A Dance at the Slaughter House

He was pleased. "You still in touch with that woman? I can picture her apartment, all black and white, that view out over the river. Beautiful place."



"I'm in touch with her," I said. "As a matter of fact I see quite a bit of her."



"Oh yeah? A very nice lady. She still in the same place? She must be, a person'd be crazy to move from a place like that."



I said she was. "And she has the sketch you did."



"The sketch I did. Of that guy? That sketch?"



"Framed on the wall. She says it's a whole category of art the world has overlooked, and after I had the sketch photocopied she got it framed and hung it."



"You're kidding me."



"Swear to God. She had it in the living room but I got her to move it to the bathroom. Otherwise wherever you sat you felt as though he was looking right at you. I'm not putting you on, Ray, she's got it in a nice aluminum frame with non-glare glass and all."



"Jeez," he said. "I never heard of anything like that."



"Well, she's an unusual lady."



"I guess. You know, it's kind of nice to hear that. I mean, she's a woman with good taste. I remember the painting she had on the wall." He described the large abstract oil on the wall near the window, and I told him he had a hell of a memory. "Well, art," he said. "That's, you know, like my thing." He turned away, a little embarrassed. "Well, who've you got for me today? A real bad guy?"



"One very bad guy," I said, "and a couple of kids."



It was easier than I'd thought it would be. I had seen the older of the boys only on videotape and never had a really close look at the younger boy or the man. But I had looked at all three so intently and had thought about them so urgently that all three images were very clear in my mind. The visualization exercise Galindez used was helpful, too, but I think I'd have done as well without it. I didn't have to work to conjure up their faces. All I had to do was close my eyes and they were there.



In less than an hour he'd managed to transfer the images from my mind's eye to three 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of drawing paper. They were all there, the man I'd seen at ringside, the boy who'd been sitting beside him, and the other boy, the one we'd seen murdered.



We worked well together, Galindez and I. There were moments when he seemed to be reading my mind with his pencil, catching something beyond my descriptive abilities. And somehow the three sketches captured the emotional resonance of their subjects. The man looked dangerous, the younger boy blindly vulnerable, the older one doomed.



When we were done he put down his pencil and let out a sigh. "That takes it out of you," he said. "I don't know why, it's just sitting and sketching, I been doing it all my life. But it was like we were hooked up together there."



"Elaine would say we were psychically linked."



"Yeah? I felt something, like maybe I was linked with the three of them, too. Heavy stuff." I told him the sketches were just what I wanted and asked what I owed him. "Oh, I don't know," he said. "What did you give me last time, a hundred? That'd be fine."



"That was for one sketch. You did three this time."



"It was all in one shot, and what did it take me, an hour? A hundred's plenty."



I gave him a pair of hundreds. He started to protest and I told him the bonus was for signing his work. "The originals are for Elaine," I explained. "I'll get them framed and they'll be her Valentine's Day present."



"Jeez, it's time to start thinking about that, isn't it? Valentine's Day." Shyly he pointed to the gold band on his ring finger. "This is new since I saw you," he said.



"Congratulations."



"Thanks. You really want these signed? Because you don't have to pay me extra to sign 'em. I got to say I'm honored."



"Take the money," I said. "Buy something nice for your wife."



He grinned and signed each sketch.



I went downstairs with him. He wanted to catch the subway at Eighth Avenue, and I walked halfway to the corner with him and stopped off at a copy shop where they ran a couple dozen copies of each sketch while I went next door for a cup of coffee and a bagel. I left the originals to be framed at a little graphics gallery on Broadway, then returned to my room and used a rubber stamp to mark my name and address on the back of the copies. I folded a few of each to fit in my inside jacket pocket and went out again, heading on down to Times Square.



The last time I'd hung out on the Deuce was in the middle of a heat wave. Now it was bitter cold. I kept my hands in my pockets and my coat buttoned at the throat and wished I'd had the sense to wear gloves and a muffler. The sky was all shades of gray, and sooner or later we'd get the snow they had predicted.



For all of that, the street didn't look much different. The kids who stood in little bunches on the sidewalk wore somewhat heavier clothing, but you couldn't really say they were dressed for the weather. They tended to move around more, bopping to keep warm, but aside from that they looked pretty much the same.



I walked up one side of the block and down the other, and when a black kid murmured, "Smoke?" I didn't dismiss him with a quick shake of the head. Instead I flicked a finger toward a doorway and walked over to it. He came over right away, and his lips didn't move much when he asked me what I wanted.



I said, "I'm looking for TJ."



"TJ," he said. "Well, if I had some I sure would sell it to you. Give you a real good price on it, too."



"Do you know him?"



"You mean it's a person? I thought it a substance, you know."



"Never mind," I said. I turned from him and he laid a hand on my arm.



"Hey, be cool," he said. "We in the middle of a conversation. Who's this TJ? He a DJ? TJ the DJ, can you dig it?"



