* * *
Joe crawls out of the foam-edged river onto shore at 215th Street, just south of where the Harlem River marks the northern edge of Manhattan. Although Joe is very happy to be back on land, he can’t help but worry about what aquatic parasites might be attacking his body through the scratches and scrapes he has gotten during the last days. After Bob Tom lands and busies himself coiling the rope he has used to pull Joe ashore, Joe tells the old man he needs to find someplace where he can thoroughly wash himself. The old man snorts, “No real riverman’s gonna get sickly from a bitty little bug you can’t even see. Besides, it’s good insurance. You walk around this here town smelling like you do and folks might sniff twice, but they ain’t gonna take after you like they done in Albany.”
While Joe takes some extra comfort in thinking that Bob Tom might be right, he is mainly basing his hopes that he goes unregognized on the transformation he has made by shaving his head and eyebrows with an ancient octo-blade they had requisitioned from a summer camp lodge. Joe hopes that his bald head and eyebrow welts, plus the patchy stubble on his chin be enough to keep people from recognizing the missing son of the Co-president of Cygnetics.
“And even though you still got lots to learn about river life, Noby One, any bug that looks at you the way you look now is gonna figger you’re already desperate sick with something a whole world worse than whatever it could inflict on you.
“Now, where we goin and how we getting there?”
Joe has wanted to call Nancy to see if she has heard from Prissi, but he doesn’t trust Nancy to keep a secret. He guesses that if she hasn’t heard any newz that he has reunited with his family she will assume that he is trying to find Prissi—which can only mean that Manhattan is his destination. Even though Joe’s has spent many of the hours they were captives thinking of the best answer to Bob Tom’s question, he still wavers, “I don’t know. Maybe at the NYPD.”
“I think we should start where she and her pa lived.”
“That’s the last place she would be.”
“I know that, but mebbe we’ll find something that’ll get us started. Kinda like given a dog a scent.”
Joe disagrees, “Don’t you think whoever is after her will already have done that? If something is there, they’ll already have found whatever it was.”
“Good God in heaven, Noby, what do they teach you at that school of yours? You think if you want a huntin dog, you just go git the first thing with a waggly tail and floppy ears? There’s a wide world of difference between this here dog’s nose and some others. And let me remind you that yore lucky to be spending yore days with the best-nosed Damall dog in this here quarter of the country.”
Joe gives Bob Tom a deep bow, “I know. And I also know I’ll never be allowed to forget.”
Bob Tom slaps his thighs and shuffles his feet, “There you go, son. Now, let’s git.”
Two hours later, Joe stands a half-block down and across the street from the entranceway of the Gramercy Arms partially camouflaged by the lush ficus tree he is holding in a cerulean ceramic pot. Bob Tom Damall is directly across from the apartment building’s entrance taking an interminably long time trying to re-pak his chest pak. Joe watches him and as soon he sees the flick of the old man’s hand, he picks up the pot and starts for the door. When Bob Tom picks up the pak and shakes it as if to settle its contents, Joe picks up the pace. As he gets close enough to see in the lobby, he adjusts his pace. He watches the elevator light switch from 2 to L. Three seconds later the elevator doors slide open. Joe reads the speed of the roly-poly woman leaving the elevator with the instinct he has honed in hundreds of hockey games so as to perfectly time his arrival. As the woman reaches for the handle on the door, Joe hefts the pot to make it more difficult for the woman, whose eyes have the shallow bright shine of costume jewels, to see past the ficus leaves to his newly bald head and the red welts where his eyebrows should be. When the woman’s hand falters, Joe wiggles the tree a second time. The door opens. Joe tips the tree away from his face and, grinning like a drunken monkey, staggers in. Seeing what she has let in, the woman begins swatting away Joe’s word of thanks, like they were midges on a muggy night, as she totters out the door.
Joe walks toward the elevator, but as soon as the woman is out of sight, he hurries back to the door. Bob Tom is already half-way across the street. Once the old winger is safely inside, Joe dumps the pot in a corner of the lobby and races to the stairway door. He and Bob Tom have agreed that Joe should stay two flights of stairs above the old man to warn him if the improbable—someone using the stairs in the middle of the morning—is happening. When Joe arrives on the fifth floor, he waits behind the stairway door until a wheezing Bob Tom catches up with him.
