Now, listening to the rain, Beverly Starr looks down at a narrow blue padded mat spread across the floor. She kneels on the mat, stretches forward, facing the floor, her hands flat beside each shoulder. Then she rises, arching backward, pushing against the floor, forcing her back to crack. She is facing the Mac, a kind of supplicant, and when she comes up she can see the packed shelves of the Collection. And remembers trying to sell Bushwhacker to that guy from the World. The editor. Briscoe. The one-shot strip was about a woman who had the mysterious power to remove clothes from anyone. She chooses to strip clothes off George W. Bush. There he is with a bullhorn at the ruins of the World Trade Center, and the rescue workers are all laughing or smiling, and Bush is naked. His limp pecker hanging there. Yelling “Bring ’em on!” The crack of his ass is withered. He stands with Condoleezza Rice on the White House steps and she’s got a big grin, and Bush is balls-ass naked. He visits troops for Thanksgiving dinner in Iraq, and they are all laughing, and Bush is holding a tray with turkey and stuffing, his schlong resembling a week-old piece of broccoli.
Remembering: When she went to Briscoe’s office at the World and showed him the printouts, he laughed out loud and then said he couldn’t use them without folding the paper an hour after they came off the press. But he was having a dinner party that night at his place in SoHo and she was welcome to come if she had time. Why not? She was single. Free. No deadline. There were eight guests at the table in Briscoe’s loft: a political operator and his wife, a professor of French history from NYU and his wife, an unhappy woman novelist and her unhappy female companion, the painter Lew Forrest, and Beverly. The chef was from the French Culinary Institute, a man handsome in a vaguely sinister way. Forrest and Briscoe and the professor exchanged jokes in French. Beverly imagined her own mother at this table. Hawk-faced, her mouth a slash. Sneering, bitter. Muttering: Speak English, you schmucks. Full of the endless anger of the South Bronx, anger at the Depression, anger at the rich, the deck stacked against them all. Heard her: You wanna be what? An artist? Yeah? Go downstairs, sit on the railing, you meet plenty of artists, baby. Bullshit artists! Until one son went off to the army and died in Korea and the other son found heroin and died in Attica. And I invented Beverly Starr. Good-bye, Ruthie Rosenberg. Hello, Beverly.
In a corner, Briscoe introduced Beverly Starr to Forrest. The older man’s eyes were glassy, but he seemed alert and amused.
–Are you related to Brenda, the great reporter? Forrest said.
–In a way, yes.
–I always liked her stuff.
–So did I, Beverly said. And yours too. I have a print of Chelsea Hotel, Evening in my studio.
–No kidding?
He smiled in a pleased way and then turned to the political couple. Parties are always like that. You start a conversation, but almost never finish it. Beverly did like the people, or as much as she could learn about them, which wasn’t much. They all had good faces, character digging into their flesh, and she slipped away to the john twice to jot sketches on index cards when the light was too dim for her use of the blink. She was still smoking then and slipped onto Briscoe’s terrace for a fast Marlboro Light, looking out at the city and the dark river and the moving line of cars on the Jersey shore. That night she felt that New York and its buildings and its people and its nervous style would last forever. Before they sat down to dinner, Briscoe showed her around, and Beverly saw the way he had organized his library, New York, Italy, Mexico, and so on, and the next day she started doing the same here in her house on 8th Street in Brooklyn. The house that was not yet paid off. The house purchased with her work.
So tonight, three years later, the house paid off, cracking her back, doing sets, she can see each section rising from floor to ceiling, covering the entire wall. The Collection. Her collection. The first section on the left, near the draped window, has the early classics in hardcover reprints, old comic books, or in retrieved pages from ancient newspapers, all covered in protective plastic. Winsor McCay and Little Nemo in Slumberland or Dream of the Rarebit Fiend; Herriman and Krazy Kat; Milt Gross and Count Screwloose of Tooloose along with Nize Baby; Max and Moritz from Germany; Mutt and Jeff; Happy Hooligan; Bringing Up Father, with the amazing George McManus holding the pen. Briscoe even had a McManus original on his wall. They invented comics, those guys, and, in a way, the movies, since comic strips are really frozen movies. At the party at Briscoe’s she asked Lew Forrest if he ever knew the painter Lyonel Feininger, who once drew a knockoff version of The Katzenjammer Kids.
