Dutchman Rules
Fiction - by R. G. O'Reilly
Dearest A,
Thank you again for such a wonderful time. It’s amazing how they reconstructed Florida, and the house your hubby built is marvelous. I wish your mom could have seen how everything played out. I could have never believed that a Brooklyn kid like me could have lived so long and have seen so much change. I have not only been blessed by the transplants, bio-augs and gene therapy, but also by you, my little Princess—and to think that you’re still having my grandkids at your advanced age. I wanted to take some time to type this out—like an old fossil (you’re lucky I didn’t try to write a letter—if I could find a pen—or paper—not to mention a mailman). I wish to address your invitation to go South and live with you and the kids.
No, thank you.
I have walked upon this Earth much longer than I could have ever imagined, eventually it will all end. I don’t intend to have my exit be from any other place than from the place I entered. I’m not going to leave this City no matter how little of it may be left.
Now relax. I believe this missive will explain everything. Know first that I love you and I’m happy that you’re not only surviving but thriving. I wanted to tell you this story a while ago but on some level I felt ashamed, because I never told your mother. But now I’ll tell you.
Way back in the day—when Lower Manhattan was higher than the Hudson and the East River, well before any attacks, and between wars—I was a young man. This part I know you’ve heard before. The summers I remember were always swelteringly hot with days of sunbaked concrete simmering forehead perspiration and steaming the starch from collared shirts. Nothing like the fetid humidity we have now. After a long winter we used to welcome those summers.
During one of those summers, I began my career in an insurance company situated among the other insurance companies in an older section of Lower Manhattan that was decorated with local businesses and narrow alleyways, the kinds littered with cardboard castles, fading stable and livery signs and packing crates. While taking a walk during lunch, I stopped in front of one and without explanation, entered it.
A street sign affixed to the side of the building called it Van Houden-Heugenis Alley. It was your average dead-end path. It was cleaner than most and nothing lined the street leading to the dead end save a makeshift stand composed of a wooden seltzer crate in front of a store front. I must admit that at first my thoughts were of an establishment for more illicit interests, but curiosity nudged me further down that alley. There was a small placard thumb-tacked to the base of the crate—“What will I fetch?” it read. In the crate were short stacks of cracked and jaundiced paperbacks, broken toy tops and an empty soda bottle the color of jade. I rummaged through the books and found one distinctive novel. I lifted it with two fingers, transfixed by the cracked and worn cover. While the sun was baking the back of my neck I could not stop staring at it as a flood of memories possessed me. Standing in that alley I felt like the seven-year-old I was when I held a book just like this one. This very edition, the exact same cover art—albeit this copy was a bit worse for the wear—I was sure it was the same. It was Tarzan and the Castaways. I first saw this book when I was with my mother shopping for greeting cards. I had wandered off in the store and picked it off the shelf. Mother caught me and yelled to put it down, and to not touch anything. “You’ll never read it,” she scolded, “It doesn’t have any pictures.” Then she dragged me out of the store.
Holding that dog-eared and creased copy I was determined to possess and read it despite the lack of pictures. The shop had a wooden door replete with cracked and chipped paint and an old brass doorknob. You couldn’t see much through the store front window and the only indication of life inside was the passing of shadows through the stacks. The lighting wasn’t much better inside. A bell hung over the door attached to the transom support bar tinkled as I entered. The shadowy customers scurried from the sunshine permitted in through the doorway.
“Welcome Laddie, and what have you found?”
The proprietor—thin, white collared shirt sans tie and a stub of a pencil behind his ear—sat on a tall stool next to a standing desk. “So what do you have?”
I reached out and handed him the paperback. He looked on both sides, opened the front and back covers, leaned over his desk and handed it back to me. When I grabbed it he placed his hand over mine. His hands were calloused, parchment dry, worn as the paperback and as warm as the summer sun. He tapped the back of my hand. I looked up at him during this odd gesture. He donned one of the most comforting smiles I have ever beheld in this City. Pale green eyes peered over reading glasses, and a faint tobacco scent in his breath.
“I see you are enamored of the Lord of the Jungle. Enjoy it. Not many illustrations though.”
“How much?” I asked.
