Winter's Tale Page 4

  But when the water was flowing, and could be released at any time whatsoever from the Jerome Park Storage Reservoir to charge through the tunnels faster than a horse could run, then it was considerably worse, and a great honor for the deceased to have two Short Tails pull his corpse through the tunnel, hurriedly slam it into a crypt while they listened breathlessly for the rush of approaching water, and then lope prone through the tube of green moss, mad for breaking into the air, speeding along like wild jittery whipcords.

  When E. E. Henry (for a time Peter Lake’s partner, and one of the Short Tails’ best woola boys) had been ground into small smithereens by a speeding engine on the El during an unsuccessful attempt at urbanizing train robbery, two Short Tails—Romeo Tan and Bat Charney—had volunteered to take what was left down into the crypt. Brave they were, for E. E. Henry had departed from this world one crystal-clear day in October after two solid weeks of rain. Upstate dams were overflowing as steadily as power looms vomiting out silver brocade, and the pressure tunnel was much in use as Jerome Park periodically disgorged inflowing lakes of freezing water.

  Entering in bright moonlight late one night, they struggled through the shafts, carrying E. E. Henry in small sacks that they dragged after them with cords held between their teeth. Several inches of cold water lay on the bottom of the horizontal tunnel. As they sloshed through they could smell oxygen, which meant that the water was fresh. Were the Jerome Park sluices to be drawn open as Romeo Tan and Bat Charney crawled toward the silt chamber, they would die a horrible backward death, because the tunnel was too narrow for turning around. They stopped every now and then to listen, and heard nothing. Finally, Romeo Tan broke through to the silt chamber. Working in four feet of ice water, they lit the candle, pried open a crypt, threw in the sacks of E. E. Henry, slammed the door, said a two-word prayer (“Jesus Christ!”), dropped their hammer and crow, and made for the exit, hearts racing. Bat Charney made a step of his hands. As Romeo Tan’s head reached the level of the tunnel he was about to enter, he heard a strange sound. It was like wind whistling over the peaks of high mountains, or the sound of a geyser minutes before it erupts. It was the water, which had just begun to pass through the gates at Jerome Park.

  “Water!” he said to Bat Charney. At first they nearly collapsed, but soon they were snake-dancing through the tunnel, going faster than they would have thought possible. They dug so hard into the moss to pull themselves ahead that after a hundred feet they had no nails left, and their hands looked like newt paws. Still, they kept on, but it was too late. They heard the water explode into the silt chamber, and felt the displaced air rushing past them like a hurricane. Then came the torrent. Its icy mass, frothing and dark, banged into Bat Charney’s feet, knocked out his false teeth, and jolted him forward into a fetal position. He drowned that way, but he saved Romeo Tan, since Bat’s compacted body became a plug in the line shooting rapidly forward at the head of the water column. Romeo Tan lay on his back, sliding across the wet moss at the bottom of the tunnel as fast as a bullet. At the shaft, they curved upward and rose so fast that the flesh on Romeo Tan’s face was pulled down until he looked like a bloodhound. He wondered what would happen when they hit the top, but he didn’t wonder long, for they were shot from the mouth of the shaft (which they had left open) like cannonballs, or, rather, like a long cannonball and a trailing bunched-up wad. Romeo Tan felt his head break a splintering hole through the shingle roof over the entry. Suddenly he was flying free in the night, toward the stars and a bright moon which almost blinded him. The city on an autumn night, exciting and full of charms, was spread all around him. He could see lights, smoking chimneys, and fires at the edge of the windy parks. The Harlem River was covered with the glistening white paint of the moon. He wondered if he would fly into space. But he rose only two hundred feet above Morris Heights before he started down, and landed in an apple tree. His fall was broken as every single apple, perhaps five hundred of them, left the tree and thudded to the ground. Romeo Tan watched the apples roll down the hill and pile up against a farmer’s shack. Then, for the rest of the night, he sat in the tree, under the moon, trying to reconstruct what had happened, wondering if everyone had to experience this kind of thing sooner or later, or if in fact it was a relatively isolated occurrence.

