Enough Rope

  He poured himself a drink. It helped, but it didn’t change anything.

  Had he been mugged? There was a thin line, he realized, and he wasn’t sure if the man had crossed it. He had not been asking for money, he had been demanding it, and the absence of a specific threat did not mean there was no menace in the demand. Elliott, certainly, had given him money out of fear. He’d been intimidated. Unwilling to display his wallet, he’d fished out a batch of coins, including a couple of quarters and a subway token, currently valued at $1.15.

  A small enough price, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that he’d been made to pay it. Stand and deliver, the man might as well have said. Elliott had stood and delivered.

  A block from his own door, for God’s sake. A good street in a good neighborhood. Broad daylight.

  And you couldn’t even report it. Not that anyone reported anything anymore. A friend at work had reported a burglary only because you had to in order to collect on your insurance. The police, he’d said, had taken the report over the phone. “I’ll send somebody if you want,” the cop had said, “but I’ve got to tell you, it’s a waste of your time and ours.” Someone else had been robbed of his watch and wallet at gunpoint and had not bothered reporting the incident. “What’s the point?” he’d said.

  But even if there were a point, Elliott had nothing to report. A man had asked for money and he’d given it to him. They had a right to ask for money, some judge had ruled. They were exercising their First Amendment right of free speech. Never mind that there had been an unvoiced threat, that Elliott had paid the money out of intimidation. Never mind that it damn well felt like a mugging.

  First Amendment rights. Maybe he ought to exercise his own rights under the Second Amendment—the right to bear arms.

  That same evening, he took the gun from the drawer and tried it in various pockets—unloaded now. He tried tucking it into his belt, first in front, then behind, in the small of his back. He practiced reaching for it, drawing it. He felt foolish, and it was uncomfortable walking around with the gun in his belt like that.

  It was comfortable in his right-hand jacket pocket, but the weight of it spoiled the line of the jacket. The pants pocket on the same side was better. He had reached into that pocket to produce the handful of change that had mollified the panhandler. Suppose he had come out with a gun instead?

  “Thank you kindly. Have a nice day.”

  Later, after he’d eaten, he went to the video store on the next block to rent a movie for the evening. He was out the door before he realized he still had the gun in his pocket. It was still unloaded, the six shells lying where he had spilled them on his bed. He had reached for the keys to lock up and there was the gun.

  He got the keys, locked up, and went out with the gun in his pocket.

  The sensation of being on the street with a gun in his pocket was an interesting one. He felt as though he were keeping a secret from everyone he met, and that the secret empowered him. He spent longer than usual in the video store. Two fantasies came and went. In one, he held up the clerk, brandishing his empty gun and walking out with all the money in the register. In the other, someone else attempted to rob the place and Elliott drew his weapon and foiled the holdup.

  Back home, he watched the movie, but his mind insisted on replaying the second fantasy. In one version, the holdup man spun toward him, gun in hand, and Elliott had to face him with an unloaded revolver.

  When the movie ended, he reloaded the gun and put it back in the drawer.

  The following evening, he carried the gun, loaded this time. The night after that was a Friday, and when he got home from the office, he put the gun in his pocket almost without thinking about it. He went out for a bite of dinner, then played cards at a friend’s apartment a dozen blocks away. They played, as always, for low stakes, but Elliott was the big winner. Another player joked that he had better take a cab home.

  “No need,” he said. “I’m armed and dangerous.”

  He walked home, and on the way, he stopped at a bar and had a couple of beers. Some people at a table near where he stood were talking about a recent outrage, a young advertising executive in Greenwich Village shot dead while using a pay phone around the corner from his apartment. “I’ll tell you something,” one of the party said. “I’m about ready to start carrying a gun.”

  “You can’t, legally,” someone said.

  “Screw legally.”

  “So a guy tries something and you shoot him and you’re the one winds up in trouble.”