“Oh, that box is filled with things I can’t bear to put in the dustbin. It’s yours to have. Come back again. We have a grand assortment of castaways in the cellar. Thank you for your patronage.” He winked at me and went back to his ledger.
I left and walked into blinding sunlight. The wall of the alley facing the storefront had an old faded advertisement for Weatherby’s Castor Oil. I put Tarzan in my back pocket—a perfect fit— and went back to work. That evening I read it. In spite of stilted writing and sinful stereotyping it transported me, not to the jungle, but to the mind of a young boy, with a tincture of guilt.
The next day I couldn’t get back there fast enough. I stood with my back to Weatherby’s Castor Oil and made the bell ring again.
“Welcome back, Laddie, let’s see if we can’t find something in the cellar. But first, what’s your name?”
“Thomas.”
He stood up, adjusted his reading glasses, backed up and grabbed the glass knob on a narrow wooden door that was obscured by the standing desk. “Doubting Thomas?”
“Eh, sometimes.”
He pointed a finger at me and beamed. “Precisely. An open mind is a wonderful treasure, but…”
“You need to assess all the facts and circumstances.”
He raised his head and lifted both hands high as if imploring a god on the ceiling, “And he’s a philosopher.” He pulled a leather thong from his pocket from which hung a single key and a few feathers and seashells. The shells clinked as a small wind chime in a soft breeze. He didn’t use that key to open the door but simply turned the knob and the tarnished mortise lock creaked and the spring audibly stretched. The hinges released a screech and opened to a rickety wooden staircase lit with a single bare bulb dangling from a pony tail socket. I passed him and descended. With each footfall the treads groaned, the strings squealed and I was immured in a loamy cellar-scent. I hit the bottom and turned left into a vast cellar completely filled with all manner of items and every sort of man to be found Downtown. There were businessmen with briefcases, tradesmen with tool boxes, messengers with pouches and an array of ill-defined men. The cellar clearly exceeded the floor plan of the first floor. To my right there was a large room with a curtained off section at its far end. To my left the cellar dogged-legged and nearly wrapped around the stairs I descended.
That was the first time I met Frankie.
“Hey, man, you’re new, Buster must have found another one,” he said. He was the gas man—not the only utility found in that cellar on any given day, but Frankie, I learned, was a regular. He was a chubby guy from Upstate and could always be found in his navy-blue overalls with the “Frankie” patch over his breast. How that man could sweat in any weather. He would become a trusted friend and consummate playmate. I stood there with Frankie as I took in the inventory haphazardly shelved, stacked and stored on the mismatched shelving units and wooden milk crates stacked on the walls and side rooms that honeycombed the left side of the cellar. There were rusted coffee tins of bottle caps, tops, cap guns, rubber banded stacks of baseball cards, basketball cards and hockey cards—I didn’t even know they made hockey cards. My surveying was interrupted by the proprietor who put his hand on my shoulder and smiled at me with that tobacco-stained grin.
“Gather round me, Laddies,” he announced, “We are welcoming a new one.”
There had to be twenty or more men in that cellar. They came from side rooms carrying comic books, trains, die-cast cars, half completed plastic models and tattered baseball caps. Each eagerly addressed him as “Buster.”
“This here is Tommy—looks for tales of action and adventure.” A cacophony of “Hey, man,” “Hi,” “Hello,” and “Nice to meet you,” rose from the crowd.
“Ah, such a polite group of lads, you are.” He turned me around and laid both hands on my shoulders. “In this cellar, Tommy-Boy, it’s Dutchman Rules. You like it; you can keep it or leave it here. You trade it, it’s no longer yours. You take it home—there better be a place for it, lest someone mistake it for trash. You can always bring it back. Now sometimes in the cards there are chalky pieces of gum, and sometimes those little bricks…
“PEZ!” yelled Frankie.
“Yes, those things, they get shoved in the trains and cars—don’t eat them. Don’t want to hear about cracked teeth. I don’t have a dentist on call.” He held up a single digit. “Then there’s the most important Dutchman Rule of all…”
“No coin,” they all murmured.
“That’s it Tommy-Boy. Nothing in this cellar is for profit. Nothing is bought. Nothing is sold. If you come here to collect and profit, you will never be welcomed again. Simple enough?”