Once both invaders are in the quiet, low lighted hallway, Joe stands guard as Bob Tom hunches over the door handle to do whatever magic he is going to do to get into the Langue’s apartment.
In the action vids Joe infrequently watches, thieves use sophisticated sensors and decryptors to get past locked doors. Joe doesn’t expect to see those kinds of tools get pulled from the old man’s pak, but he realizes that he won’t be surprised to see Bob Tom bring out some small box with a glowing screen and lots of buttons. Instead, the riverman taps the wall alongside the door frame a half dozen times with a knuckle. When he is satisfied, he tells Joe to take off his coat and spread it on the floor beneath the door handle. When that is done, he pulls out a worn canvas scabbard from his pak and withdraws a shiny fish gutting knife. Bob Tom stabs the wall and begins hacking downward.
Debris falls onto Joe’s coat.
“That orta kill the alarm.”
The old man withdraws the knife and flips it around so that the serrated edge is down and begins sawing away at the wall until he has three sides of a rectangle cut out. He scores the bottom edge, then, pushes in that section of the wall like it’s the flap on a cat door. The old man’s arm disappears into the hole and he begins cutting through the interior side of the wall. A minute later, Joe watches the old man’s arm disappear into the hole up to his elbow. There are two clicks and Bob Tom opens the door with his free hand. He steps back and makes a gracious sweep of his hand.
“Gordian knot. Who’s got time for all the fancy stuff? Grab your coat and careful with them scraps.”
Before he enters the apartment, Bob Tom taps the exterior wall flap back in place.
“Noby, find me a piece of paper, and a pen.”
As soon as Joe returns with the supplies, Bob Tom folds the sheet in half, scribbles a note about hemming the curtains and writes, “Ms. B” in large block letters on the outside.
“Noby, tape that over the cut, will ya, while my nose starts workin.”
Joe has been in Prissi’s room at Dutton so, despite the open drawers and scattered papers, it takes a minute for him to decide whether he is just seeing a bigger version of her dorm room or whether someone has been searching the apartment. It also takes him awhile to find any tape, but after he does, Joe covers the evidence of their break-in with the note.
While Bob Tom remains standing in the middle of the living room, the teener wanders aimlessly around the five-room flat, touching things and thinking about how different Prissi’s life is from his. When Joe gives him a look as he passes by in his meanderings, Bob Tom declares, “Ya gotta let em come to you. A good dog’s a still dog.”
The old man does the same motionless inquiry in each of the other rooms. Finally, after a quarter hour he says, “Well, she ain’t here.”
Joe sputters.
“So, I guess we’ll go where she was.”
“And where’s that?”
“Well, I reckon we orta take a look at that liberry she was at and that market where them food wrappers come from in the kitchen and, probly, that school where them kids in the pitcher in her room go to. I’d say that’s a start.”
Joe goes back to look at the pix in Prissi’s bedroom of a dozen kids of various sizes and colors standing close together. Prissi is
in the background with a half-grin. A skinny black boy with a keyboard wide smile, holding a soccer ball tightly to his chest, stands front and center.
The boy in the pix, but two two years older, and, with his shorn scalp and rough-sewn stitches, looking somewhat the worse for wear, is standing behind the counter when Joe and Bob Tom come through the door of the EZ-Lam Global Market. As they walk up and down the aisles, Bob Tom keeps whistling through his teeth and muttering “Jeezm” as he looks at the diversity of food for sale.
“Makes squirrel and coon and even bear look pretty damall tame. My gut’s haingry, no denyin that, but I ain’t so sure my mind is gonna let it eat most here all of this stuff.”
Joe reaches for a package of mbatata biscuits.
“Let’s try these. Prissi told me she loved them.”
Bob Tom draws back a step as if Joe is holding a mongoose cage, which might spring open at any second.
“What is it?”
“Biscuit.”
“Damall, boy, who you foolin? I growed up with biskits and these here shore don’t look like any bisket I ever et before. What’s in im?”
An exasperated, but laughing, Joe says, “Damall your own self, Bob Tom, you shore ain’t much of a city man. I reckon flour or sumpin pretty close to flour’s in im.”
