The next day, I sat on a concrete stoop on 149th street in Howard Beach with my hands jammed deep into my pockets against the cold breeze that had settled in the afternoon, reading a book, and watching a tall, thin black kid bouncing a tennis ball in the middle of the street.
The kid’s name was Jack, or maybe it was Jimmy. He was young, maybe fourteen. Hunched down over the sidewalk, he slapped the tennis ball against the ground with one hand…he let it bounce a few times on its own, and then he slapped at it with the other hand.
He did this over and over.
It was October, and the trees were starting to turn, where there were trees. I stood up, and I craned my neck around in every direction, and I worked my shoulder-blades and my back. It was a residential street, near the Conduit…lots of small apartments in duplex houses and in co-op apartments. I didn’t live there, not in that neighborhood. Not for a long time.
I watched the boy, Jayson- if that was his name- bouncing his ball up the street. I remembered him for some reason, from when he was a boy. I remembered that he was soft in the head, and couldn’t learn how to read and that he got made fun of a lot by some of the younger kids that lived near there. But that boy was only seven. Even then, he had a large, lilting head…the same one he had now, slack to the left like a Macy’s float with broken cords…a head too big for his narrow body.
He slapped away at the tennis ball, always let it bounce three times, and it always stayed close by. His feet moved...quick, agile, and his hands were supernatural.
I could barely look away.
There were clouds forming in the sky, and it looked like rain, and it felt close to snow. A gaunt, pale black woman with skin the color of cigarette ashes and long, stringy hair came to Jayson. She wore shorts that came all the way up her thighs and a t-shirt that rose up above the caved-in remains of her stomach. She was trembling all over, and had her arms wrapped around her middle as if she were fending off implosion. She whispered something in his ear, and the boy laughed. She looked at me, and her cheeks were sunken, and her jaw was swollen.
I almost screamed.
“It’s that African blood,” Vermin said. “That’s what it is, the fucking jungle, man.”
Vermin was sitting next to me, and he was one of Getch’s guys. He was wearing a ratty pink bathrobe. He wore it everywhere. Under his robe was a big bulge, the bulge of a stainless steel Ruger, .357.
Vermin scratched at four days of beard, and pulled his robe tight around a brown sweater with a hole in the chest. “It’s cold,” he said. “Too fucking cold. Already. I have tropical blood, my man, I’m straight on that. I’m part African, part Colombian, part mother-fucking Afghanistanian, but I know that my genes, my genetics were not put together with this northern, wind chill shit, you dig?”
It was cold, but I didn’t notice. I was looking up past the school, and far off in the sky. Gray clouds were swallowing up the Earth, beginning with Astoria.
The girl with the sunken face was whispering to Jayson, and he was holding the tennis ball in his hands. Clutching it close to his body.
“I think Randy Johnson is too tall to pitch in New York,” Vermin said to me. “It’s the wind,” he said. “It’s this cold weather.” He scratched at the scruff of his beard, and he shifted in his seat, and he sipped from a hip-flask of whiskey. He pointed at a lamp post across the street, and he said, “See? See the way the wind is slamming into that thing,” and I didn’t. “Tall objects, man. They take the wind like fucking bug zappers take fucking mosquitos.”
I agreed, even though I wasn’t listening. My head hurt, and my stomach was turning in knots. I popped a fistful of aspirin and I reached across for Vermin’s flask, and I chased it all down with Kentucky’s finest, and I looked at the sky, and I said, “Tall objects,” thinking of Kevin and the night before.
The light in the window.
“Fucking tall objects.”
A light rain was starting to fall. The skinny black girl disappeared into an alley, dragging the boy with the limp neck off with her. Way out past Brooklyn, and past Coney Island, and far past, the sky was tearing itself apart. I smiled, and I was sure that I could hear music.
Vermin turned over the paperback on my lap, and he spied the title. “So what the fuck is that about?”
“The end of the world,” I said, laughing. “The end of the world.”
No comments:
Post a Comment