Checker and the Derailleurs

“You must finish wrap.”

This whole time Rahim had been following the medical process suspiciously, examining the label on the antiseptic; when she stopped working on the bandage Rahim couldn’t contain himself.

“What?”

“Wrap,” said Rahim staunchly.

“You spy on my work and knock over a whole barrel of cullet and I still take you in to patch up your bloody bungling and I don’t do it fast enough. So sorry.”

“’Sokay,” said Rahim, who had no sense of American sarcasm. “Just finish quickly, please. Sheckair vedy tired. I take him home now.”

“Well, I’m a little tired myself,” she said with genuine annoyance. Disappointed, Checker watched her tie up his hand summarily and stand, hands on her hips. She was taller than both of them.

“Come.” Rahim took Checker’s good hand and began to pull him toward the door. The Iraqi had his proprietary side, like a severe, overly protective secretary.

Check dragged. “Can I come back?”

“What for?”

“The glass. I want to watch.”

“You’ve been watching.”

“Tomorrow!” At last Rahim succeeded in hauling Checker out the door, but not before he’d gotten one last glimpse of the glassblower, who was looking at him, he thought, terrifically hard. She had the same drastic features as Caldwell Sweets, and she certainly did look older than twenty-nine, but Checker, who had a lot of experience with looking at people right, knew full well that she was gorgeous.

3 / bad company (#ulink_93b7ab99-4b2f-53cc-9ec0-1a1eea9264a2)

Astoria Park is bordered by two bridges—on its northern end by a lumbering rusted railroad bridge called Hell Gate, named for the dangerous eddies that churn below its girders. Several workers lost their lives in its construction; gruff and awkward, Hell Gate would have bid them farewell without ceremony. It has the terse, groggy, and potentially violent character of heavy drinkers; accessible only by the desperate clambering of lonely adolescents, it isn’t a trellis to which you’d ordinarily appeal. Still, Hell Gate is comforting in its way, quiet, protective, and steady. Whenever it rained, the band huddled under its belly, leaning up against the rough concrete abutments to smoke.

The Triborough, on the southern end, is an entirely different animal. Constructed in 1936, she’s young, for a bridge. While Hell Gate arches downward, the Triborough is a classic suspension span, with the grace and desire of a cathedral. Unlike the craggy umber of her senior upriver, the Triborough is painted a soft blue-gray; while even more enormous, she never gives the impression of weight. From that vain sally over the river, the swoop and cinch of her waist, Checker had detected her feminine nature, but she still seemed to have a boyish sense of fun. Riding the powerful rise and fall of her pedestrian ramps, he could tell she was athletic, well-toned.

Checker had respect for Hell Gate; he was glad the old man was there, and did sometimes consult the older bridge on difficult and purely masculine matters, but his heart belonged to the Triborough. In spring he bounded across her walkways in new tennis shoes; in winter, Checker and his bicycle, Zefal, scrumpled fresh squeaky tracks in her snow.

While the two bridges embrace all of Astoria Park, a lush, well-populated recreation area old as the neighborhood itself, another finger of public land extends north of Hell Gate called Ralph DeMarco, recently developed with the help of nearby Con Edison to spruce up the rather bleak city projects across the street. Like so many good deeds, Ralph DeMarco has an overplanned, overdeliberate quality that defeats it. Ralph DeMarco is a failed park. It has no intermediate vegetation, for example—only very short grass and whole young trees, sunk in lifelessly regular rows. The trees themselves are pretty but too exotic—willows, cherries, and beeches; foreigners like the Indians who live here, they don’t fit in. Benches are set in optimistic semicircles, as if to encourage the kind of warm community closeness no one here feels—unwed mothers sit facing each other blankly, not talking. The railings by the river are painted a shocking shade of plum, a color some commission must have hoped would be brightening but which ended up simply peculiar.

Lately Astoria Park was thriving, overcrowded in summer, but Ralph DeMarco was nearly deserted even when it was warm, and Checker felt sorry for it. Ralph DeMarco was hanging on by a thread. He sometimes took the band here evenings just to cheer it up. The little park broke Checker’s heart. It tried too hard. It reminded him of Howard.

Besides, the relative quiet of the place had advantages, like the time last summer Danno’s Late Show was playing a Perfect Album Side from Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues. Caldwell never tired of telling the story, because that night a Corvette braved the terrifying void of the land from Con Ed and parked right in front of The Derailleurs’ ghetto blaster, challenging the Heads with loud, ill-tuned Judas Priest.

Checker had approached the man in leather leaning against the hood. “Can’t you get NEW in that car?”

“Can. Won’t. Gotta problem?”

“Actually, yes,” said Checker, with that disconcerting innocence of his that made the rest of the band’s skin crawl; for once it was apparent that Check was small. Still, he stared up at the tough with his odd Sicilian-blue eyes. “I’d appreciate it if you’d either tune into the same station or park a block or two away. They’re coming up on my favorite song.”

