Read Online Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas - Free Book Online Page A

behind me. He spits. ‘Dude.’ I stay in my stance.
‘What?’
I don’t look, but I can tell he’s trying to get up.
‘Run, dude. You’re gonna lose.’
I hear him go down again.
‘You’re going to lose terribly.’”
    The waiter drops off the check. I take it, and before he can leave I put down my twenty.
    â€œChange?”
    â€œNo thanks.”
    â€œThank you.”
    â€œThank you,” she says. “We should really get together when everyone is back.” I nod while sliding to the edge of the banquette. “Here.” She pushes a card across the table. I pick it up. It’s heavy stock—linen. In pale blue it says:
    Delilah Trent-Usher
Fine Artist
    Delilah.
I think I only think it. But I suppose, at least, my lips move. She reaches for my arm, smiling, as though she can barely contain a laugh. One eye
is
much larger than the other when she opens them wide like this.
    â€œYou’re not finished.”
    â€œWith what?”
    â€œWhat happened?” I don’t say anything. “Thirty against one. Your lone friend down and out—what happened?”
    The waiter counts his few tips at the bar while yapping at the bartender, who’s washing something in a low sink. On the monitor, migrantfarmers and sharecroppers are on parade. Porkpie’s leading them, strumming hard, singing, “Yeah, yeah.”
    â€œThe cops came.”
    â€œThey broke it up?”
    â€œI kicked the car. They took us in.”
    She smiles. She shakes her head, slowly, sucks her teeth, like some sex and maternal hybrid.
    â€œSo you were a bad boy, huh.”
    Gavin’s mom had told me earlier that year not to bring him home drunk anymore. Even the cops had heckled him.
“Your buddy stinks, Sammy.”
I wonder where Gavin is now—where he’d been calling from.
    She knocks on the table. “Are you there?”
    â€œNo. We weren’t bad.”
    She pats the table as if to say, “Sure.” She’s figured me out again. She picks up the swizzle stick. Her hand looks like a pincer. She holds the stirrer as though she’s about to tack me to the seat back. The singer walks off a porch full of damaged people and heads back to the crossroads. His voice howls. Something sounds wrong. He hits the note, and it seems to be a lament, but it’s a lament without sorrow.
    â€œI’m getting tired,” she says.
    Outside the traffic on Smith Street is thinner.
    â€œWell, I guess I’ll be seeing you.”
    â€œI’ll walk you home.”
    â€œThank you.” She does a mock curtsy. “Such a gentleman.” She winks. Perhaps her way of inviting me to do ungentlemanly things to her. She stretches her tiny two-martini body and rubs her back against the wall of the old factory.
    We walk deeper into Brooklyn, down under the Ninth Street El, under the BQE, where phantomlike shapes push shopping carts filled with debris or hide in the shadows of the steel and concrete columns, toward the old warehouses that line the waterfront. She’squiet. Perhaps it’s the booze. Perhaps she’s taking in the shapes and shadows along the way, giving them sharper form, animating them with purpose—a future sketch or painting. Perhaps she has nothing to say. We turn west before the projects and into the bright light of the Battery Tunnel. The opening wriggles in the wave of heat and exhaust.
    Brooklyn is not the Brooklyn I imagined while in Boston, or Manhattan, or even Brooklyn. I’ve seen the supertankers coming in and out of the harbor through the Verrazano Straits, but I don’t remember them ever docking. I’ve seen the cranes from Atlantic Avenue, idle, and followed their line south, here, to Red Hook, where the dead warehouses sit. And then somehow without machines or hands, the containers get lined up in the shipyards. It’s as if the ports are still thriving and the longshoremen are busy with