Night Soul and Other Stories by Joseph McElroy Read Free Book Online Page B

“criminal—” he tripped, lunged, got his footing—
    “The war you mean.”
    “Criminal as war. As war criminals if you want to know. And all this, this architecture, city planning theory (?), the military’re using it now, operational you hear. Glad you missed your turn anyhow.”
    “You heard that bang out in the River whatever it was?” Why did the visitor ask, when his host had already said.
    Surly now, some story in his eyes, preoccupied, not answering. Was he ready for his guest to go? Yet in their Army jackets, host and visitor together shared then the oddest thing of all stepping out onto the old irregular slabs of sidewalk, where Whey like a workman in broad daylight let out a whistle ear-piercingly through his teeth, and the roof-light of a taxi slid into view at the corner. Like some secret but one that hardly matters, next to this meeting.
    Now the cab paused as if to back into this odd street of unrenovated commercial buildings, begrimed and fine—old cobbles a bike tire’s mine field he had known. The host shook his head at the twenty-dollar bill, a corner torn. They looked at each other. Something: what was it? Luck that Whey had looked out when he did? “Yeah I heard it,” Whey said.
    “Yeah, I was looking out at the River and I missed my turn,” said the other. “Well, I was on the phone, I got it in both ears, I thought it was my head splitting again,” said Whey.
    “And then?” said the other, for now the phone was ringing.
    “Person on the phone’s saying, ‘Not long for this place’—her place she meant, hearing the explosion, I think. Sometimes you want your life back. Sometimes you don’t.” He laughed and pulled a remote out of his jacket pocket. “You never lost it,” said the other. “Well, I need a break.” “Don’t get locked out…” (what was the guy’s name?—propping the door ajar).
    “A pleasure I’m sure.” The cab came up the wrong way, U’d and pulled over. “An honor in fact.” The visitor had said so little. Why an honor?—his coming and going sandwiched between two phone calls. The steel door swung shut upon the light, upon the host, his body, its progress, the body you did violence to yet in adapting took bizarre instruction from point by point in building the building, locating this dark street that knew him and he had bumped along late at night yet never quite noticed. And now the cabdriver with baseball cap and ponytail gathered with a shiny clasp, Russian, was known to him.
    Not a huge surprise for this city traveler, her hand on the wheel, her nearness, her shoulders. She seemed to remember him, waiting for him to notice. Russian, a moonlighter from some Union Square spa. They had compared notes one night, two hold-up stories; then (may I?) their own handguns (the range he went to in a downtown basement, hers across the river in Long Island City, keeping up to snuff, permits up to date). They had even compared hands. A bond. She reaching up, he forward just past the divider, their own hands extending with a quite separate and ancient intent off the stem of the arm knowingly, yes—“what does it know?” she’d said. Yet rider and driver—tonight they matched discretion, no questions, the smell of her coffee, a lifted sandwich, the mayo and meat aroma of her late lunch lessening and another sweeter smell bearing him along—no regret realizing after all that his bike with its tire would have gone in the trunk, and oddly that some current was live in him from that chance encounter.
    So now he was inspired to tell her about tonight. Though he wondered out loud why the man wouldn’t let him pay for fixing the blow-out, it was a job to be paid for; while she replying, “He had something else from you, I think,” made him think again of what they could do with this block. His thinking ten, fifteen years ago, proportions came to him, two types of structure neither enough by itself, not just for a block, a neighborhood, a wider scheme, it