"If you don't know him-"



"I hear TJ I think of that old man, pitched for the Yankees. Tommy John? He retired. Anything you want from TJ, man, you do better gettin' it from me."



I gave him one of my cards. "Tell him to call me," I said.



"What I look like, man, his fuckin' beeper?"



I had half a dozen variations of this conversation with half a dozen other pillars of the community. Some of them said they knew TJ and some said they didn't, and I couldn't see any reason to take any of them at their word. Nobody was absolutely certain who I was, but I had to be either a potential exploiter or a prospective victim, someone who would hassle them or someone who could be hustled.



It occurred to me that I might do as well enlisting someone else instead of trying to get in touch with TJ- who was, after all, just another street hustler on the Deuce, and a surprisingly successful one at that, having hustled a streetwise old sonofabitch like me out of five bucks without even trying. If I wanted to give away five-dollar bills, the street was full of kids who would be glad to take my money.



And all of them were easier to find than TJ, who might very well be unavailable. It had been half a year since I'd seen him, and that was a long time on this particular stretch of real estate. He could have moved his act to another part of town. He could have found himself a job. Or he could be on Riker's Island, or doing more serious time upstate.



Or he could be dead. Considering that possibility, I scanned the Deuce and wondered how many of the young men on the street right that minute would ever see thirty-five. Drugs would waste some of them and disease would do for some more, and a fair number of the rest would kill each other. It was a grim thought, and one I didn't care to entertain for long. Forty-second Street was hard enough to bear when you stayed right in present time. When you took the long view it was impossible.



TESTAMENT House had gotten its start when an Episcopal priest began allowing runaways to sleep on the floor of his apartment in Chelsea. Before long he had talked a property owner into donating a decaying rooming house a few blocks from Penn Station, and other donors had contributed funds which enabled him to buy the buildings on either side. Two years ago another benefactor had purchased a six-story industrial building and donated that to the cause. I went there after I left Forty-second Street, and a woman with gray hair and unsparing blue eyes told me the institution's history.



"They call this building New Testament House," she said, "and of course the original complex is Old Testament House. Father Joyner has been trying to arrange for the donation of a piece of property in the East Village, and I can't imagine what the kids will call that. All that's left is the Apocrypha, and somehow I don't think that's quite catchy enough for them."



We were in the building's entryway, with a sign running down the building's rules. Anyone under twenty-one was welcome, but no one was allowed on the premises with alcohol or drugs or weapons in his or her possession, and no one would be admitted between the hours of 1:00 and 8:00 A.M.



Mrs. Hillstrom was being charming but cautious, which was understandable; she didn't know yet if I was a prospective donor or someone with a predatory interest in her charges. Whichever I might be, I wasn't going to get past her and into the building proper. I was unarmed and drug-free, but I was clearly over the age limit.



I showed her the sketches of the two boys. Without looking she said, "I'm afraid it's not our policy to disclose who is or isn't staying with us."



"There's nothing to disclose." She looked at me. "Neither of these boys is staying here."



Now she looked at the sketches. "These are drawings," she said. "That's unusual."



"I think one or both of them may have come here. I think they were runaways."



"Lost boys," she said. She peered at each sketch in turn. "They could almost be brothers. Who are they?"



"That's what I'm trying to find out. I don't know their names or where they're from."



"What happened to them?"



"I think this one is dead. I think the younger boy is in danger." I thought for a moment. "Or beyond danger," I said.



" 'Beyond danger.' That means he may be dead also, is that what you're saying?"



"I guess it is."



She cocked her head and searched my eyes. "There's more than you're telling me. Why would you have sketches instead of photographs? How can you be looking for boys if you don't know who they are?"



"There are things you don't want to know about."



"Yes," she said, "and I already know most of them. I'm a paid employee, Mr. Scudder, not an unpaid volunteer. I work twelve hours a day, six days a week, but I don't always take my day off. I get a room of my own and three meals a day and ten dollars a week. That didn't cover cigarettes so I quit smoking, and now I usually give half of my salary away. I've been here for ten months, Mr. Scudder, and I've quit three times. When they train you you agree to stay for a year, so the first time I quit I was afraid I would get yelled at. I told Father Joyner I couldn't take it anymore, that I had to quit, and he said, 'Maggie, I envy you, I wish to God I could quit.' I said, 'I changed my mind, I'm staying.' 'Welcome back,' he said.



"Another time I quit screaming and another time I quit crying. I don't mean I ceased to scream or cry. I was angry, so I quit, and I was weeping, so I quit, but then each time I calmed down and decided to stay. Every day I see something that makes me want to walk down the street and grab every person I meet and shake them all and tell them what's going on. Every day I learn another of the things you say I don't want to know about. One of the three buildings at the Old Testament House is our HIV wing now, did you know that? All the boys there have tested positive for the virus. They're all under twenty-one. You have to leave here when you're twenty-one. Most of them will never have to leave because they'll be dead by then. You think there's something you can't tell me? You think you know something worse than that?"