Short Ride to Nowhere Read online

  He glanced around and checked the storefronts again, all the billions of bucks worth of real estate, the action, the money, the lights, theater, tourists, dead bodies waiting to fall. Hale sitting here reading moldy novels and somehow a girl dies. And Ferdie, with his throat spewing.

  The woman paid and left. Jenks said, “Where’d it happen?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jenks back-handed Bobby shook the kid by the collar until his teeth rattled. “Where?”

  “Shit, man, why the fuck are you hitting me?”

  “I’m sorry,” Jenks said, and he meant it. He didn’t want to hurt the boy. He didn’t want to hurt anyone. He remembered coming here with his wife, shopping and enjoying himself, walking up to the park and catching a horse and buggy ride. His wife cozied up to him with a blanket over their laps, the driver calling out bits of trivia about the city, the afternoon cold and perfect. And now–

  Jesus–and now.

  “He got killed in the park,” Bobby said.

  “You know where?”

  “No.”

  “Near the fountain?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why was he there?”

  “How the fuck do I know? And why do you care?”

  Jenks let the boy go and waited for him to throw a punch or run away or start yelling or do some damn thing. But Bobby just stood there, frowning. Jenks frowned back. He had one last question to ask.

  “Hey, Bobby, where can I buy a nice knife around here?”

  4

  The bar was dark and overpriced. A sign on the wall said that F. Scott and Zelda used to booze it up in here. Jenks hadn’t had a drink in over a year.

  At the end there, he’d been knocking back a lot of whiskey and beer before bed. And before breakfast. And at lunch. It was the only thing that helped him to sweat out the day. The anti-anxiety meds and anti-depression pills didn’t do shit. He was so decimated by dealing with creditors and juggling accounts and trying to make his wife happy through it all that he’d fall across the mattress and be out instantly. But a few minutes he’d pop back up, completely awake, panting and tasting salt with a moan or a sob ready to break through his chest. He’d go in the backyard and smoke a cigarette on the patio, three or four o’clock in the morning, look across the fence and see Hale doing the same thing over there.

  But afterwards, after it was all gone, there hadn’t been any reason to drink anymore. The fight was over. You’d lost. You hadn’t given up but you may as well have. You stared at your old man’s photos and felt the shame heat your belly until you tossed. He’d been an ignorant mook but he’d taken care of his family. You’d done your very best and still hadn’t come close. The game was over. No need to grind out the weekly paycheck or worry about the IRS or how much water and electricity you were wasting, or how you couldn’t afford kids, and how you were forced to try to explain to the wife, yet fucking again, not to go over the credit card limit, not to go over the debit card limit, not to write checks you couldn’t cover. Compared to all that, there was no reason to get drunk anymore. All that was left was filling the car’s gas tank and finding a park or beach to sleep in.

  He sat in a bar and sipped his beer and tried to plan a next move but couldn’t find one. He felt the same way as he had when he was sitting in his house holding the foreclosure papers in his hand. This is it, the next step leads me to something completely new whether I’m ready for it or not.

  After this, there’s no way back.

  He drew out the butterfly blade and toyed with it. It really was just like the one his old man used to have. Bobby had told Jenks to fuck off, but it wasn’t hard finding a weapons shop down one of the side streets leading from 42nd Street. Sure they’d cleaned up the area, but the seedier elements always had a way of seeping back in. Nobody came to Times Square for Disney.

  In the window there’d been a nice array of blades. Two-inchers, three-inchers, six-inchers, curved, double-edged, serrated, carbonized. Samurai swords, throwing stars, even a goddamn Ali Baba-Hassan Chop scimitar. No butterfly blades or switchblades out in front, but after the clerk showed up and learned Jenks was interested, he brought them out from the back.

  There seemed to be some kind of synchronicity happening. Whatever happened from this point on, it was destined to occur. He wasn’t fighting fate anymore but letting the current take him along. It made him feel like he was a part of a greater whole, as if he wasn’t being ignored anymore by the machinery of the world.

