He pulls out the empty suitcase from under the bed and packs what to wear on the day they free him: his midnight-blue suit, neatly folded; his suede cap-toe boots fitted with hand-carved cedar shoe trees; a black silk shirt with silver quarter moons for buttons; boxer shorts; black dress socks. He packs a string of old Spanish rosary beads that Naturelle gave him on his birthday two years ago. He packs the photograph of his mother, father, and six-year-old self standing before the lit Christmas tree.
He returns to the living room and leaves the suitcase by the front door. ‘I’ll say goodbye here,’ he says. He goes to Naturelle and gathers her in his arms. He holds her for a long time before letting go. She smiles up at him, her lips pressed tightly together. The skin around her eyes is dark and swollen from lack of sleep. She blinks and looks away but Monty watches her for a moment more. She seems very young right now, all her makeup washed away, her long black hair tied back in a schoolgirl’s ponytail.
He approaches his father but Mr Brogan shakes his head.
‘How you planning on getting to the Port Authority?’
‘Subway.’
‘You won’t make it. Trains are barely running right now. I’ll drive you to Otisville. Jesus, look what they did to you.’
‘Come on, Dad, go easy on me. I’ll take a taxi.’
‘There won’t be any taxis,’ says Naturelle. ‘Let him take you to a hospital.’
‘You don’t trust my driving?’ asks Mr Brogan, trying to smile. ‘I got chains on the tires and everything.’
‘I don’t want it like this. You’re making it harder. Let me walk away, Dad. It’s easier that way.’
‘What’s easy about it, Monty? Easy? My God, you don’t understand, do you? You don’t have any idea.’ He touches Monty’s cheeks very lightly with his fingertips. ‘Let me drive you there. I need to see where it is anyway, for visits. Okay, buddy? Help me out.’
Monty blinks and then nods. ‘No hospitals,’ he says.
Mr Brogan kisses Naturelle on the cheek and she embraces the older man, wrapping her arms around his winter parka and hugging him very hard. When she releases him he walks to the front door and opens it, picks up the suitcase, and leaves the apartment without closing the door. Monty stands still, looking at Naturelle. They listen to his father’s footsteps echoing in the stairwell.
‘Wait a second,’ she says. She goes into the kitchen and he waits, rocking back and forth on his boot heels, his eyes closed. The faucet in the kitchen is dripping slowly, each drop a distant handclap. When Naturelle comes back she gives him a plastic bag filled with ice cubes and makes him hold it against the side of his face. They don’t move for a moment, her hand on top of his hand, the bag of ice pressed to his jaw.
He wants her to grab him, to whisper that she knows a place to hide where no one will ever find them. He wants her to promise that she’ll follow, that she’ll find a job in Otisville and come to visit every week. He wants her to say that seven years will pass like a night’s bad dream, that he will wake to find her arms around him, that a lifetime is waiting for them around the bend.
Naturelle says nothing and Monty says nothing. Finally he nods and turns away, closing the door softly behind him. He unknots the plastic bag and dumps the ice down the stairwell, watching the cubes glitter and disappear before clattering on the linoleum three floors below. He balls the empty bag and pockets it.
Downstairs Mr Brogan’s car is double-parked in front of the building, his hazard lights blinking. The roof of the old Honda is crowned with snow but the windshield and rear window have been swept clean. Mr Brogan opens the passenger door and Monty eases carefully into the seat, then leans over to unlock his father’s side.
They wait for a minute until the engine is purring smoothly and warm air is flowing through the vents. ‘FDR is closed,’ says Mr Brogan. ‘I figured we’d go up First Avenue, take the Triborough, catch 87 up to Route 17, and then 211 takes us right into Otisville. Easy drive, except for the snow.’ Monty doesn’t respond so Mr Brogan continues. ‘I saw a bad accident on the BQE. A tow truck flipped over. They were going to tow the tow truck, I guess, but they had to get it on its feet first. Its wheels, I mean.’
Monty rubs the corners of his eyes and his fingers find crust there. He picks away the dried blood. His father sees what he’s doing and hands him a red handkerchief from his coat pocket.
‘It’s clean,’ says Mr Brogan, studying the side of his son’s face. ‘Jesus, look what they did to you. I’ll tell you what, Monty, you’re going to be okay. The false teeth they put in now, you can’t tell the difference. How’s your nose?’
‘Broken.’