  “I’ll tell you something,” the man said. “I’d rather be judged by twelve than carried by six.”

  He carried the gun the whole weekend. It never left his pocket. He was at home much of the time, watching a ball game on television, catching up with his bookkeeping, but he left the house several times each day and always had the gun on his person.

  He never drew it, but sometimes he would put his hand in his pocket and let his fingers curl around the butt of it. He found its presence increasingly reassuring. If anything happened, he was ready.

  And he didn’t have to worry about an accidental discharge. The chamber under the hammer was unloaded. He had worked all that out. If he dropped the gun, it wouldn’t go off. But if he cocked it and worked the trigger, it would fire.

  When he took his hand from his pocket and held it to his face, he could smell the odor of the gun on his fingers. He liked that.

  By Monday morning, he had grown used to the gun. It seemed perfectly natural to carry it to the office.

  On the way home, not that night but the following night, the same aggressive panhandler accosted him. His routine had not changed. “Come on,” he said. “Gimme a dollar.”

  Elliott’s hand was in his pocket, his fingers touching the cold metal.

  “Not tonight,” he said.

  Maybe something showed in his eyes.

  “Hey, that’s cool,” the panhandler said. “You have a good day just the same.” And stepped out of his path.

  A week or so after that, he was riding the subway, coming home late after dinner with married friends in Forest Hills. He had a paperback with him, but he couldn’t concentrate on it, and he realized that the two young men across the car from him were looking him over, sizing him up. They were wearing untied basketball sneakers and warm-up jackets, and looked street smart and dangerous. He was wearing the suit he’d worn to the office and had a briefcase beside him; he looked prosperous and vulnerable.

  The car was almost empty. There was a derelict sleeping a few yards away, a woman with a small child all the way down at the other end. One of the pair nudged the other, then turned his eyes toward Elliott again.

  Elliott took the gun out of his pocket. He held it on his lap and let them see it, then put it back in his pocket.

  The two of them got off at the next station, leaving Elliott to ride home alone.

  When he got home, he took the gun from his pocket and set it on the nightstand. (He no longer bothered tucking it in the drawer.) He went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror.

  “Fucking thing saved my life,” he said.

  One night, he took a woman friend to dinner. Afterward, they went back to her place and wound up in bed. At one point, she got up to use the bathroom, and while she was up, she hung up her own clothing and went to put his pants on a hanger.

  “These weigh a ton,” she said. “What have you got in here?”

  “See for yourself,” he said. “But be careful.”

  “My God. Is it loaded?”

  “They’re not much good if they’re not.”

  “My God.”

  He told her how he’d bought it in Florida, how it had now become second nature for him to carry it. “I’d feel naked without it,” he said.

  “Aren’t you afraid you’ll get into trouble?”

  “I look at it this way,” he told her. “I’d rather be judged by twelve than carried by six.”

  One night, two men cut across
the avenue toward him while he was walking home from his Friday card game. Without hesitation, he drew the gun.

  “Whoa!” the nearer of the two sang out. “Hey, it’s cool, man. Thought you was somebody else, is all.”

  They veered off, gave him a wide berth.

  Thought I was somebody else, he thought. Thought I was a victim, is what you thought.

  There were stores around the city that sold police equipment. Books to study for the sergeant’s exam. Copies of the latest revised penal code. A T-shirt that read n.y.p.d. homicide squad, our day begins when your day ends.

  He stopped in and didn’t buy anything, then returned for a kit to clean his gun. He hadn’t fired it yet, except in Florida, but it seemed as though he ought to clean it from time to time anyway. He took the kit home and unloaded the gun and cleaned it, working an oiled patch of cloth through the short barrel. When he was finished, he put everything away and reloaded the gun.

  He liked the way it smelled, freshly cleaned with gun oil.

  A week later, he returned and bought a bulletproof vest. They had two types, one significantly more expensive than the other. Both were made of Kevlar, whatever that was.

