Slipping Into Darkness (4 page)

“So, what do you say?” he asked, ready to reach for a pen. “Are you gonna be a man or not?”

The kid looked up, as if he realized he’d just reached his own childhood’s end.

“You said I could talk to my father.”

PART II

THE WORLD’S FORGOTTEN BOY

2003

2

THE FIRST THING that threw him was the girl with the tattoo.

He’d just gotten out of the van when he saw her come strutting down the boulevard. A Queens Plaza goddess with porcelain skin and vermilion hair, a body that turned a Misfits T-shirt into elegant eveningwear. A tear in the fabric revealed a black bra strap resting on a white shoulder like a cat’s paw. Old forgotten hungers began to stir inside him. Girls did not look quite this good when he went away. They weren’t quite so lean and voluptuous, so thrillingly bold in the way they carried themselves, so direct in how they looked at you.

But then he fixed on the dark line circling one of her biceps. A barbed-wire tattoo. Not just any barbed wire, but razor ribbon with sharpened points of the evil kind used atop state prison walls. He stared, wondering why anyone possessing such pure lunar beauty—why any free person, in fact—would do this to themselves.

Seeing desire light up his face, she stuck out her tongue. A small gold stud lay near the tip like a pearl on pink velvet. She snaked it out and waggled it at him, enjoying the riot of shock and dismay it provoked, then walked on by, a cool kitty licking the cream from her lips.

He set down the duffel bag made of old towels sewn together with dental floss, and tugged self-consciously at his belt loops. His old clothes no longer quite fit him. His blue work shirt, which somehow had survived twenty years in the state storage system, was too tight around the collar and his Levi’s were too snug. It wasn’t just that he had filled out from lifting weights and eating starches, the styles had changed.

He saw a group of teenage boys with jeans slung so low that the ass pockets were on the back of their knees, eating Chinese takeout by a white Cadillac Escalade. Ultraviolet lights circled the rims, and a rapper on the speakers shouted things that you could hardly even say on a record back before he went away.

He let go of the belt loops that suddenly seemed too high on his waist, remembering himself at seventeen, buying these jeans at a Gap on East 86th Street for eighteen dollars, the private-school girl working at the register smiling shyly at him and tucking a few stray chestnut-brown hairs behind her ear.

She was probably married now, with three kids and two cars in the suburbs. And here he was, twenty years later, dumped in Queens on a late-summer night, a grown-ass man, with jailhouse muscles, trimmed eyelashes, thick black hair graying slightly at the temples, and a quarter-inch razor scar under his chin signifying this was a child who’d had all the softness bled out of him.

Something called the W train, which hadn’t even existed before, rattled by on the elevated tracks, screaking and squealing like a teakettle, the passing windows casting a harsh shuttering yellow light over the boulevard.

“Say, Hooligan, you got a ride?”

Timberwolf, a double-wide-load brother Hoolian knew from Attica, had just gotten out of the Department of Correction van behind him, six foot five, 280 on the hoof, carrying a brown paper bag with his clothes inside, T-shirt untucked, and sneaker laces untied like an oversize four-year-old waiting for a grown-up to come help him.

“My cousin’s supposed to come pick me up in a cab, but I don’t know, man,” said Hoolian, his voice rough and sandpapery from the long upstate winters. “I think maybe she might have misunderstood and thought I was coming on the four-thirty Rikers bus. Or maybe she might’ve got tired of waiting and been and gone already.”

“Yeah, tell me about losing patience.” T-Wolf yawned. “Seven motherfuckin’ years I did for selling two little faggoty bottles of crack. And then they tack on another six months at Rikers for some bullshit robbery I didn’t have nothing to do with. How long was your bid?”

“I was in since ’84.”

“
Damn,
that’s more than half your life!” T-Wolf clutched his chest. “We definitely gotta get you some pussy tonight. You come to the right place.”

He pointed across the twelve lanes of traffic to a “gentlemen’s club” that called itself Shenanigans in festive ruby letters, just down the block from a Marine Corps recruiting station. But the mere thought of being within touching distance of a woman made Hoolian’s heart start to thud frighteningly.

