God it feels good.
With some difficulty I locate my cell, force my Nix-numbed finger to dial Herk’s number, and, while moonwalking on a small, slippery quantity of out-of-bounds egesta, I slur angrily into the mouthpiece, “What’s Schermer’s address?”
Life of Crime
“You spare some, pretty lady? You so pretty you look like Michelle Pfeiffer and shit. Come on, Michelle Pfeiffer, you don’t need that extra change in your pocket. All it do is go jingle-jangle-aing and make people stare at you as you walking with those fine legs of yours, and you don’t need no more men staring at those stems than you already got. Am I right?”
I have been outside Herk’s apartment on the corner of Eighty-ninth and Second for nearly twenty minutes, waiting and listening to this homeless guy with a burlap bag and a long-necked shovel sitting on the curb and spare-changing people. He’s petitioned me five times, even though I gave him a dollar the first time he asked. I am not usually a sucker like that, but I am nervous about breaking into Schermer’s and feel, like an underqualified52 character in a Greek myth, that it would be a good idea to propitiate something, even if it’s a nut with a shovel.
It’s hot enough to deliquesce cardboard, but mainly I’m slicked in the sweat of tortured morality. The prospect of getting caught breaking and entering is worrisome, of course, but I also feel a deeper, stomach-based, karma-centered dread about it. My whole life I have dedicated myself to upholding the law and it seems very weird—like my yin-yang has shortcircuited or reversed its charge or something—to be committing a crime now to prove my innocence.
I may not be doing the right thing, I tell myself, but at least I am doing.
The light on Eighty-ninth turns yellow and the blond woman shifts on her feet, preparing.
“Come on, Michelle Pfeiffer,” he says, making creepy murder-movie scratching noises on the pavement with the tip of his shovel. “Turn around. You know you want to. Turn around and Catwoman back to me. Give me what I deserve. Give me what I don’t deserve. Give me—”
The light goes green and the guy nearly prostrates himself, clawing and scuttling after her, but the woman is already gone.
“Bitch!” he yells, banging his shovel. “I didn’t mean none of it! You’re no Michelle Pfeiffer! You’re Teri Garr, lady! You’re Sissy Spacek!”
A hand attaches to my ankle. The homeless guy, writhing like a crushed insect, has me in a vise-grip and is weeping into, and possibly purging his nose on, my sock. I whirl around and see that under everything—soiled Depression-era cotton overalls, sans shirt, a tattered and grease-stained stadium jacket, duct tape shoes, reversed bomber hat, heavy woolen gloves—the dirt-smudged face contorted in grief is Herk’s.
I yank my foot away as if pulling out of a sinkhole.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Hey buddy,” he says happily. “Hand up?”
“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”