In the window of the bus he peered into his own dark image, thinking about Alyce and Great-Uncle Big Jim. These unknowable quantities, he felt, were what made him stagger through life. Or maybe it was his mother’s unexpected death or his father’s betrayal.
“My life hasn’t really been all that bad,” he said to the image of himself.
“What did you say?” asked the woman in the aisle seat next to him.
“Nuthin’.”
“It was something,” the youngish, round white woman said. “I heard it. I just didn’t understand the words.”
Her smile was gentle and reminded Al of a time when he wasn’t sad.
“I was sayin’ that my life hasn’t really been all that bad. I mean, I’ve had some hard times, but every trouble I’ve had has been at least partly my fault.”
“We all make our own beds,” she agreed, “but it’s God that gives us bedbugs.”
Albert laughed deeply. While laughing he tried to remember the last time he felt mirth when sober.
Mary Denise Fulmer was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. She taught middle school there and lived by herself in a small red house near the train tracks. She was unmarried and had never lived anywhere but Springfield.
“Where are you coming from now?” Albert asked.
“My grandmother lived in Montreal,” Mary Denise said. “She died last week, and I took a few days off to wrap up her affairs.”
Albert told Mary Denise about his mother’s death and his on-again, off-again ten-year bender.
“I just can’t seem to get straight,” he said more than once.
Somewhere outside of Amherst she asked, “Would you like to come stay with me for a while? You could sleep on the couch . . . or in my bed if you want.”
Albert hadn’t had a drink in thirty-four hours. He felt queasy but clearheaded.
“I really, really want to, Mary D,” he said, surprising himself with the clarity. “But I’m on a tight schedule here. I got to get to a place that’s mine. Mine.”
The plump schoolteacher smiled sadly and put a hand on his forearm. She leaned over and kissed his bristly cheek.
2.
The next twenty-two years passed like overlapping spirals drawn by a tired child on a rainy afternoon. Albert would work for weeks, sometimes for months at a time, and then he’d fall off the wagon.
But even when on a bender, Albert would always find time to beg. This practice he’d learned from his Tibetan master.
“A man with a tin cup allows the more prosperous to pay penance. Without this opportunity, their souls would surely be lost.”
Albert could imbibe prodigiously in his younger years, but after he crossed the half-century border his capacity diminished. Where at one time he could drink a fifth and a half of sour-mash whiskey, now half a bottle of cheap red wine was all he could manage before the gut rot set in.
He’d been hospitalized twice by the city and had done three stints in jail, for public lewdness, resisting arrest, and simple assault. The Eagle Heart Construction Company of Queens always took Albert back if he was sober. He’d been working for them as long as most could remember.
Between work and inebriation, jail and hospitalization, Albert lived in a cavity under an abandoned subway tunnel on the Upper East Side. This space was an underground chamber he inherited from a German survivalist named Dieter Krownen, who had returned to Munich when his mother got sick.
Chained together under metal netting in the abandoned tunnel above his subterranean lair, Albert had a collection of shopping carts in which he kept those belongings that didn’t fit in his 137-square-foot underground bunker.
Albert hadn’t realized he’d passed the half-century mark until he was fifty-three. One day he’d come across his birth certificate in an old alligator wallet in the bottom of one of the carts. The date of his birth was January 12, 1958, the time 4:56 a.m. His race was Negro, sex male, and he came into the world weighing six and three-quarter pounds.
After calculating his age, Albert stopped working for Eagle Heart Construction. Fifty, he thought, should be the mandatory retirement age in order to make space for younger workers. One of his professors at state college had told him that.
So for six months he’d been strolling around Manhattan with his travel cart. He pushed the rickety shopping cart all over the city, whispering words about his father and mother, Luellen, and always, always Alyce. He begged for a few hours each day, thinking about his deceased master and believing that he was doing penance by begging and saving souls.
One sunny afternoon he found himself on Sixth Avenue, two blocks south of Houston Street. There he stood on the corner next to a restaurant with half of its tables out on the sidewalk. He leaned against a lamppost remembering the half-told story about his great-uncle Big Jim who, Albert imagined, had killed a dozen white men in a just war.
Over the years, Albert had fleshed out the tale that his mother had tantalized him with before she died. Albert’s Jim was six foot six, with fists like hams, and very proficient with every kind of weapon. He’d fought beside Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War and had been wounded more than once . . .
While reconstituting the story he’d contrived over the years, Albert became aware of a woman crossing the street.
It was Alyce or, at least, almost Alyce. The woman walking toward him was the same age Alyce had been when Albert knew her; she was taller, with different-color eyes, blond not brunette, white not black. But in spite of all that she had the same style and poise and grace. She had the same wildness in her blue, not brown, eyes. Her gait was brash like Alyce’s, and her expression was one of mirth in the face of disaster.
This woman, who every man and woman around was looking at, walked right up to Albert and said, “Hi, I’m Frankie. What’s your name?”
“Albert.”
“You want to make some money, Albert?”
“OK.”
“Well, then,” she said, with a wry grin, “let’s go.”
Stillman’s Gourmet Grocer was a chain that had a store in SoHo. Frankie had Albert leave his cart down the block from the entrance and told him to go into the fancy supermarket before she did.
“First, go back to the meat section,” she told him, “and then to the fruits and vegetables. Whenever you see me, count to twelve and then go to the next section. Don’t act like you know me. Just count to twelve and move on.”
She laid out the plan for him to go to five different sections. He committed these destinations to memory, thinking that maybe the Tibetan notion of reincarnation was true and that Alyce had died and been reborn as Frankie.