where were those ragged thumbs of hers, and her odd, tiny earlobes? Was he about to be one of those guys, clutching a photograph of Gwen, on the news every year in support of an extreme new crime law? Were they becoming one of those families used as a murmured example of the wickedness of the world, as a worst-case scenario to comfort those whose daughter was merely pregnant or paralyzed? Would there be a funeral, everyone sweating in black clothes in the summer and squinting in sunglasses? Oh God, would there be a hasty peer-group shrine, wherever she was found, with cheap flowers and crappy poetry melting in the rain? Would her college fund sit forgotten for a while in the bank, like a tumor thought benign, and then be emptied impulsively on some toy to cheer himself up? He had seen in a magazine a handsome automobile some months ago, shiny as clean water. Somebody opened the doors. A man came in a black suit missing a tie, his beard stopping just where the shirt opened to show Phil Needle a gold chain.