I was confused and a little unnerved but nodded all the same. He disbanded the group and guided me to the far left side because he had something he thought I would particularly like. He had another standing desk in the cellar next to a back door. Over the door was a sign that looked as if it should have been at a circus: “EGRESS” in baroque gilt and peeling paint rested precariously against the door frame.
He led me to an antique bookcase filled with the entire library of Tom Swift books. Some had tattered dust jackets, most had nothing but the sack cloth binding. My grade school library had Tom Swift books and the nuns were never pleased to see a boy take one out. I gingerly winnowed one from the shelf—Planet X—thumbed the dust jacket of faded pastels and blanched veins of creases and then fanned the pages until the dust motes tickled my nose. How I miss the feel and smell of old books.
The inside cover bore an Ex Libris stamp and the sight of it ripped the breath from my throat: From the Library of Our Lady of the Sacred Rosary—Grammar School. Remarkable. Here they were, ready to be read all over again.
“Take a seat,” he said, pointing to an armchair in the corner.
“Thanks. So they call you Buster?”
“Close enough. It’ll do.” He sat at his desk and started writing in a ledger with the pencil stub he pulled off his ear.
Over the course of several seasons, I reread every book. But my times in Buster’s cellar were not only occupied with reading. There were slot races, train sets, card flipping, stickball in the alley, skelzy on the sidewalk, and the euphoric celebrations of repatriated comic books.
The cellar ceiling would creak with the errant traffic of customers on the first floor who were not invited to attend the gathering below. Often, I would look up from my reading or tinkering and watch grown men dig through wooden barrels filled with rubber balls- Spaldeens, Super Pinkies and handballs piled like miniature cannonballs. Some men would simply put their faces in the barrel and inhale the rubber scent of summer games.
My attention was often caught by stacks and shoe boxes stuffed with comic books. There was no particular order or organization. One brand mixed with another and not one was sealed and packaged for safe keeping. There wasn’t a mint in the lot. They were used, well used—some covers torn, creased to perforations, dialogue and articles were circled and underlined, adverts for Charles Atlas and X-ray glasses were missing. Holding them made me want to sit on the floor and thumb through them and read every single word. For some issues, it would have been the umpteenth time I read them; of course, I hadn’t read a comic book in years, but, in time, I made up for it.
The sports cards were no different, well used. When I was a kid I collected and traded baseball cards until my mother told me to throw them away. No one I knew ever collected hockey cards. Frankie told me that hockey was really big Upstate where he grew up. The cards had creases and bends from flipping or from the spokes of bicycles and were bundled together with frayed rubber bands that would snap off and sail across the room.
I eventually won the entire 1972 New York Mets through flips. I took them, put a new rubber band around them and put them back on that shelf knowing that they would always be there. No one would throw these cards out.
Nothing in the cellar was a portfolio asset. These were slices of our history served up on platters of memories to be touched and moved. Each fold and crease was just another memory and a mirror of our aging faces.
Every so often, Buster would use his wooden hand truck and wheel in barrels filled with old sneakers and boots with their respective laces tied together. I dug through a couple and saw they were all weather-beaten, torn, some with gaping holes in the sides and soles. “I don’t think you’ll have to worry about those,” Buster explained from his cellar desk. I was completely perplexed as to their significance when Frankie waddled over with an action figure in his catcher’s mitt.
“My mom used to say, whenever we saw sneakers hanging over telephone lines that ‘every time a pair of sneakers gets tossed over the lines a devil earns his horns’—and this is where they come to get them back…if they deserve it.”
So that was what Buster offered, I thought, forgotten memories and redemption, all in one cellar.
Each lunch time that I went there, when it inevitably came time to go back to the office, I’d say goodbye to Buster and then yell across the cellar, “Hey Frankie, you going back to work?”
Frankie would look up with a cherubic smile and yell back, “Hey Buster!”
Buster would lean over from his desk and turn a tiny valve on a pipe that ran along the wall and around the back door. The valve, I recognized. It was one of the old pipes for gas fixtures. “Frankie-boy, I think there’s a gas leak.”
“I’ll get right on that Buster.”
Some guys had all the luck.
There were lunchtime visits, “Honey, I’m working overtime” visits, a few weekend trips, and the occasional post-pub-crawl drunken visit. There were always new deliveries of memorabilia, toys and sports equipment. I found a Ron Swoboda baseball bat—just like the one I had before someone lifted it after practice when I was ten. I can’t remember a time when Frankie wasn’t there—it was like he never worked.
