Читать книгу The Changeling - Victor LaValle - Страница 29

PATRICE SENT WORD of an estate sale in the Bronx. Close enough to Washington Heights that Apollo had to get on the road, no excuses and no more delays. And he had to bring Brian with him. Six weeks was the most time Emma could take off from work before her salary vanished. In the United States this counted as generous.

Going out the door that morning, she’d cried worse than when she’d been in labor. Apollo promised to be careful with the boy, but that wasn’t what crushed Emma. Of course she trusted Apollo, but leaving her baby so soon after birth felt like stepping out of an airlock without a space suit, no source of oxygen. How would she breathe? Nevertheless, she had to do it. They couldn’t afford for her to lose her job.

Apollo rented a Zipcar for the trip, something sturdy, a Honda Odyssey. The company gave each car a name. This one’s was Suave. He admired that level of self-delusion. He strapped the boy into his rear-facing car seat and arranged the armful of pillows he’d brought along on the floor and around the car seat. The baby lay surrounded by padding, and still Apollo never drove faster than fifteen miles per hour along the Henry Hudson Parkway. Other drivers beeped and cursed as they swerved around him. This bothered Apollo not a bit. The pair crept all the way to the Riverdale section of the Bronx. The twenty-minute trip took almost an hour. At one point, on Dodgewood Road, a street sweeper passed them.

This pocket of the Bronx turned suburban, nearly rural, with uneven single-lane streets and two-story homes sitting on large grassy plots. On Dodgewood Road, Apollo found the place: a large single-family house with a driveway and two-car garage. A familiar car by the curb, a red 2001 Toyota Echo. Its bumper sticker read LIBRARIAN OF ALEXANDRIA.

Patrice Green had beat him here, and that man lived in southeastern Queens.

Apollo turned off the car and arched himself over the front seat so he could see his son. Brian Kagwa watched the bright sky through the passenger window, mouth opening and closing as if he was actually feeding on the sunlight.

“Let’s go hunt some books,” Apollo said.

Apollo came around and unlatched his son. Wind rattled the property, and Brian seemed to focus on the quaking limbs of a tree. Apollo looped on his BabyBjörn baby carrier and strapped his son in. Daddy’s heartbeat would be mood music for the kid.

Apollo went through the baby bag, cross-checking like a pilot about to take flight. Bottle, three diapers, wipes, burp cloth, set of plastic keys for rattling, and finally, a small, fluffy blanket.

“Flight attendants take your seat,” Apollo whispered. “We are prepared for takeoff.”

As he rolled the minivan’s door shut, a man’s voice came from the garage.

“I didn’t have that much gear on when I was fighting in Fallujah.”

Patrice stepped into the daylight, so tall his head nearly clipped the raised door. Patrice had a face like a catfish, with an overhanging upper lip and errant mustache hairs. Eyes a little too small for his head.

“You were never near Fallujah,” Apollo said.

Patrice shrugged. “Closer than you ever got.”

Apollo raised his diaper bag. “Now I’m in my own dirty war.”

Patrice Green had never fought in Fallujah, but he did serve in the army from 2003 to 2004, during Operation Iraqi Freedom, in the 62nd Air Defense Artillery Regiment. He’d spent much of his time doing counter-IED operations along a supply route in Iskandariyah, Iraq, a city twenty-five miles south of Baghdad, not far from the Euphrates River. He’d done that work and then returned to the United States. He’d been the manager of an AMC movie theater on 34th Street. He’d been a graduate student at Queens College, in library studies, for five months. And eventually he became a used and rare bookseller.

The garage behind Patrice looked bigger than Apollo and Emma’s apartment, filled now with fifty cardboard boxes of books. The top flaps of every box lay open, a treasure room already plundered.

“Grandmother,” Patrice said. “She died four months ago. Family finally got all the old lady’s books into boxes and put out the ad. Son-in-law let me into the garage. Other than that, he’s stayed out of my way.”

“He’s cool?” Apollo said, bouncing in place lightly, for Brian’s benefit.

“I asked to use their bathroom, and the dude wouldn’t let me in the house. Motherfucker said they didn’t have a bathroom.” Patrice gestured at the two-story structure. “Four-bedroom home but no bathrooms. Imagine that.”

“You’d think they would’ve checked before buying the place.”

Apollo laughed with Patrice just to keep from crying. Now Apollo looked inside the garage, scanning the open boxes as Brian wriggled against his chest. If Patrice had already been through all these, then he’d found everything worth anything.

“Grandma liked books,” Apollo said. “She have good taste?”

“I found a few winners,” Patrice said.

No doubt he’d already set those books aside, but look how full the boxes in the garage remained. That meant most of them were nearly worthless, the kind of stuff that would turn a profit only on the shipping. He’d rented the minivan to keep his son safe, but at least it had plenty of storage space.

“There’s a few more in the basement,” Patrice said, pointing to a door, slightly open, near the back of the main house.

“You haven’t been down there yet,” Apollo said.

For the first time since he’d stepped out of the garage Patrice Green shrank. “Nah. Thought I’d leave something for you.”

Patrice Green, big man and expert bookseller, counter-IED specialist and child raised in the roughest part of Roxbury, did not like basements. He’d returned from Iskandariyah uninjured but not unharmed. He had never explained his fear, but Apollo intuited it and, most importantly, never asked about it directly. A fair number of estate sales in New York City took place in the basements of various apartment buildings, and Patrice Green never set foot in one of them.

“You hear that, Brian?” Apollo said as he let the front flap of the Baby-Björn fall loose and pulled his son free, turned him around. “Uncle Patrice is letting us take point.”

“But we split whatever you find,” Patrice said, looking over the baby’s head. “Sixty-forty. That’s the deal.”

Apollo lifted the boy higher. He’d expected Patrice to say something about the baby from the moment he’d shown up, but instead they’d gone on about the books. This was the first time his best friend had met his child—shouldn’t that merit at least one comment? Apollo felt surprised by how much this moment bothered him.

“Look into his eyes,” Apollo said, trying to act playful.

“What am I supposed to say to him?” Patrice asked.

Apollo raised his voice to a child’s register. “Tell me what happened in Iskandariyah, Uncle Patrice.”

Patrice leaned close to the baby. “Tell your daddy I said, Fuck you.”

“I haven’t mastered language yet.”

Patrice grinned. “I’ll teach you the gesture.”

Now Apollo had to smile. “You’re going to be a bad influence on me.”

“No worse than your daddy’s going to be.”

Apollo smooshed Brian right up against Patrice’s face. “Can you spell PTSD?”

Then Apollo turned and moved to the basement door with the baby.

Patrice shouted after him. “I understand why your pops abandoned you!”