Some problem? he’d asked.
No, she told him, but she wondered if it was possible to get a contact number for the person who’d sent it.
Sure, Al said. Hang on there, honey.
Annie waited, watching the street through the window, hoping that she might catch sight of David, fed up with writing reports and feeling like there was nothing in the world he’d rather do than be with her.
Al came back. You got a pen? he asked.
Yes, Annie said, and wrote the telephone number he gave her on the back of the same envelope.
Sent by a Mr Forrester, Al said. That right?
‘Yes, Robert Forrester,’ Annie said. She thanked Al, hung up, and stood staring at the envelope, a number of scenarios racing through her mind.
Hi there, it’s Annie … I hope you don’t mind but I got your number from the courier company, and I was wondering if you wanted to move our next club meeting to tonight.
Mr Forrester. It’s Annie O’Neill here. I hope you don’t think I’m being presumptuous, but I really missed seeing you Monday evening and I wanted to thank you for sending over the manuscript. I wondered if there was any possibility you might be able to bring over the next chapters …
She felt awkward, a little confused, and no matter how she worded it, no matter what phrasing she used, it sounded artificial and rehearsed.
She reached for the receiver. Lifted it. It felt extraordinarily heavy in her hand.
She looked at the number she’d scrawled down and when she began punching it in it was almost as though she were driven: she didn’t want to do this, but she couldn’t help it.
The telephone rang at the other end. Once. Twice. Three times. A rush of trepidation overcame her, she asked herself what in God’s name she was doing, and just as she withdrew the receiver from her ear she heard the line connect at the other end.
Yes?
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I wondered if Mr Forrester was there.’
There was a pronounced pause.
‘Tell him it’s Annie … Annie O’Neill,’ she said.
She was aware of the heavy intake of breath at the other end. But, then again, perhaps it was her imagination. She was crediting the person with the same nervousness that she herself was feeling. She heard the receiver being set down, the sound of footsteps, and then the murmur of words being exchanged.
Did those voices sound aggressive?
The voices went quiet. Footsteps again. The sound of the receiver being lifted.
Miss O’Neill?
It was Forrester’s voice.
Annie was almost surprised to hear him there, at the other end of the line.
‘Mr Forrester. I’m really sorry about this. I got your number from the courier company you used to send over the manuscript Monday night.’
Ah, yes, of course. How are you my dear? I’m very sorry I couldn’t come over but there was some business I had to attend to.
‘It’s fine Mr Forrester, it really is, and I wanted to thank you for taking the trouble.’
It’s a pleasure my dear, and I can assure you that I won’t be missing the next meeting.
‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’
There’s a problem? You have another engagement?
‘No, nothing like that Mr Forrester. It’s just that … well it’s just that –’
What my dear … out with it.
Annie smiled, almost embarrassed. ‘Well, I was wondering if there was any possibility that I might –’
Get the next chapter before Monday?
Annie didn’t say a word.
Forrester laughed at the other end. It was a warm and engaging sound.
It’s quite a story is it not? I really think that it might have had a chance of being published had it ever been finished.
‘It wasn’t finished?’ she asked.
No, unfortunately not … but there’s still quite a bit of it left.
‘And d’you think that –’
You could have it for the weekend?
‘Yes, I was hoping that I might see it before the weekend. I know that there were rules and everything, but –’
But rules were made to be broken Miss O’Neill … that’s what you were hoping, I believe?
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I was hoping that there might be an exception made.’
Well, I think it’s only fair considering I was absent from the last meeting. I’ll have someone bring it over for you. What time will you be there until today?
‘Well, I’m usually here until about five or five-thirty,’ she said.
I’ll have it there before you leave … but I still wish to hold our next meeting on Monday if that’s alright with you?’
‘Of course,’ Annie said. ‘Yes, of course.’
Very well then, Miss O’Neill. I’ll send over the next section, and I’ll see you again on Monday. Take care, and have a pleasant weekend.
‘Thank you Mr Forrester, I really appreciate it.’
Not at all my dear, not at all … goodbye.
The receiver went dead in her hand, and slowly, gently, she set it back in the cradle.