“Hey Tommy,” Frankie yelped at me one day, “Man, you ever notice that there is never any girl stuff here?”
“Did you miss a doll?” I shot back, but I did find it odd that a woman never came into this store or cellar.
“Can’t know for sure, but did you ever hear a girl complain that her mom threw out one of her Barbie dolls? Man, did you ever know a girl to say she had to get rid of something because they were told they should grow up?”
He was correct. That chubby lazy gas man turned out to be a cellar savant. I never heard you, my dear, complain once that your mother threw out one of your toys. You were more than eager to move on to bigger girl things. I cannot remember one iota of an argument between you and your mother about something that needed to be cast aside or discarded. There were no protestations of wants or needs and no indictments regarding a failure to let things go or to grow up. I would be curious to know your feelings on this matter, but perhaps it would be pointless at this juncture. I can remember only one instance of your attachment to any piece of your childhood.
Do you remember the Fairy Chalice of Queens? It was that plastic cup on a pedestal you drank everything out of. You even insisted on having your cereal in it. It melted after one run in the lower rack of the dishwasher. The look on your face when it came out - utter loss and abject devastation. How you cried! How I tried to find another one. Your “fix it” pleas haunted me for some time and as I type, it’s a palpable heaviness on my heart. So long ago, you were my little girl and we had your mom. In time you moved on and it was like the Fairy Chalice never existed. Do you remember, or do such things just fail to linger on in a mother’s mind? When does a mother have time to remember her own childhood?
Over the years the group of guys changed. Like balls hit over a fence or onto a roof, some guys left and never came back. Some like me would make a pilgrimage from wherever we were working. Buster said the Dutchman said this place was like the call of the sea, you always come back and you never forget.
At one time or another, we all tried to leave through the Egress and Buster would always tell us to go upstairs. That door was not for us, he’d say; but I did see a few old men over the years go through that door. They would come down the stairs and Buster would happily greet them, hand them some packages and then take the key that hung from his belt and unlock the Egress. Some of us said it was a back alley entrance to a hat store that was around the corner, but Frankie would shake his head and say it was for something else.
One lunchtime Buster grabbed me as soon as I touched the cellar floor, “Tommy-Boy, do you have change for a dollar?”
I fished in my pockets and pulled out some change, “Yeah, I think I got a buck.”
“Good. Keep it and stand there.” I was confused and put the change away and went directly to the new barrel filled with Matchbox cars. Frankie came out of the train room and, as always, greeted us all by name. ”Frankie-Boy,” Buster yelled to him as he pushed a wooden wheelbarrow over towards us, “I got something for you.” He took two small latched boxes out of the wheel barrel. Anyone back then would have recognized them immediately. One was an LP case and the squat one was for 45s. Buster reverentially placed the cases on the floor between us. As I was going through the cars, the ever-present grin on Frankie’s face drained and his ordinarily ruddy and sweaty countenance turned to ash. He knelt on the floor in front of the cases and opened them. He took out an LP, slipped it out of its case and cover and cupped the edges in his palms as he turned it over and inspected the surface of each side. In a low keening moan: “No, it can’t be…”
“Frankie-boy, get off the floor,” barked Buster, “There’s a phonograph in the room behind the curtain. Tommy-Boy, would you help him now?” Frankie carefully put the LP back in the sleeve and back into the case. He struggled to get back on his feet and carried the cases to the curtained room. I went back with him and pulled the curtain aside. It wasn’t a curtain at all, but a sheet of poorly tanned leather so thinned out in patches you could see your hand through it. Behind the curtain was a little bedroom with posters on the walls, a bed and a phonograph on a nightstand. When Frankie saw the interior of the room, there was a low gasp and he nearly toppled into me. His eyes filled up and I thought he would collapse.
“Man, you have thirty cents? A quarter and a nickel?”
I got the change out from my pocket and put it in his breast pocket.
“Thanks.” He went into the room and he kept looking at the walls and the ceiling. Then he started to cry. He put the cases on the bed and knelt. From this position, tears running down his plump cheeks, he turned his head and scrutinized every wall and under the bed. He took an LP out of the case and placed it on the phonograph, gently put the needle on the record and then, taking my change from his breast pocket, he put the quarter and the nickel on top of the needle.