  Pearly Soames wanted to take a hundred men down there and stay for an hour to explain his plan. As word spread throughout the city, one Short Tail after another felt his heart swim to his feet and cower like a dog. Their anxiety was infectious. Everyone in Manhattan was nervous. Even the music halls were gloomy. But at nine in the evening on Tuesday, the Short Tails assembled one hundred strong in the apple orchard around the siphon entrance, waiting to descend. There was much nervous talk and forced pleasantries about stealing, the conditions in various jails, and the state of the con. Romeo Tan, now a basket case, was allowed to be last in and first out. Pearly, as usual, was first in and would be last out. After three hours, all the Short Tails were stuffed into the silt chamber.

  There they stood, pressed against the crypts, every ear cocked in the direction of Jerome Park. They seemed not to breathe, while Pearly paced back and forth in the light of a dozen flickering candles. All the burglars were there in black masks (some, out of habit, had even hauled sacks through the tunnel); the agile woola boys with their strong and springy legs; the well-tailored con men; the pickpockets; the guns (marksmen in the gang wars, who were held in low regard because they could pick neither pockets nor locks); even the chef, who was uncomfortable unless he could cook with hot provisions. Romeo Tan stood with his hand on the lip of the exit pipe, listening intently for a faint white roar. Pearly stopped pacing and looked at his men. For five minutes they didn’t move a millimeter, and stood in terror of the deluge that might race through the Bronx tunnel into the chamber that was echoing with their heartbeats.

  “Do I hear water?” asked Pearly, cocking his head. He watched all hundred Short Tails turn white, as if he had drawn a Venetian blind. “It took three hours to get in,” he said, “so it will take three hours to get out. What’s that!” They started, and then sighed as one, like inmates of hell. “I thought I heard something. I guess it was nothing. Would anyone like a glass of . . . water!” They moaned.

  He pranced about as if his legs were stilts. “I have a proposition for you,” he said.

  But a horrified shudder passed through the crowd as a masked burglar shouted “Look!” and held up a pair of false teeth. Everyone remembered Bat Charney’s shame about what he called his “elephant’s castanets.” All that was left of Bat rested aloft in the burglars hand. They gazed at it meekly until Pearly cut short their devotions.

  “Shall we proceed, gentlemen, or do you wish to increase the chance of being trapped forever in this underground tea bag (where we would flavor the city’s drinking water for twenty years), by irrelevant stupidities such as a silent prayer over a pair of dentures?” Pearly’s cheek was twitching, signifying one of the many species of his cool anger. “Imagine, if you will,” he said, “that we are not in a dank and mossy crypt, but in a room of gold; that upon each solid brick is stamped a fine and florid eagle, crown, or fleur-de-lys; that warm rays make the air softer and yellower than butter; that you breathe not this base, black, wet mist, but a sparkling bronze infusion that has been mellowed by its constant reverberation within walls of pure gold.” He sucked in his breath. “The light of this room would be just that shade that we are told arises sometimes against the clouds beyond the bay, making the world gold the way it is said happens once in a . . . every . . . well . . . sometimes. My plan, you see,” he said in pain, writhing internally, “is to build a golden room in a high place, and post watchmen to watch the clouds. When they turn gold, and the light sprays upon the city, the room will open. The light will stuff the chamber. Then the doors will seal shut. And the goldenness will be trapped forever.” The thieves’ mouths hung open. “You can come there, all of you! You can bathe in the light, drink-in the air, run your hands along the
smooth walls. Even in the pit and trough of night, the golden room will be brightly boiling. And it will be ours.” Tranquilized with longing, he looked dreamily at the ceiling. “In the center, I will put a simple bed, and there I will repose in warmth and gold . . . for eternity.”