She breathed deeply. That had been fine. Forrester hadn’t seemed upset about her finding his number. Hadn’t seemed bothered at all. She shrugged her shoulders and asked herself why she’d gotten so worked up. There really was nothing to be concerned about. He’d probably appreciated the fact that someone had called him. He was just a lonely old –
She stopped mid-flight.
Someone else had answered the phone. Another man. Younger by the sound of his voice.
And was there something about his tone that made her feel he was surprised by her call? Or had she imagined it?
Hell, it didn’t matter. Job done. Purpose served. She would get to read the next part of the manuscript that evening.
The day expired in slow-motion. Four customers. See Under: Love by David Grossman; Acts of Worship by Yukio Mishima; The Dust Roads of Monferrato by Rosetta Loy and, finally, a copy of De Lillo’s Americana. John Damianka didn’t appear with the customary mayonnaise-drenched sub, and for this she was grateful. She felt content dealing with anonymity, people she had never seen before, people she would probably never see again. And if she did – perhaps on the subway, perhaps walking ahead of her on the street – she would not recognize them anyway.
She had enough to contend with. David Quinn had filled her thoughts for the past few days, and now she was trying to balance their burgeoning relationship alongside whatever she was feeling about her father.
At one point she thought of calling Forrester again to ask if there were any further Dear Heart letters that he might send over.
She decided against it. You can push the walls of envelope only so far.
The courier came a little after four. Different guy, same company. She gave Stan – his name according to the small machine-stitched tag on his breast pocket – a ten-dollar tip. She wasn’t paying ten dollars for his trouble, she was paying ten dollars because she was so grateful to receive the package before the store closed. Forrester was a man of his word. Whoever or whatever else he might be, he was at least a man of his word.
She closed up. Twenty-five after four. She turned out the lights, locked the front door, and hurried home.
Had Sullivan been in his apartment she would have said Hi, though as she’d entered the building she’d decided not to speak to him of the manuscript she carried.
This time – for reasons she could neither isolate nor fathom – she wanted to read the pages alone.
TWENTY-SIX
Rikers Island was born from the mind of a vindictive guilt-ridden man.
Rikers Island sits in the East River between Long Island and Manhattan, and from its outermost face you would have seen the North and South Brothers, Port Morris, and the vast expanse of the Conrail Freight Yard. To the left was Lawrence Point, the Consolidated Edison Company site and, over Steinway Creek, the Bowery Bay and the ripe haunt that forever gho
sted across the channel from the Sewage Treatment Facility. Though Manhattan would grow, stretching skyward with steel and concrete fingers, though the suburbs of Astoria and Steinway would forever beckon with streetlights and the sound of New York evening parties, Rikers Island would always stay the same.
It was built by unreasonable men to keep the vicious and undesirable in check. And this it did, with decisive and unquestionable authority.
Within its walls were housed the worst of the unwanteds: men who had killed for love, for money, for revenge, or for the sheer joy of killing itself. These were men who carried not only their own pain, but the pain of those they had tortured and maimed and robbed, the screams of women they had raped and beaten and abused, the children they had fathered and deserted and never given another thought for, the mothers whose hearts they had broken, the fathers whose dreams they’d destroyed. And in among these men were the innocent, the lost, the confused, the victimized, the crazy, the defeated and the near-dead.
And in amongst all of those was me.
Seven years I was there, and of those two thousand, five hundred days, and within those sixty thousand hours, there was not a minute nor a second that went by when I did not imagine that this was where I would die. But under this certainty lay a vague and tenuous hope that somehow Harry Rose would engineer a means by which I would be freed – freed to share in the wealth and wonder that was rightfully as much my own as ever it was Harry’s. I was a patient man, patience of Job it seemed, and though the hours unfolded like days, the days like weeks, I held myself in check. I never raised my voice or my fists in anger or retaliation, because I knew that once I crossed the line at Rikers there was no going back. I had gone to the cubes once, and once was enough.
From my narrow cell I heard America cry through her growing pains. I heard of the racial tensions, the shooting of blacks in Mississippi, saw Kennedy receive the Democratic presidential nomination, listened to the wireless as he was inaugurated in January of ’61.
And I waited.
