Claire DeWitt And The City Of The Dead Part 18

"And then Trey, he sits right up and says, 'Why you cryin', Andray?'"

Andray laughed again, but it worked less well now to cover up his crying. He leaned over Terrell and leaned out the window and spit.

"I nearly jumped out my f.u.c.king skin," he went on. "Nearly pa.s.sed right out. But he was fine. He just stood right up and he was fine. We was both covered in blood, but he was all healed up. Not a mark on his body. Not one scratch."

I looked at Terrell. He looked at me and nodded solemnly. "G.o.d's truth," he said. "I seen the whole f.u.c.king thing myself. That mothaf.u.c.ka, he up and walking, just the same goofy f.u.c.k he always was."

Both boys laughed nervously.

"I started cryin' all over again," Andray said, shaking his head. "Trey, he told me to stop cryin'. He says to me, 'It's all over now. You ain't going nowhere. So stop crying and shut the f.u.c.k up.'

"See, he knew. I decided-see, I couldn't live with that. If he died, I was gonna die too. Right next to him. He hugged me and we both just, like-we was so happy."

"And then it start to rain," Terrell said, smiling.

"Just like that," Andray said, snapping his fingers. "Just quick like that, a big storm, and all the blood was washed away. We was both just soaked, clean, like after a shower. And it wasn't no dirty water, like usual. It was real clean, like from a bottle. And then it stopped, just like it came." He snapped his fingers again.

"But when it was over," Andray concluded, "it was over. Trey, he never would say a word about it. Never tell me how he did it. I seen a lot of f.u.c.ked-up s.h.i.t, but that, that's the real thing."

"But Trey," Terrell said solemnly. "He ain't never the same."

"Well, he'd been shot," I said.

"No," Terrell said, shaking his head. "It ain't like that. In his body, he just the same. No scars, no nothing. But in his head-he changed."

"Stopped hanging out with us," Andray said. "Saw him less and less."

"He started ridin' trains," Terrell said. "Like some hobo s.h.i.t."

"With white kids," Andray said. "Those dirty kids, white kids with dreadlocks and s.h.i.t like that. Punks. Went longer and longer each time."

"Started making friends all over the place," Terrell said. "He went to the library, e-mailing some girl he met in Portland."

"Oregon," Andray clarified, a.s.suming I found Portland as mysterious as he did.

"Portland, Los Angeles-s.h.i.t, he went all over," Terrell said. "Ridin' trains. Then one time he just didn't come back."

"That about six months ago now," Andray said.

"About seven," Terrell said. "Seven months."

"That's a long time," Andray said.

We sat and I smoked the rest of the cigarette.

Andray looked at me.

"Why you breathing like that?"

"That's just how I breathe," I said.

I felt myself falling and I wondered if the truck had finally tipped over-it was, after all, at an impossible angle. I had as strong a grip on physics as anyone else.

"Hey, lady," I heard from far away.

As I fell I saw Trey making the girls laugh in Portland, marveling at the clean streets and whole houses. Trey in Los Angeles, taking meetings at the Brown Derby. Trey in Boston, exploring Harvard Yard. Trey in Miami, wrestling alligators. Trey in Alaska, teaching Yukon Jack to shoot nines and sling rock. Trey, laughing his way around the country, seeing everything, living in the sun.

"Her name Miss Claire. Yo, Miss Claire."

"f.u.c.k. Hey, lady, wake up"

"Hey, CLAIRE. Claire DeWhatever-the-f.u.c.k-your-name-is. WAKE UP."

Suddenly someone's hands were on my shoulders. Trey?

"Oh lady oh lady oh lady please wake up oh f.u.c.k oh f.u.c.k PLEASE wake up."

Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

I felt my heart pound in my chest. My eyes popped open. I was high and very much alive. Terrell was leaning over me, eyes and mouth open. Andray was gone.

"Oh, man," he said. "I thought you was gone, lady."

He laughed, not because anything was funny, but because he was glad I wasn't dead.

I realized I was slouched down low in the seat, my head near the bottom. I sat up.

"Hey," I said. My throat was burnt and dry. "Can I have some more?"

Terrell shook his head and ignored my request. He was used to idiots on drugs. "You really looked dead, lady. You was all white and your eyes was all up in your head like a movie."

"That's just what I look like," I croaked.

Terrell looked at me. Then he instructed me to drive to the all-night gas station on Magazine and Washington. He dashed in and came out with a corn-syrup-and-food-coloring orange drink in a little plastic tub.

"Juice," he said, handing it to me. "You drink this. Good for you."

I drank the sugar water and I did feel a little better. I understood why he and Andray were friends. He was a kind boy. We drove back toward his corner. About a block away I stopped to let Terrell out.

"You sure you gonna be okay?" he asked. "You need help or something?"

"I'll be okay," I said. "Thanks for the juice."

He nodded, shook my hand, and got out of the car.

His skin was leathery and tough, as if he'd been working hard.

35.

IT WAS NIGHT. The bar was dark and smelled like beer and felt familiar. Maybe I'd been there before. Little Christmas lights lit up the bar. Tom Waits played on the jukebox. I was on lower Decatur in the Quarter, a strip of antique stores during the day and dive bars at night. I didn't remember when I'd gotten there. But there I was.