  “Your more expensive one provides you with a little more protection,” the proprietor explained. “Neither one’s gonna stop a shot from an assault rifle. The real high-powered rounds; concrete don’t stop ’em. This here, though, it provides the most protection available, plus it provides protection against a knife thrust. Neither one’s a sure thing to stop a knife, but this here’s reinforced.”

  He bought the better vest.

  One night, lonely and sad, he unloaded the gun and put the barrel to his temple. His finger was inside the trigger guard, curled around the trigger.

  You weren’t supposed to dry-fire the gun. It was bad for the firing pin to squeeze off a shot when there was no cartridge in the chamber.

  Quit fooling around, he told himself.

  He cocked the gun, then took it away from his temple. He uncocked it, put the barrel in his mouth. That was how cops did it when they couldn’t take it anymore. Eating your gun, they called it.

  He didn’t like the taste, the metal, the gun oil. Liked the smell but not the taste.

  He loaded the gun and quit fooling around.

  A little later, he went out. It was late, but he didn’t feel like sitting around the apartment, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep. He wore the Kevlar vest—he wore it all the time lately—and, of course, he had the gun in his pocket.

  He walked around, with no destination in mind. He stopped for a beer but drank only a few sips of it, then headed out to the street again. The moon came into view, and he wasn’t surprised to note that it was full.

  He had his hand in his pocket, touching the gun. When he breathed deeply, he could feel the vest drawn tight around his chest. He liked the sensation.

  When he reached the park, he hesitated. Years ago, back when the city was safe, you knew not to walk in the park at night. It was dangerous even then. It could hardly be otherwise now, when every neighborhood was a jungle.

  So? If anything happened, if anybody tried anything, he was ready.

  A Little Off the Top

  “Consider the gecko,” the doctor said, with a gesture toward the wall at my left. There one of the tiny lizards clung effortlessly, as if painted. “Remarkable for its rather piercing cry, the undoubted source of its name. Remarkable as well for the suction cups at the tips of its fingers and toes, which devices enable it to scurry across the ceiling as readily as you or I might cross a floor. Now a Darwinian would point to the gecko and talk of evolution and mutation and fitness to survive, but can you honestly regard such an adaptation as the result of random chance? I prefer to see the fingerprints of the Creator in the fingertips of that saurian. It would take a God to create a gecko, and a whimsical fun-loving God at that. The only sort, really, in whom one would care to believe.”

  The doctor’s name was Turnquist. He was an Englishman, an anomaly on an island where the planters were predominantly Dutch with a scattering of displaced French. He had just given me the best dinner I’d had since I left the States, a perfectly seasoned curried goat complemented by an even dozen side dishes and perhaps as many chutneys. Thus far in my travels I’d been exposed almost exclusively to Chinese cooks, and not one of them could have found work on Mott Street.

  Dr. Turnquist’s conversation was as stimulating as his cook’s curry. He was dressed in white, but there his resemblance to Sidney Greenstreet ended. He was a short man and a slender one, with rather large and long-fingered hands, and as he sat with his hands poised on the white linen cloth, it struck me that there was about him a quality not dissimilar to the gecko. He might have been clinging to a wall, waiting for a foolish insect to venture too close.

  There was a cut crystal bell beside his wineglass. He rang it, and almost immediately a young woman appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Bring the brandy,” he told her, “and a pair of the medium-sized bell glasses.”

  She withdrew, returning moments later with a squat-bodied ship’s decanter and a pair of glasses. “Very good, Leota,” he said. “You may pour a glass for each of us.”

  She served me first, placing the glass on the tablecloth at my right, pouring a generous measure of cognac into it. I watched the procedure out of the corner of my eye. She was of medium height, slender but full-figured, with a rich brown skin and arresting cheekbones. Her scent was heavy and rich in the tropical air. My eyes followed her as she moved around the table and filled my host’s glass. She left the bottle on the table. He said, “Thank you, Leota,” and she crossed to the kitchen door.

