And The Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day (7)

I run up the stairwell of the old apartment block on Tenth Avenue with my breath ragged and splinteredged and rough, choking out of my throat. Oscar runs beside me. I can hear Mallet's men running up the stairwell below us, footsteps like hammerstrikes on railroad spikes. I don't think I've ever been more terrified in my life. I can feel my eyes rolling back in my head and my jaw is working, working. Everything is hot and red and my bones feel as fleeting and rickety as a Chinatown.

We reach the top flight of the building and run our fastest to get to the roof door. We don't know where we're going. Neither of us are thinking of what we'll do once we reach the roof. The walls of the hallway are peeling and yellowskinned, like an old summer dress. They are scuttleribbed where the driedskin wallpaper hugs the skeleton of the building. The doors of each apartment are deep hollow eyesockets where shadows lay eggs of more darkness, warm and clustering. It groans beneath us. It feels our footsteps strongly, but bears them with all the stoic humility of a slave.

Oscar throws open the door leading to the roof, breathless and red-eyed.

We run, run, run.

Until we emerge onto the roof, blue sky and sun leaking through the cloud cover for the first time in a month. I double over, sucking air. Oscar paces. He searches for a way out. His body trembles and sways as he walks and his skin is gray and wispy as bad farmland.

Mallet's men rumble down the hallway. I can hear them.

I can barely swallow I'm scared so bad. I can barely think. It's like all my thoughts are game birds, scattered out of the underbrush by a loud noise where they're shot and killed. Can't feel my fingertips. Can't feel my toes, even when I wiggle them.

Gonna die.

Gonna die, gonna die, gonna die!

Oscar says, “What do we do? What do we do? For God's sakes, they're almost here, man! They're gonna shoot us and we're gonna die!”

“Fire escape,” I gasp. “Is their a fire escape?”

That's how they do it in the movies.

My legs jiggle and twist, they squaredance and dosie-do and my hands shake. I can't keep them still, like blueflies, and my stomach is is empty and churning and seasick. I close my eyes for a moment. Light. Violet light is burned on the inside of my lids. A hundred burning flashbulbs, that melt away slowly like hardcandy that you put underneath your tongue and savor. I look up and see Oscar beckoning me and his mouth is moving but I can't hear any words coming out because my ears are ringing. I am aware of the sound of my breathing.

Oscar is screaming at me and starting down the ladder.

I move over to him and the roof door flies open and Mallet's men, with solemn pink faces and guns held in their hands, swing around the corner and I shove my hands up in the air. Oscar swears and his hands slip on the ladder handles. I can hear him knock against the railing of the closest platform and I can hear him gasp real loud, sucking at the air, a sound like when you pull a boot out of the mud.

He falls.

I spin around and I run to the edge and I see Oscar falling along the side of the building, his ferriswheel arms milling the air and his face drawn up in mild shock, gray as a toadstool. He makes this weird tinwhistle noise as he heads down. I watch him dumbly. I feel as if I've been split open like a corpse on an autopsy table and I'm my insides examined, displayed, poked and prodded. He hits the ground. Lies there like rotten fruit at the base of a tree. Small, small, small. Can't hardly see him. His arms and legs are all spread out and I can see now more than anything that he's just a kid. He's just another loser going nowhere at all, with wornout shoes and wearing the sun on his back and the moon on his head as a hat and all his father's sins in a battered up brief case and I can't think of someone more deserving of a grave with fresh dirt and fresh tears and if you could plant his eyes they'd grow into whole gardens that would be overgrown and choked up with weeds, choking it up with thorny fingers and malicious smiles.

Just another kid.

Now he's part of the street.

Part of the pavement.

I get sick over the side of the building. Mallet's men are kind of sick, too, I can tell. They stand there. They don't know what to do, like panhandlers on the streets. Their mouths are open.

My ears are buzzing again.

Fat, bloodswollen mosquitos with sewing-needle noses.

I can't look any more.

I can't look.

**

Their hands are cold. Louis can feel them all over his body, lifting him, examining him. His eyes are uncrackable walnut shells, shriveled up and warped and his breath is still harsh in his chest. Their voices are soft and hushed, like the shuffle of pigeons roosted under the overpass. The words are Spanish, this much he knows, and their fingers belong to farmers' hands. They place him on the back of a horse and he slumps forward because he has no control over his muscles.

Boy.

Weak as a newborn, with punching bulbfists and an old, cranky face.

They pry open his mouth and dribble a little bit of water down his throat. It is warm and oldtasting. He can barely swallow it. They give him some more. Someone thumbs his eyelid open and Louis sees a wash of white, clean and pure like a virgin, and they let it close again. They giddap the horse – tchk, tchk – and Louis feels himself bumped and jostled along. The wind rustles and lets its long, black hair down that tickles his cheeks like secret kisses.

Again, he drops into the dark.