“Well, hells bells, Noby, lime, lye and rat pizen look sumpin like flour. Here, give em to me.”
Bob Tom grabs the box and stomps toward the front of the store with Joe in his wake.
The young man behind the counter looks at the pair warily.
“Excuse me, young'n, what’s in these here?” The riverman rattles the box like a maraca.
Joe interrupts, “Bob Tom, they’re fine. They’re Prissi’s favorites.”
“Well, there ain’t no easy way to verify that, now is there, since she ain’t around to ask.”
“Which is why we need to get something to eat and get moving if we’re going to have any chance of helping her. Let’s just pay and go.”
Joe looks at the young man behind the counter whose face is flash frozen with distrust. The teener reaches into his pocket and pulls out the pix they have taken from Prissi’s room. Acting as if he doesn’t realize that the clerk in front of him is the same person holding the ball in the pix, Joe points, “This girl. Prissi Langue. She’s a good friend of ours. She lives a couple of blocks from here. We think something bad may have happened to her. Do you recognize her? Have you seen her lately?”
As he tries to figure out what is the right thing to do, Jiffy reaches out a hand for the pix. He studies it for a long time before he murmurs, “Yes, I think, she comes in here sometimes.”
“Lately?”
“I don’t think during the last few days.”
Jiffy pauses while he considers whether to say more. Prissi doesn’t need any more enemies, but she certainly could use some friends. While she was healing, Prissi had told Jiffy about how Nancy had abandoned her. She also told him who she thought was after her.
“Son, you’re taking a long time thinkin. How bout you let us in on what’s got yore tongue.”
Jiffy’s body shifts slightly to the right so that his hand is closer to the p-button. Joe notes the movement and figures he knows what it means.
“Stop, Bob Tom. That’s not doing any good.” Joe turns back to the counterman. “If you know Prissi very well at all, you probably know she goes to a school in Connecticut. A school called Dutton. I go there, too. Here. See. Here’s my id-card.” As he hands over the card, Joe keeps talking. “Prissi and I, we’re good friends. Bob Tom and I, we know someone, maybe even someone from my family, may be after her. See my pix, how it doesn’t look like me? It’s because I ran away. Maybe you heard? Now, I’m hiding, but, when I found out from another friend what was going on, Bob Tom and I thought that we should try to help. If Prissi doesn’t need help, that would be great. But, if she does, then we want to do what we can.”
Jiffy makes up his mind.
“She went below. To get away. I helped her.”
Bob Tom looks at Joe, “What’s below?”
Joe shakes his head, “I don’t know.”
Jiffy nods his head, “Below. There’s a world down there. In the old subway tunnels.”
“Son, I’m old, but I ain’t feeble. You can’t tell me livin in a sewer is safe.”
Jiffy’s hand rises to his head. As he touches his stitches he says, “Not always.”
“No, I reckon not. So, why did she go below?”
“Because she thought it would be safer than being above. She thought whoever was after her knew her i-tag code, but it wasn’t that. Someone…..” Jiffy paused and stared at Joe, “… put a TRK-R on her. I found it, the TRK-R.”
“Whoa.” Bob Tom leans across the counter. “Pup, you’ve more’n seen her, you’ve helped her.”
“I did.”
“So, where is she?”
Jiffy shakes his head. “I don’t know. I left her three days ago. She’d been hurt. She was getting better. She was planning to come back up and try to get away.”
“Away where?”
“She wouldn’t say. I don’t think she wanted anyone to know.”
Bob Tom’s face darkens, “Because she didn’t trust you.”
Jiffy’s anger propels him forward a step, but after looking at the old man’s face, he retreats, “No, because she didn’t trust herself. People who have tried to help her, like her father and me, have gotten hurt. She didn’t want that to happen again.”
Although Joe has a restraining hand on Bob Tom’s arm, most of the riverman’s torso is leaning across the countertop. Jiffy’s body is pressed against the wall.
“How bout you take us where she is…or, was, if that be the case.”
Jiffy shakes his head emphatically, “I’m not going back down there. I’ll help you get down, but I won’t go with you.”
“Because yore feart?”
“Because I doubt Prissi is down below, but I’m fairly sure there are people down there that I don’t want to meet again.”