“Aw, man, I don’t think so. What if my cousin comes for me and I’m not here?”

“You ain’t probably been with a natural woman in twenty years, son. They can wait a few minutes.”

“Naw, I’m a have to take a rain check. I put my family through enough already.”

“All right, I hear you.” T-Wolf sighed. “Guess I’m going to have to be an army of one. I’ll be thinking about you, man.”

“Don’t think too much. Just do what you got to do.”

“Heh-heh.” T-Wolf rolled up the top of his bag. “You gonna think about that other proposition we were talking about, right? My nephew could use a few more good men on the block.”

Riight,
thought Hoolian.
I’m gonna risk my bail selling weed for some punk-ass little Hoe Avenue gangsta who wasn’t even born when I got sentenced.

“I got your number.” He gave T-Wolf’s meaty fist the pound. “Stay strong.”

“Peace.”
T-Wolf picked up his bag and then hesitated. “Sure you don’t want to come along now?”

Hoolian squinted and shook his head, hearing the trepidation, knowing that even just seven years of head counts, lockdowns, unannounced cell searches, and regimented daily programs could make a man in size 14 sneakers afraid to cross the street on his own.

“Nah, dawg, I gotta watch myself,” he said. “One slip, I’m back where I started.”

“Okay, I hear you.”

Slowly and reluctantly, the big man ambled off, the plastic tips of his untied Nike laces scatting and scratching on the pavement. A blue-and-white police car cruised by, eyeballing the scene. Hoolian felt anxiety crawl across his skin like insect legs among the tiny dorsal hairs. Had they been tipped off he was getting out tonight? What if they’d seen him talking to T-Wolf? No, that was crazy. They didn’t have that kind of manpower.
Still.
“No associating with known felons,” the judge said, setting his bail. He decided he would throw away T-Wolf’s number the first chance he got.

Cars hurtled by recklessly. He looked down the street again, wondering where his cousin Jessica was. She hadn’t visited in years and he wasn’t sure he would still recognize her.

He fished around in his pocket for change and found a couple of quarters jammed in with the two twenties his lawyer had loaned him. Where would he go if she didn’t show up? After years of hanging on by his fingernails, his 440 motion had been granted so suddenly that he’d barely had time to make any contingency plans. He’d figured he’d be lucky to see a judge before Thanksgiving. Instead, he’d found himself hustled down to Rikers and taken to a dingy little hearing room this very afternoon, almost too stunned to register Judge Santiago’s setting aside his conviction but warning him that the indictment still stood.

Stomach writhing from the van ride, he found a pay phone with the words “Praise God” and “Suck Dick” scratchitied into its chrome plate covering and pumped in a quarter.

“Yo, yo, yo, whassup, y’all, this is Jes-
sick-
ahh,” her voice came on after the fourth ring, a baby wailing in the background. “I can’t come to the phone right now. Yo, shut the fuck up, I’m talking. Anyway, you know the drill. Wait for the beep.”

He put the phone back gently, knowing she’d either forgotten about him or decided not to get involved. Could he blame her? She’d been—
what?—
maybe three, four years old when he went away.

He looked up, watching the train pull out of the station, the wheels making a steel-on-steel grace note and a blinding spark on the tracks that made his whole nervous system shudder.

“Hey, Rico Suave.” The same cop car that had passed him before was pulled up to the curb now, a young sergeant in blue shirtsleeves with his hair cut high and tight leaning out the window. “What do you think you’re doing?”

He stiffened at the sight of the uniform. “Nothing.”

“Go do it somewhere else. I’m getting sick of looking at you.”

He hoisted the duffel bag, not looking for a problem this soon, and started up the stairs to the station, his legs knotted and cramped from being folded into a narrow seat next to T-Wolf. He stopped on the landing, trying to take it all in. After all these years of drab prison earth tones, the gaudy neon of the boulevard almost seared his eyes like jet fuel. FOR THOSE WHO KNOW THERE IS MORE, the sign for a psychic throbbed red on a nearby building. HAVE YOU BEEN INJURED? an attorney’s ad asked in emerald next door.

