Chapter 16

   

                Maxwell lost sight of Tom's jeep within minutes of leaving the club, as both vehicles twisted out from the core of Paterson's strip row, over the Madison Avenue Bridge and into the People's Park section, Route 80s's night time traffic humming between the bridge in a 24 hour circus of cars and trucks heading in and out of Manhattan.

                Route 80 here broke Paterson into pieces, slicing off the Lakeview section from lower portion of the East Side, and People's Park from the still thriving industrial base along Rail Road Avenue in South Paterson. On one side, brick and concrete decorated the landscape accompanied by the smell of tar and chemicals, on the other side, a strange peace fell over Maxwell, as three story houses emerged again in a brief, snapshot of what the Northside of Paterson once was. People's Park was an aberration, a throw-back to a time when a strong Italian, Irish and Jewish community thrived here, owning their own homes, running their own businesses, shaping the city with its hopeful pro-business conservative sense that mostly vanished later with the construction of the malls in Wayne.

                As Maxwell's car eased up to the 21st Avenue light, he gazed out at the now darked doors, and the familiar building around which he had once played with friends when he was very young, recognizing the allies through which he had run when fleeing the police with Puck.

                It was to one of these allies that Puck had fled the night of the robbery, the smell of gun powder still clinging to his clothing and his hands, as did the smell of blood, one hand clutching the paper bag into which he had dumped the liquor store cash.

                "Let me off here," he had told Maxwell. "I can vanished here, and you'd better get off the street as soon as you can, too. The cops are going to go wild once they get the report about the shooting."

                "Shooting?" Maxwell said, grabbing Puck's arm before the now nearly 18-year-old boy could slip out into the dark. "You didn't say anything about a shooting."

                "I didn't say anything about the robbery either," Puck said, grinning, one front tooth cracked with a small chunk missing, this leaving a slanted crack. "But you went along with that."

                "I wouldn't have if I'd known what you were up to before I drove you there. Was anybody hurt?"

                "Don't be so stupid," Puck said, "or pretend like you're so innocent. You've been through all the other shit with me from stealing cigarettes from the supermarket to setting off cherry bombs in the church. So why shouldn't we get some money, too?"

                "I asked if anybody was hurt."

                "There generally is when a gun goes off."

                "How bad?"

                "How the hell should I know, I wasn't going to stick around to get a medical report."

                "My God!" Maxwell moaned.

                "Look, friend," Puck said. "Just do what I'm telling you. Let me slip away into this alley, then you go home. No one's ever going to believe an innocent like you helped kill anybody."

                "Kill?" Maxwell said, his voice shrill. "Someone is dead on account of this?"

                "I told you, I don't know anything for sure," Puck said. "I just pulled the trigger. I saw blood. I saw the fool fall. Yeah, he could be dead, or he could be dying, I just don't know."

                "We've got to go back," Maxwell said, and reached for the gear shift.

                "Fuck you!" Puck said, poking the still warm pistol into Maxwell's face. "You're going to do exactly what I tell you. If you get caught and talk, I'll fry. Which means you're not going to get caught, or talk or go back."

                Puck, however, had no time to pull the trigger. One moments he held the pistol, the next minute, Maxwell did, and Maxwell immediately tossed it out the driver's side window, where it clattered on the pavement before striking the far curb.

                "You idiot!" Puck howled, and with the bag of money still clutched in his free hand, he leaped out of the car, running around the rear of the car to retrieve the pistol. Maxwell slammed the car into gear and roared off, leaving smoke the smell of rubber in his wake.

                Back, he drove, back down 21st Avenue, right onto Madison Avenue, then straight, following the same path then as he drove now, although now, his foot pressed less urgently on the accelerator, and the reflection of his car moved more slowly from store front window to store front window. The dark around him held the same sense of terror, as if he expected a sudden explosion of lights and sirens forcing his younger self to pull over to the curb.

                Maxwell remembered his stoned younger self parking the car and stumbling through the downtown streets, remembered showing up in front of town hall where he pitched his pennies at the statues, partly enraged at Puck, but more at himself for being so stupid. And he remembered Officer Wilson's face, not the puffy grey fraud Maxwell had most recently seen at the falls, but the hard face, asking him what he was doing, then grinning as he called in other officers to arrest him, not for pitching pennies, but for murder.

                No sign of Puck showed now, though in the dark streets, similar figures buzzed in and out of allies like flies, eyes flashing in the passing beams of Maxwell's car's headlight, faces dirty and stained from their search through trash bines and people's yards. Many scurried away, others remained, stares fixed on the car.

