Short Ride to Nowhere Read online

  There was a lot of action around the front counter this morning. Homeless checking in and checking out, whatever you called it. Paperwork, computer files, lots of typing, stapling, stamping. Meds being handed out. There was some laughter back in the dining room. People could believe in hope if they weren’t quite so hungry. Scraps were fed to the dogs. Old men told stories. Kids ran around.

  None of it would have touched Hale much. Jenks knew because none of it touched him much.

  Tomorrow it would be even busier in here because winter was coming and it would be colder. The ranks would swell. The shelter would overflow. The tax breaks were farther off. Baldy would push his way through the weak. More emotionally unstable losers would try to go out reinforced windows. More docs with plaid socks would send you to the madhouse to burn.

  Jenks stepped up and tried to give a disarming, amiable smile. He knew he wasn’t going to make it. Angela had seen it all, experienced it all, and survived with that chin growing softer through it all. Jenks wondered where that kind of strength came from. It couldn’t just be pain. Jenks knew he’d never have it, never manage to be as efficient with his loss.

  “Hello,” he said.

  Angela didn’t look up. She didn’t gesture for him to wait while she finished her paperwork, didn’t do or say anything. Jenks waited. She flipped through pages so fast he thought she couldn’t possibly be reading them. Her eyes didn’t seem to be moving across the sentences. He figured she’d get around to him in the next minute or two. So he stood silently and Angela stood silently and the action continued going on around and around them as the people shuffled out of the shelter and hit the skids in the sun.

  “Hello,” he said.

  Angela’s eyes flashed towards him. There was no anger or impatience in them. There was nothing in them, not even death. He thought, My Christ, so that’s what’s going to happen to me next. He tried to imagine sitting on the beach with eyes like that. They’d cordon him off on the sand like a beached killer whale. Erect a fence around him; try to get him back in the water at high tide so he could drift the rest of the way to the bottom of the abyss.

  He wasn’t sure she was seeing him. She still said nothing. He thought saying Hello for a third time would be ignorant, so he didn’t bother. He wondered if she’d gone insane, or if he had, or if this was just some kind of a miscommunication, two different species unable to understand each other despite their best efforts. Maybe she was speaking in an unknown language; maybe he was so tired and tense that he was missing a series of subtle signs.

  “My friend, Ben Hale, stayed here a few months back. I wanted to ask if you remembered him. It’s important. To me anyway.”

  The tip of Angela’s tongue jutted and slowly rimmed her lips. They parted. He watched her take a breath. It was as if she was emerging from a long sleep. Maybe Hale’s name had some kind of quality to it. Jenks tried it again. “Ben Hale. He’s dead.”

  The shelter had mostly cleared out. A colicky baby was still somewhere groaning and spitting up. The smell overpowered everything, even the blood. The sound of the butterfly blade snapping open and shut tugged his attention away. His vision came unfocused. He checked his hands and they were balled into fists clamped to the side of his legs.

  Angela said, “You’re Jenks.”

  8

  She moved down the corridor with a clipped efficiency as well, like a machine doing its primary function and nothing else. Her arms didn’t swing; her hips didn’t sway with sexuality or life. He was struck with an overwhelming depth of sympathy for her. Whatever had happened, it would have been kinder to have killed her.

  “He told me about you,” Angela said.

  “What did he tell you?”

  “That you would be along eventually.”

  “I wouldn’t have if he hadn’t killed himself.”

  She stopped short and he nearly ran into her. She turned on him, the empty eyes full of something uncoiling now, trying to awaken, but Jenks had no idea what.

  “He committed suicide,” Jenks said. “After someone tried to murder him.”

  She shook her head slightly, like she had an earache. Jenks explained what he’d learned, and what the cops and the shrink had told him. Angela listened but kept creeping up the hallway step by step, forcing Jenks to stagger-step along as they progressed. Finally they were in her private office and she shut the door.

  On the desk was a small plaque with the name ANGELA PINCHOT.

  She sat in an uncomfortable-looking chair. The office was sparsely decorated. There were no photos anywhere. No paintings, no signs of personality. A computer hummed, the screen active with animated pipes. There was another chair in the small room but it had been tipped forward to lean against the far side of the desk as if it was out of commission. Jenks squinted and reached out with his thoughts trying to feel Hale here in the air. Hale must’ve stood here noticing all the same things, acknowledging the woman in the same way, talking to her. He had mentioned Jenks.

  “How long was he here?” Jenks asked.

  “Three days.”

  He nodded and waited. Angela said and did nothing. She could outwait the ocean and the mountains. She had more patience and permanence than the throne of God.

  “So why do you remember him?” Jenks asked. “What happened? Did it have to do with a young girl?”

  “There was an incident.”

  Of course there had been. “What kind of incident?”

  “An altercation.”

  “You mean Hale got into a fight?”

  “Yes.”

  “You must have fights here practically every night. You would’ve had a bad one last night if the bald son of a bitch who’d tried to mug me hadn’t run for it at the last second. So why do you remember Hale?”

