Small Town

Your bladder was a problem once every hour or so, or more frequently if you’d been spending too much time at Starbucks. Your brain was dangerous every minute you were out there. Because it could get bored, and it could wander, and the thing you were waiting for could happen right in front of your eyes and you’d miss it because your mind was somewhere else.

It was a funny thing, but detectives weren’t the best choice for a stakeout. Patrolmen tended to be better, especially veterans who had never got a gold shield and never would. It wasn’t that they were stupid, or lacked ambition. What they lacked was imagination.

And imagination was the common denominator of detectives. It wasn’t enough by itself to get you a promotion, good luck and good connections played a bigger role than anyone cared to admit, but still it seemed to be part of the makeup of virtually every detective he’d known.

On stakeout, it was a curse. A sufficiently unimaginative man could stare out a car window at a front door, or crouch in a closed van listening to a wiretap, for hours on end, thinking of nothing but the job he was doing. A man with an imagination would try to do just that, but his mind would jump from one thing to another, going off on tangents, and he’d lose track of what put him there in the first place.

Again, a partner helped. The two of you could talk, and one could bring the other back to the here and now.

Alone, well, it was a problem.

Right now, for instance, he was working hard to stay on top of things. He’d peed not twenty minutes ago, at the men’s room of the café, and had resisted the urge to pick up a small bottle of Evian water at the bar on the way back. And now he was watching the crowd, keeping an eye on the approach to the Boat Basin gates. He looked at another pigeon feeder and wondered why people fed the birds, what it was they got out of it. And he started thinking about pigeons, and how you never saw a young one and rarely saw a dead one, and why was that, anyway? And was it true that kids from the Asian subcontinent, or from Central America, or from Vietnam, trapped pigeons off the street for their parents to cook in their restaurants? And hadn’t they said the same thing a generation or two ago about the Chinese? And wouldn’t they have said much the same about the Irish, but for the fact that no Irish immigrant had ever opened a restaurant, and who would have gone there if he did? And...

He caught himself, forced his mind back to business. It was going to be a long day, he thought. It felt like it had been a long day already.

The Carpenter was watching a newsreel.

They had newsreels all the time when he was a boy. Coming attractions, and then cartoons, and a short, either a travelogue or something funny, and then the feature. Followed, more often than not, by the second feature, itself preceded by more cartoons and coming attractions.

Now you got commercials, and animated exhortations to put your trash in the basket and be quiet during the movie.

Once, he remembered, there had been a newsreel theater near Times Square that showed nothing but newsreels from morning to night, a sort of theatrical version of CNN. Television had put paid to that enterprise, as it had meant the end of newsreels altogether. So the Carpenter couldn’t be watching a newsreel. It had to be a dream.

He was awake enough to reason that out, while sufficiently asleep to remain in the dream and go on watching the dream newsreel. It was in black and white, of course, as newsreels were meant to be, and it included moments the Carpenter had seen in newsreels, or might have seen — the mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion, German soldiers goose-stepping, Allied troops liberating a concentration camp. Then, still in black and white, a plane sailed into the World Trade Center tower, and flame billowed, and the building fell in on itself.

There is an announcer throughout, and the Carpenter can hear the words he speaks but can’t make them out. And then one word leaps out, the word Carpenter, with nothing intelligible before or after it. And there he is on the screen, dressed not as he is today, in dark trousers and a dark nylon sport shirt from the store in Greenpoint, nor in the clothes he has in his backpack, his yachting costume. No, on the screen he is wearing a dark suit, like one of the ones he used to buy at Brooks Brothers, and a striped tie, and he’s surrounded by a crowd, and they’re cheering, they’re all there to honor him.

Savior of the city, he hears the announcer say, and President Eisenhower is there, smiling that huge smile of his, and Mayor Wagner, and John Wayne, and they’re giving him some sort of reward. And now the noise dies down, and he’s supposed to say something.

And can’t think of a thing to say.