Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

My wife is a lawyer, I remember. “I don’t know what I saw,” I say. “I just saw that this guy had been roughed up. And his office as well.”

“Why?”

I give her a blink. “I don’t know. They were into something. They had a real estate business, so maybe…” I say, “Chuck liked to diversify. He liked to get into all kinds of things. Things that were not necessarily…” As best and briefly as I can, I explain the weh-weh and, as I see it, my unwitting role in it.

Rachel can’t quite believe what she hears. She shakes her head and purses her lips and leans on an elbow. “It doesn’t look very good, does it?” she decides to say. “You drive him around while he runs his numbers game? What were you thinking?” She says, “Darling, this man was a gangster. No wonder he ended up the way he did.”

Now on top of everything else I’m anxious as hell and running a hand through my hair, and my wife leans over to take this hand and hold it between hers. “Oh, Hans, you silly goose,” she says. “It’ll be all right.” But she also says that she’s calling a New York attorney first thing tomorrow. (Which she does. The attorney opines that as a practical matter I have nothing to fear and charges us two thousand dollars.)

When I go on with my account, Rachel interrupts me once again. She seems aghast. “You continued to see him? After what happened?”

I recognize the accusation on the tip of her tongue: that I have a temperamental disposition to pardon that simplifies things for me and is certainly a symptom of moral laziness or some other important character weakness. And she’d be right, in general, because I’m a man to whom an apology of almost any kind is acceptable.

“Just hear me out,” I say.

In October — two months after what I’d thought had been my last dealings with Chuck — my electronic diary gave me a week’s notice of the personal day I’d set aside, back in the summer, for a driving test in Peekskill, a town upstate (the farther away from Red Hook the better, I reasoned). I confirmed the date. Why try out for an American driver’s license just before you’re leaving the country? This is Rachel’s question, too, and there’s no answer I can give her.

I traveled in a rented car up the Saw Mill and Taconic parkways. My preparatory examination of the road map had turned up such place-names as Yonkers, Cortlandt, Verplanck, and, of course, Peekskill; and set against these Dutch places, in my mind, were the likes of Mohegan, Chappaqua, Ossining, Mohansic, for as I drove north through thickly wooded hills I superimposed on the landscape regressive images of Netherlanders and Indians, images arising not from mature historical reflection but from a child’s irresponsibly cinematic sense of things, leading me to picture a bonneted girl in an ankle-length dress waiting in a log cabin for Sinterklaas, and redskins pushing through ferns, and little graveyards filled with Dutch names, and wolves and deer and bears in the forest, and skaters on a natural rink, and slaves singing in Dutch. Then out of nowhere came the loud blast of a horn — I’d swerved halfway into the next lane — and this dreaming came to a sudden end as I steered back and gave my attention to tarmac and automobiles and the real-time journey on which I found myself.

My arrival at Peekskill came, as planned, an hour before the appointed time. I familiarized myself with the streets and practiced parking. The town was built on steep hills by the Hudson, and it soon became clear that the principal hazard facing drivers was that of sliding down toward the river — indeed, it was my impression that the fundamental challenge facing the whole community was to resist the immense gravitational force drawing all of its constituents, organic and inorganic, toward the watery abyss that constantly came into view. This struggle appeared to have taken a toll on the townspeople, who hung out in front of unaccountably run-down dwellings and wandered through barren shopping precincts with the lassitude of a population in shock. There seemed to be an abnormal concentration of impoverished black residents and a bizarre absence of the satisfied middle-class whites I associated with outposts of the City, as New York is called by people living in such places, and all in all I was put in mind of a town in East Anglia I’d once visited with my wife: arriving there at night, I was taken aback, in the light of morning, by a scene of exclusively white people, all color and shape drained from their faces, shuffling here and there with an ill-omened, idiotic slowness, so that it seemed to me a species of zombie had established itself in that place. This inexcusable dread did not escape Rachel, who quietly said, after I had passed some comment, “There’s nothing wrong with these people.”

My driving examiner on this occasion was a polite old white guy who asked me in a bizarrely defeated voice if I had foreign driving experience, and I told him that, yes, I had. He beckoned the car forward, made me turn a corner, and asked me to park. I did so clumsily, anxious not to violate the ridiculous rule whereby the slightest contact between tire and curb results in automatic failure.

“Not great,” I suggested.

“Yeah, well,” the old guy said. “I always used to tell my students, take a bogey on the parking. Never screw around with the out-of-bounds.” He directed me back to the starting point, and only after I’d come to a stop did I realize that he was intent on giving me my license.

“Thank you,” I said, a little overcome.

“Drive safely,” he said, and got out of the car.

I was examining my temporary New York license when there was a rap on the window. It was Chuck Ramkissoon.

I watched with astonishment as he opened the door and sat beside me. He removed his India cricket cap — sky blue streaked with the saffron, white, and green tricolor — and paused for effect. “What?” he said. “You think I’d miss my student’s moment of glory?”

Chuck, who’d agreed back in August to supply his car for the test, was not one to forget a date; and a call to my office had told him all he needed to know.

“I took the train,” he said. “You’re going to have to drive me back.”

What was I supposed to do? Throw him out?

“Yes,” Rachel says. “That’s exactly what you should have done.”

Nothing was said as Chuck and I got under way. Then, hard by the river at the outskirts of Peekskill, there appeared two immense semi-spherical roofs escorted by a thin, strikingly tall chimney: from our angle, two mosques and a minaret.

“Indian Point,” Chuck said.

It felt good to swing away into the countryside. Chuck turned off his phone. He said, “You know, I never finished telling you the story of my brother.” He was looking into the hollow of his cap. “My mother was destroyed by my brother’s death,” Chuck said. “She was inconsolable for months. Literally. Nothing my father could say would make things better. One day they had a terrible argument. My father, who had taken some rum, got so angry he ran out into the yard and came back with a chicken in one hand and a cutlass in another. Right there, in front of all of us, he chopped the head off the chicken. Then he threw the chicken head at my mother. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘Take that with you.’”

Was I hearing this? Was he really telling me one of his stories?

Chuck reached for the handkerchief in his back pocket and mopped his mouth. “The fight,” he said, “was because my mother wanted to take part in a Baptist ceremony for my brother. You know who the Baptists are? You know about Shango?” Self-answering as usual, he said, “The Baptist Church is this Trinidad brew of Christian and African traditions — you’ll see them in Brooklyn on a Sunday, wearing white and ringing bells and trumpeting the spirit. They believe spirits take possession of you. Sometimes one of them will catch the power on the street, shaking and trembling and falling to the ground and speaking in tongues. It’s a spectacle,” Chuck said, holding out his arms and wobbling his hands. “The other thing people associate with Baptists is sacrificing chickens. So you can see why my father did what he did. He was angry my mother was falling for this black people’s voodoo.”