‘Broken nose, that’s character. It looks bad now, I know it, but when all the swelling goes down it’s going to be okay. Don’t worry, when you come home, you’re still the best-looking kid in Bensonhurst. They sure gave you a licking, though. How many were there?’
‘I don’t know, Dad. A bunch of them.’
They drive up First Avenue, the tire chains chanting steadily: deh-deh-leh-deh-deh, deh-deh-lehdeh-deh. Each time Monty presses the handkerchief against his eyes, pain flares along the bridge of his nose. But he can see a little better now. He looks out the window and watches the city roll by.
The white clouds above them are cracked here and there with blue. The streetlights are still on, glowing weakly in the morning air. A mustachioed man stands on a corner, holding a cigarette in gloved fingers, his snow shovel resting in the crook of his elbow. A woman wearing a man’s overcoat, the hem brushing against the toes of her galoshes, shakes salt on the sidewalk in front of a shuttered butcher shop. Two young boys drag their sleds behind them, huffing and puffing with exaggerated fatigue, their breath rising above their bright-red faces. A man and woman wearing matching green parkas load their skis into the rack on their car’s roof. A newspaper vendor sits on a blue milk crate, sipping coffee from a paper cup, while his curly-haired son snaps icicles from the kiosk’s eaves. A police officer, hands on his hips, stares under the opened hood of his cruiser while his partner leans against the driver’s-side door and laughs into his walkie-talkie.
At a red light on 96th Street, Monty looks up at the city bus idling noisily alongside them. A little boy in the backseat, wearing a white knit skullcap, waves at Monty. Monty waves back. The boy taps on the window and Monty reads the letters finger-drawn on the frosted glass: moT. It takes Monty a moment to figure it out. Then he smiles as well as he can and draws on his own window: Monty. Before he can cross the t the bus pulls away and Monty watches it go, trailing exhaust in its wake.
‘Give me the word,’ says Mr Brogan, ‘and I’ll take a left turn.’
‘Left turn to where?’
‘We can take the George Washington Bridge. Wherever you want.’ Mr Brogan drives carefully, hands on the wheel at ten o’clock and two o’clock, squinting into the slush ahead for potholes. ‘We’ll get you stitched up somewhere and go west, find a nice little town—;’
‘Dad.’
‘I’m saying if you want. If that’s what you want, I’ll do it. We’ll drive and keep driving. Stop in Chicago for a Cubs game. I’ve always wanted to see Wrigley Field. Maybe we can go to the Grand Canyon, take a few pictures. We’ll find a little town somewhere, find a bar, and I’ll buy us drinks. I haven’t had a drink in nineteen years, but I’ll have one with you. And then I’ll leave. I’ll tell you, Don’t ever write me, don’t ever come visit. I’ll tell you I believe in God’s Kingdom and I believe I’ll be with you again, and your mother. But not in this lifetime.’
Monty runs his tongue over the splintered roots of his missing teeth. The left side of his face feels as if it had been pressed onto the red-hot coils of an electric stovetop. He looks at his father and sees the determination on the man’s face, eyes unblinking, muscles in his jaw bunched behind his cheek like a wad of chewing tobacco.
‘They’ll take your bar from you.’
‘Jesus.’ Mr Brogan shakes his head. ‘My bar? They can take my bar to hell.
You think my bar is more important to me? If you say the word, Monty, we go.’
‘They’ll find me. Sooner or later—;’
‘You know how they find people, Monty? They find them when they come home. People run away but they usually come back, and that’s when they get caught. So you go and you never come back. You get a job somewhere, a job that pays cash, a boss who doesn’t ask questions, and you make a new life, and you never come back.’
‘I can’t get away from it, Dad. Okay? I’m stuck with it, it’s going to happen. Please? Just take me to Otisville.’
