Bitter Bronx (16 page)

His mother and father were about to withdraw, but Dee held them with her own invisible string, soothed them with little nonsense songs, like the patter of a mockingbird. Then she appealed to the giant.

“Ed, I'd like to try some photos with you and your mom and dad.”

“They're shy,” he said. “They're not like me. They've never been near a circus, Deeyann.”

Perhaps he wasn't eager to share the landscape of the photograph with his mom and dad. And she wondered if she'd ever capture Eddie Carmel. She'd photographed Charles Atlas at his home in Palm Beach, had caught him among his trappings, the mile-long drapes, the chandeliers, the crystalline lamps, and there he was, a seventy-six-year-old muscleman who'd marketed himself and now looked like a tanned monster waiting for his death; she'd unmasked the quiet dignity of dwarfs in rooming houses; she'd photographed mothers with swollen bellies in the backwoods of South Carolina, captured the undaunted look of campers at a posh camp for overweight girls in the heart of Dutchess County; she'd revealed the mad, wrinkled fury of Mae West in her Santa Monica fortress, but she failed year after year with Eddie Carmel.

She smiled, she wheedled, she danced around Ed like a coquette, and finally the faltering giant agreed to pose with his parents. And she also had to wheedle them. They would rather have sat behind a closed door and not be reminded of the monstrosity in their living room. Dee couldn't have coaxed them without Eddie.

“Ah, come on, it's for posterity.”

And then he revealed his wickedness in a gentle way. He tried to straighten his crooked back, preened for a moment, and said, “Deeyann, isn't it awful to have a midget mom and a midget dad?”

Mr. and Mrs. Carmel didn't laugh. They posed with their giant son. He had to lean on them; his parents had become Eddie's twin canes. They stared into her camera, but something was wrong in this family portrait. Eddie Carmel was still the performer, still the star. His big ears overwhelmed the frame. Dee clicked and clicked—nothing happened. She was forlorn. Then he fumbled with his canes and stood without the help of his mom and dad. She caught him in profile, with one of his canes hidden and much of his vanity gone. Mr. and Mrs. Carmel looked up at Ed like immigrants who had spawned a monster in the New World, and Eddie clutched his canes and stared back at his mom with an aloof tenderness that only a giant could have. Dee clicked. Eddie stood there in his wrinkled pants while Mrs. Carmel was in a daze and Mr. Carmel struck his own pose, with a hand in his pocket, distancing himself from all giants and his son . . .

One of the art directors she'd worked with had called her a huntress, and she probably was. She'd found what she wanted—it was as if the image itself had pressed the shutter. Some of her compassion had fled after that click. She wouldn't photograph Eddie Carmel again, and now she was trying to distance herself, the way Eddie's dad had done. But she couldn't. Eddie Carmel clung to her bones.

By some miracle she scrambled down from Eddie's hill with all her paraphernalia and was able to find the subway. But her elation didn't last. Once she arrived at her pauper's castle near the docks, she fell into a crippling gloom. She began to phone people at random. While she chatted with some curator at an art museum in Kansas, Dee pretended she was a mermaid following a barge on the Hudson, but even that couldn't console her. She smoked a little pot. All the belief in her own power was gone—the right to stir up some mischief in a portrait session, and then to hold that mischief in the frame. She felt guilty about the giant. She'd stolen into his life, posed him and his family like a minor-league Velázquez, while she stood there, a lurking presence in the photograph. She'd manipulated Eddie Carmel. She was better off posing Mae West. Dee didn't mind stealing from her. Mae West was a profusion of masks. Dee had caught the rage under her creams and cocoa butter—the madness of decrepitude.

But Eddie Carmel was visited by old age before he was old, and even that couldn't anger him. She shouldn't have pursued the giant. Distressed, she began to doze in the dark. She forgot to unplug the phone. She fumbled for it as the ringer ripped into her sleep.

“Deeyann, it's me.”

