Crumbtown Read online

  Rob looked up at the light. “Big things, Walter. The biggest.”

  “I saw that dwarf commercial. Great stuff. Hey, we’re kidnapping Dyan Swaine today. You want to help me tie her up?”

  “Thanks, Walter. Can I get through here?”

  “Make a right, and then a left and then another left. You look stressed, Rob. I mean it’s coming out in your skin.”

  Rob drove past the actors’ trailers and the rows of cars with NYPD painted in blue and white on their side. Spending three million dollars an episode in a neighborhood where most of the residents were eating dog food. The injustice of it. Five hundred channels and no one would give him a job.

  By the time he got around the set, Rob was lost. He couldn’t find the fat woman’s hotel, and the rental car he’d taken out of Halo’s lot began to cry every time he stepped on the gas. Half the streets were unnamed, most of them dead ends; the houses numbered randomly. Three times he drove around the block he thought held the hotel, then all the blocks around that. After an hour of this circling, he figured out that the buildings were numbered not in sequence but according to color. He picked up the phone on the seat next to him and called Thelma at the office, who told him again the directions he’d already written down. “How many white buildings over from Dyre,” he shouted, “white ones; that’s what I need to know. I’m lost, Thelma.” Still shouting as he ran the stop sign that someone had painted black. He swerved left around the crossing oil truck, cut right to miss by inches the back of the bus, and drove directly into the young woman running behind it.

  Her head cracked against the windshield and the rest of her body came along to push the glass down and in, lines of cracked glass fleeing in all directions, her face looking at him through one hundred pieces. “Jesus,” Rob said to Thelma, and kicked the brakes and watched the woman fly up and away, to reappear on the street thirty feet ahead, lying quietly, as if exhausted by a long fall.

  He opened the door and approached her, the stocking torn around the knee, hands scraped pink and blue. Gently, he pulled the hair back from her face. The hundred pieces he’d seen through the windshield were put back in place. If he hadn’t just struck her with his car, he’d almost believe she was sleeping, a beautiful woman sleeping in the street, an angel dropped out of heaven. Rob sat down next to the woman and watched the cars passing without pausing. “You died for what,” he said, and laid his head next to hers.

  Rita stared into the sun. The bus had passed its stop, like it often did, and she had chased after. Why was she lying on the ground? Because of her head. Something was in there that wasn’t there before, squeezing inside. Other parts hurt as well, left knee, right hand, but the pain in her head was above all else. English words would not do. Only Russian could explain this.

  She rolled onto her stomach, to her knees, and looked up at the broken windshield and dented hood, felt the sharp splinters in her hair, the warm blood on her fingers. She stood crookedly, her left leg too short, as if the bones that once met in her knee had passed one another. She reached down and felt her knee, then the ankle, and below. If things weren’t bad enough, she’d broken a heel.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  Rob looked up at her face. He nodded, thinking, Now I’m dead too.

  “Have you seen my heel?”

  “Your heel? My God.” He looked down at her foot, her broken shoe, then slowly back up to her head. Except for some blood on her hand, she came across as unscathed. Yet he’d killed her. He saw it happen. And now she was alive. He watched her limp toward the car, still looking for her heel. “You’re not supposed to be moving,” Rob said. He was thinking how nice it felt to lie on the street. “Come over and lie down. It’s the best thing for you. I’ll call an ambulance. I have a phone. I had a phone.”

  “I have an appointment at noon. This woman will think I am vagabond like this. I have to find the heel.”

  “Look at what you did to my car. You can’t be walking around.”

  “I am sorry,” Rita said, “it has been a bad week.” She stopped her search suddenly, and jerked her head up and back toward the intersection, as if for the first time remembering the crash. “I must go,” she stepped over Rob. “My husband will kill if he sees.”

  Rob looked back to the corner, then at Rita walking up the street. “He’ll kill me.”

  “No, me,” she shouted back. “Me.”