Through the freedom rides, the Marines in Laos, the death of Marilyn Monroe, white mobs storming the University of Mississippi, the Bay of Pigs, the blockade of Cuba; through a thousand arrests in Alabama, the shooting of Medgar Evers, Valachi’s testimony to the Senate Committee on Organized Crime, Kennedy’s assassination; through the declaration of martial law in Saigon, the killing of Malcolm X and the bombing of Hanoi – through all these things, these monumental swathes of history daubed across America’s canvas – I, Johnnie Redbird, would remember little of anything at all.
Perversely, I would most of all remember teeth.
Incisors, molars, pre-molars, canines, crowns and roots, dentine, cementum and enamel. Infected gums, wisdoms, root canals, fillings, extractions, abscesses and gingivitis.
Through my association with one Oscar Tate Lundy, teeth would become my life, and ultimately my salvation.
*
‘Doc’ Lundy was not a real doctor, not even a dentist. Doc Lundy was a retired auto mechanic from Brooklyn Heights, a man who took it in his head to supplement his meager life’s savings by holding up a jewelry store in broad daylight with nothing more than a two-foot length of copper pipe packed with sand. He’d been sixty-six at the time, and though he’d managed to run from the store with a handful of cultured pearls and three diamond engagement rings, a lifetime of smoking and heavy drinking caught up with him after four blocks. As did the store manager, two store assistants, a customer, and an off-duty cop who just happened to be looking in the window at the time.
Doc appeared for his arraignment thirteen minutes late. He told the court clerk to ‘go fuck himself in the ass’ when he was asked whether he was pleading guilty, and when the judge suggested there might be a slim possibility of a contempt charge to go with his robbery, Doc Lundy stood up, unzipped his pants, took out his cock, and told the judge to ‘come suck this you faggot motherfucker’.
Some said Doc Lundy handled his court appearance with such delicacy and tact because he was plain and simple crazy.
Some said he wanted the longest sentence possible because by the time he got out his life’s savings might actually see him through.
I figured he was a lonely old loser who never amounted to anything much in life, and Rikers Island seemed like a country club after the disappointments he’d suffered.
So Doc Lundy came, and he made it his business to be useful. There weren’t one helluva lot of cars to fix, and so he went to the library – religiously, like a full scholarship out of Queens into Harvard – and he studied teeth.
After a year and a half of prodding and probing, painful extractions and saltwater gargles, the Block warden gave Doc Lundy his own cell. They brought in hypodermic needles and painkillers, tongue depressors and paper cups. They painted the walls white and put a little dividing wall between Doc’s berth and his ‘surgery’. Even the screws came down there to get their checkups, and when Doc fixed a rotten molar that had been plaguing Tony Cicero’s brother for the best part of five years, that old man earned himself a place in the hearts and mouths of Rikers Island.
By the time Doc was seventy-four he was getting too old and frail to be fixing teeth. His hands were unsteady, his eyes failing, and though option for parole had been given three times in the previous four years, he had never taken it. Rikers had not only become his place of work, it had become his home, and he’d long since decided that he’d been an awful lot more useful to humanity there than he had ever been on the outside.
So Doc Lundy took an apprentice, and the man he chose was me.
I didn’t read so good, at least not then, and so I learned all I needed by watching, by listening, by practice and experience on the mouths of some of the most dangerous men in America. Doc insisted that I study, however, sent me down to the library and punished me through hours of texts. After a while, some months perhaps, I started to crave understanding. I read voraciously, not only about teeth, but anything I could get my hands on. There was a world there, a world within worlds, and through the pages of books, through stories and articles and biographies and technical manuals, I gained the education I had never received. Knowledge is power, Doc told me, and I believed him. He made me write as well, made me practice writing for God’s sake, and he would go through sentence after sentence correcting spelling, grammar, punctuation and tense. He made all of these things a condition of my apprenticeship, and I bore them without complaint. It will serve you well one day, he said, and even though I did not believe him then, I do believe him now. Had I not learned then, I would not be writing these lines. At that time such things had no purpose, but in time – as I now know – they became the most important purpose of all.
After a year I knew all that Doc Lundy had ever known about teeth. Teeth became my reason for being, and with the assistance of the local medical facility I started making up dental records, taking patients down for X-rays, some of them in waist-shackles and under armed guard. I took my job seriously, like a real professional, and even as I worked, even as I filled and scraped and injected and rinsed, I began to understand the significance of teeth.
