The Fugitives (41 page)

The need for my death arose solely from convenience, Bobby’s convenience. I didn’t know anything. I couldn’t have known anything, because I was incapable of suspecting anything of Bobby. Others, yes. Women, I always suspected of ulterior motives and untrue deeds. That was prejudicial. Men with whom I served time in prison. That was necessity. My mother. That was conditioning. (What grief she caused, right up until the end! Bobby himself called to tell her I was missing and even he was shocked by the callousness of her response: as far as the killer was concerned, the mother’s indifference went against nature.) And many other individuals and groups for reasons that ran the gamut from prejudice to necessity, from whimsy to the paranoia to which I was not unsusceptible on some of my more memorable days, having been conditioned to it by the best, by the old woman who still lives and rages, alone and unrepentant in the backwater parishes of Bay Ridge.

But not Bobby, whom I loved and thought of as a brother, a big brother, despite his being younger than I. I would not have suspected, I would not have known, and had I known I would not have betrayed him. And Bobby had to have known that, because, after all, didn’t he know me? But that wasn’t his concern. My death and disappearance were a part of his scheme from the beginning: missing, there was no need to look any further for the money. If I turned up dead, it could be surmised that I had been murdered for it. He left my car on the beach road. He went home.

There was desperation involved, Bobby’s desperation—not, strictly speaking, a mitigating factor, although I might have understood, and forgiven, had I been given the chance to understand or not to, and to forgive or not to, while such things might still have mattered to me. But I wasn’t given that chance. And now that it has stopped mattering to me, now that the question of survival, having been removed from the equation, from my equation, is a matter of indifference to me, I could see that with the money he’d wanted so badly he now lived better than he had—but how much better? Did he sleep better, did he digest his food better, did his body trouble him with fewer aches and pains? Did it heal his diseased heart? It was the acquisition, having the money, that gave him satisfaction; that shored up his defenses against the darkness that always comes with wanting. Things got dark for Bobby when he wasn’t acquiring something, someone.

Unfortunately for Bobby, while he wasn’t a savage, his tastes were underdeveloped. About as far as he got was mastering the menu at Highlands. I mention that only because you’ve seen him there, rehearsing his courtly spiel. It takes effort for a man like Bobby to learn how to passably pronounce “Armagnac,” to learn how to dress, although he never quite lost that look of the bespoke primitive, straining at the seams. Fat Mike, one of our associates at South Richmond, saw him wearing a cashmere golf sweater once and said he looked like someone had shoved a salami into an argyle sock. It was a good joke. We laughed a lot at South Richmond—which is, in case you’ve been wondering, a storefront on Hylan Boulevard in Staten Island. The proverbial empty storefront. Folding chairs, card tables, and lots of laughs, nearly all of which would forfeit their humor in translation.

OH, AND WHY
don’t I sound the way I did when I was living? Ah, the dialect of the streets. It would certainly be more colorful, more in line with expectations. But—you have to understand—these aren’t words. These are the harmonic thrummings of the music of the spheres, physically imperceptible to human hearing. Except through the intercession of the creator. Make of that what you will.

BOBBY BROUGHT ME
to Manitou Sands after I was released from Dannemora. He found me at my mother’s. There I sat, in the front room, looking across at the day care center, the saloon, the storefront MRI clinic, pondering my unsupervised life, if that is an accurate term for the life I was living under my mother’s roof. Well, it is: my mother sought not to supervise me, only to impose her peculiar
Weltanschauung
upon me and then to turn me loose on the world to see how her ideas, having taken root in me, would burst into flower. At least, that’s how it worked when I was a child. My mother’s special contempt for other human beings—their enthusiasms, their tastes, their ambitions, their beliefs, their appearance, their origins—found its fullest expression in me in the form of antisocial behavior, which was duly punished, of course, frequently by my mother. She talked the talk, as the saying goes, but for the most part kept herself in line, and she could hardly approve publicly of my having demonstrated my faith in her rhetoric by acting upon it. Yes, ultimately she put that much store in appearances, and hated the world all the more for it. I saw
freedom
on the other side of her lessons, but she herself saw them only as proclamations issuing from her bondage. Odd. I could see her inertia plainly only as an adult, an adult with some sense of what it was to have experienced life. She was inert, noisy but inert. Her tune had not changed at all. You had only to crank her up and she began to sing it.

What sort of
freedom
? The freedom of not caring.

I am not
blaming my mother
. My mother did what she had to do; she was at the mercy of forces tracing their spindly route back through the usual multigenerational history of frustration and oppression. All the worst brutality begins across the threshold of home. But she didn’t lay a finger on me, not after I got bigger than she was, which didn’t take long.