“What kinda folks?”
Jiffy begins to tell the story of what had happened to Prissi and himself with the zies.
After the bleeding, disoriented Jiffy had been discovered in the tunnel by Yoli and Lavie La, and nursed for a day, they had shown him another way back to the surface which not only lowered the boy’s chances of running into the zies but also offered an easier exit.
That path presents no difficulties in Bob Tom and Joe in their descent and their going remains smooth until the approach the Lafayette Street station. Even before they can see into the station, they can hear a stew of shouts, songs and screams. They approach the end of the tunnel cautiously. From where they remain hidden in the darkness, they watch something that is less than a melee but more than an Italo-Irish wedding. Two stocky boys with round heads, no necks and ears as big as conch shells are pounding something raggedy and hairy with rough-cut swords of badboard.
“I guess the circus has reassembled. You ready, Noby?”
“We’re not going in there.”
“Of course, we are. I’m eighty-one, have never missed a party, and don’t reckon to start now.”
“It’s not a party. It’s a fight.”
As Bob Tom strides into the light, he turns back toward Joe, “Well, Noby, scuse me, but where I come from, there ain’t much difference.”
A second later, a small group of zies, dividing their attention between the thrashing and a roaring fire fueled with a mattress, notice the winged stranger walking toward them. Without a word spoken, like a nest of ants, the whole group mills in agitation for a few seconds before some rush to collect rocks, bottles and clubs. As the armed crowd begins to surge toward the riverman, Bob Tom stops and bellows, ““We welcome you today. We welcome you to play. We see. We say….”
As the old man yells out the word, “Pray,” he leaps forward toward the motley of zies, flares his wings, and commands, “Kneel. Kneel and obey or wear my wrath like
a fiery garment.”
The crowd slows, then huddles like cows in a summer storm. Bob Tom strides forward and, trailing behind, with guilt as a propellant, Joe emerges from the shadows.
“Kneel or suffer, my weak and wounded troth. Kneel before my magic fells you like lightning slays the tallest tree.”
The stunned Joe, who is now tagging along a couple of steps behind the old winger, is even more astounded when Bob Tom pulls the butt end of his fly rod from its case and whips it through the air. Except for two old men who drop to their knees, the rest of the zies retreat several steps. As the rod slices through the air, the riverman yells, “Beware. Its hiss is nothing compared to its bite. Kneel in thrall, churls, or bid this sunless day adieu.”
The riverman beats his wings and launches himself toward the mob. Before his wings have flapped twice, all of the zies have prostrated themselves onto the pocked and filthy subway concrete. After Bob Tom lands at the edge of the cowering zies, he whips his fly rod back and forth like a manic d’Artagnan. Finally, Bob Tom spreads his legs, stomps a foot, then, with a voice loud enough to echo from the curved ceiling high above, bellows, “Call me king.”
“King, king,” is heard from the crowd. But, other words, “Kill im. Kill em,” can also be heard.
A small monkey-like man, leaps from the crowd and catapults himself toward Bob Tom. Bob Tom slashes his face with the rod and the zie falls to the floor. Bob Tom bows before he turns to Joe and using one wing as an impromptu cloak waves the boy forward.
“Give way to the prince.”
Joe pauses alongside the momentarily leaderless crowd, which is beginning to wriggle on the floor like maggots on a trash can lid, before he hurries toward the opening at the far end of the station. Bob Tom stands guard until Joe is safe inside the tunnel, then he walks over to an over-stuffed chair, which looks to have begun its life in the lobby of the Black Hole Hotel. When Bob Tom smacks it with his rod a mushroom cloud of dust arises.
“I claim my throne. Any subject who dares touch my throne forfeits his life. I will return aneigh with food, freedom and foolery.”
As Bob Tom flies toward the tunnel opening, he murmurs, “Awright, boys and girls. Show’s over. Git up and git back to your kind words and deeds. Thank ya all for your attention and homage. I could git used to it, but King Damall’s got to carry on the quest.”
As Bob Tom flies deeper into ancient inky tube, he spies Joe ahead running alongside the moldy curved wall at full tilt. He languidly beats his wings until he catches up, “Damall, Noby. I never had no one beat a retreat from one of my performances, a right good un I might add, as fast as you done.”
