Lowboy (5 page)

“Might it now,” said the woman. She inspected the money closely, turning it clockwise with her foot, then sighed and shuffled off behind the columns. Time went by. Lowboy leaned forward and touched
his middle finger to the bill. A current shot up from his palm to his shoulder, locking his jawbone and making his teeth knock together. He pulled back and the feeling stopped at once.

“I thought you said that bill was
counterfeit
, little boss,” the woman hissed, stepping out from behind the nearest column. She held a small blue suitcase tightly in both hands, the way a baby clutches at a blanket. Her hands were too small for the rest of her. She moved her body modestly, taking tiny bashful steps, considering every move before she made it. Her dark eyes never wavered from the bill.

“How much does a twenty buy these days?” Lowboy said, making room beside him on the bench.

“Don’t you know about money?”

He shook his head. “I’ve been away.”

The suitcase jangled as she set it down, as though it were filled with champagne flutes or Christmas lights, or possibly empty bottles of perfume. They sat for a while with the suitcase between them, watching people come and go across the tracks. An express train came and went, and for an instant Lowboy worried about the money, but the money stayed exactly where it was. It didn’t even flutter. Finally the woman cleared her throat and nodded and smoothed her eyebrows down with her two thumbs.

“$20,” she said, “don’t buy too much of nothing, on the floor.”

Lowboy grinned at her and shrugged his shoulders. “What’s your name?”

“Heather,” said the woman. She drew herself up smartly. “Heather Covington.”

“Heather Covington,” he repeated. He looked the woman over. She was adjusting the plastic lining of her shoes.

“You don’t look like a Heather,” he said.

She gave him a wink, as though he’d played into her hands, then opened her suitcase and brought out a battered blue passport.

“What’s this for?” said Lowboy.

“Introductions.”

He took the passport and flipped through it. Except for a faint yellow stamp from Fort Erie, Canada, all of its pages were blank. The issue date was 4/2007. “Heather Dakota Covington,” he read out. “Hair Auburn. Eyes Green. Weight eighty-seven pounds.” He paused. “Born Vienna, Virginia, 11/13/1998.”

She smiled sweetly at that, still averting her eyes, then tucked the passport back inside her coat. He looked at her closely. The smile sat tightly on her face, sliding sideways a little, as though it was hard work to keep it there. She turned toward him expectantly, pointing at her mouth, and for a moment he thought she was doing some sort of impression. Then he recognized the smile. It belonged to the girl in the passport.

A train came in across the tracks, a downtown express, full of people staring dully into space. “November thirteenth,” Lowboy said finally, for the sake of being friendly. “What’s today?”

“The eleventh.”

“Then the day after tomorrow is your birthday.”

“Goddamn fucking right it is.”

“You should take the money, then. Many happy returns.”

She yawned at him. “It’s not my birthday yet.”

He sat up straight and tried to make a joke. “You should celebrate your birthday early this year. I recommend it.”

“How come?”

“We might be dead tomorrow, Miss Covington.”

“Call me Heather.” She smoothed her eyebrows down again, more precisely than before. “I already took the money, little boss.”

Lowboy looked down and made his Philip Marlowe face. She took the passport out again and held it open. The bill was tucked between its last two pages.

He opened his mouth and closed it. Heather Covington only smiled. Her wide brown features seemed suddenly like a landscape that he knew. Another dimly recollected picture. Three years gone,
he told himself, remembering. Violet had borrowed a car and they’d driven to the Pennsylvania hills. Let’s go someplace empty, she’d said. Just us two. Which had made him laugh because who else would have come. The hills had looked wrinkled and brown, like a sad old man’s neck, and it had been hot in the car. You’re my hero, she’d told him. My little professor. I can’t wait to see what you’ll become some day.

That was the first day that he’d heard the turbines.

“What are you giggling over, little boss?” Heather Covington said. Her voice buzzed in his ear like a mosquito.

Slowly and regretfully he let his eyes open. “Why do you keep calling me that?”

She kicked her legs out and inspected the toes of her shoes. “You don’t look like a regular boss to me. That’s why.”

