Free Fatherhood by Thomas H. Cook Page A

him.
    Had the world been less the thing it is, and more the thing we wish it were, then my father would have recovered, and we would have had a few more years to work out the long confusion of our lives, come to graceful terms, so that by the time his death at last arrived, I would have been a truly loving son, he a loving father, the two of us at last in some accord with what he had done, and I had done, what he was and what I became. But it was too late for that, as I could see by his waning strength. And so I accepted what the Talmud teaches, that no act can be wholly undone. But then, “The Raven” teaches that, too , I thought, and so I returned to it and began to read to my father again, this time from the beginning, a land both dark and dreary rising before me as I read, that place denied all true atonement, and where, as Poe so darkly knew, each second turns Forever into Nevermore.

RAIN

Battery Park
    A burst of light releases the million eyes of the rain, glimpsing the Gothic towers in dark mist, falling in glittering streams of briefly reflected light, moving inland, toward the blunt point of the island, an outbound ferry as it loads for the midnight run.
    So like I said before, it ain’t like she has long, you know ?
    Yeah, mon. She just hangin’ on now .
    Rain streaks down the ferry’s windows where the night riders sit in yellow haze—Toby McBride only one among them, single, forty-two, the bowling alley in trouble, thinking of his invalid mother on Staten Island, money leaching away, watching her Jamaican nurse, such big black hands, how easy it would be.
    I figure you could use twenty grand, right ?
    Twenty, huh ?
    The rain falls on intrigue and conspiracy, trap doors, underground escape routes, the crude implements of quick getaways. It collects the daily grime from the face of the Custom House and sends it swirling into the vast underground drains that empty into the sea. Along the sweep of Battery Park it smashes against crumpled cigarette packets, soaks a broken shoelace, flows into a half-used tube of lipstick, drives a young woman beneath a tattered awning, blond hair, shoulder-length, with a stuck umbrella, struggling to open it, a man behind her, sunk in the shadows, his voice a tremble in the air.
    You live in this building ?
    Long, dark fingers still the umbrella, curl around its mahogany handle.
    Name’s Rebecca, right ?
    The rain sees the fickle web of chance meetings, the grid of untimely intersections, lethal fortuities from which there will be no escape. A million tiny flashing screens reflect stilettos and box cutters, switchblades and ice picks, the snubnosed barrel that stares out from its nest of long dark fingers.
    Don’t say a word .
    Off West Street the rain falls on the deserted pit of the ghostly towers, and moves on, cascading down the skeletal girders of the new construction, then further north to Duane Street, thudding against the roof of an old green van.
    So, when you get here, Sammy ?
    Don’t worry. I’ll be there .
    Eddie squeezes the cell phone, glances back toward the rear of the van, speakers, four DVD players, two car radios, a cashmere overcoat, a shoebox of CDs, some jewelry that might be real, the bleak fruit of the hustle.
    I need you here now, man .
    You that hyped ?
    Now, man .
    In the gutters, the rushing rain washes cigarette butts and candy wrappers, a note with the number 484 in watery ink, a hat shop receipt, a prescription label for Demerol. It washes down grimy windshields and as it washes, sees the pop-eyed and the drowsy, the hazy and the alert, Eddie scratching his skinny arms, Detective Boyle in the unmarked car a block away playing back the tape, grinning at his partner as he listens to the voices on the ferry.
    We got McBride dead to rights, Frank .
    A laugh.
    That fucking Jamaican. Jeez, does he know how to work a wire .
    At Police Plaza, the wind shifts, driving eastward, battering the building’s small square