“You’re crazier than they are.”
“I certainly hope so, Noby. I surely do.”
When they come to the door that Jiffy has described, they are not surprised to find it locked. Joe rattles the lever handle before pounding on the door itself. Nothing happens.
“Move aside, son.”
The old man pushes down with all of his weight onto the handle. When the door remains closed, he puts his shoulder to it and pushes until his groans begin to sound like a locomotive leaving a station. The ancient steel door finally moves a half-centimeter in its rust-covered frame. The old winger grunts in approval.
“Where’s your cue card, Noby?”
Joe keys his mypod and listens to what Jiffy has entered. He whispers under his breath, falters and then tries again. When he thinks he has it, he puts his mouth close to the edge of the door and shouts in garbled Arabic.
Joe and Bob Tom hold their breaths, but hear nothing. Joe repeats his lines in a voice so loud that he is afraid that the syllables will be distorted beyond meaning. They wait another minute in silence before Bob Tom bangs on the door with his mallet-sized fist. After a dozen strikes that grow to two dozen with their echoes, he gets a small battered lumenaid from his pak and methodically drags the narrow beam over the seams where the door fits into its frame.
“What are you doing?”
“Seein if there’s a good place to go fishin….” He inspects the entire perimeter of the door looking for a vulnerability. After a minute he returns the intense light to study a spot on the rusted edge of the door about thirty centimeters above the door handle. “…and I think I mighta found one. Here, boy, hold this.”
While Joe trains the narrow beam of halogen, the old man uses his knife to scrape away at the scabby section of steel. When he is satisfied with the slight gap he has made, he pulls three meters of line off his fishing reel and ties the ends together. He hands his knife to Joe.
“Wedge it in the crack, but, by God, Noby, if you break the tip off my most favorite knife, you’ll find whatever’s left stuck deep in yore gizzard. Are we clear, son?”
Joe grins, “I’m just glad we’re good friends and you’ve cut me a break.”
“That could change, little un, that could change.”
While Joe carefully pushes on the handle of the knife to make the opening between door and frame as wide as possible, a kneeling Bob Tom begins threading a loop of fishing line into the crack. When half of the fishing line is through to the other side, he hums as he works the line down toward the handle.
Suddenly, Bob Tom’s hands stop. He whispers, “I do believe I’ve got a nibble.”
The river-man leans back on his heels as he slowly withdraws the line. He shows Joe the two ends where the loop of line has been cut.
Joe leans his mouth close to where the knife is still acting as a wedge.
“Yoli? Lavie La? My name’s Joe. I’m Prissi’s friend. Please, let us in. My friend, Bob Tom and I, we want to help. Jiffy said to come. We got past the zies to get here.”
A noise like the buzz of flies trapped behind blinds comes through the crack.
“What? Oh. The zies. The ones that hit Jiffy on the head and bit Prissi on the leg.”
As if the mention of the wounds is a magic incantation, the door jerks open and Joe and Bob Tom are studied by a dozen black-skinned, weapon-holding, rag-wearing women. An out-sized woman, whom Joe assumes is Yoli, holding an out-sized staff, which Joe assumes may be for more than walking, beckons the two males to come through the doorway.
Joe responds immediately, but Bob Tom, who is still on his knees, hesitates. Joe hears him whisper, “Damall, man, show some heart.”
Slowly, the ancient fisherman gets to his feet, but once he is upright, he stands frozen outside the doorway. Not hearing any footsteps behind him, Joe turns back. Bob Tom waves a hand dismissively, “You go on, boy. I think I’d better stand guard.”
As Joe continues to stare at him quizzically, Bob Tom stutters, “Just in case them crazy folk get an idea they want to pay homage to prince and king.”
When Yoli takes a step forward to re-extend her invitation, Bob Tom skips backward like a skittish horse. Joe doesn’t even pretend to know what the old winger is up to. Instead, he walks up to the large woman and asks if she is Yoli. After her nod, Joe begins his story. Before he is twenty seconds into it, Yoli interrupts to tell him to follow her. She and the woman turn and walk to a narrow door at the far end of the room. Joe looks to Bob Tom for a cue. When the river-man shrugs, Joe follows the Africans.