  He bought the knife and slipped it into his pocket with no idea what he might do with it afterwards. Could he really kill someone? Was that what Jenks had been waiting to do all this time?

  He sipped from his mug and played with the blade and thought about it some more. He could’ve just as easily bought a gun off the street. It probably would’ve been the smarter move to make. Anyone could pull a trigger. But stick a man with the point of a knife? Ram it in there with blood spurting all over you? The guy screaming, still reaching for your throat? Jenks wondered if it was ever actually going to happen.

  The beer went down smooth. He had another and then another and then he quit counting. The bartender kept checking him out, trying to see just how hammered Jenks was getting. He’d give a long deep look in Jenks’ eyes and then pour another. Jenks kept putting them away and never got drunk, not even when he started in on the whiskey. His eyes were clear. The bartender kept pouring. Jenks kept drinking. He didn’t have much anymore but he did have patience. Plenty of that. He had nothing else to do with the rest of his life. He had all the time it would take.

  5

  It took a day and a half before Jenks found Hale’s little cubby hole in Central Park. He followed homeless men around to their little tent shanties hidden beside natural rock formations or part of old revolutionary war forts. He asked them about Hale, described him, talked about books. He was surprised that so many men wanted to discuss literature and art and women. He no longer enjoyed conversation. He looked around the park and saw himself living here the way Hale had and it didn’t look so bad, at least in the summer. In the winter you’d have to hole up in the subways or shelters or clinics, but you could make it if you wanted to. The trouble was wanting to.

  There was still a small amount of scattered books around, torn mostly to shreds, the pages bloated from rain. He knelt and collected some of the novels, recognizing passages and titles and authors, thinking about the days when books used to matter to him.

  He kept asking questions. The rummies, addicts, and the newly impoverished seemed scared of him at first. But it didn’t take long for them to recognize one of their own. He asked about the little girl. Too much time had apparently passed. These were a new batch of transients. They told Jenks to try the nearest shelter. Hale probably would’ve stopped in there on occasion for food or a dry place to sleep on particularly cold, wet nights.

  They told him how to get there. They told him the food was good on Monday nights and to stay away next Thursday. Next Thursday was a full moon. The lunatics crammed into the shelter on nights of the full moon. Most of them were loud and harmless but a few were dangerous. Make sure you got your bed early in the day and that you held it until at least the following morning. If you wandered in too late the muggers would be waiting for the chance to roll you. Ask for Angela.

  Jenks found the shelter and gave it a go. It was Angela’s day off. He got Mike instead. Mike was an NYU student who was volunteering at the shelter to fatten out his college records for when he started filling out resumes in the summer. It would look good that he did such altruistic extracurricular activities. He had a smug air of superiority, as if he would always be on the right side of the desk. Maybe he would.

  Jenks asked Mike about Hale and got a song and dance about how employees of the shelter couldn’t give out personal information on their patrons. Hell of a word that, patrons. Like these folks with nowhere to go are just afternoon shoppers waiting for the aisle six sales. Jenks figured he could rattle Mike pretty bad
ly if he got a little rough, but there was no reason to go down that road so soon.

  Men and women had already set up in the wards, entire families, children, even pets. You wouldn’t be surprised to see somebody holding a goldfish tank in his lap. People wanted to save what they could.

  A little girl was crying that she was hungry and her mother shushed her and hummed a lullaby. He wondered which of these people might go mad on the night of the full moon.

  “Okay,” Jenks said. “Can I get a bed?”

  Mike looked perplexed. “What? Now?”

  “Yeah, now.”

  “I thought you were just asking about your friend.”

  “I was.”

  “Are you homeless as well?”

  “I am.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  “What’s a homeless person look like you little fucker?”

  Mike took umbrage. “Hey, there’s no reason to use that kind of language!”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  “Where have you been staying?”

  “In my car.”

  “Where is your car located?”

