Don Winslow - A Cool Breeze on the Underground

“Yeah, okay, not steal. But stuff like this.”

Neal planted his foot on the edge of the step. The result was an awful screech.

“You want to wake the whole building?” Graham asked. “Always, always step to the butt end of the stair. That’s where it’s the most solid, least likely to squeak. Also you can feel your way. You can feel where the next step is. ‘Faginesque.’ I’ll give you ‘Faginesque.’ Get to work.”

Work this evening was learning how to climb stairs without making any noise. Work was doing it with your eyes closed. Work was realizing that you make more noise going downstairs than going up, so, generally speaking, you sneak up but run down.

“Christmastime,” Graham said as Neal practiced his step technique, “I run out and buy presents for those people who put carpet on their stairs.”

“Nice people,” Neal agreed.

Going downstairs was a genuine bitch, mostly because you can’t find the butt end of the step with your toe and you’re afraid of pitching forward and breaking your neck. So observed Neal to his tutor about the fortieth time he’d fucked up the maneuver.

“Worse comes to worst,” Graham said, “and it will, you get down on your belly and swim downstairs.”

“Swim?”

“Try it. Don’t be afraid. Lie down, headfirst, and do the dog paddle.”

“I can’t swim and I don’t have a dog.”

Neal felt stupid as shit lying down dangling over the stairs.

“You’ve seen Lassie, haven’t you?” asked Graham. “Do like Lassie does when she has to save that little bastard from drowning.”

“Timmy.”

“Right. Whatever. Quit stalling.”

Graham put his foot on Neal’s ass and pushed.

It wasn’t so bad when you got used to it, Neal thought, doing like Lassie does, etcetera. He made his way to the bottom of the stairs.

He asked Graham, “How do you do this with one arm?”

“You don’t. You hire some stupid kid to do it for you.”

He walked over Neal’s back and out the door.

A couple of months later, Neal tried to climb through a window and talk at the same time. He had something on his mind.

“If I gave you the money, would you buy me something?”

Graham stood on the fire escape. “What? Beer? Cigarettes? Rubbers?”

“A book.”

Neal was backing through the window, his feet already in the kitchen sink.

“A book? You really want to go through a window like that? So you can’t see what’s in the room awaiting your arrival with a Louisville Slugger? What book, Neal? Swedish Sex Slaves? Ruby and the Firemen? Like that?”

Neal climbed out. “Tom Jones.”

He started back through the window, headfirst this time.

“Tom Jones? Is it dirty?”

“Dirty enough, they won’t let me buy it.”

“Are you really this stupid, Neal, or are we just having an off day? Going into an apartment window head in the air like a hanging curveball? You go in like that, you come out on a stretcher, anyone’s home.”

Neal eased his way out. “So will you?”

“What’s so important about this book?”

“David Copperfield read it when he was a kid. You know David Copperfield?”

“Yes, I know David Copperfield. I saw it twice. Freddie Bartholomew and W. C. Fields.”

“Really? W. C. Fields? Who’d he play?”

“I don’t know. Guy who was always broke, owed money.”

“Mr. Micawber.”

“Yeah, okay. Now will Mr. Carey please show me the correct way to enter a domicile via a window, if this literary discussion is over? Or shall I pour tea?”

“I don’t know.”

“What don’t you know?”

“The correct way to enter a domicile via a window.”

“Why didn’t you ask?”

Feetfirst, facing the window, and swing through. Like you’re on the monkey bars. Then walk purposefully through the kitchen and down the hallway and into the bedroom, which will be on your right. Don’t tiptoe. Tiptoes are for ballerinas and guys who go to jail for B amp; E. Which you are neither. First thing, grab something that looks pawnable and put it in your pocket. If someone is there and you can’t get out, don’t fight. Let him grab you and call the cops. Levine will be right there to arrest you.

So you’re in the bedroom and the guy is asleep. You put his watch in your pocket and place this nice little mike under the side table. Put the watch back. I said put the watch back. Now go out the way you came in.

Easier than Maloney’s sister. Your old Dad taught you well. Home now for a Swanson’s TV dinner and a book.

Thus, Neal Carey grew up and learned a useful trade.

“Today,” said joe graham with his brightest nasty smile, “we are going to play a game.”

“Swell,” said sixteen-year-old Neal, who possessed that finely tuned sixteen-year-old sense of sarcasm.

They were sitting in Graham’s apartment on Twenty-sixth Street between Second and Third. The place looked like an operating room, only smaller. The countertop of the efficiency kitchen glistened and the sink and tap handles shone as brightly as the soul of a seven-year-old Catholic girl leaving confession. Neal could not figure out how a one-armed man could make a bed with hospital corners you could cut yourself on. The bathroom contained a toilet that begged sunglasses, a similarly shimmering sink, and a shower-no bath. (“I don’t like lying around in dirty water.”) Graham had moved in ten years ago because it was an upwardly mobile Irish neighborhood. He had failed to discern that all the upwardly mobile Irish were moving to Queens. They came back to the neighborhood only on Saturday nights to sit in a local tavern and listen to songs about killing Englishmen, sanguinary concerts punctuated by maudlin renditions of the dreaded “Danny Boy.”

On this particular Saturday, an unseasonably warm autumn afternoon, the neighborhood was noisy with the sounds of playing children, old couples returning from their weekly grocery shopping, and neighbors hanging out on the sidewalk enjoying the sun.

Neal would rather have been enjoying the sun, especially in the company of one Carol Metzger, with whom he had planned a stroll in Riverside Park and maybe a movie. Instead, he was cooped up in Graham’s stuffy shrine to Brillo, about to play a game.

“The game is called Hide-and-Go-Fuck-Yourself,” Graham announced, “and the rules are simple. I hide something and you go fuck yourself.”

“You win. Can I go now?”

“No. Now, let us say I have lost my earring-”

“Your earring?”

“Just play the game. I have lost my earring. It is somewhere in this apartment. Find it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to have a beer.”

“Can I have a beer?”

“No. You can look for the earring.”

Graham went to the fridge and got a cold one. Then he sat down on a stool by the kitchen counter and turned to the sports section of the Daily News.

Neal began to search the apartment. If he could nail this stupid thing early, maybe Graham would let him out of here and he could still catch up with Carol Metzger. The way her brown hair fell on her shoulders made his stomach hurt.

If I were an earring, where would I be? he thought. This seemed like the most logical way to go about this. He looked under the cushions of the small sofa in Graham’s “sitting area.”

“Good idea,” Graham said.

There was no earring in the sofa. There was no earring under the sofa. There wasn’t even any dust under the sofa; no pennies, rubber bands, paper clips, or toothpicks, either. Neal looked in the seam between the seat cushion and back of Graham’s Naugahyde easy chair. No earring.

“The Giants are eight-point dogs tomorrow,” Graham noted. “At home against the Colts. You want in?”