Eddie Carmel listened to her cry. “I'm a tramp,” she said. “I'm a stinking siren. I took advantage of you, Ed. I'll tear up all the rolls of film.”

“Calm down. Mom said she's glad I have a friend like you.”

“I'm a witch.”

“Ah, but I'm blue without ya, Dee. I can't dream up a poem . . . give me a hint, huh?”

But she had no hints. Her mind was all scrambled
.
Eddie pleaded with her.

“Have a heart.”

And she came out of her gloom. She scratched her chin with her own normal-sized knuckles, while she recalled the carbuncles on Eddie's hands.

“Hill,” she said. “Hill . . . and court jester.”

“Ah, that's a real conundrum,” he said, as he started to compose.

Look at the giant who lives on the hill

He laughs and he cries like a court jester

But one morning he swallowed the wrong pill

And now the whole world can watch him fester.

Eddie Carmel roared at his creation; his poem was as sad as the dwarfs Dee filmed in their rooming houses, but the giant's deep, rippling laugh went right through the wires.

“Dee, I'm helpless. I can't write a poem without you.”

He hung up, but the echo of that roar remained in her ears.

PRINCESS HANNAH

H
arrington fell.

It wasn't cocaine. It wasn't alcohol. It was circumstance. His wife left him, took his kids away. Her name was Charlotte, and she had a college degree. Harrington had never gone to college. He could barely write a paragraph, and Charlotte was a great reader of books. That's what had attracted him to her: Charlotte was a witch with words. Harrington had his own silent poetry—the deep sadness in his face—but that wasn't enough. They were lovebirds for a little while. She bore Harrington two boys. But the boys soon turned against him. They must have recognized Charlotte's disenchantment with Harrington; they'd watched him beat her up. She ran to another city. He could have tracked her down, but he didn't have the resources. He always existed at the edge of things.

He was a packer at a chocolate factory, earned decent money, but he was paid off the books. The factory loved to hire “ghosts” like Harrington. His wife had worked as a kindergarten teacher, covered the children and Harrington on her health plan, so he could drift, and now he had to drift alone.

He'd been sleeping with the boss's wife, Diane, who also worked at the factory. He would improvise, catch her in a closet. It was furtive and quick, but Diane must have squealed on him. Perhaps she was also sleeping with another man and had used Harrington as a scapegoat. The boss had a tribe of brothers and sisters, and this tribe slapped Harrington across the factory in front of all the employees.

He had welts on his face for weeks. He couldn't find a job. He had no references. He washed dishes for a while, but he would get into fights. Harrington lost his apartment. He moved in with an old high school buddy of his, Martin Hare, known as “the Scooter,” because he was always scurrying around. Both of them were forty-one and had dreams of making a fortune, but neither knew where to begin. They weren't gangsters or commercial pirates. Harrington was still handsome, in spite of the welts. Scooter was a gnome.

“We'll be rich,” the Scooter would say. “You'll see.”

They decided to rob the chocolate factory, so that Harrington could have his revenge on Stillwell, his boss. It was the Scooter's idea.

“It wouldn't work,” Harrington said. “I've never used a gun.”

“Come on,” the Scooter said. “I know a toy shop. They have guns that look realer than the real thing.”

“Like what?”

“The Colt Commander, Beretta Jetfire . . .”

Harrington couldn't understand a word, but he went to the toy shop, and Scooter was right. The guns in the window could frighten a hundred chocolate factories. Harrington bought plastic Colt Commanders for the Scooter and himself. Tuesday afternoon was the ripest time for a robbery. Stillwell would take out all the cash he collected from the factory's little retail shop and bring it to the bank. Harrington and the Scooter would wait for him in Halloween masks that Scooter had kept from childhood. The masks were a little too tight. But they didn't really mind. They rehearsed the robbery, mapped out their positions as if they were preparing some kind of imbecile ballet.

