Read Online The Garden of Lost and Found by Dale Peck - Free Book Online Page B

dresser that took the clothes Trucker had given me and still had room for so much more, very shabby chic according to the style pages in the Sunday papers I salvaged from trash cans and recycling bins, more Martha Stewart than Wallpaper maybe, but still fashionable. Certainly it was fortuitous that the soapstone sink in the kitchen was the size of a small bathtub, because every morning I had to wash my sweat-soaked antique bed linens. I hung them to dry in a back bedroom where I hoped Nellydean wouldn’t see them, just as I did most of my work at night so she wouldn’t see what I was taking from the shop—technically it all belonged to me, but I knew there’d be trouble if I ran into her—and I only paused in my labors when I came across a keyhole in a door or cupboard or chest. Then I would take the key hanging from my neck and try to fit it in the slot, but, like Cinderella’s stepsisters’ feet, it always proved too big.
    Perhaps foolishly, I’d picked a room at the front of the building to sleep in instead of one of the bedrooms overlooking the garden. There was something about the garden that bothered me: no matter how hard I looked I couldn’t see the end of it. I could see its borders well enough—three skyscrapers reaching hundreds of feet into the air—but try as I might I couldn’t see where leaf and trunk gave way to steel and glass, and the more I stared the more they seemed to retreat from me, as if the garden, like the Tardis, were infinitely bigger than the box that contained it. And so I chose to sleep beneath a window looking out on the comprehensible boundaries of Dutch Street, and every evening the car alarm that had gone off on my first night in the city sang me to sleep after I’d hauled my last piece of furniture up four flights of stairs.
    At first it didn’t bother me. The alarm, I mean. It was my Siren song, I told myself, an aural part of my New York landscape. But after three or four nights of continuous keening I was over it. Sometimes it went on for ten minutes, more often for three or four hours, but one night it took on a different sound, an arrhythmic honking coupled with something that sounded like shouting, and then I realized it was shouting, and honking of the old-fashioned variety: someone was leaning on their horn and they were doing it right in front of No. 1. When I hauled my body from the wet sheets and poked my head out the window I saw the snout of a yellow cab directly below me. It pointed south, straight at the flat front of a white van that faced north, and even in my half-sleeping state it was clear to me why the horn had honked—the cab had honked, I realized, as soon as it honked again—because there wasn’t room for two vehicles to pass each other within Dutch Street’s narrow track. The cab honked a few more times, the sound bouncing off the buildings like a pinball, but the van sat there, implacable as the White Whale before his final charge, until finally the cabbie opened his door and stood up.
    He was a big man, Pakistani maybe, or Afghanistani. All I could really see of him was the thick black turban wound around his head and the wide gray beard avalanching down the slope of his chest. “ Hey motherfucker ,” he shouted in thickly accented English. “Ay mooderfooker” it sounded like: “Ay mooderfooker. Move jour mooderfooking fan out of dee vay.” At that, the driver’s side door of the van opened, and the man who leaned from his seat without actually getting out of it was even bigger than the cabbie. He was white, bare-headed, dark-haired, his motherfucker came out in that old-school Italian accent: “You betta be movin your own muthafuckin ass back,” is what he said. “I ave right of way,” the cabbie insisted. “I ave right of way mooderfooker,” to which the van man replied, “Get out the way muthafucka,” and this went on for a minute or two until the passenger door of the van opened and a third man joined the fray. He was smaller