“Tommy-Boy!”
I dropped the curtain and went back to the cars. For the rest of that lunchtime, nothing but Classic Rock—with all the scratches and pings. Not a single skip.
The next morning Frankie shocked me by showing up in front of my office building before I got through the front door. He was standing there and walked right up to me, “Let’s get some coffee, I gotta talk to you before we get into Buster’s today.”
When autumn began in the City it normally started with the winds that whip off the Battery and howl up Broadway. Sitting on a bench before the sun was fully awake was not for the faint of heart. Frankie must have been crying all night. His eyes were red and swollen and he kept biting his lower lip. Frankie told me his story. Upstate—well past the Bronx—in the land of cows, hockey ponds, snow and more snow—Frankie grew up with his parents and his older brother. When Frankie and I were growing up in separate places in New York, Viet Nam was a mystical faraway place with the power to take over your television, the radio, and the streets of any town or city. We never really understood it until we were older, but it was a presence felt and touched by everyone. Frankie’s older brother felt that call and signed up for the United States Marines. I always thought that’s what farm boys did. Frankie’s mother screamed and pleaded but Frankie remembered the day they all got into the pick-up and dropped his brother off. Frankie’s brother took him aside and said goodbye, told him to be good and told him to watch over his stuff, especially his records. He told him to be careful and not to scratch them.
Frankie’s brother never came home.
Frankie came home from school one day and saw two Marines in the kitchen speaking to his parents and his mother cried for months. Frankie would sit in his brother’s room and cry by himself and flip through the records. His mother couldn’t be consoled, and she never left the house and sometimes she never left her room. His dad tried to comfort the family but Frankie remembered hearing him cry on the porch late at night. All ostensible mourning ended after his mother cleaned out his brother’s room and threw everything that was his brother’s away.
“She got rid of everything and anything that was his. I didn’t have anything left to look at. I begged her to bring them back, but she completely ignored me, and my dad told me not to bother my mother. She had to deal with this her way. What about me? Tommy, that room behind the curtain was his room, just like he left it - his posters, his trophies, his records and record player.
I didn’t know what to say. Looking at old LPs made him believe a room in the back was his brothers?
He was convinced.
“It’s magic,” he said, “like the Egress. The old guys, they go through it when they tell Buster they’re ready.”
“Aw, C’mon. You’ve been breathing methane for too long. It’s the back exit for old guys.”
“No, I’ve been there when they come in the first time. They talk to him, he writes something down in the ledger then they come back, he gives them something to take and then he unlocks the door. You ever see the key? It’s one of those old skeleton keys hanging on a thong with feathers and shells. It’s magic.”
“Okay Frankie, it’s magic. I got to go to work. Some of us do work. How about we meet up at lunch?”
“I’m going to be a little late; I got a doctor’s appointment. See you later.”
I made it to Buster’s that day, but Frankie and I missed each other. He had one doctor’s appointment, and then another and then another and then it became just one word: Sloan.
The gang would visit him in the hospital. Buster even made the pilgrimage, travelling above 59th Street without a nosebleed. Chemo was a horrible thing to witness. Thank God they don’t need to do it so much anymore. It has a certain smell that lingers on the patient. We would be planning street hockey games for when Frankie was strong enough to stand. Buster brought him Tonka trucks, I brought the sports pages and the rest brought him junk food he couldn’t hold down. You were still a baby when I got the phone call. I remember your mom asking who would have the nerve to call at this hour with a baby in the house. The call was from Frankie: “Meet me at Busters. Now.” You have no idea what it took to convince your mother that I was leaving the house at some God-forsaken hour to meet a friend. Despite her claims of my abandoning the family, I got dressed and left.