Teeth were as telling as fingerprints. Teeth survived fire and acid. Teeth were as characteristic as retina, as unique as DNA.
It was the birth of an idea, and when Doc Lundy finally died, when his body was cremated and his ashes scattered in Rikers Island Channel, I went before the governor and insisted that the dental facility be maintained. I calculated the amount of money that such care would cost the detention system, and when the governor saw the facts and figures presented he agreed. I would become the new Doc.
It was early 1966. The US launched the most significant offensive of the Vietnam War, sending eight thousand troops into the Iron Triangle; Buster Keaton died in the same month as Admiral Nimitz; Mrs Gandhi came to Washington to talk with Lyndon Johnson, and I started lancing abscesses at Rikers without Doc Lundy over my shoulder.
With access to medical and dental records I found my man. Henry
Abner Truro was a three-times guilty child-molester from Staten Island. Posing as a fairground worker, he’d lured three little kids into a narrow tunnel behind the ferris wheel engineer’s platform and done his worst. Why he did it no-one knew. Truro didn’t give a single word in his defence, merely stared – dumb and angry – at the jury, the prosecutor, even his own lawyer. The trial was swift and perfunctory. Truro went to Rikers Island for ten to fifteen, and when he came to see me he had an infected molar in the right lower quadrant and the worst case of body odor I’d ever had the misfortune of experiencing. Any man who smelled that bad deserved to die. Henry Truro was also the same height, almost exactly the same weight, the same build and shoe size as me.
Truro was in a cell alone, a precaution often taken with sex offenders, and a week after treating him for the first time I went down to that cell during exercise period and doused Truro’s mattress with cleaning alcohol. Odorless, highly flammable, Truro didn’t figure a thing when he went back into his cell that same afternoon and lay down on his cot.
I went back to my own cell, the cell I had inherited from Doc, attended to a broken crown and an incipient abscess, and then I asked for access to the dental records. I was walked down there by a warder, left to my own devices, and took a moment to exchange my own dental records for those of Henry Truro.
Then I went back to see Truro, offered the man a cigarette as he lay on his cot, and when I was done lighting it I dropped that match onto Truro’s horsehair mattress and stood back. I watched the flames envelop him, suddenly, like a wind that had rushed in to swallow him. The expression on his face was one of disbelief and confusion, and I smiled to myself as I thought of the kids’ lives he had ruined. He started batting at the flames with his hands, but the fire was hungry like it wanted to devour him, and there was little he could do. At one point he tried to get himself up off the bed, but I raised my foot and kicked him back against the mattress. He opened his mouth and I knew he was going to start screaming, so I raised my foot once more and leveled a kick at his face with all the strength I could muster. He fell back stunned, his head impacted against the wall, and though he was not unconscious he was dazed and disoriented. He was looking at me through eyes that could barely see, his clothes on fire, his skin burning. I could hardly begin to imagine how excruciating the pain must have been, but I wanted him to feel that pain. He was someone I didn’t know from Adam, but I wanted him to hurt. Never women or kids, me and Harry always used to say. We never do women and kids, and this asshole had done the worst of the two. He tried to get up again, and this time I let fly with a sideways kick to the middle of his body. Blood erupted from his mouth and I knew I had shattered his ribcage or somesuch. Still he was conscious, his hands clawing desperately at the air, his body fighting the agony he was in. I kicked him once again in the face, and this time he did fall unconscious, and I managed to drag his body away from the burning mattress and smother the flames with a blanket. The smell was like a roasting pig on some Sunday church barbecue. That, combined with the burning horsehair, filled the cell with a dense and acrid smoke. Standing in the corridor beyond you would have seen nothing, would have been unable to enter because of the atmosphere. I tore off my own shirt, and soaking it in the john I wrapped it around my face. I could barely see, my eyes were streaming, and any other time I would never have been able to manage a second in there, let alone several minutes. But my life and my freedom were at stake; if there was any second that I thought I could bear it no more I only had to think of Harry Rose’s face as he took yet another bundle of dollars from some poor sucker and tucked it into his jacket. The money was out there. My money. I wanted my goddamned money, and that was all that kept me going.