Tracy and Andray sat at the bar, drinking together. Andray was drinking a martini in a big oversize gla.s.s and smoking a cigar. Tracy was drinking a gla.s.s of beer and smoking a cigarette. Andray must have come straight here from the truck where I last saw him.

So that's where Tracy's been all these years, I thought. Here I was thinking she was dead. But she's been in New Orleans. It made a strange kind of sense. Tracy would love New Orleans-the murder, the music, the people. She was my age-her age-and she looked hard and bleached and a little bit scary. Just like I always knew she would. She wore a black fur coat that was falling apart at the seams and big c.o.c.ktail rings on her fingers. Under her coat I could see the tattoos on her wrists: C, K. Around them were new tattoos: snakes, roses, names of boys she loved, however briefly.

I wanted to talk to them but they couldn't hear me, even though I could hear them.

"The thing is," Andray was saying, "people come down here thinking it's some kinda Damon Runyon story. Thinking they gonna see some parades-"

"See some voodoo s.h.i.t," Tracy said, in full agreement. "See some little black kids tap dancing in a puddle. Maybe see an old black guy playin' guitar down in the Quarter."

Andray laughed. It made so much sense that they would like each other. Of course they would be friends.

"But once they here," Andray said, "they gonna find out. This ain't no Damon Runyon s.h.i.t."

Tracy laughed.

"More like Jim Thompson," she said.

"Or Donald Goines," Andray said.

"Maybe even like Chandler," Tracy said. "Like how things never make any sense."

"Yeah," Andray said. "You got it. If anybody looking for that kind of story, the kind where every little thing gets tied up in the end, they best stay on the train and go right through to Texas."

"Don't even get off," Tracy said. "Stay right on the train. I heard they got some good stories up in Oxford, Miss."

Andray laughed.

"Got some in Miami, what I hear," Andray said.

"Got plenty in California," Tracy said. They laughed again.

"The thing about this city," Andray said. "It knows how to tell a beautiful story. It truly does. But if you're looking for a happy ending, you better be lookin' somewhere else."

Tracy cackled.

"You got it, pal," she said, lighting a cigarette. "There's a lot to love about this place. But it ain't for the weak of heart. And it ain't no place for happy endings."

36.

I WOKE UP and got my phone and called Kelly. I hadn't spoken to her in five years. I got her answering machine. Her voice was clipped and mean, just like the last time I heard it.

"You've reached the McCallen detective agency. Leave a message."

"It's me," I said. "I had a dream."

I hung up.

We started our careers as detectives by solving the mysteries in our own homes. Where was Kelly's mother going at quarter after one every afternoon? To the liquor store, as we found out. What did Tracy's dad keep in the mysterious box under his bed? Bondage p.o.r.n, photographs I wished I'd never seen. And who was my mother making such mysterious calls to after my father fell asleep at night? We found out it was my father's brother.

It wasn't long before we had proven Silette's first rule of solving mysteries: most people don't want their mysteries solved. Including us. But it was too late for us to stop.

Next, we started solving mysteries in the neighborhood. There was no shortage of crimes, but the solutions weren't very challenging. Everyone knew who'd shot Dwayne. Everyone knew about LaTisha's dad. The problem wasn't solving the crime. The problem was that no one cared.

As we got older we spent hours on the subway. From the Cloisters to Coney Island, New York was ours. It cost seventy-five cents for a subway token, and a can of Krylon was two bucks. And turnstiles were easy to jump, and spray paint was easy to steal. We rode the trains and left our mark where we could. Some kids lived or died for graffiti. We just wanted to leave some evidence we'd been alive.

New York was our own private mystery. Like children alone in the woods, we followed our trail of crumbs wherever it led us. No one looked for us. n.o.body missed us. Our only encounter with adult authority was the cops, and all they ever said was Pour it out, Put it in a paper bag, or Put it out.

Together we wrote graffiti, together we bought records, together we combed thrift shops for clothes and books, together we bought nickel bags of weed and pints of vodka on Myrtle Avenue, together we faked the age on our bus pa.s.ses to sneak into shows, together we rode the subway to the end of the line, together we met other kids like us-a whole city of kids like us, from neighborhoods and houses they wanted to be away from as much as possible.

But there was one difference between us and the other kids we met. We had read Detection. They hadn't.

By 1985 we'd started reading the papers and watching the news and trying to solve the crimes we read about. That year more than a thousand people were murdered in New York City. There were one or two shootings a week in our neighborhood alone.

But the city at large, we found, wasn't so different from our neighborhood. Sometimes the problem wasn't cracking the case. It was finding someone to care after you cracked it.

"The clue that can be named is not the eternal clue," Silette wrote. "The mystery that can be named is not the eternal mystery."

37.

THE NEXT DAY I drove to the park on Annunciation and Third again. In front of me was the big white truck with a cherry picker I'd seen around the city. I still didn't know what it did. I looked at the license plate; it was covered with mud. I tried to catch sight of the people inside but I couldn't make much out, just two people in white jumpsuits. At Josephine it made a right turn and I didn't follow.

The park on Annunciation was supposed to be a playground. No one was playing in it. But the same boys were hanging out, trying to sell the same drugs. One of them was small and had great big dreadlocks. I knew it was Lawrence.