Once the room is empty, a less tentative Bob Tom comes through the doorway and lets it close behind him. After a minute of slow breathing, Bob Tom ties one of the strands of fishing line he is still holding into a loop, drops it over the handle of the door and carefully pulls up. The line either slips off the handle or slides all the way to where the post enters the door more than a dozen times before it finally catches on a slight burr on the ancient metal. When that happens, Bob Tom feels vindicated that if he had fished long enough and with enough patience, he would have been able to open the door.
After the fishing, there is little to do. The old man tries to stay calm, but the thought of somehow being trapped in the room with the women he has just seen keeps returning to him. The notion of being trapped underground with them tugs at him like briers in a fev
erish dream. There is little Bob Tom fears—not precipitous heights, not stormy flights, nor surging water, nor winter’s sharp fingers digging through his campsite bedding. Not bear, nor violent men. But a group of women, of single purpose, a hydra form of female, has come to spawn a mindless terror in him that can’t be calmed. When that re-awakened motion overwhelms him, Bob Tom bolts from the empty room to the safety of the subway’s tunnel’s dank gloom. He stands at the rail, drenched in shame. His hands grasp the handrail and twist and turn on the pipe so that flurries of brown and orange flakes drift through the air.
The old man’s body is tired. Beyond tired. He can feel that his courage is fast slipping away. He’s running out of tricks. His pretence to youth and vigor has cost him dearly. He thinks that Joe is no more than a slight flutter of the curtain away from seeing the shabby truth behind. He, who has courted danger like a cow-eyed swain, knows that however true those old acts were, now, they are no more than artifice and dream. His sigh echoes in the tunnel. He has disappointed himself, but he knows that regardless of how badly he feels, that feeling’s sound would be nothing compared with what would wail from him if Blesonus were to learn of his weakness and failure. He knows that to go further is to fail. He is just too old for heroics. But, to quit is to fail completely. He can’t accept that. He wants and needs a final trick even as he wishes he could be free of the quest. He want and needs Joe’s admiration and adulation even as he wishes he were sitting on a fallen log, his back against the smooth warm bark of a birch tree with his fishing line dancing along the surface of a spring swollen pool.
The palms of Bob Tom’s hands are sore and caked in rust when Joe half-opens the door. As the old man brushes his palms against his pants, Joe says goodbye to Yoli and her friends. While Joe is busy, Bob Tom clears his face of any evidence of what his heart still feels.
Joe grins to the old man as he waves a piece of paper.
“I’ve got it. We’ve got it…I think. Here. Look.”
“Well, Noby, this is mighty pore light for reading. Just tell me what it says.”
Joe reads the numbers Prissi had given to Yoli, the same numbers Prissi herself had found in Al Burgey’s freezer.
“What do you think? It has to be the co-ordinates for where she’s gone. Don’t you think? What else can it be?”
“I don’t know, son. Let’s get out of this hellhole and sit in the sun for a spell and parse and ponder it.”
The climb out is not much easier than their descent, but it is safer. Yoli has given Joe directions to another egress that brings them to the surface without contact with the zies. However, after Joe climbs out of the fireplace, steps through a blizzard of blue jay feathers and looks out the window, he realizes that whatever happens next is going to be easier for Bob Tom than himself since the street below is underwater. When Joe turns back to tell Bob Tom about the water, he can hear the old man wheeze and groan as he clambers up the ladder. As Joe sits by the entrance waiting for his friend and listening to his efforts, he worries about the toll their search is taking on the ancient riverman.
When Bob Tom approaches the light at the top of the ladder, he stops so that he can catch his breath. He hangs on with one hand and uses the sleeve of his shirt to wipe the rivulets of sweat from his face. After he feels that he has recovered enough to be presentable, he finishes his climb. He emerges from the chimney with a happier smile on his face than is present in his eyes.
“Nothing better than a little exercise, huh, Noby? Keeps us fit.”
Joe shakes his head, “I don’t like being underground. I didn’t like it with the Greenlanders and I didn’t like it down there. How did you live inside that mountain for years?”
Bob Tom’s smile gets pinched off, “It warn’t nothin. I figure it’s just like livin in a basement, only a little deeper.”