  For a moment, they forgot where they were, and bombarded Pearly with questions. When he told them what he intended, the cynics replied that he had lost his mind. No one could rob a gold carrier. But Pearly countered with a scheme. A lookout at Sandy Hook would scan the sea day and night from a tower that they would build in the guise of charitable works. Another lookout atop the Manhattan pier of the Brooklyn Bridge would keep an eye on Sandy Hook. The Short Tails would cut their work rate by two-thirds, for the specific purpose of keeping a force of fifty men always at the ready, poised to break out into the harbor fully armed in their swift fleet of winabouts—the fastest small sailing craft in the city, of which they had ten. When the Sandy Hook lookout saw the ship, he would launch a flare. Upon seeing the flare, the man on the bridge tower would, via a special line, telephone the alert Short Tails waiting in their boats under the docks at Korlaer’s Hook. The Short Tails would immediately sally forth into the harbor. There, they would set up two buoys, and sail to and fro between them on a line perpendicular to the channel through which the carrier made its way to the fortified pier. The Short Tails would be dressed, one and all, as ladies, and, one and all, they would make sure that the winabouts in the fake regatta would be rammed and sunk by the very ship they planned to rob. It would take some precise boat handling, and the patience to sit in a dress under the docks for a month or two, but it would be worth it, for no captain would abandon fifty yachtswomen to drown in New York Harbor, and they would undoubtedly be taken up on deck, where they would remove from under their dresses the bristling arsenal for which they were famous, and proceed to take over the ship.

  “So what,” someone said. “The escorts would capture us soon after that. The Navy.”

  “No escort,” answered Pearly, “is as fast or as well armed as a gold carrier.”

  “But it doesn’t matter even so, Pearly. You can’t get the gold out of those ships unless you have special machinery, and it all has to be done in a large dry dock.”

  “We’ll build our own dry dock.”

  “That’s preposterous,” yelled a woola boy. “How are we going to build a dry dock? Even if we could, everyone in the world would notice. And when we took the ship there, they would just follow and catch us.”

  “That shows what a woola boy is good for,” said Pearly. “Stick to Woola Woola until I promote you, my fancy young rabbit. We won’t build the dry dock until we’ve taken the ship. We’ll have all the time we want to do that, and all the time necessary to extract the gold by drilling a hole in the vault (one hole—we should be able to do that!) and building a big fire under the ship to melt the gold so it can run like lava right into our waiting pigs.

  “The reason we’ll have all the time in the world, and I mean time in profusion, is that when we take over the ship we’ll head her west to the Bayonne Marsh and ram her through the barrier of white clouds.”

  An even colder chill spread throughout the chamber. “When you go beyond those clouds,” said a sheepish pickpocket, “that’s it. You don’t come back. That’s dying, Pearly.”

  “How do we know?” asked Pearly. “I’ve never known anyone to tell what’s on the other side. Maybe they come back and keep their traps shut. Maybe it’s great over there—lots of naked women, fruit on the trees, hula dancers with bare breasts, food for the taking, silk, motorcars, racetracks where you always win . . . and we might be able to make our way back. If and when we did, we’d be the richest men on earth. It sure beats holding up tobacco stores for cigar bands, doesn’t it? Think of E. E. Henry. Think of Rascal T. Otis. They died for peanuts. I myself prefer to risk my all for something on a larger scale.”

  This latter appeal swung the company of thieves. They were willing to charge the cloud barrier. But a man with vast experience of the harbor (his specialty was looting pleasure yachts) pointed out that the reedy channels running mazelike to the white wall were not deep enough for an oceangoing vessel. Furthermore, he said, he had seen the cloud wall from less than a mile away while standing upon a harbor bar that had appeared suddenly after a storm. The cloud wall, he said, did not remain in the same place. It went around the city “like one a them Moibus belts,” and oscillated along the ground. Sometimes it disappeared, bringing into view the rest of the country beyond (it was then that transcontinental railroad trains proceeded through the gap, rolling over blinding silver tracks that had been scoured to a gleam by the agitated base of the cloud wall), and sometimes it lifted like a stage curtain, disappearing wholly or partially into heaven. Sometimes it sank into the ground, leaving only silence and a sunny landscape. But when it was up, the base moved rapidly over a changing space of several miles. There were no certain limits to its traverse. It had been known even to cross the river and sweep through Manhattan, taking with it as it left those whose time had come.