Downtown was barren and the crunch of the snow under foot echoed. When I got to Buster’s the door was unlocked, the bell rang and I went downstairs. The moist loamy scent was accented with a distinct tinny acetone stench. The acrid stench was Frankie. He was emaciated with hollowed out eyes, but he was smiling. “Hey, Tommy, I wanted to say goodbye to you in person. Buster said it was okay for you to watch. Thanks for coming. Say goodbye to all the guys for me.” I was mute, I couldn’t think or move. I hugged him and there wasn’t much to hug. “Watch out for my arm,” he said and I saw a blood smear in the crooks of his arms. I helped him over to the Egress. Buster had the wheelbarrow stacked with ice skates, hockey sticks, a catcher’s mitt and the record cases. Buster took out the key and I saw the shells dangling from the leather thread and scrawny feathers on the end. He opened the door and I could feel it again, that hot summer breeze. Frankie took his ice skates which were tied together like that barrel full of sneakers and draped them over his neck and pushed the wheelbarrow through. Buster closed and locked the Egress.
“Tea, Laddie?”
Buster and I drank tea in cardboard cups in Battery Park while he regaled me with stories of what the City used to be like. There wasn’t a situation or happenstance that some Dutchman didn’t have an aphorism for. Whenever I steered the conversation to Frankie or the door, Buster held up a finger to his lips and shook his head.
Life, no matter how much it gets extended, is basically the same. Children are born, jobs change, and wives come and go. Some like your mother are taken away. Towers tumble. We moved and I changed jobs several times. I would make it back to Buster’s whenever I got a chance, but chances came less frequently. I made it back to Lower Manhattan when they called it Ground Zero. Buster and his boys were helping out with food for the search and rescue crews. Many of those police and firemen passed through Buster’s cellar, but there wasn’t much playing then, only crying. Buster would shake his head and stare at the hole in the ground. He didn’t speak much those last few times I was there, but he always asked me about the family.
They rebuilt my City and then the rising waters took it away again. Everything changes. That’s the only constant. No matter how many surgeries, gene splicing, and organ farming is successful, that big Egress sign is always there—my new eyes make it look so clear. When I got back from Florida I would close these new eyes and see every brush stroke and chip. I thought about Frankie and how he walked through that Egress on his own terms with his stuff. As much as I knew I didn’t want to walk through, I also don’t want to go to Florida. Sure the City isn’t what it used to be. But I’ve found the kills of Lower Manhattan to be quaint and there’s something about a gondola ride through the Freedom Estuary that is breathtaking. Even though I hadn’t been Downtown in decades I had to see it again for myself.
When I went to the Empire State Building Pier the tourist party boats were all moored up and the tweed apple-capped tourist-tuggers were hawking the Extra-Extra Kill Tour of Lower Manhattan and the Freedom Estuary. It’s amazing how this City still garners an international crowd of gawkers even when most of its history has been swallowed up by the Hudson. I paced the slate covered pier getting shoved and shuttled by the boarding and disembarking tourists debating how I could get a tour of my own choosing. I had to see it without the tourists and transplants. So instead of getting a chit and getting the generic tour, I started watching the ones who were watching others. After a while I spied her. On a perch constructed from a refurbished fire escape a matronly woman was flashing hand signs and whistling to the others working the pier below. I recognized the double finger sign for bank credit transfers since I have one embedded in my own hand. It seemed that after each party boat was loaded, the tourist-tugger would tip his cap to the pilot and then turn and hold up his fingers to the woman flashing the number of tourists he tugged upon it. Since she was collecting the money she had to be the one to arrange my last trip Downtown. Then I reinforced an old adage: If you walk determinedly and with an attitude, no one stops you. So I walked past the hawkers and tuggers and went to the ladder and climbed up to the network of catwalks in this outdoor fly space of Fifth Avenue—just like I owned the place.
She was a stocky woman with sun leathered skin offsetting a perfect set of off-white teeth which were probably her own. Her name was Sharon—originally from New Jersey—and after I convinced her I wasn’t a treasure seeker, and I transferred a sizable credit — my fingers almost fell off—she told me to take a party boat to the Estuary and ask for a man named Harry.
The party boat left me off at the Municipal Building on Civic Duty Pier. The party boats aren’t allowed anywhere near the Estuary so after we got off the boat, we were all shuttled off to an array of modified gondolas. Harry found me, pulled me off the line and took me over to my personal gondola for a ride to the Freedom Estuary. The gondolas poled in single file to the Estuary like calamari fishermen. I was in the last gondola. Angelo, my gondolier, described the network of raised platforms underwater that the gondoliers poled off.
“What happens if you move off course? How do you steer the boat?”