“I’m not any kind of boss,” he said. “Not yet.”

“I guess that’s right,” she said. “Boss wouldn’t leave no twenty on the floor.”

“I don’t care about the money, Miss Covington.”

“Why don’t you care about it?” She narrowed her eyes. “You a celebrity, little boss?”

“Call me Lowboy,” he said. “I prefer it.”

“Shit,” said Heather Covington. He felt her disapproval like a hand against his face. A breeze was building in the tunnel, humble but determined, the advance guard of a great mustering army. Near the turnstiles two fat college girls were holding hands and crying and touching their foreheads together. Beyond them a maintenance crew in orange vests stood propped together in a kind of huddle.

“You ought to be a celebrity,” Heather Covington said. “There’s money in it. All you do is put on underpants and pout.”

“What are you going to spend that twenty on?” Lowboy said. “A Swiss cheese omelet?”

She laughed at that. “Last time I paid for my breakfast, I was—”
She frowned. “I was still—” She patted the side of her suitcase. “Don’t you worry about me.”

“Where do you go to eat?”

“I used to go to the kitchens,” she said. “They had organic greens. Street Life Ministries was my favorite.” She batted her eyes at the memory. “They have a kind of a vehicle takes lunch around. Old creamy kind of a truck. You know the color. Ham sandwiches, turkey sandwiches, coleslaw. Coleslaw is my personal reason to believe in God.” She held up a finger. “With pepper.”

“Pepper’s good on coleslaw,” Lowboy said. “When I was little—”

“It’s easy for me to put food in my mouth. I have no need of the clergy.” She ran her tongue along her bottom teeth. “The clergy runs the kitchens. They make the food and give you it for nothing. Then they teach the parents how to fuck the children.”

“All right,” said Lowboy, watching her features give way. “All right.” The fact that he couldn’t understand her didn’t bother him at all. It made him feel alive and restless and unmedicated. He’d had the same feeling at school, listening to the new arrivals shudder and shriek, lit up like fireworks by the ideas inside them.

I could give my body to her, he thought suddenly. She might take it.

“I want to tell you something,” Lowboy said, fighting to keep the excitement out of his voice. “I want to tell you something about the world.”

“Not interested,” said Heather Covington.

“Everyone knows what’s happening to the air—what we’re
doing
to the air, I mean. The air is changing every single minute. It’s thickening and flattening and building up speed. The air is getting hotter every day.” He ducked his head and looked her in the face. “Is that correct?”

“
Uhhh
,” said Heather Covington.

“But not everybody knows it’s not happening on a straight line— not at all. The air is getting hotter on a curve.”

He bit down on his wrist—to check himself, to keep himself from stuttering—and watched her. There was no way of knowing whether or not she understood him. Her eyes were clenched shut and her mouth was quivering.

“The line is curved, Miss Covington,” he said, taking her unprotesting hand in his. “The change gets faster every single second. It’s like squaring a number.” He laughed. “It is squaring a number.” He dug his fist into her hand to rouse her. “There’s almost no way of stopping it once it starts.”

“Sounds like a credit card,” said Heather Covington. She seemed to be saying it to someone on the ceiling.

“But there’s a way I found. I invented it myself.” He was whispering now. “It has to do with what’s inside my body.”

“Stop it,” Heather Covington mumbled, looking straight above her.

“The world’s inside of me,” said Lowboy. “Just like I’m inside the world. Religions teach that. Buddhism.” He rested his free hand against her cheek. “Are you listening, Miss Covington? I read it in
National Geographic
.”

Heather Covington didn’t answer.

“To cool down the air, I have to cool myself down first.” He cupped her face in his palms like a Hollywood lover. “I’m going to open like a flower, Miss Covington.”

“
Stop
it!” she shouted, pushing her head back against the tiles. “Because I
said
to stop!” Her arms flailed out in all directions, at the maintenance workers and the MetroCard dispenser and the coeds. The coeds turned and gaped at her but the rest paid no attention. “Stop it!” she said again, spitting the words out like a judgment. She gave a hacking brokenhearted laugh.