  Pearly supposed that they would have to dredge a channel as close to it as they could get, and trust to luck that the wall would sweep over them at the right moment. It was a risky business. The harbor man spoke up again, saying that dredging a channel would be nearly impossible. It would have to cut across the Bayonne Marsh, where the Baymen lived.

  “It’s come to it, then,” said Pearly. “We’ll have to make war on them, which means killing every single one. The sooner the better, before word gets out. They’re wicked fierce. I fought one once and nearly died, and it was nowhere near the cloud wall or the marsh but on dry land in Manhattan, where he had landed in a gale and I mistook him for a simple fisherman. Their swords fly so fast you can’t even see them. We’ll have to take them by surprise. We’ll go over there in canoes when the men are at work, kill the women and children, and wait in the huts. When the men come back, we’ll catch them unprepared, and shoot them from behind cover. There’s no sense in an open battle.”

  When all the Short Tails finally filed out into the light of the declining moon—just ahead of a torrent of freezing black water that filled the siphon soon after they left—their spirits were high. Perhaps it was because of the beauty of the night, the felt-dark woods soft and cold, the orchard high on the hill, the view of the sparkling and serene city. They melted into the fields and trees as only they could, contemplating victory over the Baymen, willing even to dress as ladies and plunge into the harbor, apprehensive of penetrating the clouds, eager to build a fire under the ship so that the gold would pour out, and delighted to think that they could be the richest men on earth if only they could hold their courage.

  Peter Lake, too, had been in the tea bag, pressed in a corner with a bunch of apprentice woola boys of whom he was one. At first he had been entranced by the venture. Pearly’s description of the golden room made Peter Lake think of the deep dreams he had had in which golden animals with soft golden pelts nudged him in tender affection, and he stroked and kissed the smooth faces of marvelous flying horses, tame leopards, and good-natured seals. How canny, immoral, and thievish, to think of trapping the rare light (which he himself had never seen), and yet how admirable a rebellion. Peter Lake thought that in wanting the golden light in his peculiar way Pearly Soames had shown certain of the attributes of innocence. The thieves were in rebellion to capture the light of heaven—though they thought it was for the loot, or for Pearly’s color gravity. For half an hour, Peter Lake had listened to the scheme, wanting it to succeed. He had even come to ignore the surroundings, devoid as they were of congeniality, and imagined that the chamber of gray granite was in fact a magical room of inner sunlit shining. But because of the plan against the Baymen, Peter Lake had become forever alienated from the Short Tails, and would have to betray them. He, and only he, knew that Pearly would never have his golden chamber.

  Peter Lake Hangs from a Star

  MUCH HAS been written and sa
id about Castle Garden, entryway for immigrants, inlet to a new life, bursting star. But seldom have those beyond its solemn silent spaces been ready to confess that once, in a different time, it loomed for them or for their parents like the gates of St. Peter. Its servants in deep ornate dress turned away those who were unsound and unfit, in a process of judgment that was both the work of bureaucrats and a dream. Many had crossed the ocean seeking light, and were suddenly hurled backward, tumbling through white waves and green oceans until the light receded into the point of a star in total darkness. Turned away, they died.

  Off Castle Garden, a mile to the southeast, near the western edge of Governors Island, a ship lay resting through a foggy spring night before the long and arduous trip back to the old world—whether Riga, Naples, or Constantinople is not certain. But it was probably Constantinople, for the collection of people on deck and in the silent common spaces that once were echoing and jammed, was colorful enough still to represent the great mélange of races that, fleeing wounds and fire, drained from Asia, Asiatic Russia, and the Balkans. The ships that arrived also left. And they took with them, without fanfare, those who were forced to make two trips. Many of these people were nearly dead to begin with, and would have to be buried at sea on the voyage home. Others were well enough to return to hostile or empty villages, where they would live out their days in amazement that they had been to another world, and come back.