Colin Harrison - The Havana Room

She nodded, made a humming, filled-mouth affirmative.

"So then you could see for- yourself, boy."

I said nothing. We were living in different movies, both terrifying. H.J. whispered to the girl, "LaQueen, go easy there." He lifted his freaky sunglasses up to his forehead and stared at me with oddly small and sensitive eyes set on his large cheeks. "My auntie, she say they found Herschel's ass out on the bulldozer, frozen. Frozen! How you let a black man freeze, boy? That don't go down, you know what I'm sayin'? Something wrong in all this, and we gonna find that Poppy or Popeye or whatever the fuck he called!" He reached down to his ankle and pulled out his gun, pointed it at me. "That make a man feel murderous! White man never pay Uncle Herschel shit! He work that land for somethin' like thirty years, never saw nothin'!" He let his hand rest on LaQueen's shoulder, holding the tempo. "I want repairation! You got to pay the repairations! We heard that land got sold for fourteen million dollars!"

"You heard wrong."

"Shut up! I want three hundred-"

"You're talking to the wrong guy."

"— thousand dollars. Don't think so, Mr. Wyeth. I think we got exactly the right muthafucka! We watchin' you, we know where you hang out, we know where this guy Rainey's new building is. We got it covered, boy."

Some of this was bluffing, I hoped. "You've got to take all this to Rainey," I said.

He moaned and rolled his head and looked upward in anticipation. "Go, LaQueen, do it, sista!" The girl was working harder, faster. "Give me the booty!" he screamed. He pushed the girl deeply onto himself, holding her head all the way down with both of his hands, making her feet kick a bit in gagging panic, the gun next to her ear, his knees shaking with the pleasure, and when the moment came, he lifted the gun over his head triumphantly-"Oh, you fucka!" he screamed- and fired into the ceiling, then again. I flinched. "Oh, sista!" he cried, collapsing backward and pushing the girl away to reveal a giant wet black penis that leapt from between his thighs. He tipped his head forward, inspected himself, then looked up at me looking at him, at it. The girl lay her head on his thigh, licked his softening size with obligatory reverence, her eyes on mine, coldly dismissive. The room smelled burnt. H.J. grabbed his security headset. "Antwawn, come up here and get this white boy outta my face." He aimed the gun at me. "You get me my money," he said, stroking the girl's head as she sucked him in and out. "Lawyer-man, you get me that goddamn fuckin' money or I'm goin' find you and fuck up whatever shit ain't already in your pants."

The next morning was blue-skied and excellent — if you weren't freaked out. Which I was, coffee-jittery, anxious, driving a rent-a-wreck too fast away from the city toward Jay Rainey's old farm, my terrorized heart pattering, It's bad, they're bad, it's bad. Like anyone, I prefer to forget that I am to die, not be reminded, prefer to think of my last breath as a far-off event, the years measurable in, say, the unit of time it takes to discover, test, refine, approve, and market a major new pharmaceutical. Yes, give me two or three of those epochs, a couple of new brain-boosters and cartilage-thickeners, and I'll be fine; the romping American society I die in will be unrecognizable to me. But meanwhile, the passage of days is ominous. I feel the past dropping away an inch behind me, a dark wind sucking coldly at my ears, yanking on the shorthairs of the back of my neck, gurgling like a suffocating eight-year-old boy. Yesterday is not yesterday, it is lost and gone forever, collapsed, rotten, moaning in the graveyard. Day by day I see that my future holds far less than does my past- ever fewer pieces of chocolate cake, clean shirts, fresh newspapers, hot cups of coffee, the milk swirling in a beguiling cloud. Yes, I scare much more easily than before. I freak more easily. I take threats very seriously. I believe, for example, that when an insane black guy with no pants on pulls out a gun and fires it, then that threat is real. When that happens, you run.

Yes, you run and stumble and have people yell at you and you see the pit bull still hanging from the rope, and you hear kids pointing and laughing and saying Mister! Yo! And you stumble whitely out into the cool air of the street and run with no wind and little form as fast and as far as you can before hailing a cab, which is what I did, arriving back at my miserable apartment and high-stepping it up the stairs to my door with great gratitude for the peeling paint and bald carpeting, the half-clogged sink, the soft-sagged bed- my shithole deluxe, the most wonderful place in the world.

