Peter Landesman: Blood Acre

"I'm sure."

Santos pulls at his cigarettes and holds out the pack.

"No thanks," Nathan says.

"Go ahead.”

"I don't smoke."

“You used to."

"That was a long time ago."

Santos lights up and blows a thin breath toward the sky. "Not so long," he says. "It was good of you to give Isabel a job."

"Errol, it's been, what, four years, five?"

"Well, I never thanked you."

"Your mother had more to do with it than I did. It was an easy handoff, a pass of the baton, mother to daughter-"

"Still, I hope she's no trouble. And how's-" Santos peers into the air, searching. The smoke coils and fades in the low winter light.

"We live uptown," Nathan says. "Maria. Her and her boy, Benny. What, Errol, have you been keeping tabs?"

Santos shrugs a shoulder. "We go back in a hundred different directions. It's just information, Nathan. My mother works for your father practically before I was born. Now my sister works for you. I used to know everything about you all by myself. Now what I know they tell me, but just dribs and drabs. It's sad."

A funny smile crosses Nathan's face.

"But Benny, right," Santos says. "I remember now. Maria and Benny. Wow, she was something. And she was a keeper. And her kid, he was just a baby." Santos grins. "Daddy," he says. "I never would have guessed."

"Daddy," Nathan repeats dryly. "I don't think I'd go so far as to say that."

I have to say I can't see it."

I wouldn't." Nathan steps back, clutching at his belt. "Sorry," he says. "She beeps me ten times a day." He peers down at the readout. "It's the only number she has."

Santos sucks deeply on the cigarette, reflecting. "They need attention, Nathan."

"We all need attention, but she's got her daughters."

"Daughters? I thought it was a son."

Nathan looks up. "Son?"

"Yeah, Benny."

"Oh, Maria."

"Maria," Santos repeats. "Who are we talking about?" But he holds up his hand, his face darkening. "It's none of my business."

Santos searches the street. The junk shops on Surf Avenue are opening. He motions toward the door. "Let me buy you a cup of coffee.

"I'd like to Errol, but-" Nathan thumbs back through the doors, "I have a meeting."

Santos stares through the murky plexiglass at Krivit, who spots them and smiles the same gummy smile. Santos returns the gaze.

"He'll always play both ways," he warns Nathan. "You never know what he's saying in the other guy's huddle."

"He's just playing the game, Errol, keeping the clock moving, nudging things along when the rules get things stuck."

"That's what worries me. He's not interested in outcomes. Milton never trusted him."

"Milton? My father doesn't trust anybody-" Nathan begins, then stops. Some clock tolls the hour. An illuminated dial inset within the Wonderwheel, suspended above the barren carnival, hanging like another early moon, making the light shift. Santos blinks a stray snowflake out of his eye, thinking of Nathan's money, Nathan's clothes, Nathan's side businesses, his little ventures, his stable of Latina mistresses with whom he famously argued-Santos could have had all that. He was always smarter than Nathan, always a step ahead; already in law school Nathan was leaning on him, pawning favors for homework and crib notes.

Nathan shifts from foot to foot. "Anyway."

Barbados pulls up to the curb and knocks on the window, motioning to Santos, aiming his finger onward.

"Okay. I'll tell Claire I saw you."

"Do that."

"You ought to come down to Brooklyn some night."

"I'm in Brooklyn all the time." He looks about him. "Like now."

"You know what I mean, Nathan."

"Same apartment?"

Santos kicks at the old snow. "That's right. She'd be thrilled. You'd be surprised."

"I guess I would.”

The plexiglass doors of Famous's flap closed. Santos spins in the snow and, squinting upward, heads for the car. Up and down Surf Avenue Russians are smoothing blankets over the sidewalks, laying out pairs of old boots and rusty pliers, lampshades, authentic jackets from the Red Army. There is something threatening about the open day, the light a diversion, the sun not quite what it seems, not high enough, even for winter; a shadow washing over the city.

"Wasn't that Milton Stein's son?"

Santos nods.

That apple didn't fall far."

"It's a big tree."

"You were friends," Barbados says. "More. Compadres, no?"

Santos waves a hand, as if to say, Where would I begin?

As the Ferris wheel sinks from sight he slumps against the car door, his eyes locked on ten years ago. On a yellow room one summer night kneeling over his father. Reek of iodine and urine. Santos saw the skull through the old man's skin, the caved and wasted face. Everything phony slips off the dying and his father arched his neck to tell him the last thing. The dead will take the living with them if they can, and he wheezed his son's name to draw him closer in, but Santos pulled back against the wall and listened to his father suck at the cold air between words. His father said that in the courts and the billable hours is the carnival of the powerful and the insane while your people walk blind and helpless. His father said that the life Errol would one day feel he was missing was occurring in the streets. And since that day, on this planet, what has he done? By that autumn Santos stepped out of his suits and his law-firm offers and into dank bars full of sweaty cops. Knights of old, wielding their stubby little guns. Into the streets, his father had said. Into the streets. After his first collar, downtown to central booking and a meet with an A.D.A., he stepped into the sour spice of a hall strewn with men, men sleeping along the walls, propped up on elbows to stare stonily into the dingy middle distance. It looked at first like a railway station in the dead of night in a far part of the world, the bums, the unwashed drunks, the reek of refugee dishevelment and sleep and malnutrition. But here and there they wore parts of patrolmen's uniforms, the pants or the shirt, or the blue cap pulled low over the eyes, their street shoes. Pretenders, kids, those beat cops, twenty, twenty-two, buzz cuts and puffy cheeks and semiautomatics and off days in front of the tube. Stepping quickly over their legs, like a halfback running through the tire drill, Santos turned for the main waiting chamber where a fuzzy TV in the corner played soaps to blank-faced and slack-jawed cops. An emergency room at a public hospital but without the urgency.

What Santos has done, he has done it there. He has done it in elevator shafts and dumpsters. He has done it in fields of rubble where sheets of newspaper roll in the wind.

All that school gone to waste. All that law and the money to come. His sister Isabel thought he'd gone mad. He hardly understood it then himself; today, he's forgotten his reasons for almost everything.

Warily, Santos eyes the horizon. There are clouds, he sees, over open water, black as thunder. Like a herd, or cavalry, body parts and animal shapes charge toward shore, fists, the fleeting contour of faces, vanishing as soon as they appear, dark horses rearing up.

Inside Famous's, Nathan's footsteps turn no heads. He slaps his arms and breathes in the tepid air, wanting to be glad to be here. After all those Sunday excursions from Queens and then Manhattan in the Silver Shadow with Milton, the pastrami, the foot-longs.

The friends he's brought, the women, Claire a dozen times, for this taste of old New York. Errol Santos-when weren't they here together, riding the train all the way out, kids leaving behind a wake of minor mayhem. Now Errol is thicker around the middle than Nathan remembers and shorter, with his hair slicked across the front of his scalp.

The fact is none of it is much to remember. Lately Nathan has been robbed of his ability to sentimentalize. Like a camera his shutter opens and closes, recording, not thinking, not feeling, while what sticks to mind is the opening scene of La Boheme when Marcello, staring out his attic window at an infinity of Paris rooftops, mourns the consuming appetite of love, while Rodolfo, hungry and cold, burns the manuscript of his five-act tragedy for fuel. Nostalgia, what is that? A settling of scores, small acts of vengeance and indiscretion between the now and then, the past and present.