Motherless Brooklyn

“Just that I’m not acquainted with this giant killer you keep talking about. Are you sure you’re not imagining things?” She turned and handed me the lighter, plucked the cigarette from her lips and held it out. “Would you light this for me, Lionel?” I heard a weird vibration in her voice, as though she were about to cry again, but without the anger this time, maybe begin to mourn Minna at last. I took them away from her, put the cigarette in my own lips, and turned my back to the wind.

By the time I had it lit she’d taken her gun from her purse.

I put up my hands instinctively, dropping the lighter, to make a pose of surrender but also of self-protection, as though I might deflect a bullet with Frank’s watch like Wonder Woman with her magic wristbands. Julia held the gun easily, its muzzle directed at my navel, and now her eyes were as gray and hard to read as the farthest reaches of the Maine horizon.

I felt jets of acid fire in the pit of my stomach. I wondered if I would ever get used to facing gunpoint, and then I wondered if that was really anything to aspire to. I wanted to tic just for the hell of it, but at the moment I couldn’tlignk of anything.

“I just remembered something Frank once said about you, Lionel.”

“What’s that?” I slowly lowered one hand and offered her the lit cigarette, but she shook her head. I dropped it on the lighthouse deck and ground it under my shoe instead.

“He said the reason you were useful to him was because you were crazy everyone thought you were stupid.”

“I’m familiar with the theory.”

“I think I made the same mistake,” she said. “And so did Tony, and Frank before that. Everywhere you go, somebody who Gerard wants dead is made dead. I don’t want to be next.”

“You think I killed Frank?”

“You said we’re the same age, Lionel. You ever watch Sesame Street?” she said.

“Sure.”

“You remember the Snuffleupagus?”

“Big Bird’s friend.”

“Right, only nobody could see him except Big Bird. I think the giant’s your Snuffleupagus, Lionel.”

“Shockadopalus! Fuckalotofus! The giant is real, Julia. Put the gun away.”

“I don’t think so. Step back, Lionel.”

I stepped back, but I pulled out Tony’s gun as I did it. I saw Julia’s fingers tighten as I raised it to her, but she didn’t fire, and neither did I.

We faced one another on the lighthouse rail, the vast sky dimming everywhere and perfectly useless to us, the ocean’s depths useless, too. The two guns drew us close together and rendered the rest irrelevant-we might as well have been in a dingy motel room, with an image of Maine playing on the television set. My moment had come at last. I had a gun in my hands. That it was trained not on Gerard or the giant or Tony or a doorman but on the girl from Nantucket who’d grown into Frank Minna’s bruise-eyed widow, who’d chopped off her hair and tried to retreat to her waitress past and instead been cornered by that same past, by Gerard and the giant and Tony-I tried not to let it bother me. I’d been wrong, Julia and I had nothing in common. We were just any two people who happened to be pointing guns at one another now. And Tony’s gun had object properties all its own, not a fork nor a toothbrush but something much weightier and more seductive. I slipped off the safety with my thumb.

“I understand your mistake, Julia, but I’m not the killer.”

She had both hands on the gun, and it didn’t waver. “Why should I trust you?”

“TRUST ME BAILEY!” I had to scream it into the sky. I turned my head, bargaining with my Tourette’s that I could let the one phrase fly and then be done. I tasted salt air as I screamed.

“Don’t scare me, Lionel. I might shoot you.”

“We’ve both got that same problem, Julia.” In fact my syndrome had just discovered the prospect of the gun, and I began to obsess on pulling the trigger. I suspected that if I fired a shot out into the sky in the manner of my verbal exclamation, I might not survive the experience. But I didn’t want to shoot Julia. I flicked on the safety, hoped she didn’t notice.

“Where do we go from here?” she said.

“We go home, Julia,” I said. “I’m sorry about Frank and Tony, but the story’s over. You and me, we made it through alive.”

It was only a slight exaggeration. The story would be over at some secret moment in the next few hours or days when something found Gerard Minna, a bullet or blade that had been searching for him for almost twenty years.

Meanwhile, I flicked the safety back and forth, impelled, counting. At five I stopped, temporarily satisfied. That left the safety off, the gun ready to shoot. My fingers were unbearably curious about the trigger’s action, its resistance and weight.

“Where’s your home, Lionel? Upstairs from L and L?”

“Saint Vengeance Home for Bailey,” I ticced.

“Is that what you call it?” said Julia.