Cadence babysat Osley the rest of the day.
He had shed his coat, and his stink was only slightly muffled by the new long-sleeved T-shirt he was wearing, as if he dressed up for the occasion. He was in a zone of intense concentration.
Looking at him, she could see remnants of the young chemist focusing on his lab work, developing techniques. Yes, the spark, so long diluted with psychedelics and God knows what else was still there.
There was more, too, a heavy pall of sadness, but this was well hidden. She wondered how many different lives one old man could hold. She decided to quit hovering.
“Os, I’ll be back in a little while. You all right?”
He turned and smiled, saying, “Yeah, I’m great,” and then turned back to the papers. Scratch, think, write, his free hand pumping out some long ago rock and roll rhythm on the desk.
As she left, Cadence felt good. There was progress. In the quiet lobby, she took a bouncing skip and step and edged through the ponderously closing brass doors of the Algonquin. The doorman fussed belatedly to help, but she was gone.
Outside, she inhaled the city smells and heard the city noises and saw the city bustle all around her. Horns honked. A siren wailed a few blocks away.
At that moment, several things happened.
Across the street, a dented and city-worn delivery van was pulled up. It was going to double park. Its color was some faded and lesser version of green. On its side it bore what had once been an extravagant image of a sunlit garden, overlaid with arching, three-dimensional letters that read “SANTI’S VEGE’S”.
Cadence’s mental sketchpad took in these details, adding verisimilitude to the scene that was about to unfold.
The van slowed. The street was otherwise surprisingly empty. Down at the corner, two taxis were laboring around the turn from 6th Avenue. Before them lay the wonder of an entire block of empty Manhattan cross street.
Taxis in such a situation could proceed with caution, or they could proceed at the posted speed, or they could take the imperative third choice: Gun it! Both taxis complied fully. They simultaneously jammed accelerators and jockeyed for position.
Meanwhile, a kid, skinny and good-looking — he could easily be one of Cadence’s fifth-graders — stepped toward the slowing van. He was silky smooth and confident in his motocross jacket. He casually moved in front of the van. He collided with the last bit of its momentum, tumbled head over heels, rolled once, and lay dramatically still. The van nose-dived and screeched as the driver stood on the brake pedal and the tires skidded the last foot before stopping. The driver was a balding man in his fifties. He jumped out, his arms making hysterical waving motions. A terrified and somehow sad “AAAaahh!” cycled from his open mouth.
The van door was open. Quick as a shadow, another kid appeared at the open door, reached in, and grabbed a small leather bag from the front seat. The size and shape suggested it might hold cash receipts. He fled down the sidewalk.
The taxis were oncoming.
The fallen boy got up, seemingly fit and healthy. The van driver grabbed the kid’s jacket with one hand, pointing in the direction of his moneybag evaporating into a crowd of pedestrians. He yelled a futile, “Hey. Hey!”
The boy was trying to slip the driver’s grasp as he sized up his escape route. Cadence knew fifth graders. She could read his eyes. She saw that at any moment he was going to bolt out into the street in front of her.
The taxis were hurtling toward them.
Cadence didn’t think. She ran. She flashed in front of the first taxi and collided with the kid. This time, his backwards flip was unpracticed. They both rolled clear as the taxis slammed on their brakes and skidded and fish-tailed and swerved past them, tires screaming, white smoke boiling, the air filling with the tang of hot, abraded brake pads. The long teeth-grinding, shoulder-wincing sentence stopped. There was a void. The inevitable punctuation mark — the hollow whomp and glassy jingle of impact — didn’t happen.
On the pavement, the kid looked at Cadence. His eyes were saucers overflowing with fear and, that most fleeting thing, kid gratitude. He scrambled up and was gone.
She pulled herself up, slowly, legs like rubber. She brushed herself off and reached down to pick up her Borunda bag, surveying the deep scrapes along the sides. The driver scurried around her. A cluster of passerby milled for a moment, but the event was just a close call, not even meriting a decent gawk. She stood there, received five, maybe ten seconds of New York accolades— the maximum allowed in this City of Haste — and it was all over. The taxis moved on. The van driver had gone somewhere. The Algonquin doorman, fussing and faithful, stayed with her.
It dawned on her, as she replayed the high-def tape of what just happened, that she probably saved a life. She was wrong. She had saved two.
Thirty feet away, Barren milled with the crowd. He had seen it all unfold. The kid with his accomplice, practicing the bump and roll to fake an accident. The stuntman’s art of timing a slowing vehicle, bouncing with it, and topping the move with a fine comic book death sprawl. Then the playing-for-gold part, his buddy’s quick reach and grab heist. They were pretty good!
Just like he had been at that age.
A memory rushed through him. He and his best friend. Inseparable, they were destined to escape their little village and conquer the world together. They stole from the first incoming circus wagon, Barren got caught, and then the circus suddenly packed up and took him with them. Barren remembered the stink of the dancing bear’s urine and feces and its low grunts as he lay tied next to its cage. He remembered the lolling wagons and ox carts trying to out-pace the plague. He remembered leaving his best friend behind to dance with the Black Death.
The memory passed. Barren had stationed himself here to complete his task. Return the scribbles entire with bloody showings in hand.
He looked at Cadence and felt a hunter’s admiration for his prey. She was quick to move and selfless. A fair steward— worthy but fated — to the vile remnants of the Saga of Ara. For this moment only, he would stay his hand.
Cadence thanked the doorman. Her adrenaline was still in full flow. She needed to move. As the crowd dispersed, she decided to walk for awhile. What she really needed was to jog, find that solid, earnest conversation of feet and earth. But that would have to wait.
She walked the streets for an hour, then came back and sat in the hotel lobby. She was coming down. The adrenaline fading into an exhausted, pensive mood.
A cat, evidently a perpetual guest at the hotel and probably a mouser, watched her from its perch on the check-in desk. She purposely ignored it. Resting in the big, plush chair, enjoying the quiet and comfort, her thoughts turned to her father and his own absent, almost mythical father. She closed her eyes and felt a desert wind.
The man who was her grandfather and who was almost always gone, so the story went, sometimes came home. At those times he was quiet. Not morose, exactly, but subdued, as if gathering strength between the legs of the unfolding journey that took him, like an alcoholic, to drink on months-long benders of wandering in search of his soul. How his soul got lost was a story untold.
Nonetheless, in those times at home he had a country man’s eye for simplicity and unspoken elegance. Things he pointed out to his son, as simple as a knowing glance or a nod, were passed on, gesture for gesture, through that soundless language, to the son’s child. So might it be for generations, a kindred nuance, none knowing the source.
There was a day’s drive from their home in Western Colorado a sagebrush desert. It was set amidst low broken hills cut by tumbleweed-clogged arroyos that flanked the high green massif known as Grand Mesa. These hills and gorges, known locally as the Dobies, grew into larger canyons that dropped to the thick willow banks lining the brown flow of the Gunnison River. In some off-road spot, amidst these low hills, Jess pulled over. The jeep, rickety and open-topped, waited like a panting horse. He cut the engine and the tick and gurgle of the radiator measured the minutes as he and nine-year-old Arnie just sat there.