“The train is coming,” Lowboy said, patting her on the shoulder. But it didn’t seem to do her any good.

T
ell me about your son’s illness,” said Detective Lateef.

Violet sat crookedly on the little roundbacked stool. Her panic at Will’s letter had quieted and she felt more tired than she could ever remember feeling. She was grateful for the detective’s question, grateful to be asked something that she could answer. It was the first of all his questions that she was grateful for.

“Can you be more specific, Detective? You’re asking me to describe the last four years of my life.”

Already he seemed impatient with her: he passed a hand roughly over his face, as though it cost him strength to keep awake. But in spite of this she knew that he was not unkind. He’s a bachelor, she thought, watching him shuffle his papers. Desperate women put him off his stride.

He made a mark of some kind on one of the photocopies. “How old was your son when he had his first break?”

“Twelve.” She waited while he made another mark. “It was in the garden of his grandfather’s house, in Brooklyn. Richard—my husband’s father—was still alive back then. It was the year before Will started gymnasium.”

“Gymnasium?” Lateef said, frowning slightly.

She felt her face go hot at once. “I’m sorry, Detective—high school. We call high school ‘gymnasium’ in Austria.”

“In Austria,” he said slowly. “Is that right.” For a moment he avoided looking at her; then he smiled, shook his head, and made a quick lateral mark in his notes. Crossing something out, she guessed. Where on earth had he imagined she was from?

“I don’t know why I said that,” she heard herself stammer. “I’ve been in this country sixteen years—seventeen in December—but still, certain things—”

“That’s perfectly all right, Miss Heller. Please go on.”

His face grew set and she saw that it was time to give her answer. She allowed herself a few more seconds, examining the memory before giving voice to it, holding it painstakingly up to the light. But there was no need to examine it. It played out photographically before her, each instant distinct from those before and after, like exposures on an unspooled reel of film. She could go back and forth in the events of that day as often and as carefully as she liked.

“The garden had a low brick wall around it, about Will’s height if he stood up straight.” She cleared her throat. “Richard spent most of his time out there, hunting for weeds. He was a hard man to talk to, very strict, but he was wonderfully patient with Will. There was so much compost in his garden that he’d had to build steps to get up to his vegetables. His tomatoes had won some sort of neighborhood prize, a medal he kept in the kitchen.” She shook her head slowly, remembering. “He had four rows of them that took up half the garden— you know how small those Park Slope backyards are—and past that was a little patch of lawn, with a cast-iron table and a chair that only Will ever sat in. The tomatoes made a kind of barrier there, a screen that hid the table from the house. That was Will’s favorite place.” She hesitated a moment. “I’m not sure you need to be writing all this down, Detective. Richard’s been dead for almost three years now.”

“It helps me to pay attention, Miss Heller.” He glanced up at her. “Does it make you self-conscious?”

She shrugged, and he went back to his scribbling. There was a matter-of-factness to his voice now that made her feel that she was giving him what he wanted. The filmreel was unspooling more quickly than before and she found that she had to hurry to keep up.

“It happened on a Sunday. I was making breadcrumb dumplings in Richard’s kitchen, something old-fashioned and Austrian, feeling about seventy-five years old”—she gave a dry little laugh— “and Will and his grandfather were fixing a trellis in the basement. I wanted Will to taste something, a sauce I was making, and I called down for him to come upstairs. But Richard told me Will was in the garden.”

“Did your son have any close friends at this time?”

“No,” she said quickly. I sound so defensive, she thought. But her voice when she spoke next was even sharper. “He spent most of his time by himself or with Richard, puttering around in the garden.”

He nodded curtly at that, as though she’d given him the answer he’d expected. Everything I’ve said might be redundant, she thought. I wonder whether he would stop me if it was.

“Go on, Miss Heller.”

She took a breath. “I went to the garden door and looked outside. I couldn’t see Will, but that didn’t surprise me: I expected him to be at the table, out of sight. He used to spend whole afternoons wedged into that little chair, reading his comic books and doodling. He was making up the wildest things—mostly superhero stories—and drawing funny pictures to go with them. I was in some of the stories, usually as the villian. I was called The Final Solution and I wore a black rubber cape.” She smiled crookedly. “If you were a therapist you’d start listening closely now.”

