Underwater New York

Anhook and the Eskimo Caddie by Adam Sexton

Her home lacks clocks.

But the woman knows what time it is, at least to the half-hour; she tracks its passage via programs on the living-room TV, her family’s focus, its jabbering blue hearth.  And when Geraldo appears and her baby hasn’t, she knows that something is amiss, that He been beat up after school.  Or maybe one a them Dominicans in they big cars, like a old Lincoln or something?  With the windows open and they music turn all the way up, down from Washington Heights?  Maybe they runned over my baby in the street like he nothing, the woman thinks, like he a animal.

The News 4 New York theme plays, the phone jangles in her kitchen, and when the woman lifts the receiver the little boy is somewhere crying and another voice wants half a million dollars in ransom money.

The kidnappers are, indeed, Dominicans.  They are rivals of the child’s brother, a neighborhood entrepreneur who sells $50,000 worth of crack cocaine each week.  (It’s the Nineties.)  He has been arrested repeatedly, though convicted but twice: of drug possession in April five years ago and weapons possession the following November.

But it’s like yo, he ain’t got the money, a’ight?  Know what he’s saying?

Spewing Spanglish and bile, the boy’s captors say to look for a coffee cup in the men’s room of the Mickey Dee’s on 125th, and on a December afternoon, brumal and bitterly cold, the dealer locates the cup atop a sweating urinal past the swinging sign there (MEN), past the How may I help you?s and Happy Meals.  He peels the membraneous plastic lid from the foam container and sees an unlabeled audio cassette, a Maxell XL II 100-minute tape.  Also what appears at first to be a broken stick of blackboard chalk, gray.  It is a finger from his brother’s hand.

› Continue reading

Share on Facebook

Tags: Adam Sexton, Body, Long Island Sound