  Rob stood and went to the car, strands of the woman’s hair embedded in the glass. The engine was still running, and he put it in drive, following her through the cracks in the windshield, the sun breaking through like a storm washed over. He felt light, suddenly new and clean, like he was the one who’d miraculously survived. He wanted to rush out and kiss her, and write that feeling down. He grabbed the briefcase out of the backseat, found the little tape recorder buried at the bottom that he’d bought months before, hoping it would help him start writing again. He hit the red button marked RECORD:

  “A man runs over a woman with his car. He takes her home to care for her. They fall in love. She gets him writing again. She’s foreign. European. They have enemies. Their love constantly tested on adventures. Oh God, I’ve heard this story. Don’t worry, Rob. It’s going to happen. Be patient. A man runs over a woman with his car. Miraculously, she’s fine. She saves him from killing himself. He saves her from a homicidal husband. The accident that brought them together was destiny. They fall in love. Each subsequent episode will star the same two actors, only in different roles, in different parts of the world. The abiding power of love. Love as fate. These two people, no matter where they are, or who they are, are destined to find one another. God that’s awful. Keep it rolling, Rob. It’s waiting for you.”

  He stopped the tape player and pulled alongside her. “I’ll give you a ride. At least let me do that. I just ran you over.”

  She looked back up the street, then opened the door and gritted her teeth. “Go up two blocks and make a left.”

  “I’m sorry I hit you,” Rob said, “are you sure you’re all right?” He looked over at her small ear that blushed where it had struck the glass, the old red sweater she was wearing, that her shoulders could barely hold up, and that made something tragic of her short black skirt. She pulled down the visor and looked in the mirror, wiping the lipstick from her clenched cheek, less beautiful than the angel he’d seen in the street, yet so real, a woman unstoppable, exactly the kind he’d been born to write. He imagined typing at his desk while she slept in his lap.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “I am meeting a woman for apartment.”

  “Look, I was thinking, maybe it’s more than just chance, meeting like we did.” Rob searched her sweater for a reaction. “Can I buy you lunch or something, we’ll get you a new heel. It’s the least I can do. What’s your name?”

  Rita shook her head.

  “Come on, just your name? That’s not much to ask.”

  “No, I want to remember,” she looked back in the mirror. “But I cannot.”

  “I’m Rob,” he said.

  6

  Loretta waited outside the blue and gray four-story eight-unit on Haight Street for her twelve o’clock appointment. Everything was ready. The morgue wagon had left with the body, and she’d struck a deal with the super, whom she’d worked with before. He handed over the keys for a twenty, even said he’d hold off the other agents for a day or two. The place was clean enough. But the smell. She found a can of air freshener under the sink. Enough to get her through the interview, if that girl ever decided to show. The dead guy had no family. The apartment came fully furnished.

  The cracks in the windshield made the street appear to be sneezing. With his head up close to the glass, his eyes in the space between the two largest lines, Rob could see enough to drive straight. Right turns were a problem. When she told him to pull over, he jumped the curb and struck a lamppost. Her head hit the windshield, this time pushing it out.

  “Sorry about that,” he said. �
��I’ll just wait for you here.”

  She stumbled to the sidewalk, her hands holding up her face. “No. Please. I want you to go.”

  Loretta walked over and put her hand on Rita’s arm. “What’s wrong, hon?”

  “I have to get a place right away,” Rita said. “My husband won’t leave me alone.”

  “Believe me I’ve been there,” Loretta said. She couldn’t see the driver’s face, but she had a clear enough picture in her head. A man who’d drive around in a car like that. Knocks her down the stairs after a few drinks. She remembered the time when Tim tried to hit her, right in front of the kids. So drunk he missed and fell down. Loretta put a chair in his head. “You just let me take care of it. This is the first step of taking back your life. I did it. You’re gonna do it too.” She grabbed Rita’s arm and helped her up the front steps. This poor girl walking with one heel. The scum. “These wounds will heal,” she said, “I promise.”

  “Do you know my name?” Rita asked.

  “You’re Rita. You work in the bar where my husband Tim is drinking himself to death.” This girl had it even worse than Loretta thought.

  “I just want a room with sun.”

