Hawk takes the number 1 train to Columbus Circle, where he sits under the stone monument to the valiant seamen of the Maine, licking a mango ice and thinking that somewhere south of here someone’s licking an ice under a statue honoring those who sunk the Maine. A ring of vendors sell framed photos of celebrities, watercolors of city scenes, replicas of city monuments. A dirty boy asks him for “change for a bagel” and Hawk hands the guy a quarter. A vendor yells “peanuts, I got your nuts, I got your peanuts” over and over until Hawk’s mouth is salty and he craves a cold pint. Roller skaters disappear into the hot gray-greenness of the park.
Then Hawk walks across Fifty-ninth and turns uptown toward the zoo, hoping to buy a creamsicle from Two Hats Gonzalez—who walks around with a Q-tip sticking straight out of his ear and two hats, one on top of the other—and have a session with Elton the gorilla. Human DNA is only 1 percent different from an ape’s, Jep says, without saying which species should feel envy. Elton has a face more expressive than that of any human Hawk knows. He can look at you with the deepest compassion or wipe you out with a nose-pick. Gorilla therapy is the finest Hawk can afford.
But the old zoo has been bulldozed as a succession of mayors threatened. Just a few weeks ago he’d been there with Zoey, watching sleek, torpedo-like seals and polar bears with massive buttocks glide on their backs and Japanese snow monkeys hop around rocks scratching their assholes. A cop tells him the new zoo opens in a week. The gorillas were transferred to the Bronx Zoo and there’s no sign of Two Hats Gonzalez. Maybe he couldn’t stand to be separated from Elton.
Hawk walks through the park looking at trees and brown drying plants and realizes that he doesn’t know any of their names. He enters a playground and sits beside a teenage girl nursing a baby, his eye catching the dim figure of a cans man going through the trash outside the circle of bars. On his other side, women talk about their children, as if there were no other stories in the world. Groups of kids not much older than Zoey chase each other with sagging water balloons, screaming with delight, sole proprietors of swings and slides. Hawk waves and makes goo-goo eyes at the young mother’s baby, but the baby looks at him and begins to cry.
“I need a push for starters,” says a girl on a swing, but when Hawk walks over to give her a push the girl recoils and runs back to one of the women on the bench, who frowns at him.
Hawk slinks out of the playground and at Broadway heads downtown, stopping to eat a few grilled fifty-cent Nathan’s dogs on a bench on a traffic island on Forty-fourth. Bites of news for August 10 scroll by on the side of a building. It’s ninety-six and sunny. Fifteen days in a row over ninety degrees now is believed to be a modern-day record. Cost of the drought for the summer of 1988 is now estimated in the billions. Drought killed 166,000 chickens and 15,000 turkeys in North Carolina last week. Wildfires claimed millions of acres in Yellowstone Park. Mississippi River is at lowest recorded level since 1895. Drinking water salty in Louisiana delta. An ad for Rush Limbaugh on the side of another building changes one dot at a time until Oprah Winfrey emerges. A messenger in a Godzilla suit enters a building carrying colored balloons. Streams of traffic converge on Hawk, but the flashing cars never hit him.
Hawk sits on the bench and thinks about Sammy, pale and thin, receiving a drippy dinner through his veins, unable to piss on his own, a nurse changing his bedpan. His fingers uncertain and trembling when he reached to shake good-bye, like a chess pigeon’s. And then, like he’d been keeping it wrapped in his mind, saving the thought like a shrink-wrapped porno magazine, he imagines the safe in Sammy’s apartment.
Man, the old guy’s a secretive, odd duck. Not even telling Harold about this box until his heart clogs and they call in the plumber. Maybe this was a place, apart from the bookkeeping, where he stashed extra money. Him and Norman maybe nicking each other, what with all their shared interests. There could be keys to other boxes in the envelopes. Numbered accounts in Switzerland or Freeport in the Bahamas. Places where Sammy wouldn’t be taxed, since he was all for skimming the government every chance he got.
Sammy always told them as boys during count-out that if you were going to break the law you were best off doing it inconspicuously, gently—gently, boys, gently—so you didn’t upset the system. If you didn’t upset the law, the law wouldn’t get upset with you. Hawk wondered even then what Sammy meant by The Law, since it was the law or it wasn’t no matter how gently you broke it. Maybe The Law was just some morning line that set the odds on how likely you were to get away with something, divided by how much it would cost you if you got caught.
Even today he can never see Sammy’s various schemes as fundamentally different from Fives’ enterprises, or those of legit corporations. You tried to take in as much money as you could and pay out as little as possible. That was business. You respected the law if it suited your interests, paid it off or monkeyed with it in your favor, and it respected you when it was in its interest. The law was on the side of some, against others, and ignored most until they made a disturbance, in which case it slapped their wrists or executed them or locked them out of sight. Little people had no faith they’d get a fair shake and only counted on not being noticed. It stands to reason that only those with a chance in the system could have faith in it.
For himself, Hawk had learned to keep the lowest profile. He was all cash. All the bills to the loft were in Sammy’s name. Hawk had never registered to vote, never paid taxes, never registered his car or had a license, even when driving the van. Officially, it was doubtful that he existed.
Days later, Hawk sits in the Family Surgical Waiting Area with Harold and Flo. Sammy has had follow-up surgery, which went well, and they’re waiting for the green light to visit. Flo paces up and back, her long slinky legs a medley of pink-and-black cling pants, her socks matching the bows in her hair and a thick leather belt.
“I just hope the surgeon is Jewish,” she says, sitting down. She picks her teeth with a plastic fork end, hesitates, and then lays down a card. “Here’s a seven of diamonds just for you, dahling.”
“Many of them are Indians or Chinese these days,” Harold says.