                Gradually, the neighborhood changed, and Maxwell squinted out at the buildings trying to recall his previous journey, that specific route that had brought him and Patty from Wolfman's club to Patty's apartment. Maxwell's thousand and one previous wanderings into this neighborhood as a kid interfered with the more recent memory, each leaping out of him with a fragment of memory. Like the time he sand "I heard you're getting married" to his 16-year-old best friend, Dave, outside the Dairy Queen, or the time he and Hank crashed Hank's mother's Oldsmobile into the side of a bus on Park Avenue.

                "What took you so long?" he heard his younger self asking over the span of years, the image of his uniformed uncle swarming into his life after his three days in jail. "Why did you leave me here."

                "I didn't know," Uncle Charlie said, gathering Maxwell into his huge arms. "I was off in Oklahoma with my unit. No one called me or I would have flown back right away."

                The man smelled of Old Spice, though in shaving he had left a rough stubble on his lower chin, nicking himself a few times in other places.

                "They kept coming at me," Maxwell mumbled, his whole body now limp and his eyes so heavy with weariness he could hardly keep them open, despite the delight at seeing his uncle again.

                Charlie glanced at the guards, who hid behind the barred doors on either side of the visiting room.

                "What happened in there?" he shouted at them. "What did you do to the boy."

                One guard poked his nose around the edge of a wired window, looking sheepish.

                "We didn't do nothing to him," he said, though in the same guilty tones Maxwell himself had used when omitting some relevant fact, guilty of neglect rather than action. "He's all right, isn't he. He don't have no bruises on him, does he?"

                "Lucky for you, he doesn't," Charlie said. "Now how do I go about getting him out of here."

                Although struck with the urge to fly, Kenny did not press down hard on the accelerator, keeping the speedometer needle precisely at 25, as behind him the two cops faded into silhouettes, amid flashing lights above their cars. Then, as if one cop was angry, those lights blinked off and the cop car did a squealing three-point turn in the street, traveling in the opposite direction.

                Kenny focused his attention ahead, buildings full of store fronts framing the new block: shoe store followed by delicatessen, newspaper and tabaco stores, windows full of signs for cigarettes in one store, while the houseware store's window glinted with clutches of copper pans, his headlights bringing each to life. He had come through this block before, years ago, but had never lingered, the aging Italians then more in their prime, guarding their doorsteps with brooms and curses, despising any encroachment by the long-haired 1960s flower children, dissuading any invasion of blacks or Latinos or any children that were not their own.

                Time had made the place look sad, creating sags in the once proud face of the neighborhood, pealing the paint from the wooden doors, leaving in its place, cracks of rotting grey. This sadness had escaped Kenny during his previous ride to Patty's, but now after the scene and the near battle at the Palace, after the few beers whose glow had worn off, he felt cheated and old, and missed those days when he had been less chained to job and routine, and ached for a chance to go south to Nashville, and its life dedicated to poetry and music.

                Now slithering creatures Kenny might have expected to haunt the streets downtown encroached, shadowy figures sliding back into the doorways as his headlights revealed them, beings no longer either black or white, but that onerous grey which seemed to strip them of all humanity. When Kenny pulled the car to the curb and shifted the gears into neutral and turned off the engine, the shadows vanished with only the thin whisper of a sweet and sour vapor hinting of their former presence, sweet with a disturbing under tone of chemical, which made him pause as he climbed out of the car.

                It smelled like a familiar perfume, but he couldn't quite figure out where he had smelled it before, yet when he sniffed again, it was gone, and all he could now smell was the nearby river. He stood there for a moment, the cool air swirling around him, his weariness making thinking hard. Finally, the issued seemed moot, he shrugged, and sighed and surveyed the block, then made his way along the sidewalk until he found the doorway through which Patty had vanished the last time when he dropped her off. Like the other doors, this one was in need of painting with huge splinters of wood falling in from its frame. The outer door lacked a lock, although a hole existed where it should have been. Someone had pried off the inner latch, without removing it entirely, keeping the door from closing properly. When Kenny touched it, the whole door shuddered in, groaning at the hinges.

                The small vestibule reminded Maxwell of the tenements he had seen on the Lower Eastside in Manhattan, with the same tiled floor and the same brass mailboxes inset into the left side wall, only these tiles were worn so smooth they had lost all sense of pattern, and the locks on the mailboxes had been wedged open, leaving their contents to overflow to the floor. The remains of a tiled mural showed on the right wall, from the days when the neighborhood had been mostly Italian, with the faded image of near naked ladies lying in luxury beside a Roman bath. Someone had spray painted the word "fuck" across the tiled surface.