  “In a parking garage off Times Square.”

  “You have enough money to pay parking lot fees in Manhattan?”

  It wasn’t enough that you had no house or woman or kids or dog anymore. It wasn’t enough you were practically out of the game. They wanted to know exactly what you had in your wallet. They needed to rub your face down in the vomit on the floor. They had to take your last bit of umbrage.

  “Get me a bed,” Jenks said.

  “You have to fill out paperwork.”

  “Fine. Give it to me.”

  The questions were in-depth, mostly financial. These people, they asked for reasons. The reason for your need to use the facility. Financial? Medical? Pertaining to addiction? Jenks stared a the questions and looked back at the kids roaming around, little girls in the eye of the storm, a couple of crackheads watching like wolves, and he thought again of the child who had died with Hale.

  Jenks filled out the forms, mostly writing in “N/A” where he figured the information wasn’t anybody’s business, even for a free bed. As if you had no right to privacy anymore because you were down on your luck. He finished the paperwork quickly and returned to the front desk and handed the clipboard back to Mike.

  “What’s N/A?” Mike asked.

  “You really don’t know what N/A is?” Jenks said.

  “No.”

  “‘Not applicable.’”

  “That’s how you responded to most of the questions.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t think you can do that.”

  “What time does Angela get in tomorrow?”

  “What?”

  “What time does her shift start?”

  “Eight a.m.”

  Mike went through the paperwork and typed it into the system. Then he showed Jenks to a room that was like a hospital ward, a mental ward, a prison, full of beds already filled with other people. All of us stacked up like cordwood, like the dead. Mike walked him all the way to the back corner and did a little ta-da wave of the hand, preeee-senting your bed. Jenks laid down wearing all of his clothes, even his shoes.

  He kept one hand in his jacket pocket toying with the butterfly blade. It took him an hour to realize he was almost hoping that someone who try to jump him, rob him, start some kind of shit. The American dream was dead but the American nightmare was still on the roll.

  A bloodletting was bound to be next. It had happened to Hale. Most of what happened to Hale had or would soon happen to Jenks. So this is probably what would go down next.

  And so he flipped the blade open and then snapped it shut, again and again. He fell asleep to the sound of children whimpering.

  6

  Hours had passed. There was grit in his eyes. He came awake in the dim light to somebody trying to go through his pocket.

  Instead of nabbing his wallet they’d cut themselves on the knife and had let out a hiss of pain.

  Jenks rolled aside fully aware. He wasn’t fat and lazy with a head full of classic literature anymore. He was a constantly vibrating wire.

  A bald guy with a bristly horseshoe 70s porn mustache, his forearms thick, his breath dank as methane at the bottom of a crypt, sucked on his index finger. The point of the blade had barely touched him, but it was sharp enough to prick him.

  Jenks’s hand shot out and he gripped Baldy’s wrist tightly. That mustache, Jesus. You had to have balls to walk around with that thing crawling across your face. Baldy was an individualist. Baldy was a trend-setter, not a trend-follower.

  As Baldy tried to yank free, Jenks shifted his body weight and levered himself to his feet in one fluid motion. They stood facing each other in the dark, in the silence. Jenks waited to see if the guy would pull a weapon, if he’d have to now draw the butterfly blade, if this was the moment, finally, when something like this went down.

  But instead Baldy just pulled away again, but he couldn’t break Jenks’s grip.

  The mustache, it had its own life, its own history. It had fucked a lot of women and presented itself in porno theaters across the country. It had signed autographs. Your daddy used to sit in theaters and play pocket pool to the mustache’s exploits.

  “There’s nothing you can do to me that hasn’t already been done,” Baldy said.

  “You’re probably right, but you still shouldn’t steal from one of your own kind.”

  “You aren’t my kind.”

  “I’m you, brother.”

  That got nothing but the sound of scoffing, maybe from the man, maybe from the mustache. Jenks looked at Baldy’s pockets, which were so overstuffed with items that shit was hanging out and falling to the floor. Candy, coins, a few dollar bills, a toy car, a dog biscuit, some string.