“I guess that’s okay if they’re trained in the right kind of surgery,” she says.
“Ginsky,” Hawk says, looking up, surprised. “You sure you’re okay, Flo?”
“They don’t let you out until you suffer,” Flo says.
“Hard to imagine Sammy laid up like that,” Harold tells Hawk, his wide face drawn. “Remember him racing Norman over the fence last year on a five-dollar bet. Norman says, ‘You’re getting old’ and Sammy says, ‘Old, you call me old?’”
How could you forget the way these old foxes carried on. The gang saying at first, “Don’t hurt yourselves, play him a hand of gin instead,” and Sammy saying, “Oh, no, Gramps doesn’t get off that easy.” And then the white-haired guys squirreled up the chain-link fence by a cracked and glass-strewn basketball court, the gang hollering and making side bets. At the top, both looked dangerously about to pitch over, feet making swipes over the barbs, then one shoe in firm and the other scissoring over. Sammy dropped the last few feet, shimmied through a rip in the rusty fence, then took his feathered shuffleboard hat from Harold.
“I love how frisky you are,” Norman said, panting as he stripped a fiver from his grapefruit roll, rubber banded in all directions. The chintzy bastards would have thousands in their pockets and play gin with Flo for five cents a point.
“Who’s old?” said Sammy, adjusting the feather in his hat, that cackle of his like tearing duct tape off a spool. “You hard-of-hearing-bastard. I came two times last night!”
“I only hope they didn’t charge by the hour,” Flo said.
Now Harold takes a flask from his jacket pocket and pours some rum into a plastic cup and adds Coke from a liter bottle.
“Want a taste, Hawk?” he asks.
Another guy in the room sees and Harold gestures him over and pours one for Hawk and one for Flo and a snort for the guy, who nods, a tear streaking his face, and wanders into the hallway.
“It makes you think about things, allowing yourself to enjoy,” Harold says. “Like that song, ‘It could be later than you think.’”
And Flo sings,
Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think
Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink
The years go by as quickly as you think
Enjoy yourself enjoy yourself
It’s later than you think.
“You guys sound like those Seven Day Adventists,” Hawk says.
“Life’s what happens while you’re making plans,” Flo says. “This rum will put holes in your head.”
“You gotta let the light in somehow,” Harold says.
Sitting there reminds Hawk of a time he shared whiskey and Cokes with Harold in Sammy’s apartment. Harold looks like a man who invented a rocket that didn’t fly to the moon. He’s got a haggard look, teeth starting to brown. But the twinkle in his eye suggests that if he has only one brain cell left it’s the cell for brilliance. Since being let go from his accounting job soon after being let go by his wife, he’s let go of his previous life.
“This was my wedding ring when I was married,” he told Hawk that night, pointing to a band with file cabinet keys hooked into a larger key chain. They’d just finished signing a couple of U.S. Open visors “Chris Evert” and “Rod Laver” to sell outside of Forest Hills. They copied the signatures out of an old tennis program and put the visors in Ziplocs with descriptive labels. Hawk sold two Lavers along with a couple of Jimmy Connors photographs Jep signed.
“One morning, after I brushed my teeth with Micatin,” said Harold. “I decided not to let my life go down the drain.”
“You brushed your teeth with athlete’s foot creme?”
At thirty, Harold had been punctual, fastidious, fit from his five-mile runs in a plastic suit, knocking down 40K. Now, a shabby forty-two, working for Sammy, he could relax. Harold scouted good deals on condos, saw that they got cleaned after a show, picked up button orders from Norman, all of this giving Sammy the space to create. In winter Sammy gave him the keys to the Miami Beach condo, and Harold lazed on the deck, smoking cigars and sipping whiskey, ordering Cuban takeout, watching the sun’s slow arc.
“You okay?” Harold asks Hawk. “You look restless and anxious these days.”
They were still waiting for a doctor or nurse to get them.
“I thought I looked like that all the time,” Hawk says.
“I used to run around drunk and miserable,” Harold says. “Man, I miss those days. But kid, whatever’s on your mind, you need to let yourself feel clearly. You gotta stop auditing yourself. We can be worse on ourselves than the IRS.”
“Me and the IRS have an arrangement. We leave each other alone.”
Harold looks around for a nurse, then slips more rum into Hawk’s drink.
“Salud, compadre,” Hawk says.
“Thanks, kid. Listen. You don’t struggle for happiness. You choose not to be unhappy. I realized I didn’t have to run five miles in a sweatsuit every morning. It’s enough to walk without discomfort. I stopped dreaming of a great job and promotion. I’m happy to pay my bills. It’s about appreciating little things. You gotta think of the misfortunes that you don’t have. You could get a brain tumor anytime, or piles, or shingles, or prostate cancer.”
Hawk nods, and Harold wipes his thick glasses.
“Sometimes I weep when I see a bloodied boxer after a fight thanking his Lord and personal Savior and then hugging his wife. You’re in your living room and you’re crying about some gymnast on the other side of the planet. You feel so much emotion that you have to go outside and walk around the block a few times, get a slice of pizza and a beer. You gotta live your life, kid. You ever see a U-Haul behind a hearse? Do you follow what I’m saying?”
“I think so.”
“You do?”
A pager tells them that the doctor will talk to them now.
“Hey kid,” Harold says. “I almost forgot. I need a favor for Sammy. His plants and stuff, they need watering. I gotta get to New Orleans, check a few things. You could take in the mail or anything in front of Sammy’s door so they don’t swipe it all. Check the answering machine. You could drop the key with Flo and Norm before you leave for New Orleans. Flo said she’d stop in a few times while we’re down South. Norman is going to come down by plane and run the show. You got time for that?”