“Not to worry,” he whispered in a practiced tone of solemnity, “Pole has a small propeller to get you back for a bit, and then if there are any other issues, there are paddles stowed in the bottom of the gondola. From now on, if you must talk, whisper.”
As we passed the Trinity Cross, the full expanse of the Freedom Estuary fills the horizon. The only sound was the lapping water and the birds. Floating barges held assorted vegetation used for the nesting fowl. Man-made atolls littered the surrounding area and looked to have been inhabited by creatures. “Are those beaver?”
“Never got close enough,” Angelo whispered, “Hope so. Either that or some freakish rats.”
Tourists tossed curios, coins or flower petals in the water. Soft prayers echoed in the wind.
In slow measured strokes all in rhythm with each other the gondolas passed the full breadth of the Estuary pausing occasionally in predetermined stations for reflection. After making the rounds they poled their way back towards Civic Duty. Angelo flipped the propeller out of the end of his pole and we sliced off the line and moved due East.
“Now,” Angelo spoke in a less reserved tone, “What are you looking for? The kills back here are dangerous. The buildings still shift and the depth isn’t consistent. They didn’t clear these kills, which is why this is where all the raiders come. The Wardens are okay with private tours but we really can’t stand still for long. Sensors keep us on their grid.”
I couldn’t recognize a single thing. It was a gapped and jagged toothed grimace of buildings wherever I looked. I saw neither a personal landmark nor a reference point. I came looking for a glimpse of Van Houden-Heugenis Alley, and all I found was a tea-dark bayou of broken buildings and overgrowth.
“Memories…from my youth.”
“Okay, let’s find some.” Angelo collapsed the pole and put it in his jacket. “Reach under and get a paddle. We’re going Down-Downtown.”
“Where we going?”
“Let’s see if we can find something,” he said looking ahead. “Maybe you find something, maybe you won’t. The Battery Cove is peaceful and uplifting. “
Thank God for new shoulders! By the time we finished getting down the Broad Kill I thought the warning alarm in my implants would start telling me it’s time for my ten-thousand stroke inspection.
We stopped paddling just as I saw the top of the Custom House. The wind still whips around these parts especially since most of the wind breaking buildings collapsed.
“All right, I can use the propeller from here.” He elongated the pole and the buzzing propeller slid out and we meandered Down-Downtown. “If you look off to the left in a bit, as we get closer to the City Edge, you can see….”
“The Statue of Liberty. The first structure they raised, lest there be nasty cinematic allusions.”
“I see you read the brochures.”
“Nope. I remember it.”
There was a make-shift porch with a floating pier attached to an upper story window on the Customs House. Angelo and I disembarked after securing the gondola and walked through a driftwood door fashioned to an old window frame. I couldn’t tell if squatters or legitimate residences were there. There was probably some offices filled with illicit activity but that has always been Downtown.
I heard him seconds before I saw him. Over the din of a couple of reclaimed brick merchants, “Look at what Angelo the Ferryman brought me today, an old friend. Tommy-Boy, good to see you.” He was older—still older than me—but the voice was vibrant and alive.
“Buster, I believe I found you.”
“The good ones always do, Laddie. So what ails you? Looking for the Egress?” He tilted his head and stared at me as if he still had reading glasses.
“No.”
“Good to hear. Let’s take a gander around. We have full Cloud Cover, a VR room, table top gaming units and a new delivery of those cars that follow your eyes—that is if you have one of those shunts implanted in your noggin. Books are exceedingly rare these days and don’t keep well Downtown but,” he grabbed my arm and whispered in my ear, “I happen to have a copy of one of The Three Investigators.”
Buster still had a lingering scent of tobacco on him. “Where do you find the tobacco?”
“I have my ways.” He winked his eye, grabbed my arm and gave me the grand tour.
Buster had taken over much of the upper floors and some additions to the roof. There were wires and cables running along the floor and walls. Every type of gaming rig and jack-in attachment for the past thirty years was there. There was precious little that I recognized. Maybe their mothers threw away less, or maybe nothing was obsolete, only upgraded.
“Laddie, it’s all about the virtual memory. We have memory for the memories now. Physical contact and conversation are almost extinct. These lads today saved everything in hermetically sealed packaging. I guess they enjoy watching things and not using things. But I get the occasional athlete. There is a bowling alley and a batting cage below, when you’re ready.”