But for the space of a mile, as the old car wheezes and hacks through the slush, as the tire chains chant deh-deh-leh-deh-deh, deh-deh-leh-deh-deh, Monty closes his eyes and unleashes the temptation, lets it run free in his mind. He has thought these thoughts a thousand times, but they’ve never been so pure as now, when a left turn westward can make them reality. Drive west and keep on driving, over the Hudson River, through the New Jersey suburbs, through states Monty cannot map, whatever lies west of New Jersey – Pennsylvania, maybe, and then Ohio? He imagines the hills and shivering cows, red farmhouses and white church spires, the black road carving through the middle of it all. He imagines miles of cornfields and wonders what cornfields look like in winter. He imagines the desert, a vastness of sand and wind-carved mesas, pitchfork cacti lining the roadside. A dusty town lost somewhere in this West, a bar with a sign on the window: HELP WANTED. Hiring on to barback, washing the glasses, sweeping the floor, sleeping on a cot in the back room. Going to the nearest city and finding the right people, buying a forged driver’s license and birth certificate. The bar owner would have a beautiful daughter, and at first he would warn Monty that the girl was not for him, but he would watch how hard Monty worked, how the glasses sparkled, how the floor shined; he would promote Monty to bartender and marvel at the place’s growing popularity; he would admit to his friends that here was an honest man, a man you could trust with the till, a man who never pocketed what wasn’t his. The bar owner’s daughter, black-haired and black-eyed, would smile at Monty from across the room; she would keep her lips closed to hide her crooked teeth. He would buy her a turquoise-and-silver necklace with six months’ savings, and she would cry as she unwrapped it; she would bury her face against his chest and wet his shirt with her tears. They would drive to the nearest river and lay their clothes on clay-colored rocks and step into the cold cold water, hand in hand, an eagle cutting figure-eights in the sky far above them. On a dry summer evening a brush fire would start in the western hills and quickly gather force, marching toward town, the jackrabbits and armadillos fleeing before it. Everyone would pray for rain but none would fall. Monty would join the volunteer firefighters and battle the blaze for three days and three nights, chopping down trees and clearing brush for a firebreak around the perimeter of the town, hosing the rooftops as the citizens packed their cars and prepared to flee. The volunteers’ efforts would be rewarded, the wind direction would change, and the town would be saved. A parade would be held on Main Street to celebrate the victory and thank the heroes; Monty would roll by in the mayor’s convertible and wave to the cheering crowd. One day the bar owner would pull Monty aside and ask him if he loved the man’s daughter, and Monty would tell him, Yes, with all my heart, and the bar owner would say, I’d be proud to call you son. Monty would shake the man’s hand and they’d have the wedding that Sunday. The bride would walk down the nave in her mother’s white dress, and Monty would wait for her, his new friends by his side, electricians and truck drivers and firemen and the high school basketball coach – Monty helps him in the winters, running the kids through drills, playing in scrimmages sometimes but never showing off, because these are just kids, desert kids, they dribble slow and have no left, but Monty never steals the ball, he never ever steals the ball. He would kiss his wife and the priest would smile and pronounce the benedictions. Soon they’d have children, green-eyed sons and black-eyed daughters. The kids would be country, going fishing during the long summer afternoons, riding horses through narrow canyons, attending church every Sunday in their blazers and ties and gingham dresses. They would grow up smart and kind and cheerful, they would get good grades and go to college, they would become doctors and engineers and teachers, they would have their own families and come home for the holidays, all their black-haired children in tow. And on one of these days – make it the Fourth of July – after the fireworks had boomed and spangled the sky, after the last ear of corn had been chewed down to the cob and the last crust of pie gobbled up by the littlest girl, after the babies had been put in their cribs and everyone else had gathered in the living room, black-and-white photographs of the past forty years hanging on the walls – Monty’s photographs, for this is his hobby and he’s become expert at it; his friends tell him he should have a show somewhere but he never does – Monty would stand in front of them and tell a story. Everyone would be quiet, listening, because Grandpa isn’t a big talker; this is a rare thing happening. The smaller ones, sitting cross-legged on the floor, big-eyed and open-mouthed, would stare up at him. His children would listen carefully, exchanging glances once in a while and shaking their heads, for what they hear sounds impossible, but they know it’s true, all of it, every word. Monty’s wife would watch her husband, not hearing the words because she knows the story. He told her the night before their wedding. He told her he would understand if she never wanted to see him again, that if she wanted he would buy a bus ticket and leave that night and never come back. His black-eyed wife would watch him and remember that night, and remember what she said: Stay, stay with me. Monty would tell the story to his family and the rest of the world would be still, his pit bull on the front porch would quit barking, the crickets and coyotes and owls would hush, and Monty would tell his story, of who he is and where he came from. He would tell the whole thing and then listen to the silence. You see? he would ask. You see how lucky we are to be here? All of it, all of you, came so close to never happening. This life came so close to never happening.
Table of Contents
Cover
Also by David Benioff
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
David Benioff, 25th Hour - Film Tie-In
(Series: # )
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