  “So this is how you get by?” Jenks asked. “Cleaning out people who have even less than you do?”

  “Nobody’s got less than me.”

  “Don’t be so certain, you prick.” The rage suddenly prodding him like a branding iron. “You see kids out there? You see mothers who can’t feed their children?”

  “Fuck them.”

  Jenks backhanded Baldy, hard. The loud crack of bone on bone echoed across the high corners of the shelter but didn’t seem to disturb or rouse anyone. Not even the mustache, which seemed content to watch the proceedings.

  Baldy let out a soft grunt of pain and his eyes wobbled around in their sockets for a moment before focusing again.

  Jenks released him and stood there staring. “Get out of here. Go sleep in the park.”

  “And what if I said no?”

  Might be fun. “Do you really want to find out?”

  “Sure.”

  Jenks nodded. He wanted to know as well. He cocked his head and felt the rage reaching through him like timid fingers, moving backwards and forwards through time. It connected everything he’d been to everything he was now and was about to become. Other men had money and fine memories and lessons learned from their lovers and fathers and mentors. Jenks figured, Okay, so this is what I’ve been given. It had been accumulating for more than a year, since his wife’s whispering laughter while she hid in another room, giggling on a cell phone that sometimes racked up a monthly bill that topped $250. All these fucking plans in the world and she had to fuck around with a chatterbox, couldn’t even change her calling plan or just meet the guy at Penn Station and let him splurge.

  A dog began to mewl. Or maybe it was coming from inside his chest. The blackness took over and he could feel his teeth drying. He realized he was smiling and had been for a while. He couldn’t feel the butterfly blade in his hand but he could hear it spinning and snapping closed. It sounded as resolute as the word of God. The dogs wanted blood. Warring angels barked orders with that same sound. The children needed milk.

  He moved on Baldy and Baldy said, “Wait, you crazy bastard, don’t kill me, I’m going.”

  Baldy spun and ran for the
front door and Jenks took two steps after him, his heart dropping with sudden intense disappointment. He was still curious about exactly what might have happened, what should have happened, what the proper order of things was supposed to be now. If the ages of civilization had been peeled away far enough inside his DNA to get back to the basics of one man’s teeth in another man’s throat. Baldy was right. Murder was in the air. Jenks turned and a poodle was pissing in terror.

  7

  The whining of pets, children, and addicts grew louder with the dawn. Jenks listened to the din as if it were elevator music, something you had to put up with until you reached where you were going.

  Breakfast was being served in the dining hall of the shelter. Dishes banged together, grease fires occasionally roared. He could smell ham and eggs, powdered milk, fresh bitter coffee brewing, and, beneath it all, blood. The dying AIDS patients, the crackheads’ wounds, the sores of the unwashed. The usual stirring morning sounds reminded him of home when he was a kid. His father hacking, his mother sighing, his brothers grousing and arguing. It was all here.

  He checked his watch. Somehow it had survived through everything. Losing the suburban world, time on the street, working the boat, sleeping on the beach, the cheap-ass watch had made it. There was probably a moral there, or a metaphor, but he didn’t have time to work through it. It was 8am and Angela was at the front desk.

  She ran the show, all right, you could sense it the second you saw her. A bullwhip of a woman, tall and lean without an ounce of fat. All muscle and tendon and hard edges. But with a blunt face, as if her features had been worn down by a thousand years of hurricanes. Graying blonde hair pulled back into a sloppy ponytail, loose frizzy curls going all over. Low maintenance and high-strung. She had never been an Angie.

  The purse of her brittle lips said she hadn’t had a man in ten years, and the last one had been the worst of her life. Angela had probably had some looks before her wary and harried expression had set like stone. The crows’ feet seared in. The rigid mouth uncompromising. The jut of a nose ready to sniff out your secrets and sins.