To change topics, Bob Tom says, “Tell me about that paper. Iffen it’s co-ordinates, where does it put her? Did you check?”
“No, I wanted to wait for you.”
“Mighty gracious. Well, plug em in and see what comes up.”
Joe keys the mypod. When the map fills the screen, he studies it for a minute, but when he doesn’t recognize any landmarks, he reverses the zoom. He has to scale it down twice before Bob Tom, who is leaning over his shoulder, exclaims, “Damall, Noby, it’s all the way out on Long Island. That ain’t gonna be much fun.”
“Bob Tom, it can’t be as far as we’ve already come, can it?”
“No, son, it ain’t as far, but if memory serves, all you had to do to get where we are is sit on your butt and let me and them damfool pirates and the mighty Hudson carry you along. Getting to where you think we orta be getting next is gonna be just a tad more difficult. At least for you. If you don’t mind, boy, bob Tom Damall’s gonna take a wee minute and be wistful.”
“What about?”
“About how my life woulda been a site easier lately iffen you’d a gotten yourself a pair of wings instead of a poor attitude.”
Joe has a rejoinder on the tip of his tongue, but he restrains himself as he tries to imagine what will be required for him to get to the eastern end of Long Island. Bob Tom can fly—even if he has to make frequent stops. But, what Joe doesn’t have an easy answer for is how he is going to go where he wants to be. From what he has seen on the mypod, where Prissi has gone is beyond the Pale. He won’t be catching a cab. From what he knows, that area is nothing but impenetrable growth and disease. But if that is where Prissi is, he has no doubt that is where they have to go.
“Let’s rent a car and stop when we can’t go any further.”
“What are we gonna do with a dang car? I cain’t drive. Can you?’
Joe considers telling the truth, but decides that that makes little sense.
“Sure. I can drive.”
“You own yourself a license?”
“No. I’m too young.”
“Well, I don’t either. Once I got my wings, I never felt the need. Without a license, no one will rent us a car. I’m not sure, even with your new looks, that you should be in a public place much, so busses are out.
“I’m thinking this here may be the end of the road for us, Noby. At least, for the two of us. I’m thinking you orta go home, Noby. See your folks. You done what you could do. There ain’t nothing more for you to do. I can go off my own and do a little more lookin around while you go git yore wings.”
“Before we decide that, can we just get out of here?”
“And how you wanna do that? Me pullin you again?”
Joe barely keeps his anger under control. He doesn’t like feeling helpless, but he finds he is having a harder time taking Bob Tom’s help.
“No. That water’s not much more than a meter deep. I can slog through it. You go ahead. I’ll meet you on the levee.”
Forty minutes later, as Bob Tom pulls the soaking Joe from the water, they begin to argue. Their disagreement over what to do continues as they walk north on the levee wall and make their way onto the Queensboro Bridge. After a long, drawn-out debate, a discussion that is loud enough to draw the attention of the occasional passersby as they walk across the ancient rickety span, Joe still refuses to turn back. When they finally get to the Queens side of the river, Bob Tom’s chest is heaving from his exertions. Joe can’t tell if his friend is serious or just doing more acting when he snarls, “Now, what? We’re gonna go somewhere where no one’s gonna take us? That don’t mean much to me cuz I can fly. But it certainly puts a cramp on what you can do. Now, there’s a decision to be made. She’s yore friend, but the way you are, yore bout as helpful as a hound dog in a hurricane. Caint be helped. We done what we could, but now it ain’t we no moe, it’s me. That little un needs help and I mean to help her. And I cain’t help her if I got someone helpless holdin me back.”
Joe starts to argue, but Bob Tom ignores him as he puts his rod in his pak.
“Bye, Noby. You larned a lot these last days, but you gots lot more to larn. I hope to see you around the river som
etime.”
Before Joe can say anything, Bob Tom flicks a wave of his hand and he is in the air, beating his wings eastward. Joe is shocked. He can’t believe Bob Tom has just left him. The stunned boy watches the old man until he is no more than a dark dot on the horizon; however before the dot becomes too small to see, it becomes blurry. Joe takes a deep breath and holds it.
The teener’s companion has been gone less than five minutes, but Joe’s chest aches at the loss…and at how lost he himself feels.