“I
am
listening closely, Miss Heller.”

“I know that.” She felt awkward now, unsympathetic, like someone auditioning badly for a role. “I had a spoonful of sauce in my hand and dinner cooking on the stove. The easiest thing would have been to call Will’s name, but I never thought of that. I was careful to be quiet, I remember, when I pushed the back door open.” She sat gingerly forward on the stool, her eyes half closed, listening to it
squeak under her weight. “As though I expected to catch him at something. But I expected to find him drawing his little comics, nothing else. That was all he ever did back there.”

“What did you find this time?”

“This time?” she said. For a moment nothing came to her. “This time I went to the back of the garden—it was only a dozen steps— and found him lying facedown in the grass.”

Lateef was studying the ceiling tiles and chewing on the blunt end of his pencil. She could only assume he was listening. “Go on, Miss Heller.”

“I crouched down next to Will and turned him over. All of this happened very quietly, I remember. His eyes were open, but they were …” She hesitated, waiting for the proper word to come. “Unconvincing somehow, like the eyes of an expensive doll. I remembered something I’d heard about sleepwalkers—that it’s dangerous to wake them—but Will sat up as soon as I touched him. His eyes came into focus and he got to his feet and let me lead him back into the house. Then Richard and I put him to bed.”

She noticed that Lateef had put his pencil aside, and she looked questioningly at him, but he motioned to her to go on.

“Will was an unusual boy, always off in some corner, but this was nothing like that. He barely seemed to recognize the house. I knew right away that he was sick.” She laughed. “I’m a morbid person, Detective—I’m not proud of that. But my worst ideas always come true. What other kind of person could I be?”

After what seemed a very long time, a slow dull spell of wasted quiet, he nodded once and coughed into his sleeve. “What was your father-in-law’s reaction to the change?”

“He told me I was being hysterical. He called me an overprotective little fool.” She held her breath a moment. “Worse than that, actually. Finally I admitted that I might have jumped to conclusions, if only to stop him from talking. I was terrified Will would overhear us, but we checked on him and he was fast asleep.” She searched her pockets one after the other and eventually dug out a broken cigarette.
“Even now he looks perfectly normal when his eyes are closed.”

Lateef produced a lighter from some hidden precinct of his desk and slid it hospitably across the desktop. So he smokes, she thought. Not cigarettes, I’ll bet. She pictured an enameled meerschaum pipe.

“How long was it until his next break?”

She didn’t answer until the cigarette was lit and she’d taken a long and brazen drag from it, pinching it together in the middle. She exhaled and sat back and watched him wait for her to go on talking, doing his best to master his impatience, his yellow bankteller’s pencil hovering above the desktop like a wasp. His interest in what had happened seemed suspect to her now, almost spiteful, as though he was secretly on the payroll of the Post. She imagined Will’s picture on the front page with a suitable caption beside it:

or something even more cataclysmic, something deliberately free of thought or sympathy. Headlines from the trial came back to her but she suppressed them. Talking about Will seemed reckless to her suddenly, even mercenary. But not to talk about him made it seem as if he were dead.

“Is there a bathroom on this floor, Detective?”

He looked surprised. “Of course, Miss Heller. Just follow the hallway left until it ends.”

She gave him an apologetic smile and stood up at once, leaving her coat and handbag on the stool. She glanced back at him as she pushed the door shut, but he was busy with his cards and photocopies. What a kind face he has, she thought. How considerate he looks when no one’s watching. Maybe I should tell him everything.

She closed the door behind her as gently as possible, guiding it shut with her fingertips, like a governess leaving a nursery. The hallway was full of the same stricken faces she’d seen when she arrived: old men with blank expressions, bewildered-looking women, teenagers
who shrank from her as she went by. She moved past them as unobtrusively as she could, filled with a revulsion she could neither account for nor dispel. The few who met her eyes did so resignedly, expecting nothing from her and receiving nothing. There wasn’t a thing on earth that she could do to help them.

