Adrian McKinty - Dead I Well May Be

I was annoyed. You see, this is the sort of thing that gets Danny a reputation for having sense. He really doesn’t, but Ratko or someone else in the building will hear him come off with this sort of shite and think that he’s on to something. It pissed me off. And I knew that I was going to be forced to tell Ratko this little story and it was going to reinforce all his prejudices.

Have to head, I said and got up.

You want the rest of your coffee? Danny said.

No.

I passed it over; our eyes met for a second.

Did you go to university? I asked him for some random reason.

I did. Rutgers.

Huh, well, look at you now, I wanted to say, but of course didn’t.

I dumped my plastic utensils and plate in the garbage and went out. I was dying for a fag now, but I tried unsuccessfully to kill the thought. Danny waved at me and grabbed the paper that I’d left.

Outside it was getting a wee bit hotter, but it was still ok. From 125th you can see up to the City College campus, and I shook my head. It was all a bit awful, that killing; I thought about it while I looked in my pockets for my cigarettes before remembering I’d left them in the house.

Shite.

Later, when I’d come back from the Yucatán and was thirty pounds lighter and shell-shocked and was in a bar with Ramón Hernández, I found out all about that murder and, believe me, it had nothing whatsoever to do with Jamaicans or stool pigeons. The cops couldn’t have been more wrong, in fact, unless they’d been deliberately misleading the press. Ramón told me that it was all a Santería thing. The heart gets burned and the straw that would have been burned goes where the heart was. As long as the heart stays in your hearth or fireplace no harm can come to your house; the bigger the villain whose organ it was, the more evil is warded off. Santería is really crazy, but Ramón believes it and a lot of other Dominicans do as well; it’s what comes of sharing an island with Haitians, I suppose. But also, you have to ask yourself, how many people in New York actually have a fireplace in their apartment? Not too many I would imagine.

Anyway, at this time, I didn’t know Ramón, and after about five minutes that killing went out of my head completely. I was too annoyed with Danny showing off to care about another dead black guy in the long, vague list of horrible violence which was engulfing Upper Manhattan this year.

To walk off my urge for cigarettes, and perhaps for some other reasons, I decided to dander down to the river. It wasn’t too far, and there wouldn’t be anyone about to hassle me.

Not the nicest walk in the city. Chop shops and tough little bodegas and empty lots. On the left-hand side of the street, the relocated Cotton Club, which seems a sad reflection of the original. Next, the West Side Highway, whose elevated steel girders form themselves into a beautiful series of diminishing arches. A Columbia building, parking spaces, another chop shop, a few guys fishing, but that’s about it.

To see people fishing in the Hudson always made me unhappy. They weren’t just fishing for sport, they were eating those things or selling them. Little black ones and green ones and big ones that in another universe entirely could perhaps be trout.

Morning, I said to the boys, and I got some grunts back in reply. Didn’t want to upset their casting, so I went up about half a block and sat down on some tires. I was sweating now, some kind of hypoglycemic reaction to all that sugar at breakfast, no doubt. Probably kill me.

On the water an enormous garbage barge going up to the 135th Street depot. Farther up, coming under the George Washington Bridge, there was a yacht with its sails tied up and motor on. I sat on the railing for a while, looking at the water, thinking about cigarettes. I decided to head home. Shower, disconnect the phone, go back to bed. I’ll set the alarm for twelve so I don’t destroy my sleep cycle too severely. Maybe call that girl later.

I looked at my watch; it was around seven. I wasn’t as tired as I should be.

Riverside Park was relatively empty, a few dog walkers, a few joggers, homeless guys, and the Columbia University women’s volleyball team, which cheered me up immensely. At the top of the many steps, I had to catch my breath for a moment or two. I went by the dreadful wreck of Grant’s Tomb and down 122nd past the music school. I got my keys and did that gun-keys-keys-gun thing I’d been doing recently and went in the building.

I made some more coffee. Showered, shaved again by mistake, brushed my teeth, put on the fan, and climbed into bed. Only about another hour and the doorbell went and it rang and rang and I almost cried out in frustration: Dear God, will no one let me sleep in this world? I got up, and when I opened the door Bridget came in without a word.

Bridget. She is almost too beautiful. Ethereal, poised, elegant. Some days, it’s as if she’s just stepped out of a poem by W. B. Yeats. Aye, you can imagine her haloed against a dewy wood, singing of Tír na nÓg, summoning you to a barrow in the earth. You would know all this and still you would bloody follow her.

Yes.

Bridget. Heart-attack red hair. A dancer’s grace, but with curves and long, long legs and a bum Rubens could have spilled a few pots of paint depicting.

She dresses well, too. Today she’s in jeans and a white T-shirt that has a daisy in the middle of it, between her breasts. She’s wearing Converse high-tops, which make her look goofy, a counterbalance to the haircut that makes her look a little older. None of this, though, is important. She could be two hundred pounds heavier and wearing a potato sack and it wouldn’t make a difference. It’s her face. The expressions that move across it like a storm on the lough. The thin nose that gives her an aristocratic bearing. The pale skin. And those eyes. I can’t describe them. Lieutenant Narkiss and all other women are put out of your head in a second. Blue and green on different days, but those are just the names of colors. When they flash dark you want to crawl into a hole somewhere, and when they’re lit up you feel the universe is too small to contain your happiness.

Bullshit, I know, but once you’ve seen her, you’ll get it.

She was going out with Andy for a while, but Andy has enormous, complex, and ongoing problems with the INS, and apparently the buggers hassled the poor kid so much that he couldn’t really give her the time that she deserved. He had to work and he had to get down to the INS office at four in the morning (they only let in the first thousand applicants every day), so Bridget eventually dumped him. Bridget was seventeen then and Andy, who was nearly two years older, was her first boyfriend, I think. It was a very tricky situation, and I, for one, suspected that Andy was relieved not to be going out with Bridget anymore. I’m not a huge conspiracy theorist but if one was of a conspiratorial nature, one might have gotten the impression that Andy was somehow not really into Bridget at all, and in fact he was perhaps the stalking horse for another party entirely. Sure enough, Darkey started going out with her about a month later. Darkey is mid-forties, and her parents might have been more disturbed about the age gap had she not shown that she could handle men by dumping that inconsiderate eejit Andy, who was always arranging to go places with her and then pulling out at the last minute because of his difficulties with the authorities. Though now, with Andy apparently skulking around death’s door and in a coma, I’m sure all is forgiven.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that Bridget is Darkey’s girl. Whether she’s the only girl, I don’t know, but he plays it like she is. They’ve been going out over a year and there is some old-fashioned talk from Mrs. Callaghan of an engagement. Bridget is the youngest of five and the rest are scattered to the winds at university or in California or wherever, so it wouldn’t be such a huge loss for cute wee Bridget to end up with less-than-cute Darkey White. She could do worse, in fact, for although twice divorced, Darkey is sitting pretty with his building business, his glass company, and his shares in Mr. Duffy’s various coys. Both Pat and Mrs. Callaghan like Darkey too, and it’s not that they’re afraid of him; they’re not, they really like him. They’re afraid of Sunshine (and who isn’t?), but Darkey they like and trust.