                Maxwell pressed one of the six pearl-colored buttons that proposed to serve as doorbells, even though only two of them still glowed. No name marked any of them so he had to guess which one was to which apartment on which floor. No one bothered to buzz him in, nor did he need a buzzer to enter the building, since someone, perhaps the same fellows that had broken the mail boxes and spray painted over the naked ladies, had kicked in this door, leaving its lock in a shambles of splintered wood and twisted metal.

                Maxwell pushed the door in with the tips of his fingers. No sound accompanied its opening, though he heard something stir in the dark hall beyond, though squint as he might he could made out nothing but a single slanted beam of light working its way down through the stair banister from the floor above. The stairs rose along the right wall while a narrow hall penetrated the building along the left with two or three closed doors exiting into it. The first door glinted with a chrome #1, he could see no numbers on the other doors.

                From above, and flowing down the stairs from one of the upper floors, music boomed, filling the former silence with echoes as if someone had turned it on with a light switch, loud, vibrating music Maxwell could feel through the floor and when his hand touched the banister, through that as well. The whole apartment building seemed to act as one huge woofer to one huge speaker, but being inside now, Maxwell could not make out what song was playing. He climbed the stairs slowly, as the stairs groaned under each step and the volume of the music rose. He kept thinking the vibrations would shake the building to pieces and that he would plunge straight down when the stairs collapsed.

                Finally, he reached the top floor and Patty's door. Someone had hung up a sign saying "Home Sweet Home," numerous other hands had added sentiments of their own in scrawled handwriting, some in ink, some in felt marker, some in lipstick. Some of these remarks simply said "BG was here," another said "Go home, fool, before it's too late."

                Maxwell rapped sharply on the fat wooden space beneath the sign. If he expected anyone inside to hear him, he was disappointed. With the volume so loud, a sledge hammer pounding on the door would have attracted no attention. He then pounded with his fist, and remarkably, the unlocked and unlatched door opened in, and a shadow moving passed, instantly fell against the door, slamming it in Maxwell's face.

                One lock snapped, then a second, and then, leaving a dent in the air nearly as deafening as the unbearable sound, the music stopped. It took Maxwell a moment to hear the whispered voice through the door asking "Who is it?" He hardly recognized Patty's voice, it sounded so scared.

                "It's me," Maxwell said, his own voice sounding strange in the sudden quiet.

                "Me who?"

                "Maxwell Zarra."

                "I don't know any Maxwell Zarra, go away."

                "But you asked me to come," Maxwell insisted, sensing the shadow inside moving away, catching a glimpse of it in the peep hole as it returned to the door.

                "I did?"

                "Yes," Maxwell said. "You told me to meet you here."

                "Longfellow?" the voice said. "Is that really you?"

                Maxwell let out a long sigh. "Yes," he said, "I guess that’s who I am."

                "Well," Patty said, rushing to open the locks nearly as quickly as had latched them. "Why didn't you say so in the first place?"

                She threw the door open and grinned, leaving Maxwell a little startled at the changed woman he found inside. Instead of the slinky bar gear, she wore a loose sweat shirt that came down to her bony knees. Oddly enough, he liked the new version better than the old. She glanced nervously over her shoulder, as if fearing to find someone there.

                "Who are you looking for?" Maxwell asked.

                Patty blinked. "I'm not looking for anybody," she snapped, then shut and locked the door.

                Maxwell, however, took note of the frayed edges around the inside frame of the door, where the molding had been splintered and repaired, and the old standard lock twisted into uselessness.

                "Give me a minute and I'll finish dressing," Patty said. "Then we can go out and get food, I'm famished."

                "But it's four in the morning."

                "So?"

                "So where do we go this time of night?"

                "You don't get out much, do you?" Patty said. "Just wait there."

                Patty vanished through a door at the other end of the room, leaving Maxwell to himself. The apartment surprised him, build like a wheel with all the rooms spokes extending out from the kitchen. Wide door to the right lead into Patty's bedroom, another, less wide door to his immediate right led to a room with a couch.

                On the kitchen table were the makings of a mixed drink, an act Maxwell's arrival had interrupted, ice melting in a tall glass with a bottle of vodka and container of orange juice sitting beside it. A dozen roses spouted from a vase in the center -- the unopened card stood at the base.