He led me up to the roof and once again we looked at the horizon together. He took a few long draws on his pipe.
“It’s almost like when I first came to this shore. Throw in the stench of horse shit and it would be right on the money.” Buster walked to a shack of reclaimed wood, where the doorway was draped with that leather shroud. “Come on in. Refreshments to be served.”
I wasn’t sure what I would find behind the curtain. I was curious, not afraid. Would it be Frankie’s brother’s room or just the inside of a wooden shack? When I lifted the curtain and walked in, it was my turn to get choked up. I stood in the doorway of Mama’s Luncheonette and Soda Shop. Mama’s was an antiquated fountain soda shop and a relic when I was a boy. It was a living dinosaur that held its ground among fast food joints and video arcades a few blocks from where I grew up. Just as I remembered it. A dowdy counter separated this artifact into stage and stool. On one side children would rotate themselves into footless stupors and on the other flavor pumps were tunefully pressed to produce syrupy drinks we all consumed with impunity. A clock shaped like an owl was still on the wall behind the counter. The wan eyes swayed in harmony with the tail feathers to the ticking of the clock.
“Have a seat.” Buster went behind the counter and put on an apron. “So, will it be chocolate or vanilla?”
I was dumbstruck. There were the comic racks, the candy stands, and the gum under the counter.
“Vanilla,” I whispered. Buster took two ornate glasses from the shelf and pumped two squirts of vanilla syrup into them. He pulled a glass quart of milk from the bottom refrigerator, pulled the foil cover off and poured some into each glass. Then taking a seltzer bottle, he sprayed and stirred the foamy concoction. With a flourish he popped in straws.
We both drank our vanilla egg cream in silence.
“Okay, Buster,” I tried to find the wording, but blurted, “Am I dead, and I just don’t know it?”
“You said you didn’t come for an Egress. But perhaps a bit of a story is in order.” He came around the counter and took the stool next to me. He pulled out his pipe, struck a match and pulled hard. After a few puffs he looked me in the eye and gave me that familiar comforting smile.
“I don’t have all your answers, Laddie. The Dutchman didn’t have many himself. These were Lenape lands. When the Dutchman arrived, there was a little shack out in the marsh where an old holy man — shaman lived. The natives would visit him and get arrowheads, knives, cloaks and he would usher some into the afterlife. How the Dutchman and the shaman got together, I was never told.” He reached into his pocket and took out the skeleton key and there was the leather thong with the shells and the feathers. “It’s not the key.” He shook the thong and the shells clinked together. He placed it deferentially on the counter next to my empty egg cream and stared at it while he fingered the leather thong. “The Dutchman said one night the shaman came to his cabin and gave him this decorative thong. Something about manning or guarding the portal and keeping the detritus and desideratum that the waters washed up. Over time the waters were pushed back and the marshes dried up and this wonderful City began to emerge. First as a colony and eventually a Greater City. I washed up on these shores so long ago. The runners on the docks had names for us. ‘Bruscar,’we were. Amazing how your own would treat you.”
“Buster.”
“I said it was close enough. The first time I walked into the Dutchman’s parlor looking for work I found my father’s hod and a skinning knife I lost on the trip over. I worked for him and then with him. One day he said he had enough and gave me the thong and asked me to let him through the Egress. He said when my time to pass the thong over arrives I would know. The day you brought Tarzan over that threshold I knew it was only a matter of time. Couldn’t‘ve imagined you’d all be living tortoise lives, though. Which will make it easier for you ‘cause you have so many people here who know who you are. Me, there hasn’t been anyone left for some time.”
Well, I didn’t have to think twice. Over the next few days he taught me about inventory and the deliveries, rituals and fetishes and everything I would need to continue to keep the portal. Then Buster put his hod on his shoulder and I lead him to the Egress. In the end, he looked forward to it.
So, as you can see, my dear, I am gainfully employed on the remnants of Manhattan. I will not be moving to Florida and would like so much for you to visit me and bring the kids—I know I can have precisely what they would like. All you have to do is get a gondolier and ask to be taken to Buster Cove. As for you, my little Princess, I have made a few changes.
I have the Fairy Chalice of Queens.
Love Always and Forever,
Father