And yet there I was in the front room. Days, I would watch the patients on their way into the MRI clinic. Frail people and strong people, people who’d been living with illness for years and people who seemed blindsided by its unannounced arrival. I saw people who’d never left the neighborhood, and were stamped with its stunting imprint, and people who obviously had recently arrived; bought one of the big houses on Colonial Road or Narrows Avenue and, having thus established a beachhead in their lives, thought they were all set for a long campaign. I saw anxious sons, daughters, wives, husbands on the sidewalk outside, smoking, pacing, talking on the phone. The place had a cheery sign; it strove for the mien of a drive-in oil change franchise. Mornings, I would watch the day care center. Nights, the saloon. I waited.

I was never a planner, but to wait is to plan, or it is itself a sort of plan. Actions move us swiftly into the irrevocable, but to wait keeps the irrevocable at a distance. I realize that this attitude defies conventional wisdom, but what had conventional wisdom ever done for me, other than to absorb me into its patterns and rationales (I embodied the cautionary tale)? To learn patience was to remove myself entirely from the story. I reassured myself: when it’s cold out, I’m warm. When it’s wet out, I’m dry. When I’m hungry, I eat. When I want to bathe, there’s hot water. These and similar needs met, the only other thing I needed was the window, and to wait. Who needed to act? I watched the actors; the day care, the bar, and the clinic embodied the entirety of life, framed in that window: in the mornings, they kicked and screamed, at night they behaved like fools, and during the day they came, pale and sweating and full of terror, out of the hammering confinement of the clinic.

Then one day Bobby appeared on the stairs, carrying a white box from the bakery tied with red and white twine. We embraced, we kissed, we sat. Bobby had come up in the world: he didn’t hesitate to tell me what my eyes already had. The jacket, the slacks, the loafers, the watch. The subtle haircut. That he would even know where to go to get his hair cut like that: would you? He’d come up in the world and now, he announced, he was in a position where he could do a favor or two for an old friend in need. In short: Michigan, and Manitou Sands. I left with him within the hour, leaving the unopened pastry box for my mother to remember me by.

I would have sworn that Bobby and I worked closely together, that we were close, had I been asked, but no one would have asked me, because the question would not have occurred to anyone. I was obviously a factotum. I had a title, I had clothes, both of which were intended to stir faint echoes of the title and clothes Bobby possessed, as my specific responsibilities were intended to stir the faint echo of the authority Bobby wielded. Certainly I was feared, but I was not respected, and never in my natural life was I able to tell the difference. I fetched things, stood off to one side, carried money, beat people with my hands and feet when asked. I would have been happy to spend my life that way. Each day, the same as the last. There was nothing beyond Michigan and Bobby: nothing bigger, nothing waiting, nothing to come, nothing to catch up with me. So it seemed.

Yet the present is always the secret encampment of unintended consequences. Sedate as a neutered tomcat, it never occurred to me to
rue the day,
as the saying has it. Yet to rue the day doesn’t begin to cover it. One would have to rue every day, every one that came before and every new one as it arrives and all those to come in anticipation. Only in death is there time to rue life as fully as life deserves. But I get ahead of myself.

OUR MONEY CAME
from two streams. The original of the two was a laundry operation. Money from illegal sources was painstakingly changed into legal winnings. This took time, and patience, and it was not ideal, since the winnings were subject to taxation. Naturally, the government’s lawful share was found, on the scale of dreams, to be disproportionate. Whose dreams? What dreams? Dreams of capital flowing unfettered, unimpeded, from its dreamy sources to the parched and dreamy basins it filled and brought to blossom. The everyday dreams of people everywhere. Does taxation ever find a place in those dreams? Does even the most liberal of minds, in its uninhibited moments, dream of higher taxes? These are rhetorical questions. And there were other, unofficial tariffs; doubtless you can easily imagine all the ways in which various officials were induced to turn a somewhat myopic eye to our activities. It was Bobby’s job now to increase our margin. His solution was simple: he began to make money disappear during the minuscule interval when it has stopped existing. There is always an instant, as money changes hands, when it slips into limbo. It nearly always reappears, recognizable though slightly redefined—mostly in terms of whose property it has become—but its bardo is a moment of opportunity for those who know how to enter it. Why should Bobby and I have been afraid of the space between money’s death and rebirth? The sanctity of property rights, of generally accepted accounting principles? We’d
killed
people; laughed at the concept of the immortal soul. This was nothing. It was a coin trick.

Yet what I felt when I went into the cage was that it was
I
who made the money take form—I made gestures, I spoke words, and the money was suddenly
there,
body and blood. And with that miracle in my mind, I toted it back to New York, puffed up as any magician. To spend it, to steal it—that never entered my mind, not once. Not only because it would have been impossible for me to be disloyal to Bobby, but because it was pleasure enough to have created the money, to have brought it out of the shadows of its liminal existence. But Bobby didn’t see it this way. As far as he was concerned, the money was always money, as good as what it could buy. It belonged to no one, it belonged to luck, it passed into and out of various hands, and to put it in the hands of South Richmond Consultants, to call it theirs, suited Bobby, at first. Everyone was satisfied, even the Indians. Bobby’s suits, his car, his privileges at the hotel, improved, as did mine in their faint echo of his.