“And this lunk,” Caldwell would recall later, “some Hulk or Bubba or Crusher, cracks his Bud with his teeth. I don’t give a livin fuck, suck-ah. Howard here is creaming. Old J. de K. is rolling up his sleeves, so for once we’re glad the man’s had a few too many pancakes. Q.C. starts getting that Chinee squint, like maybe he’s studied karate, though all us knowing good and well Carl hasn’t even studied algebra. Rache gets this High Noon look, with hair everywhere … All the while the Heads bouncing through ‘This Must Be the Place,’ the Priest screaming, I don’t know, Hate-your-sister-smush-your-mother-kill-the-whole-world—you’ve heard their stuff. It was tense, boy. Crusher, he steps forward from the ’vette. Check, he’s had his hands behind his back the whole time, okay? And he doesn’t step back. He smiles this tiny don’t-fuck-with-me smile. The tunes, they break at exactly the same time. And for two, three seconds there’s total silence, even the wind stops. In the break, behind Check’s back, there’s a click. Oh, God. You know that sound, man. That little blade sound, and that is it, man, that is the end of the old hangout-in-the-park-one-more-summer-night kind of thing and into this, oh shit—

“Or that’s what Crusher figures, anyway, and you can see his face twist up and he reaches inside his jacket and—”

J.K. always starts laughing here.

“Shut up, man, you’ll ruin the story!”

“I heard the story a hundred time, Sweets—”

“They haven’t heard it! So don’t—”

“It a umbrella.”

“What?” asks the new audience.

J.K. keeps laughing. “The snap! Check don’t have no blade, man! It one of these portable suckers, see—”

“Shut up, J.K., it’s my story—”

“Everybody story, longhair. Real small and real sweet. Jus like a candy, that night a little candy night.”

It was, small and perfect, it lay on your tongue. That’s what nights with Checker were like. Before the man in leather had reached all the way into his pocket Checker brought the little umbrella out front and propped it pleasantly on his shoulder. “They say,” he said, “it might rain.”

His hand still in his jacket, the man released a single, unintentional guffaw.

It’s funny how people will deal with you on the level you choose for them. Suddenly everything got very subtle. The smiles. The shifts of stance. The eye contact, the looking away. “Okay, Fred Astaire,” said Crusher. “Hey, Bilgewater,” he said to the man in the passenger’s seat. “NEW.—Just for a while.” Then he raised his beer with a weird sort of—suavity. The whole thing became an excruciating, delicate joke. Checker twirled the parasol gaily on his shoulder.

Checker tried to explain later: it’s easier to change the station. All most Crushers need is a look in two blue eyes that say: The river is rushing black and furious tonight, the wind is whipping at the cherry trees and sweeping the branches of the willow like Rachel’s High Noon hair; it will rain later, lashing the rocks and bottles below us—you see, there are enough battles already. Instead, take the lights of the Triborough bright in my eyes, feel the cut of the air before a storm, try my station and roll onto the balls of your feet, coiling your calves and rippling the tops of your thighs. Keep the fight in your body. Besides, said the eyes, there is so much else to do—let me introduce you to the miracle of your neighborhood. This is Ralph DeMarco.

Later that night Checker was keeping time to the end of the Music Marathon with his drumsticks on the body of the car, trilling up and down its decals as the flames on the hood licked at their tips. But it was the snap of the umbrella that did the trick. Clear and pretty, the turn of a key in a lock. Checker changed what happened. He went in and tampered and fixed things. He tinkered with events as if nosing through the engine of a car.

As the sun set behind her, the lights of Manhattan just beginning to rise, the Triborough was in a delicate and passionate temper. The sun trembled, red like the furnace early that morning. The lines of the cables shimmered and distorted. Poignant, fleeting, something about the quality of the light transferred to Checker’s sense of the evening itself, as if he knew that the Saturdays he and the band would spend in the uncomplicated flush of each other’s company were painfully numbered. In the approaching darkness, each remaining ray sliced Checker’s chest like a shard of glass.

“Listen,” said Checker.

“What?”

“Sssh.”

The band was quiet, and for a moment only heard the murmur of cars from the bridge, the whir of a helicopter doing traffic reports, the rev of a nearby Trans Am; but gradually they each heard it, a tinkling and lapping, a singing and breaking, a sad shattering tune below the embankment on which they stood.

“Beer bottles!” said Howard.

True enough, the entire shoreline didn’t show an inch of sand or dirt but was covered instead with broken glass where locals had thrown their empties in summers past. Yet, rather than littering the bank, the bits of brown and green winked opulently in the sun. The wake of passing barges picked up pieces and threw them against each other with an Oriental pinging sound, dissonant and unlikely.

“I got a new job,” said Check.

“I thought being a bike messenger was the most majorly up-jacking job in the whole world,” said Caldwell.

“It was. Not anymore.”

“You go back there,” said Rahim heavily.