  The thing that had awakened and started to crawl across her features, shifting into an expression of interest or emotion, seemed to shudder in the light. Jenks wanted to reach out and take her face in his hands and draw her to him so he could get a better look. Angle here this way and that hoping it would catch in the light. It was hard to see but it was recognizable. Her gaze met his and he knew.

  “You fell in love with him.”

  Angela said and did nothing.

  Like Jenks, Hale wasn’t a handsome man. He’d been soft most of his life, and then he’d been lean and smelled like ulcers and anxiety, and then like sweat and ocean, and then he’d gone a little too far over the edge. But somehow it had happened.

  Why not? You couldn’t choose who you fell in love with. It went beyond your scope of understanding or reason. You couldn’t deny it. You had no way to force it or to stop it. You held on as best you could.

  “He was here three days and you somehow fell in love with him.”

  She shifted her gaze to the empty wall, then back to take in Jenks, trying in order to see if he was mocking her. But a man who lived out of his car didn’t mock anybody. She looked away again.

  “What was the fight over?” he asked.

  She took a breath. “A Danish.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “A stale cheese Danish.”

  A laugh edged up his throat but never escaped. What the hell, a stale cheese Danish; that made as much sense as anything.

  Two guys reaching for it at the same time, both wanting this thing, this little piece of, what, cake, right here. They couldn’t have anything else in life, couldn’t even keep a roof over their heads, couldn’t keep a woman, couldn’t feed the dog, couldn’t pay for their own funerals, but by Christ, they could have a stale cheese Danish. They were still men. They still had pride. They were still hungry. But then some other motherfucker had to get in your way and try to take even that from you.

  Jenks couldn’t see Hale wanting to fight, but imagined the other guy going berserk. The brawl would have been merciless, a fight to the goddamn death.

  “Did the man he had the altercation with have a daughter?”

  “It was a woman. And I don’t know if she had a child
.”

  “What was her name?”

  Angela almost hiccoughed the name. “Trina Beck. She became enraged and began screaming. Hale didn’t want to argue but she was relentless. She started hurling food and hot coffee at him. She chased him out the door. We tried to stop her and we couldn’t. I never saw him again.”

  Jenks still wanted to laugh, but if he started he wasn’t sure he’d ever stop. A strange kind of pity welled in him for this woman, who had lost her great love after only three days, thanks to a disagreement over a Danish. It sounded so ridiculous, it made you want to shake your head in disbelief. But then, so much did nowadays.

  “Has she been back to the shelter recently?”

  “No.”

  “Give me her last known residence.”

  “That’s not allowed.”

  “Who cares?”

  “I care.”

  “Break the rules.”

  “I won’t. I can’t.”

  “Do it for him.”

  “No.”

  Jenks studied her a moment and nodded. “Then I’m sorry.”

  He moved in on her quickly, swung with his right fist, held back and tapped her neatly on the chin. She let out a bleat, her eyes rolled up in her head, and she collapsed to the floor.

  He checked her as if he knew what he was doing. Mostly he wanted to be sure he hadn’t broken her neck. He made her as comfortable as possible and then sat at the computer.

  There was nothing on there that got him into the shelter system, only private files. He clicked on a few at random and didn’t see anything of interest. He’d botched the job. He was going to have to go back to the front desk and try to get Trina Beck’s address that way.

  What the hell. He left Angela lying on the floor of her office and shut the door behind him. He moved quickly up the corridors to the front counter. There was some activity back in the office area, but Jenks ignored it as he leaned against the counter, lifted his legs, swung around, and jumped down. He got on the nearest computer and found a database. He typed in Trina Beck. Nothing came up. He tried T. Beck and still nothing. He typed in Katrina Beck and there was an address on 210th Street. Jenks had never been that far north in the city.

  He glanced up and Angela was standing there looking at him from the opposite side of the counter, a thread of blood leaking down her bottom lip. Christ, she was strong. A shot like that should have knocked her out for a half hour, minimum. The bruise on her chin would easily be covered by pancake if she cared that much, and he knew she didn’t. He was curious to see if she would yell. She didn’t. He got out from behind the desk and made it to the front door. He felt her watching him, thinking about him, wondering if he could actually find out who had tried to kill Hale. He had nothing so far, but he was starting to get used to having nothing. He faltered before he hit the street and looked back at her, but she was gone. In a moment, so was he.

  9

  He took the West Side Highway up into Harlem and then cut over and threaded his way through the upper region of Manhattan, in no hurry at all. He enjoyed the way the neighborhoods shifted so completely. You could feel the difference in the air as you turned a corner, noting areas that had been gentrified, the ones that were populated by Columbia students, the ones that were gang territory, the bodegas packed tight with Hispanics, the salsa beat playing on and on. The smell of the Hudson and Harlem Rivers came on stronger and stronger as the winds brushed down out of the south Bronx and floated over Manhattan. Police cars and ambulances swarmed out of the ghettos. There was so much yelling everywhere. You didn’t know which way to look. He let out a yowl of laughter. It had been waiting inside him for the chance to break free. There was something about it that invigorated him, just being here. He knew what it meant.