The hallway was long and dropceilinged and ruthlessly bright, plastered in gray-green linoleum: the most bureaucratic hallway she had ever seen. A masterpiece, she said to herself. Someone should charge admission. The first third of the corridor was carpeted in coffee-colored shag, the rest in blanched, discolored pile. It ended without fanfare at an ancient tinted window, open just wide enough to be used as an ashtray. On any other day she’d have asked herself why in God’s name the window had been tinted, even laughed out loud at the bleakness of the place; instead she touched her forehead to the glass. After a brief spell of quiet, once she was sure she was alone, she brought out the idea of Will and let it hang above her in the air.

“Do not die,” she said matter-of-factly, just loud enough to feel it in her throat. “Do not die. Do not die. Do not die.” Her upper lip brushed the pane of the window as she spoke. She could feel the bucking of the wind on the far side of the glass and a fluttering line of cold across her thighs. She recited the phrase under her breath like a nursery rhyme, letting the words run together as she’d done countless times in the past, mixing English and German until the thing she was pleading for and the syllables themselves lost their meaning and she was left with nothing but the sound of her own voice. After a time even that fell away and she felt husked-out and contented. She took her first steady breath since she’d entered the building, ran a hand through her hair, stared down at the pudding-colored carpet and wondered how she would manage to go back. To go back would mean to keep talking, to answer when the detective spoke to her, to tell the story all the way to its end. Try as she might she couldn’t picture it.

Less than a minute later she was perched on her fiberglass stool, waiting on his convenience, watching him shuffling his photocopies
as if she’d never left the room. She felt a surge of affection for him then that she could in no way justify. Proof of my perversity, she thought, and had to cover her mouth to keep from laughing.

“Detective Lateef,” she said finally. “There’s something that I want to say to you.”

He raised his head politely. “What is it, Miss Heller?”

“You’re a decent man, Detective. I see that. I want you to know that I’m thankful for your trouble and your time—” He began to interrupt her but she held up her hands. “Please let me finish.” She let out a breath. “I’m not usually so difficult. I guess you’ll have to take my word for that.”

He nodded amiably, saying nothing. What’s he waiting for? she thought, smiling back at him as best she could. Is there some other compliment I haven’t thought of?

“I’d appreciate it, Detective, if you’d explain to me how I can be more—”

“What happened after your son’s first episode?”

She said nothing for a moment, taken aback by his formality. Then she took up the story exactly where she’d left it.

“We spent the night at Richard’s. I was afraid to wake Will up, and Richard insisted that sleep was all he needed.” She shook her head. “It wasn’t, of course. At three o’clock that morning I fell out of my bed as though someone had tipped it over. The house was rattling like a subway station. It took me a while to understand what was happening: the stereo downstairs was playing at full blast, distorting terribly. The music was something Richard liked to play, Bix Beiderbecke with some orchestra or other, a big-band record with lots of strings and trumpets. I hadn’t thought of Will yet, hadn’t connected him to what was going on. Then my foot came down on something cold and wet. It was a little heap—maybe a handful’s worth—of broken tomatoes out of Richard’s garden.”

“Tomatoes?” Lateef said, frowning. “The ones he’d won his prize for?”

She gave a stupid laugh. “Isn’t that like the punchline to a joke?”

“What do you mean by ‘broken,’ exactly? Crushed in the hands?”

“With the feet, I think.” She hesitated a moment, then nodded. “He put them on the floor and stepped on them.”

Lateef tapped the pencil end against his teeth. “What did you do then?”

“I went out into the hall. Richard was already down in the living room. He was fighting with Will, shouting as loudly as he could, but I couldn’t make out a word. I hung back on the landing, not knowing what to do, telling myself I’d go downstairs when the music stopped.” She pressed her hands together. “I didn’t want to go downstairs. It’s Richard’s house, I told myself: Richard’s stereo, Richard’s music. Go back to bed. And then I was in the living room with Richard screaming at the top of his lungs and Will rolling around between us on the floor.”

“Was the music still playing?”

She nodded.

“Why hadn’t your father-in-law turned it off?”