And that was where I'd slept not at all, wondering in the dark if I should go to the police. H.J.'s thugsters had kidnapped me and he'd pulled a gun on me, after all. Many beautiful, time-honored laws had been broken. On the other hand, what was my proof, given that I was unharmed? And no doubt H.J. could produce any number of people in his club who'd say that never happened. And then he'd mention his dead Uncle Herschel and that would point any interested policemen toward the question of his body. And that I didn't want.

But was H.J.'s outrage linked to Marceno's complaint? After all, whatever Herschel had been doing with the bulldozer had occurred before he died. And H.J.'s rage stemmed from the fact of Herschel's death on a bulldozer rather than why he was on the bulldozer. By this analysis, the two problems were potentially unconnected. But I was troubled. I was troubled in the way that makes you sit up and turn on the cheap light by your bed and pick at your fingernail, wondering why Mrs. Jones had seemed to dispute the reason why Herschel was on the bulldozer in the first place. Or why H.J., while ranting at me, had said that he or his people were looking for Poppy. Which was interesting. And maybe logical, given that Poppy had called the ambulance upon "finding" the body of Herschel. But Mrs. Jones had said she'd been pointed toward Jay's building by Poppy. How was this possible? Why would Poppy know the address of Jay's building unless Jay had told him? And why would Jay do that? Poppy was apparently just a longtime farm laborer with damaged hands. Why would he need to know the address of a specific building in downtown Manhattan? And, for that matter, how did H.J. know that the old Rainey farm had even been sold? Well, maybe because the new owner, Marceno, or his workers, had arrived the day before, the morning after the sale. But H.J. didn't seem like the kind of guy to be messing around on an old farmstead. He had a hip-hop club to run. Which meant that someone, probably Mrs. Jones, had told him. But she'd arrived at Jay's building early enough the morning before, around 10 a.m., that it was likely that she'd left the North Fork too early to see the arrival of the new owners, especially if they were driving out from the city at the same time. Which suggested she'd made a subsequent call to H.J. after threatening Jay in front of his building. Yes, that made sense, that was how H.J. had known what I looked like so that his men could follow me. Mrs. Jones, one hundred pounds of righteous determination, had described me to him.

But even if they'd had my photo (a Web search of the back copies of New York City legal publications would probably turn up a cheesy five-year-old black-and-white head shot), how had they known where I'd be? Had they tracked me the previous day from Jay's building to the steak house to my apartment to the Indian restaurant to the school? Doubtful. More likely that they'd been following Jay, then lost himhe had disappeared quickly- seen me come out of the basketball game, recognized me, and then moved in.

Now I came to the rump end of the Long Island Expressway for the second time in thirty-six hours, turning onto the country roads leading to the North Fork, wishing my rental, a beaten delivery van with stenciled letters on the door and Jesus decals on the headlights, had a decent heater. I sipped my coffee and jittered up more tangled questions for myself, feeling driven- not crazy, but into the coldly rational, ultraparanoid part of myself. My old, capable, bastardly law-firm self. I began to see that whatever was going on with Marceno, H.J., Poppy, Mrs. Jones, and Jay constituted, in its entirety, a piece of machinery, call it a gear, that was engaged with another smaller gear, this one sprocketed by Jay, and the building on Reade Street he so badly wanted, a building that housed the business owned by David Cowles, whose daughter, Sally Cowles, apparently so fascinated Jay that he was secretly attending her high school basketball games. Did Jay himself understand these two sets of complications? And where did Allison fit in? Despite her insistence that I help Jay, she'd been pretty vague when describing his real estate deal. The fact that he hadn't explained to me the convoluted purchase of the Reade Street property suggested he was in no hurry for anyone to learn that he'd sought to buy that building and no other. And from Marceno's chronology, it appeared Jay had decided to buy the Reade Street building and then put the acreage up for sale. Looking back now- from whatever miserably chastened perspective I enjoy- I see that the moment Jay disappeared from the basketball bleachers into the Manhattan night marked his acceleration toward his own long-sought imaginings. What he wanted seemed so close that his natural caution had become a burden to him and had been jettisoned. If he had seen me at the game, then he would have suspected why I was seeking him, which meant of course that others sought him, too. And if, on the other hand, he hadn't seen me, he'd nonetheless made a sudden exit, which suggested he felt a vulnerability as he sat watching Sally Cowles run up and down the court. Perhaps he'd sensed he'd overstayed his opportunity. In either case, my relationship to Jay had changed. I was hunting him now.