–I did, he said. He was a wonderful painter. But as a comics artist, I liked Harold Gray better. Daddy Warbucks! Punjab and the Asp! What blacks! What a sense of… night. All the communists I knew just loved Orphan Annie. How could the Daily Worker have invented a better epitome of savage capitalism than Daddy Warbucks?
Momma would have agreed. To her, every rich guy was Daddy Warbucks. She hated the communists too, because she hated anyone who believed in the future. And every one of her own kids was an orphan, even when they lived at home. Kids not like Annie, with a rich protector to watch her back. But kids like me, who found work at sixteen, clerking in a Walgreen’s, then took a furnished room for twenty-five bucks a week, and started drawing comics. Nobody watched my back, not even the young dummies I fell in love with.
The second book tower holds Sickles, when he was doing Scorchy Smith, and all of Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, almost all of The Spirit. She thinks of them as the books of the Gold Testament. Even Briscoe, who loved newspaper strips and hated comic books, knew how good The Spirit was. Then the superheroes, Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, Sub-Mariner, the Human Torch, Batman, Sheena, the Young Allies, and, above all, Captain America. No Superman, who was a fucking bore, living in Metropolis, where there were no shadows. At least Batman lived in Gotham, which was all shadows, put there by Jerry Robinson even if signed by Bob Kane. Metropolis was Minneapolis. Gotham was New York. But this tower of shelves is really Muscle Beach, and the star is Jack Kirby. He came crashing off the page, the toughest Jew on the Lower East Side, making his heroes do things nobody had ever done before. Baroque, full of violent power. Punching, heaving, in mortal combat with the Red Skull, that filthy Nazi saboteur. The first American heroes on steroids. All before Beverly Starr was born.
Forget all this childish crap, Momma said that time. Learn to type. To take shorthand. Then get a job in an office!
Until the day Ruthie Rosenberg came home from high school, and her comic book collection was gone, bundled up, hauled away by Momma. The girl went bawling to the street, searching in garbage cans, and the lots, and never did find her treasures. And knew she had to get out of there, go off on her own, because if she didn’t she was sure to kill Momma, and make page 1 of the Daily News.
She built up her collection in the furnished room, started her life in the comics business, and now thinks: Who was that guy took me home that time? Some kind of banker. He looked around the studio, and said, You read comics? She said, I write comics. I draw comics. Lawyers read law books, right? He never came back. Ah, well… Gotta get a Depression story going. Put Momma in it too. Find some way to forgive her…
Beverly is in the second set of the back crunchers when she hears through the rain the sound of the F train moving on the trestle over the Gowanus. Kudda-kuh-kudda-kuh-kudda-kuh, pock, kudda-kuh kudda-kuh. Pock. The wheels sounding hollow, warm, not steel on steel. Lionel trains. The pock like a drummer’s rim shot. An accent. High above the steel girders of the Kentile sign and the one from Eagle Outfitters. Brooklyn’s Eiffel Towers. Thinking: Roy Crane wrote the best sound. Caniff never tried. And Eisner was best on cities, on shadows, on nights slick with rain. Nights like this. Nights when Denny Colt rose from the mausoleum in Wildwood Cemetery. Which she knows must be the Green-Wood, the most beautiful of all cemeteries. Right here in Brooklyn. Hell, with a little effort, she can walk there from this house. My house.
She knows the Green-Wood is beautiful, because she’s walked among its tomb
stones on summer afternoons. Leonard Bernstein is there, and Fred Ebb, and George Bellows, and William Merritt Chase, and George Catlin, and Lola Montez, and Joey Gallo, and, what’s his name? Boss Tweed… and yeah: Denny Colt. Gotta do a comic about the place someday. A girl dies too young. She wakes up in the Green-Wood. Calls it “The New Neighborhood.” She meets all of them, even Denny Colt… In real life, Beverly never did find Denny Colt, although she tried, and slept with three guys who looked like him, even asking each of them to wear the fedora and little mask that changed Denny Colt into the Spirit. She even made love to one of them under the stars in the Green-Wood, for Chrissakes. Life never does imitate art.
Gotta go to work, she thinks. Gotta finish the story. Can’t sleep now. Gotta be awake until nine, when the guy comes for the pickup. Sleep now, I’ll be like granite when he shows up. Gotta work until eight. Breakfast. Watch some Morning Joe. Make the handover. Then sleep until four.
The thing tonight is cocktails, with snacks.
Like eating Crayolas.
One thing I learned in this life: If you’re going to a benefit, better eat before you go. Like going to Momma’s house for dinner. Before she did the world a favor, and died.
