Read Online The Pinch by Steve Stern - Free Book Online Page B

decay.
    “You can see how the ground gives way in the middle of the park,” I said, playing at cicerone.
    “I don’t even see a park,” said Rachel, looking a little like a refugee—which became her—in my fluttering overcoat.
    The patch of land that was all that remained of the original park resembled so many other orphaned tracts fallen victim to so-called urban renewal, tracts designated for face-lifts that never happened.
    “But look, Rachel,” I said, aware of calling her by her given name for the very first time. “See the way it dips …”
    There did in fact seem to be a slight depression in the sparse grass, a concavity I marched into in my effort to make the point. In so doing I slammed into a solid object snout-first. Stunned, I fell backward onto the hard ground with a throbbing head, my nose oozing blood. Opening my eyes I expected to see—what? Maybe a swag-bellied cop or Rachel’s battling fiancé? But there was nothing there.
    The girl was standing over me, this time not bothering to kneel. “What are you on?” she asked.
    “Methamphetamine, Tuinal, alcohol, caffeine, but that’s got nothing to do with it.”
    “Do you think these kinds of theatrics are endearing?” she wondered, since my lying prostrate and bleeding was where we’d begun. Regardless, there was enough moonlight for her to perceive that my nose was indeed hemorrhaging, and just how did she account for that? How did I?
    “Rachel,” I said, trying to sound prophetic despite being flat on my back, head tilted to reverse the flow of blood, “there are more things in heaven and earth than you dreamed of in your folklore classes.”
    “No doubt,” she replied without conviction.
    “Rachel,” I confided in a voice that trilled a bit from the fluid draining into my throat, “I walked into a tree.”
    “Uh-huh,” she breathed, hovering impatiently above me, the wind waving the showy black standard of her hair. “Listen, Lenny, my friends will be wondering what became of me.” Whereupon she removed my overcoat and spread it over me with the care she might have bestowed upon an invalid or a corpse, then set off in the direction of the bar.
    The next day on the way to the Book Asylum I barged into a rack of vintage kangaroo-calf bicycle shoes, pleased at my ability to identify them even though they weren’t there. The rack clattered noisily nonetheless as it toppled in front of me. Of course I was an old hand at confusing what was there with what was not. An intrepid psychic traveler, I’d crossed thresholds into unexplored regions encountering dragons and bugbears of every stripe and paisley (keeping the Thorazine handy in case I couldn’t vanquish the dragon on my own). So what was the big deal about occasionally crossing over from what passed for real life into the pages of a bogus historical chronicle? Never mind that I approached the book with an ostrich-egg lump in my throat, since, in reading The Pinch , I was conscious of also approaching a rendezvous with myself.
    Apprehension aside, the past put the present in the shade. The world from my North Main Street window was a toilet: the government was sliding toward fascism, the planet dying from neglect, and my lottery number put me in line to be shipped off on short notice to Vietnam. There, if I escaped the rockets and jungle rot, I would doubtless stumble into a man-trap and be impaled on envenomed stakes. Moreover—to offset the mind-fucking effects of The Pinch —I’d begun to read the newspapers, which reported that negotiations were at an impasse and no end in sight for the garbage strike. Undiscouraged by police harassment and the mayor’s inflexible stance, however, the sanitation workers persisted in marching every day. Their ranks had been joined by students, clergymen, and ordinary citizens, a few of them white.
    In that atmosphere Avrom’s Asylum was as good as its name. The crowded shelves provided insulation from the unrest beyond its door, and