Small Town

Your bladder was a problem once every hour or so, or more frequently if you’d been spending too much time at Starbucks. Your brain was dangerous every minute you were out there. Because it could get bored, and it could wander, and the thing you were waiting for could happen right in front of your eyes and you’d miss it because your mind was somewhere else.

It was a funny thing, but detectives weren’t the best choice for a stakeout. Patrolmen tended to be better, especially veterans who had never got a gold shield and never would. It wasn’t that they were stupid, or lacked ambition. What they lacked was imagination.

And imagination was the common denominator of detectives. It wasn’t enough by itself to get you a promotion, good luck and good connections played a bigger role than anyone cared to admit, but still it seemed to be part of the makeup of virtually every detective he’d known.

On stakeout, it was a curse. A sufficiently unimaginative man could stare out a car window at a front door, or crouch in a closed van listening to a wiretap, for hours on end, thinking of nothing but the job he was doing. A man with an imagination would try to do just that, but his mind would jump from one thing to another, going off on tangents, and he’d lose track of what put him there in the first place.

Again, a partner helped. The two of you could talk, and one could bring the other back to the here and now.

Alone, well, it was a problem.

Right now, for instance, he was working hard to stay on top of things. He’d peed not twenty minutes ago, at the men’s room of the café, and had resisted the urge to pick up a small bottle of Evian water at the bar on the way back. And now he was watching the crowd, keeping an eye on the approach to the Boat Basin gates.

He looked at another pigeon feeder and wondered why people fed the birds, what it was they got out of it. And he started thinking about pigeons, and how you never saw a young one and rarely saw a dead one, and why was that, anyway? And was it true that kids from the Asian subcontinent, or from Central America, or from Vietnam, trapped pigeons off the street for their parents to cook in their restaurants? And hadn’t they said the same thing a generation or two ago about the Chinese? And wouldn’t they have said much the same about the Irish, but for the fact that no Irish immigrant had ever opened a restaurant, and who would have gone there if he did? And . . .

He caught himself, forced his mind back to business. It was going to be a long day, he thought. It felt like it had been a long day already.

T H E C A R P E N T E R W A S W A T C H I N G a newsreel.

They had newsreels all the time when he was a boy. Coming attractions, and then cartoons, and a short, either a travelogue or something funny, and then the feature. Followed, more often than not, by the second feature, itself preceded by more cartoons and coming attractions.

Now you got commercials, and animated exhortations to put your trash in the basket and be quiet during the movie.

Once, he remembered, there had been a newsreel theater near Times Square that showed nothing but newsreels from morning to night, a sort of theatrical version of CNN. Television had put paid to that enterprise, as it had meant the end of newsreels altogether.

So the Carpenter couldn’t be watching a newsreel. It had to be a dream.

He was awake enough to reason that out, while sufficiently asleep to remain in the dream and go on watching the dream newsreel. It was in black and white, of course, as newsreels were meant to be, and it included moments the Carpenter had seen in newsreels, or might have seen—the mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion, German soldiers goose-stepping, Allied troops liberat-ing a concentration camp. Then, still in black and white, a plane sailed into the World Trade Center tower, and flame billowed, and the building fell in on itself.

There is an announcer throughout, and the Carpenter can hear the words he speaks but can’t make them out. And then one word leaps out, the word Carpenter, with nothing intelligible before or after it. And there he is on the screen, dressed not as he is today, in dark trousers and a dark nylon sport shirt from the store in Greenpoint, nor in the clothes he has in his backpack, his yachting costume. No, on the screen he is wearing a dark suit, like one of the ones he used to buy at Brooks Brothers, and a striped tie, and he’s surrounded by a crowd, and they’re cheering, they’re all there to honor him.

Savior of the city, he hears the announcer say, and President Eisenhower is there, smiling that huge smile of his, and Mayor Wagner, and John Wayne, and they’re giving him some sort of reward. And now the noise dies down, and he’s supposed to say something.

And can’t think of a thing to say.

That’s unsettling enough to wake him, or seems to be, and he opens his eyes, or thinks he does, and now the screen fills with the image of a stunningly beautiful woman. He thinks at first that she looks familiar, and then that he knows her, and of course it’s Carole, his wife, and she’s looking right at him.

Carole . . .

I’m right here, Billy.

Why did you leave me, Carole?

I told you I could only stay for a minute. Didn’t I tell you that?

The first time, Carole. When you took the pills. Why did you do that?

Oh, Billy.

You should have told me.

You would have made me stay.

No, I’d have come with you. I tried to follow you, but then I woke up. It wasn’t my time.

No, Billy.

I had things I had to do.

I know you did.

But I’ll be along soon, Carole. I can’t do much more. I get so tired.

I know you do.

Are you going again, Carole? Don’t go.

I have to, my darling.