  “There’s plenty of lamps. It’s fully furnished.”

  Young women and old babies crying in the courtyard. Windows facing north, a brick wall blacked with dirt. The room smelling like air freshener and a dead body. At least the door was strong, three locks. Rita gave the down payment in cash and squeezed her head between her hands as she walked down the stairs, already late for work. The man who’d hit her was still parked outside. She waved before turning up the street, as if to push him away. He waved back.

  Loretta walked up to the passenger window and stuck her hair in. “You are going to leave this woman alone,” she said. “I know where you live. I know where everyone lives. You lay a hand on her again, and I’ll cut your nuts off and shove one up each nose. You get the idea.”

  “I’m getting it,” Rob said. “That woman saved my life.” He put the car in drive and stayed half a block behind. His muse, limping on one heel through the cracks in the windshield. Six months without an idea, and now they were pouring in, the energy to live. He hit the record button. “A man runs over a woman with his car. She was escaping from a gang of Russian killers, who continue to beat her even as she lies in the street. The man pulls a gun and sends the thugs running, wounding a few. He puts the woman in the car and drives off. A city of both the future and the past, a disaster zone that seems to belong to another planet—polluted, lawless, insane—Crumbtown. She is beautiful, but wild. Lives by trusting no one. Before he can learn her name, she jumps out of the car and keeps running. He loses her, becomes obsessed with finding her. His name is Exley, a burned-out building inspector. No. His name is Rob, a writer, in a city where all the poets have died. A heart still beats in this heartless place.”

  Two

  SCENE 7

  Rita pulled two beers from the cooler and limped over to the end of the bar, one in front of Tim, one in front of Tom. “Now let me get this straight,” said Tim. “You say that guy in the suit who is standing right over there in the corner, he hit you with his car this morning and now won’t stop following.”

  “This is correct,” Rita said. She bent down and pulled off her heeled shoe and banged it against the bar until the heel broke off.

  Tom tilted back in his chair, nodding quietly to his beer, a moment before rocketing forward, pointing the bottle at Rita. “I have a question. Did you go to the hospital?”

  “No.”

  “Did you at least take an ambulance?”

  “I’m okay. I keep forgetting my name.”

  “That happens to me,” said Tim.

  “Not remembering isn’t good enough,” Tom said. “You have to be more injured than that. Sometimes it doesn’t happen right away, the head, especially the neck,” Tom pointed to his cervical brace. “I’ve been in dozens of accidents, and I’m proud to say I’ve never been hurt but I’ve always been injured. And I always take an ambulance. My lawyer says it’s very important.”

  “He’s right about the ambulance,” Tim said. “It’s worth the wait.”

  “I wish you to go over there and talk to this person, and tell him to leave and go.”

  “Look, he’s wearing a suit, Rita, he’s asking you to sue.”

  “A hit-and-follow,” Tom said. “I’m calling an ambulance.”

  Rita pulled two notebooks from behind the tequilas. One book was titled “Tim,” the other “Tom.” She placed each before its respective half twin, opening Tom’s to flip through the tidy rows of numbers to the last page, in which was written, over ten times, the same phrase—Do not serve until paid. “How many beers you had, Tom?”

  “Is that my name?”

  “Maybe we should talk to the guy,” said Tim.

  “It’s for his own good.” Tom removed the neck brace and wrapped it around his empty bottle. “A hit-and-follow.”

  Rob had been in bars like this. In college in upstate New York, driving through the valleys in Brian Halo’s convertible, the roadside lean-tos that wouldn’t ask their age, dollar beers and a jukebox in back, the walls bending with photographs, a half century of disasters: blizzards, tornadoes, weddings. Brian Halo regaling the locals, stories about shooting lobsters with shotguns, feeling up cheerleaders in church belfries.

  The sign outside said “Gloria’s Fine Food and Drink,” but the only food Rob could see was a line of potato chip bags hung over a water-stained painting of the sea. Flood was the featured disaster here, floods that seemed to hit this part of the city once a week. Rob looked through the framed newspapers lining the walls, the photos of streets become canals. One showed two men standing in a rowboat as they drank from the bar.