  Once he would’ve been terrified to drive these streets, to let himself be seen in the open, but now he met everyone’s gaze. No one could say shit to him. They knew. They knew that no matter what they had they had more than he did. No one would bother him. He wanted to race over to the east side and find his ex and her new beau and show them that he was no longer afraid.

  Jenks parked on 210th in front of a freshly painted building with a buckling brick stoop. He stepped carefully up the broken steps and found the buzzer to the correct apartment. There was no name on the label. He pressed the button and waited. There was no buzz or response. He tried the old gag of buzzing all the apartments at once on the hope that someone would open the outer and inner locked doors. Again there was no response. He waited for someone to leave the building. He kept checking his watch. After an hour of no one entering or exiting, Jenks caught wise and tried the outer door. It was unlocked. So was the inner one.

  He proceeded up the sagging stairwell. Televisions and stereos were on inside the apartments. The buzzers downstairs must all be shorted. Either that or these people just didn’t give a shit who came knocking. Both possibilities seemed perfectly acceptable.

  At the sixth floor he started checking apartments. He found 6F, Katrina Beck’s former residence, and knocked.

  The door swung open before Jenks even pulled his hand away. The guy had just been waiting there on the other side, hoping for something to happen.

  He stood 6'2, went maybe two-forty of mostly muscle. Wearing a stained wife-beater, greasy hair falling in his eyes, nine days of stubble. His breath smelled like an overflowing toilet in the far corner of hell. He filled the doorway and put on a dead-eye look, staring down at Jenks and yet somehow looking through him.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Jenks.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m looking for Trina Beck. Does she still live here? Does she ever stop in?”

  “She rip you off?”

  Might as well go with it. “Yes.”

  “I got nothing to do with that.”

  “I understand. I’d just like to talk to her.”

  “You can’t.”

  “It’s just a misunderstanding.”

  “She never misunderstood anybody or anything in her life. You want to kick her to shit and rob her.”

  “I really don’t.”

  Jenks couldn’t tell which side the guy was on. Was he trying to protect Trina or was he waiting to hurt her himself? Jenks had lost the thread already. He had to take control.

  “Does she have a daughter?”

  “What?”

  “A daughter, around seven years old or so? Does she? Did she?”

  “Did she?”

  “Yes, did she? Does she?”

  “What the hell do you want here?”

  “I told you.”

  “You didn’t tell me shit.”

  “Who are you?” Jenks asked.

  Jenks could feel the fight coming.

  It took shape in his mind even as the tension between him and the man grew. He knew it was somehow his fault, but he didn’t know what he was doing wrong. Everything right from the moment he’d met the cops had been askew, he’d handled everybody wrong, but there was no way to correct it now. He had to see it through to the end.

  The guy started to raise his hands. It was like there was a crowd around them, cheering them on, wanting blood. Managers, money on the line, Vegas odds, promises to keep, sons at home watching the television. The roar of the crowd got louder and louder. Introductions were made, rules explained, no below the belt, now shake hands and go to your corner and wait for the sound of the bell. You lived your entire life with a movie soundtrack playing, with an audience perched behind your eyes.

  “Are you her father?” he asked.

  “Who are you, fucker?”

  “I told you, my name’s Jenks.”

  “You still haven’t told me shit. What do you want?”

  “Are you her father? Her husband? Boyfriend?”

  The crowd roared. They wanted blood. They were drunk, pouring the beer back, even the announcers sounded wasted. The card had been weak tonight, the featherweight outmatched, the champion welterweight taking out hi
s opponent in the first minute of the second round. The odds were in the shitter. Vegas was losing its shirt. Something had to turn around. Now, the main event.

  The guy flexed his shoulders, loosening up. Cracked his neck, his hands trembling at his sides. He was plugging in to his hate, his pain. “I’m Mikey. I’m her son.”

  “Look, there’s no reason to–” Jenks said, but it was already way too late.

  And it had been since the moment he stepped up and knocked. Somewhere he’d been hoping for this just as badly as the other guy. One voice in the crowd seemed to slice through all the din.

  A woman shrieking, Kill da bum.

  Mikey turned his head as if he could hear it too, and his hands rose and balled into fists and he let out a growl that had in it all the agony he’d suffered today, yesterday, maybe his entire life. The tiny knives that flicked against your skin, the hardly heard insults, the decimated fantasies, the missed opportunities and nyeah nyeahs of beautiful girls belittling smiles as they ripped down the boulevard with the slicks and hustlers and rich boys. You never got over anything. You never put aside any affront. Every barb stayed under your saddle. You collected your skinned knees and your skinned elbows and your skinned chins and gathered them one by one in a closet, and at the end of one year or ten or thirty you had fifty bodies worth of torment.

  Your father never did this. Your brothers never did this. Your friends, all of them except Hale, didn’t do this. So how did it happen to you?

  Ask Mikey. He’s in the same boat. He’s waltzing into the ring and throwing a left hook now, catching you flush on the cheek because, Christ, your hands aren’t even up. Where’s the rage now? The sports’ columnists are typing out the story, flashbulbs are going off, everyone’s expecting something special from you today, kid, but it looks like the syndicate paid you off to take a dive.