Linus came up with the score in St. Augustine, far as Freddie could tell. “It wasn’t like him to stick to one thing,” Freddie told Carney. “He had ideas—this day that and tomorrow something else.” For an “eraser key” on typewriters, and a special cap on medicine bottles to prevent them from being opened by little kids. A junkie word-of-mouth system tracked which doctors were soft touches for morphine scrips and which drugstores sold needles no questions asked—what if there were a “Yellow Pages for Dopeheads” that listed this week’s shady or clueless docs and pharmacies? The schemes were far-fetched or abundantly flawed, were shared once and never mentioned again. The heist was different. “Linus kept bringing up the setup, turning it over in his head the whole drive back.
“By then we were like brothers,” Freddie said. Carney took it as the insult it was intended to be, and it pleased Freddie to get under his cousin’s skin. When was the last time they’d hung out like this, just the two of them? Like the old days. Now as then, it was Freddie’s job to fend off the silence. Too much silence and you might get to thinking about things. Freddie the storyteller, Carney the straight man, the audience. It worked for a long time.
The front door of Carney’s Furniture was locked. The blinds in the office window overlooking the showroom were shut. Carney’s office was the captain’s cabin in a sub: Run Silent, Run Deep. The world didn’t know what was going on down here in the dark and those below were blind to everything topside.
This wasn’t Freddie’s first trip underwater. The submarine was his pet analogy for periods of exile from decent society, ever since his trip to the Tombs three years ago. The steel bunks bracketed into the gray cell walls reminded him of the crew quarters in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, albeit less vermin-filled and overcrowded. Four cots for six men. Freddie curled on the cement floor, with its soaked-in piss. Forty-eight hours in jail nearly wrecked him. Nightmares seized him still, alive with grim, half-forgotten details: roaches scrabbling into his ear like it was some insect Cotton Club; a maggot swimming in the foul, mess-hall oatmeal, twisting on his tongue.
All his life he’d heard about the Manhattan House of Detention from guys dumb enough to get caught. Freddie never understood fools who bragged about doing time—why advertise your stupidity? Then he got busted. The storytellers had undersold the wretchedness. His first trip to the chow line a guard bashed him upside the head with a blackjack. Freddie buckled and dropped to the grimy floor. Years later he woke with a ringing sometimes. Why? Freddie hadn’t heard the officer call his name. He staggered with his tray and sat down to a dinner of stiff baloney on moldy bread. Two tables over, one slob bit off this other guy’s earlobe for hogging ketchup. Bad meals all around.
Later, in his submarine cell, he stopped swatting the rats—rats boiled forth at night—when one of his cellmates warned him that “hittin’ ’em puts them in a biting mood.”
He hadn’t told Carney about those two days and never would. Freddie called Linus to bail him out because he was too diminished to abide a lecture. Linus wouldn’t scold him that it was his fault for eating chicken with Biz Dixon (as if Biz were the only crooked man they knew). Linus wouldn’t tell him that it was Freddie’s fault for mouthing off to the junk squad when they arrested Biz (as if a man could rebel against his nature and not sass a cop).
Linus bailed him out and they celebrated the remainder of Labor Day weekend by smoking reefer and drinking rum, and that worked out so well they carried the performance over another week, and another. The men had been close before the Tombs, but the arrest confirmed that they were fellow sailors on the same freakish tour of duty. Dive! Dive! Into that silty narcotic gloom. Stationed on the next submarine, Linus’s apartment on Madison: the USS Bender.
“I’m sorry you got picked up,” Carney told him. He separated two slats in the blinds and checked out 125th Street. All clear.
“Wasn’t your fault,” Freddie said.
The rest of that fall and winter was a mumble. Linus retained a lawyer who got the case dropped. Freddie crashed on Linus’s living-room couch most days, until his lease ran out and he moved in full time. They woke, grazed around Greenwich Village and Times Square, got high, made fun of TV soap operas, put their feet up in movie houses and occasionally snorted a little something, and come nightfall ricocheted through various coffee shops and cocktail bars and basement oases, propelled by debauched momentum. Pissing against tenement walls, sleeping until noon. If Freddie got somewhere with a girl, a college girl or typist three drinks in, Linus disappeared at the right time. The next day Freddie either magically manifested on the couch when Linus padded out in his weird, archduke pajamas, or he popped up later in the afternoon, returning from his mission with a sack of doughnuts. They got along fine.