2:20 a.m. Ali Watson. Manhattan Bridge.
He pulls onto the bridge with the lights of the skyline visible on the far side. Left hand on the wheel, his right hand is flicking the handheld radio, trying to get the special operations division channel, then the Sixth Precinct, in Greenwich Village. A garble of voices, male, female, abrupt bulletins about small emergencies. Can’t find it. Must be ’cause I’m between Brooklyn and Manhattan… Left message. Cell was on Cynthia Harding’s answering machine too… Nothing.
The bridge is almost empty in the driving rain. An N train goes by, heading back into Brooklyn, next stop Atlantic-Pacific. Where all the Mexicans change to the R, to get off in Sunset Park. He remembers when they just called it the Sea Beach Express. Three beautiful words, full of summer. Sea Beach Express. Almost empty at this hour. Cleaning ladies and dozing drunks. Down below, the East River’s empty too. A lot fewer yachts since the collapse on Wall Street, and none at all past the midnight hour. In the late morning, there’s an occasional Circle Line boat jammed with tourists. He took the tour once with Mary Lou. Just for the hell of it. Two New Yorkers playing at being tourists. They sailed around the island. Under the bridges. God, she was beautiful then. With a smile that could crack open a safe. In her second year at Hunter, talking about being a lawyer, maybe running for office. Sure didn’t want to get married. Not to me, anyway. Not to a cop that was a Muslim. Fuck no. And then she got pregnant…
The cell rings.
–Watson.
–Reilly, from the Sixth. You called about Patchin Place? There’s a fire there. One alarm.
–A fire? Jesus Christ… I’m on the Manhattan Bridge. Be there in ten, twelve minutes.
He clicks off. Tries the operations channel again. A fire. On Patchin Place. Oh, my Mary Lou, he thinks. Please be gone. Oh, please be safe. Please be waiting for me outside, so I can drive you back home, so we can climb into bed, so we can be warm on this cold night. Please, Mary Lou. Please.
Then in the rearview Ali sees lights coming closer, real fast. Hey, pal: I’m in the left lane. You got lots of room. No: he’s playing games. Tailgating. On the Manhattan Bridge! In the fucking rain!
Now his brights are on, blinding Ali, flooding his car with light.
Ali slows down.
Pass me, muthafucka.
And then a yard behind him the tailgater rips to the right on the slick bridge, and Ali glances at him. A BMW. A black-haired white kid. Maybe twenty. Maybe younger. Someone beyond him in the passenger seat. A girl, for sure. The kid’s laughing, eyes cocaine-wide, and then he races past. Foot harder on the pedal, and there’s a taxi up ahead. The kid wants to pass the cab, racing for Manhattan, for Canal Street. Speeding to SoHo or Tribeca. Or the Meatpacking District. But he clips the cab, spinning it off to the right, and then the BMW swerves, and hits a steel restraining wall, and flips and turns, once, twice, then comes to a tumbling thumping halt on its roof. Filling two lanes. Ali stops three feet from the wrecked car.
Fuck.
He puts the Mazda in park, red lights blinking, turns off the ignition, grabs a heavy-beam flashlight, gets out. Waving the flashlight at oncoming traffic. The taxi is backing up, righting itself, leaving a path.
Ali glances into the crumpled BMW, still waving the flashlight. He sees the driver and a young girl splayed on the inside of the roof, which is now the bottom. Blood moves in a lumpy way from the driver’s mouth. The girl’s neck looks broken, her shirt near her waist. She’s not wearing panties. Neither of them wearing seat belts. The motor is running, as steady as the rain. They look very dead. He touches the driver’s wrist. Warm. Then stops himself. No, wait for whoever gets the squeal. For a moment, he wonders how many dead people he has touched in his life.
Then he taps 911 on the cell.
Wait for me, Mary Lou. Wait, my darling. I’ll be a bit late. Wait.
He reports the accident, clicks off. Then glances at the ruined car. And imagines the parents getting the news from a tired cop. Two hours from now, the phone call at the wrong hour, the hearts thumping in alarm, hands lifting receivers. Seeing the boy at four, the girl at three, running barefoot in a backyard on a summer afternoon, splashing in surf. Seeing New York from the Circle Line. Full of amazement. Staring at the phone. Then sobbing, collapsing, falling, screaming.
At least it’s not Malik.
The rain falls hard.