Carole? I’ll be with you soon, Carole.

His eyes were open. Had they been open all along? And his cheeks were wet. Did anyone notice him weeping? No, there was no one near. No one noticed a thing.

And the movie was back, the Henry James movie, with women in gowns and everyone looking sensitive and aristocratic. And an audience, even on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, that filled fewer than half the seats.

There were two people between him and the aisle. They rose to let him past, sat down once he was by them. Their eyes never left the screen.

The men’s room, the stairs, the sidewalk outside. He’d walk home, get something to eat along the way. He knew he ought to eat, although he wasn’t very hungry. He hadn’t touched his popcorn.

O N E T R I C K , F R A N B U C K R A M thought, was to move around a little. If you sat in the same spot forever, your eyes on the same scene, it got harder and harder to pay attention to what was in front of your eyes. If you got up and walked around you got the blood moving, and when you sat down again on a different bench you saw things from a different angle.

It helped, but what would help even more was to have something to do.

A book or a newspaper would be handy. And what could look more natural than a man reading? Always the chance, though, that he’d get caught up in his reading and miss the man he was waiting for. Of course that wouldn’t happen if he had something he couldn’t read, and he found himself wondering about that Asian man he’d seen earlier with his Spanish newspaper. Was he on a stakeout of his own?

He got out his cell phone, tried to think of somebody to call.

Arlene? No, he really didn’t have anything to say to her. Susan?

Yeah, right. She’d tell him to take off all his clothes and handcuff himself to the bench. Then take two enemas and call her in the morning.

He called his own number, thinking he’d check his messages, then heard his own outgoing message, the one that told people not to leave messages, and saw the futility of that. And what an arro-gant message he’d recorded— I’m too busy for you, so don’t leave me a message, but try me again later when I might have time for you. Nice, very nice.

Even if he had a paper it was getting too dark to read. Good, he thought. Pretty soon it would be dark enough and the human traffic sparse enough to think about boarding the Nancy Dee. First, though, he’d better get something to eat. He’d pee while he was at it, but peeing wouldn’t be that much of a problem once he was on the boat. There was bound to be a toilet, which you were probably supposed to call something else. The head? That sounded right. So he could go to the head, or pee in a wastebasket (and God knew what they’d call that) or a bottle. Or in the corner, because it wasn’t his boat, and the man whose boat it was would never know the difference.

T H E C A R P E N T E R H A D W A L K E D all the way back from the theater, a distance of about two miles. He’d taken his time, stopping to buy a sandwich, eating it as he walked, stopping again for a can of soda. The sun was down by the time he reached Riverside Park, but the day was still bright, and the sky over Jersey was stained red and purple.

It was a wonderful city for sunsets. You couldn’t see them from his old apartment, and that was the one thing he would have changed about the place. It did something for a person to see a beautiful sunset.

He walked through the park, walked a hundred yards or so past the Boat Basin, sat for a few minutes, then walked back the way he’d come. Looking at the people, paying attention to what he saw.

Something felt wrong.

He’d felt glimmerings of it on the way back from the movie house. He thought about the date he’d circled on his calendar.

Well, he’d made the circle on paper with a felt-tipped pen. He hadn’t carved it in stone. Who was to say he couldn’t move it up?

A year, of course, was the conventional period of mourning.

Making the final sacrifice a year to the day after their magnificent sacrifice had a certain poetic value, not to mention a mathematical precision. But how trivial such considerations seemed to him now.

The sooner he carried out his mission, the sooner he could rest.

And he was tired, so tired, in a way far beyond what sleep could cure. His spirit ached with the tiredness he felt.

He could rest. And he could see Carole again, and his children.

And all the other poor sweet innocent sacrificed angels. That gentle fellow with the shaved head. Buddha, he was called. And that poor woman in Brooklyn, and the prostitute, Clara.

Oh, so many of them.

Yes, he’d made up his mind. He’d decided. He wouldn’t wait any longer.

But first there was the sensation he felt, the awareness that centered at the back of his neck, that atavistic animal sense of being sought, of being hunted. And hadn’t he been told just yesterday that someone had come to his boat, someone had been looking for him?

He studied the people in the area. There were two men who seemed to him to be without apparent purpose, but who neverthe-less had a purposeful air about them. As if they might be watching and waiting for someone.

One got up and left, and the Carpenter watched until he was sure he hadn’t merely changed seats. Then he turned his attention to the other, not looking directly at him but observing him out of the corner of his eye. The Carpenter was in shadows, where he couldn’t be seen easily, and he had the knack of disappearing, of attracting no attention. This man did not have that knack. He was, in fact, quite the opposite. There was something magnetic about him. He drew the eye.

The Carpenter let his eye be drawn, kept it on the man. He looked familiar, the Carpenter thought. His face was one he’d seen before, perhaps in the newspapers or on television.