“Can I have a token?” He stopped at the clerk’s booth.

“What?” The dusky lady behind the glass wore an MTA shirt and a tiny glittering Indian jewel in the middle of her forehead.

“I said, can I buy a token please?”

“They don’t sell those anymore, baby,” she said. “Where you been?”

His face got warm. A man spends years studying obscure statutes and writing erudite letters to Court of Appeals judges from the prison law library, and then can’t figure out how to get on the subway.

“I was away.” He pulled out one of the twenties, ready to throw himself on her mercy. “What do I need to do?”

A swell of understanding raised the jewel on her brow. She took his cash, punched some buttons, and dropped a golden card into the trench under her partition without looking at him.

“Just make sure the strip faces the right way.”

He nodded gratefully and hurried through the turnstiles and up to the platform, wondering how he was going to manage the next ten minutes. No one told him it was going to be
this
hard.He looked down over the railing at the street below, having a shaky moment of vertigo. T-Wolf and four other guys just off the van were outside Shenanigans, getting themselves all worked up, arguing too loudly, shouting and bumping chests as if they were more interested in attracting the attention of the police than in getting into the club.

“Okay! Okay! But what I’m asking, who put the shit in your mind? All right? Who put the shit in your mind?!”

Not me,
Hoolian told himself, turning away. Some guys secretly couldn’t wait to go back. It was just too hard for them, living on the outside and having to make decisions all the time. But he’d had enough time inside. He couldn’t have taken another day of the boredom, the constant stress, the sense of being totally controlled yet completely unprotected. He looked up the track and, in the widening beam of an approaching train, saw the brawling mass of inmates in the Auburn mess hall suddenly parting as a little man called Pellet fell to the floor, a fourteen-inch shank buried so deep in the back of his neck that the tip came out through his voice box.

The raw-throated roar subsided and the train ground to a halt, its doors popping open in front of him. Hoolian took one look inside and, seeing no graffiti there, wondered if it was just a demonstration model not meant for regular customers.

But then he heard the familiar static goulash of the conductor’s announcement, mangling the name of the next stop. Should he get on or stay off? The only address he had for Jessica was the Surfside Gardens housing project in Coney Island. He made a snap decision and got on, figuring he’d try to call again once he got there. The doors closed behind him and he took a seat, scrunching down at one end of the bench, trying not to take up too much room even though there was no one near him. An ad across the way announced,
The Whale Is Back, the Hall of Ocean Life Has Reopened
. But where had the whale gone? How had it survived while it was away?

The train rocked off, passing a broad plain of lit-up rail yards and darkened warehouses. Over on the right, the Manhattan skyline glowed like peaks and valleys of a fever chart set in glass and concrete.

At Times Square, a Hasidic family got on. The father in a white shirt, with a reddish pubic-looking beard, a black fedora, and a sleeping baby girl clinging to his chest like a little monkey. His hugely pregnant wife waddling on after him in a wig and a gray ankle-length dress, with two small boys in tow in matching yarmulkes and side curls.

Hoolian fingered his Saint Christopher’s medal and thought of his own father: a widower at thirty-five, stretching a rainbow of expectations over his head, wanting Hoolian to fulfill all the dreams he’d abandoned after he’d dropped out of City College and taken a job as a janitor on the Upper East Side. His father, who read Cervantes and Dickens on the service elevator and carried the poodle ladies’ groceries into their kitchens for Christmas tips. His father, who’d taught him how to caulk a bathtub, pushed him to apply to Columbia on a scholarship, and spoke only English to him at home.

He remembered that last weekend before he went upstate, when his father gathered what was left of the family for a going-away party on Orchard Beach. The Puerto Rican Riveria, Papi called it. Ray Barretto and the Fania All-Stars on the boom box. His
tia
Miriam bringing a roast pig. His uncles fishing off the rocks with bamboo poles. His cousins from Bayamón playing volleyball. And his father raising a half-empty
cerveza
at sunset and saying, “To my son,
mi hijo.
I’ll never stop believing in you,
muchacho.
I’ll never stop trying to bring you home.”