Sometimes Linus drove them out to Jersey in his Chevy Two-Ten to bet on the horses at the Garden. Linus was part owner of a thoroughbred named Hot Cup, a birthday gift from his great-uncle James, who was a scion of derby culture and thought you weren’t a man unless you had a piece of a racehorse. Hot Cup’s lofty pedigree notwithstanding—his father, General Tip, was a legend in championship jism circles—on the track he was an oddly distracted specimen, listless and morose. Much like his part owner, Hot Cup was well-bred, well-raised, and utterly incapable.
These ventures and others were underwritten by the Van Wyck family, who mailed checks on the second Friday of the month if Linus upheld the meager duties of his office: show up groomed and presentable for family functions and society benefits; visit the law offices of Newman, Shears & Whipple to sign where they told him to sign. Good to see you, Mr. Van Wyck. “The work is for the birds,” Linus said, “but you can’t beat the hours.” He kept his nice clothes at his parents’ apartment, got into his uniform for work, and slipped back into beatnik attire when he punched out.
One day Linus split for his grandma’s ninety-sixth birthday and didn’t come back. He rang three days later from the Bubbling Brook Sanatorium in Connecticut; his family had hijacked him when he stepped off the elevator and dispatched him for another round of psychological treatment. Zap! Periodically the Van Wycks scooped up their wayward son and carted him off to a succession of licensed facilities, an archipelago of mental recalibration centers dotting the tri-state area. Linus’s first long stint was during his Princeton days. The dorm proctor caught him sucking some townie’s dick or vice versa, Freddie couldn’t remember which. Zap! Zap!
Freddie didn’t care about Linus’s proclivities. Linus knew he didn’t swing that way and never tried anything. “Far as I remember,” Freddie said. He shrugged. “We were loaded most of the time.”
The Madison Avenue apartment was small and quiet without Linus. No one to shove the trash into the hallway chute, to laugh at his jokes when he made fun of white people on TV. Hanging with Linus reminded Freddie of the old days, when it was him and Carney running wild. Aunt Nancy had passed, Uncle Mike was who knows where, his own mother doing a double at the hospital, Pedro in Florida: That left the two boys and whole days to cram full of feverish schemes. Then Big Mike came back and took Carney home and it was over.
Before long Freddie was staring at Linus’s living-room rug and tracing his missteps, recent and not so recent. The fucked-up haze of lost seasons. Those stretches of pleasurable but aimless loafing, running numbers for murderers, his brief but momentous incarceration. The Theresa job and the guns and hard men it brought into his life. The black water of his thoughts flooded the submarine compartment, he scrambled to the hatch and sealed it off…but then his toes went cold again and he looked down…
Freddie sighed and shuffled for two weeks and then accepted Linus’s abduction as a sign from Jesus or God or the Big Whatever that he should make a change. He decided to clean up. He got his own place in Hell’s Kitchen on Forty-Eighth Street, two floors above a chop suey joint. Linus had his sanatoriums; Freddie’s version of mandatory shit-getting-together was enduring a series of square jobs. Like a chump. Or a monk performing grunt work to prove something to the empty sky. Stocking shelves in a Gristedes over on Lexington, operating the register at Black Ace Records on Sullivan, selling sneakers at a sports outlet on Fulton Street in fucking Brooklyn. Of the three, Black Ace was better for meeting girls.
“I was pulling a Ray-Ray,” Freddie told his cousin. “Keeping my head down, keeping it boring.” Like when Carney was in college studying and Freddie couldn’t get him out of his apartment. “I got so jealous when you told me you wouldn’t be coming out,” Freddie said. “I was all by myself. And when you were done and graduated, you had something.” What did Freddie have to show for all those nights?