**

“Listen. Kid. We're sorry to hear that your buddy's dead, man. We really are. But, godssakes, put yourself in my shoes! What am I gonna do about it, huh? Break down Mallet's door and shoot him dead? Is that what you're thinking. Because, then, you gotta see a shrink or sumpthin or you don't know a thing about Toby Mallet. For one, man, he's ten times bigger than this operation here and for another, you were trespassing on his territory! Broad daylight. Bold as hell. And it don't take no booklearnin to tell you that that's a stupid move, man. Stupid, stupid, stupid. You should be on your knees, man, thanking Godalmighty that Mallet didn't put a bullet through your head and toss you over right after poor, poor Oscar. But now you know, right? Now you know that everthing west of 87th is all his, right? And move on, kid. There'll be other buddies. The good die young. The bad live to be old and shriveled, man, and it's all about cash. It's the world. Not fair, never fair, never was. Now, I don't mind keeping you on. I don't. You done real nice on a coupla jobs and I appreciate it. But you gotta man up and stop wiping your snot on your sleeve and face the fact that this godawful place is gonna rip you and everone you know up into little tiny pieces until you scream 'uncle' so loud that stars a million miles away can hear you. It's just the way things are.”

**

Louis wakes up propped in a sitting position against a wall with darkness swarming around him and tugging at his skin, his face, his clothing with the warm, asking hands of children. He unclasps his mouth, old and mildewed as a locket with his tongue as the shriveled picture on the inside. There is a little bit of light coming from high above the floor behind a row of bars and there is a dripdripdripping sound and a pervasive smell of urine and bodies that have been left out too long.

He lifts his hands, which is difficult, because his arms feel all strained and weedy and thin. He lifts them and massages his wrists where there are heavy trenches of skin where they had him bound up with baling wire. There is only a little blood, too.

His mind swirls a little.

He is in a jailcell.

They had been hunting him.

They had found him, a stupid, dying horsethief, lying on the ground. They could have left him to die. But they didn't. They poured water down his throat, put him on top of a horse. They want him alive. They want to be able to hear his scream and see his blood and watch him choke and scrabble with a noose around his neck, turning his lips blue and his skin as white and spongy as manna. An eye for an eye. He doubts they would even give him a court trial. This would be a quite affair. They would drive him out to a field with a old, hunched over tree with limbs spread graciously and have him sit in the back of the truck until they finished tying the noose. Then they would bring him over, have him step on a barrel and slip the noose around his neck.

They'd kick the barrel away.

He'd drop.

And his neck would snap, like the stem of an apple being pulled off a tree.

And the branchlimb would dangle him for everyone to see, a neat new trinket for the wind to play with.

Louis tests the movement of the rest of his body and finds that his ankles are chained together. He shifts sideways a little so that he could see the rest of his cell. There are two cots and a man sleeping in one of them with his face turned towards Louis. In peace, the man's rawhide face is stiff and tough looking. He is a Mexican, but his nose is sharper and his cheekbones are higher up, nesting branches for his eyes. He is old. Scraggly hair and a wirebeard. His face seems to shrink into all that hair.

The man coos when he breathes, his hacksaw body yawing and trembling.

Louis turns away and licks his lips, still dry and raw.

“American?”

Louis jerks his head back at the old man on the cot, whose eyes are open and hard, watching him. The man's voice is ancient and yellowed and crinkly, sounding like the turning pages of an old book. He doesn't blink.

“Yeah.”

“Where about?”

“Manhattan.”

“Long trip.”

“Yeah.”

“Stole a horse and killed a man, I hear.”

“I guess so.”

“Boy, you were dead the second you laid eyes on that horse.”

The man's accent is nearly indistinguishable, flawless as a doll. And he speaks with force and distinction, despite his withering body, his wilting skin and nettled fingers. His yellow eyes travel up and down Louis's body, taking him in slowly, like he's never seen another human being before. He props himself up on one hobbled elbow and looks away for a moment.

“What's your name?”

“Louis.”

“Got a last name?”

“Brooks.”

“What's New York like these days?”

Louis looked down at his hands and cleared his throat.

“You got a name?”

The old man smiles. “Yes.”

Louis shrugs. “And?”

“I reserve the right to keep it a secret. I'm a lot older than you, chico. Got a lot more to hide.”

“It's a block of ice.”

“I don't care about the weather. How has it changed?”

“I'm seventeen, man. When was the last time you were there? Sure as hell doesn't look like recently.”

The old man closes his eyes and parts his mouth as if he's savoring some kind taste. His rattling blue china hands go up in apology and he settles back into his cot, mouth working.

“A bit longer than seventeens years. You're right, you're right.”

Louis leans back against the adobe wall, which is warm to the touch.

“I imagine they'll be coming for you soon,” the old man says, as he stares at the ceiling. “So don't get too comfortable.”