They stood at the side door in their masks, and when Stillwell appeared, both of them waved their tin guns and demanded Stillwell's cashbox. But they didn't see the pistol in the boss's pants. Stillwell shot the Scooter. Harrington struggled with him, managed to get the pistol away and bring the Scooter back home, but in his panic he'd forgotten all about the cashbox.

“Partner,” the Scooter whispered, “we did good, didn't we?” And he died in Harrington's arms.

Harrington couldn't afford to bury him, and how could he comfort a dead man with a bullet in his side? He left the Scooter in his favorite chair, locked the door, and decided to live on the lam.

S
omebody grabbed Harrington's tin gun on his first night out, kicked him in the head while he was sleeping near the ventilation duct of a midtown office building. “Hey, motherfucker,” a voice crooned at him in the dark, “that's my mattress.” There was no mattress. There was a tiny heated space, in the wild of winter. His chin was bleeding, and he didn't even have the consolation of a toy gun. He wandered across the city. He had no more plans. He was like a blind laborer in a dream. Some cursed intuition must have guided him to the downtown processing center of the city's public shelters. It wasn't shut in the middle of the night, but he couldn't find one official to feed him, only a nurse with a Band-Aid.

Men with stranger eyes than his began to collect around six
A.M
. A woman with a slightly scarred face interviewed him. She was kind to Harrington. She let him have a doughnut and a cup of coffee. He couldn't tell her about the killing, talk about his job at the chocolate factory. He was like a stateless person. He'd lost his Social Security card, couldn't recall the number.

“How can I process you, Mr. Harrington?”

“My wife worked for the city. I was covered on her plan.”

“Where is your wife?”

“Disappeared.”

The woman must have pitied Harrington. She encouraged him to invent a Social Security number.

“Lie a little,” she said. He was processed in half an hour. A bus brought Harrington and fifty other homeless men to an old armory on a hill above a housing project in the Bronx. He entered an enormous barrack and couldn't believe the smell. It was like living in an ocean of unwashed feet. There were hundreds of beds in the barrack, which probably had housed the National Guard—weekend soldiers who would train at the armory with toy guns like Harrington had used in his botched heist. But there weren't any weekend soldiers now. The barrack was overheated, and Harrington should have rejoiced. He was out of the cold. But the heat only multiplied the stench that rose up off the walls and made his nostrils quiver and his eyes burn.

The guards wouldn't leave him alone. They touched Harrington's pockets, searching for loot, told him he couldn't sleep in his bed during the afternoon unless he paid them a toll.

“Sunlight money,” they said.

Harrington blinked. They tapped his knees with their billy clubs. “Hey, little fellah, you aren't supposed to occupy your bed until the sun goes down.”

But the beds were packed with sleeping men, who blocked out the sunlight with their blankets, built their own tents with filthy sheets.

“Did they all pay their toll?” Harrington asked, pointing to the tents.

“Certainly,” the guards said. And they tapped his knees a little harder. But they were helpless scavengers compared to the little band of men that ruled the shelter, calling themselves “the Constables,” because several of them were ex-cops who'd spent time in jail. They all had other residences, but they operated out of the armory, where they could rob, sell drugs, and form their own prostitution ring. They bribed the guards, smuggled in women, and used transvestites at the shelter as their sexual slaves. The transvestites adored Jacob Faust, the Constables' chief. He was a one-eyed maniac who'd been with the military police. He had a Colt Commander tucked inside his pants, and it wasn't made of tin. He terrorized the whole shelter, demanded sexual favors, and when he first saw Harrington, he went insane.

“I'm in love,” he announced to his gang. He walked up to Harrington, handed him a dress. “You'll wear this for me.”

But Harrington was much too tired to be afraid; an anger had been welling in him. He pulled the Colt Commander out of Jacob's pants, aimed it at an invisible sky, and pulled the trigger. A chandelier fell from the ceiling like some bald, prehistoric bird. All its crystal was already gone. No one even remembered that the armory had a chandelier. And Harrington could have been a magical hunter who'd come into the Constables' lives.