He hit the books. Not schoolbooks but dime novels: Strange Sisters, Violent Saturday, Her Name—Jezebel. Stories where no one was saved, not the guilty (killers and crooks) and not the innocent (orphans scooped up at bus stations, librarians inducted into worlds of vice). Each time he thought things would work out for them. They never did and he forgot that lesson each time he closed the covers. So optimistic as he plucked the next one from the spinning wire racks. The novels passed the time, as did the pawnshop TV and the occasional girl in a rumpled skirt. His type? Barely beating back the darkness.
During his occasional visits, Aunt Millie complimented him on his healthy glow. “You have a girlfriend keeping you happy?” Freddie dropped in on Carney and his brood, keeping his clean living a secret as he had his crooked living. He liked it when May and John called him Uncle Freddie, like they knew his secret identity.
“I’d ask what you were up to,” Carney said, “and you’d go, ‘Doing my own thing.’ Why didn’t you say?”
“I was doing my own thing,” Freddie said. “That’s why they call it that.”
The mission: reemerge when he had his shit together. Freddie imagined a loud gong would tell him when it was time, reverberating, shaking pigeons loose. Spook half the west side of Manhattan. He took up a pipe and on warm nights perched on the fire escape overlooking Forty-Eighth, puffing, the iron scaffold a periscope that allowed a view of the sleepy-churning Hudson while the saxophone of Ornette Coleman barked and bleated on the hi-fi, wringing the city’s death rattle from its harrowed throat. In his own period of isolation, his cousin had cultivated ambitions—starting a business, settling down with a nice lady. Now that Freddie stopped and thought about it, he was at a loss: All he knew was that he didn’t want to be who he had been. Climb over the windowsill, flip the record, return to the periscope. Scan the horizon.
It all ended when he ran into Linus outside Cafe Wha? and like that they signed up for another tour and the ship sank into the black water and it was as if the world had never known them.
After a month he was back on Linus’s couch. By now Linus was on the needle, using every day. Freddie had a snort now and again, but he’d seen too many people gobbled up to indulge without fear. One time—they were heading uptown on the subway at two a.m.—Freddie shared stories about Miami Joe and the good times on their circuits of Harlem hotspots. He didn’t mention the heist, or Arthur’s murder, or Miami Joe’s not-quite Viking funeral in Mount Morris Park, but he did say that Florida sounded like a righteous sort of place, the way the mobster had described it. “You’ve never been?” Linus asked.
To Florida? Hell, he’d never been south of Atlantic City.
The next day they were on the highway. New sub, same duties. Four hundred meters and closing. Freddie’s submarine was anywhere he was cut off from the lives of normal people: a city jail; bouncing around in a debauched bubble with a buddy. Now it was a burgundy 1955 Chevy Two-Ten sinking through the treacherous fathoms of the Jim Crow South. Stay off their sonar, don’t make a sound.
The trip down was fine. They stuck to big cities, where it was easier to cop if you had the eye. “Linus was like an Indian scout when it came to dope.” Ran aground in St. Augustine—flat tire. “It’s the oldest city in America. Some Spanish motherfuckers claimed that shit in the 1500s. It’s on all the trinkets.” The old dude in the garage was cool and they were fixed up in no time but it was the first sunny afternoon in a spell. They decided to flop at the Conquistador Motor Lodge and bivouac for a few days.
Linus rented the room while Freddie waited in the car, per their road-trip custom. Freddie bought some cheap trunks at the five-and-dime across the street and cannonballed into the pool. The manager’s wife burst out of the office waving a bent curtain rod and told him to get his nigger ass out of there. When they went out for breakfast the next morning, the pool was as dry as a bone.
“What a disgusting little fucker!” Linus said. He wanted to call the police, or the newspapers. His family had connections with CBS in New York.
Freddie told him to wake up. Instead of leaving town they leased a furnished bungalow four blocks from the water. They were a shaggy duo by now. By way of explanation for renting to weirdos, the landlord offered that her son had run off to San Francisco. Look, the weather was better, the sky was bigger. The bartender at a Negro bar on Washington did a little peddling on the side. They decided to wait out the winter in St. Augustine.
Afternoons they passed the flyswatter back and forth and played gin rummy, nights they partook of the limited menu and always went to bed less hungry.