  He walked to the back, to a section of photos cut off from the floods. Framed by artificial wooden beams and lit from a small light fixed to the ceiling with tape, the little corner glowed like a cottage shrine. It contained a dozen headlines, the one on the top from 1986, ROBBING HOODS, it read, BANK ROBBERY TURNS INTO RIOT AS MASKED GANG TOSSES $$$ TO CROWD. The photo beneath, apparently from a security camera, showed four men wearing black ski masks, each marked with a white crescent, like a backward C, stretching from their foreheads around to their chins. Next to that was another front page, late December of ’87, with big letters. A MERRY CHRISTMAS, a photo underneath, of a street littered with red lights and police barricades, ROBIN HOOD GANG TOSSES STOLEN BILLS TO SHOPPERS. There were four more robberies down the wall, the last at the bottom, January 10, 1991, DAUGHT, the headline read. ONE DEAD. ANOTHER CAPTURED BY POLICE.

  As he bent down to read the caption, Rob realized that he no longer had the corner to himself. Someone had pushed a finger into his back, and left it there, while another had tied one hand like a tourniquet around his arm. “Excuse me,” the hand said, “my name is Tim, and this is Tom,” turning Rob slowly around. “We represent the bartender whom you ran over with your car. She has agreed not to file suit if you agree to be run over by her car this afternoon.”

  The man named Tim was built like a soda machine, the other, Tom, like an ice machine. Except for that, Rob thought, they might have been twins.

  “Except she doesn’t have a car,” Tom said dejectedly. He placed one finger between the ribs in Rob’s chest. “And so we’ve advised her to accept cash.”

  Rob placed his hands in his pockets and fingered the scattered notes, the suddenly empty threads of his future. He trusted Rita, called her his muse, and like all the others, she returned it with betrayal. He’d been hurt, and was about to be injured. “I don’t have much.”

  “You’ve got your health,” Tim said.

  “At least you’ve got that,” Tom bent forward to shove Rob over a table, crying out as he did so, “Oh God, my back.”

  “I thought it was your neck,” Tim asked.

  “The neck is the back.”

  Rob lay on the table for what seemed like minutes. The men grunting
as they lifted him to his feet. Tim put his hand on Rob’s shoulder, leaning on him for support. Tom’s hat fell off. These two had seemed capable enough of beating him up; now Rob was less sure. The man named Tom stood on one foot to get his hat, falling backward as he tried to put it on, the three of them falling into the wall, picture frames crashing to the floor.

  “Oh no,” said Tim. He lifted the broken frame, the bank robbery photo. “Look what he did.”

  “What happened?” Tom grabbed the picture. “He broke it?”

  Tim grabbed it back, “Look at that.” He shoved it under Rob’s chin, pointing to one of the masked men. “You see. The crack goes right through me.”

  “That’s you?”

  “That’s not him,” Tom reached over Rob’s shoulder. “That’s Don, and that’s me next to Don, and there’s Happy, and that’s Tim at the end, the one with the zipper open.”

  Rob looked over to Rita, then back to the men, the picture in his hand. “You robbed banks?”

  Tom reached for Rob’s elbow. Rob helped him sit down. “We were heroes,” Tom said.

  “We were kings,” said Tim.

  Rob pulled two tens from his pockets, “I work for television,” the bills already in Tim’s hands, Tim at the bar spreading them flat and neat in front of Rita. “We’ll take care of this guy don’t worry Rita he won’t bother you again.”

  She poured the drinks and when he was gone she walked to the other side of the bar and poured one for herself, drank it, and filled the glass again, her hand rubbing the lump still growing behind her ear. Like the man who’d brought it, the headache was staying. She knew the vodka wouldn’t change that. It wasn’t going to fix her shoes, or say her name.

  Tom separated two bottles from Tim’s crowded fingers. He handed one to Rob, “I was going to write a book about it,” he said, “once the statute of limitations was up. Now I just can’t find the time.”