  My eyes returned to the doctor. He was holding his glass aloft. I raised mine. “Cheers,” he said, and we drank.

  The cognac was excellent and I said as much. “It’s decent,” he allowed. “Not the best the French ever managed, but good enough.” His dry lizard eyes twinkled. “Is it the cognac you admired? Or the hand that poured it?”

  “Your servant is a beautiful woman,” I said, perhaps a little stiffly.

  “She’s a Tamil. They are an attractive race, most especially in the bloom of youth. And Leota is particularly attractive, even for a Tamil.” His eyes considered me carefully. “You recently ended a marriage,” he said.

  “A relationship. We weren’t actually married. We lived together.”

  “It was painful, I suppose.”

  I hesitated, then nodded.

  “Then I daresay travel was the right prescription,” the doctor said. “Your appetites are returning. You did justice to your dinner. You’re able to appreciate a good cognac and a beautiful woman.”

  “One could hardly do otherwise. All three are quite superb.”

  He lifted his glass again, warmed its bowl in his palm, inhaled its bouquet, took a drop of the liquid on his tongue. His eyes closed briefly. For a moment I might have been alone in the high-ceilinged dining room.

  His eyes snapped open. “Have you,” he demanded, “ever had a cognac of the comet year?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Eighteen thirty-five. Have you ever tasted an eighteen thirty-five cognac?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “Then you very likely have not, because you would recall it. Have you ever made love to a virgin? Let me rephrase that. Have you ever embraced a virgin of mixed ancestry, Tamil and Chinese and Scandinavian? You needn’t answer. A rhetorical question, of course.”

  I took a small sip of cognac. It was really quite excellent.

  “I could tell you a story,” Dr. Turnquist said. “Of course you’d want to change the names if you ever decided to do anything with it. And you might take care to set it on some other island.”

  “I wouldn’t have to name the island at all,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t suppose you would.”

  There were, it seemed, two brothers named Einhoorn. One, Piet, was a planter, with large and valuable holdings in the so
uthern portion of the island. The other, Rolf, was a trader with offices in the capital city on the island’s eastern rim. Both were quite prosperous, and each had survived the trauma of the island’s metamorphosis from colony to independent nation.

  Both had been married. Piet’s wife had died years ago, while delivering a stillborn child. Rolf’s wife deserted him at about the same time, leaving on a Europe-bound freighter with whose captain Rolf had traded for years. The ship still called at the island from time to time, and Rolf still did business with her captain. The woman was never a subject of conversation between them.

  Although he saw them infrequently, Dr. Turnquist got along well enough with both of the Einhoorn brothers. He thought them coarse men. They both had a hearty appetite for the pleasures of the flesh, which he approved, but it seemed to him that they lacked refinement. Neither had the slightest taste for art, for music, for literature. Neither gave any evidence of having a spiritual dimension. Both delighted in making money, in drinking brandy, and embracing young women. Neither cared much for anything else.

  One evening, Rolf, the trader, appeared at the doctor’s door. The doctor had already finished his dinner. He was sitting on the enclosed veranda, sipping a postprandial brandy and reading, for the thousandth time, a sonnet of Wordsworth’s, the one comparing the evening to a nun breathless with adoration. A felicitous phrase, he had thought for the thousandth time.

  He set the book aside and put his guest in a wicker chair and poured him a brandy. Rolf drank it down, pronounced it acceptable, and demanded to know if the doctor had ever had an 1835 cognac. The doctor said that he had not.

  “The comet year,” Rolf said. “Halley’s Comet. It came in eighteen thirty-five. It was important, the coming of the comet. The American writer, Mark Twain. You know him? He was born in that year.”

  “I would suppose he was not the only one.”

  “He thought it significant,” Rolf Einhoorn said. “He said he was born when the comet came and would die when it reappeared. He believed this, I think. I don’t know if it happened.”