2:22 a.m. Consuelo Mendoza. The N train to Brooklyn.
She is wearing a thick brown polyester jacket, cloth gloves, a watch cap. She speaks good English, but usually thinks in Spanish, and knows that at this hour of the night, on this night of all nights, she must be extra careful. Por seguro. She carries no purse, nothing to tempt some pendejo. In her hidden belt, she has 207 dollars in cash. In her jacket pocket, some change and a Metro-Card. The last payday. The last night of a job she has held for seven years. The thick down jacket hides an immense gouge in her stomach, an emptiness put there by her boss. There were many consoling words from the woman who was her boss. But the hole is still there. Getting larger.
The windows of the train are streaked with rain, racing left to right instead of top to bottom, as they cross the Manhattan Bridge, high over the river. The train turns and an empty plastic Diet Pepsi bottle rolls from one side of the car to the other. Just another passenger, lost and empty. Two men move to a window, looking down at something. Bright whirling lights. An accident. The train keeps moving. The men can see nothing now and one returns to a seat. A sleeping Chinese man lurches and almost falls from his seat. His eyes widen, and then he gazes around the car, relaxes, and returns to sleep. An unshaven white man in a Giants jacket stares at something in the back of his eyes. There are three other women on the train as it comes down off the bridge into the tunnel. The rain now makes paths from top to bottom. Usually, her friend Norma is with her, and they can talk and make jokes in Spanish. But Norma was laid off two weeks ago and still doesn’t have a new job. She helps out at a taco van in Red Hook on weekends, but that’s not a real job. The last year, lots of people lost jobs. Maybe tonight was just her turn. Just like that. Paid in cash by Sara, the Colombiana, as always, so they’d have no records at the cleaning company. I’m carrying the money alone. And alone, Consuelo tries to look small, insignificant, worthless, homely, avoiding all eye contact, especially with the men.
The train pulls into Atlantic Avenue–Pacific Street, and several people get up. Down the car, near the middle door, she sees a sign:
IF YOU SEE SOMETHING,
SAY SOMETHING
Consuelo Mendoza never sees anything that they’re talking about. No crazy Arabs. No guys with guns or bombs. She sees a lot of other things. But no musulmanes locos. The train waits, with doors open. Down the aisle are two other women, one of them Mexican. Or maybe Guatemalan. She ha
s an Indian face, like Consuelo’s. Sad too. The R pulls in, the doors open, and more people hurry into the N. On the platform, dozens of others start pushing into the R, which is always late. On one of the benches, Consuelo glimpses a white vagabundo in clothes made shiny by filth. No socks. Stretched out, one sneakered foot on the cement floor, one arm hanging. There are many of them now. Homeless. Jobless. Borrachos, adictos, most of them, but not all.
In her work building back in SoHo, she and Norma weren’t the only persons fired. So were the men who worked there days, and sometimes nights. All the women too. Many worked late, sweating, ruled by the computer, sometimes joking. But when she arrived at seven sharp on this night, they all were gone. She cleaned anyway, sensing it was over, but not knowing for sure, didn’t call home to Raymundo, didn’t want him to worry, to lose sleep, to fret. He is such a sweet man. All evening, she didn’t do anything except her job. While the emptiness began to widen in her belly. She ate nothing, took nothing but water. Her head was buzzing with unspoken words. We all knew what was coming. We knew for weeks that if the men left, if the office closed, if the computers were all blank, there’d be no garbage to empty, no cardboard coffee cups, no half-eaten sandwiches, no banana peels, no apple cores, no empty soda bottles, no pizza crusts. No floors to sweep and mop. No work. What will we do?
Raymundo is home, right this minute, sleeping in their bedroom, the three children in theirs. She and Raymundo will sleep together for three hours tonight and then he will rise up in the morning dark, mi Dios, whispering, walking in socks to make no noise, and wash and get dressed and take the train to his job in the coffee shop. Does she tell him when he wakes up that she has lost her job? No. Then all day at the coffee shop he will be sick in his heart, in his hands, in his belly, like me. The coffee shop won’t be the same. Usually, he would be there all day, starting at six, finishing at five, hurrying home, where they would kiss and she would show him the food in the pot, and then hurry off to her job. In the coffee shop, he cooks sandwiches, ham and bacon and cheese and eggs. All the stuff the gringos love. Sometimes a club sandwich with turkey and lettuce and tomato and bacon. He slices and toasts bagels. He fills many cardboard cups of coffee.