                "You like my flowers?" Patty asked, poking her head out the bathroom door.

                "Yes," Maxwell said, fingering the card. "But don't you want to know who they're from?"

                "I know who sent them," Patty said, from around her toothbrush and a mouthful of foam. "They always come from the same person."

                "He must like you a lot."

                "He loves me."

                "Do you love him?"

                "Of course not," Patty said. "Men are a dime a dozen. But you can't get a dozen roses for a dime."

                She vanished back into the bathroom again, twisted on the water, spat, gargled, spat again, then turned off the water and remerged, declaring that she was finally ready.

                "Nice place you have here," Maxwell said, "though it seems a little small."

                "Which is why I hate it," Patty said. "Sometimes I feel as if I'm in a cage when I'm here. That's why I spend as little time here as possible."

                "Where do you go?"

                "I go out," Patty said impatiently. "There's always someone willing to take me out and feed me, like now. If you don't mind, let's go. I'm hungry."

                Maxwell nodded, turned, then stopped abruptly, catching a whiff of the now fading scent, something so sweet it smelled like perfume, but with that chemical after scent. It was the same smell he had caught in his own loft earlier.

                "What's that smell?" he asked, snifting again, although the more he tried to recall it, the more the scent faded away.

                "What smell?" Patty asked, seeming suddenly cautious as she studied him.

                "Sort of sweet, yet not sweet," Maxwell said. "I keep running into it in different places."

                "I don't know what you're talking about," Patty said. "I suppose it's my perfume. Does it bother you?

                He sniffed in her direction and caught the sweet smell she exuded, a scent equally familiar from the days when Suzanne used it, very rare, very expensive, but not the same smell he sought now.

                "No," he said. "I know Joy perfume when I smell it, and though I like it, it's not the smell I mean. Oh, well, it's gone now."

                For a moment, he stared passed Patty, caught up in some private vision the perfume itself brought on, blinking it away to have it replaced by a shaft of light rising over the distant horizon, light that was rapidly spreading across the wide Hackensack River valley from the direction of New York City. It was not dawn yet, but a warning of it, and under it, the electric sea of man-made lights still dominated, as if someone had turned the world upside down and he was looking down onto a sky full of twinkling stars. But in the shadows he could not make out the details of the landscape, the landmarks of his life, the curve of the Passaic River, slithering around the edges of Paterson like a serpent, dark, deadly, dangerous, yet not without its attraction.

                Maxwell sighed, glanced back at Patty's impatient face, then said: "Okay, let's go."

                **********

 

                 A crisp wind blew inward from the end of the street, sweeping up newspapers, brown bags, fast food wrappers and last season's brown leaves, each item clicking and clacking along the curb and sidewalk as they stepped out of Patty's building. Maxwell felt that it would be the last great frost of the season, like a furious breath sucked in and expelled before giving way to the warmer weather of spring.

                "My God!" Patty said as they approached his car. "I forgot you drive a dinosaur."

                "It's not as much a disaster as it looks," Maxwell said, pleased at her reacting. Her attitude had annoyed him most of the night. "You have any reservations about being seen in it?"

                "A few," Patty said. "But I was thinking of the restaurant's management. They're not used to people driving up in cars -- well, as primitive as this."

                "I'm sure they'll get over it," Maxwell said, "or shall we call the whole thing off?"

                "I was thinking more of your embarrassment than theirs," Patty said. "But if you don't care, then neither do I. Come on. Open the door. I'm hungry; I don't need to feel cold, too."

                Maxwell unlocked her door first, allowing her to climb in, then closed and locked it behind her. He circled around the front of the car, aware of her disapproving gaze, she looking the way a movie star might if suddenly dumped into a Volkswagen bug. He unlocked the driver's side door and slid in behind the steering wheel.

                "All set?" he asked, fitting the key into the ignition.

                "I've been driven in a car before, Longfellow," she said. "I've even been driven in this car. I don't need for you to prepare me for it like a Nasa launch. And we're going to a restaurant, not the moon."

                Still, when Maxwell turned the key and the motor's rumble shook the car's frame, dash board mirror and seats, Patty flinched, just the way Maxwell had when he had sat where she was sitting now and it was his uncle who started the motor from behind the wheel, Charlie laughing uproariously at Maxwell's reaction.

                "Is it safe?" Maxwell had asked, far less convinced about the prospect of taking off than Patty was now.

                "Safe?" Charlie asked in that odd macho philosophical way of his, something he adopted when putting Maxwell on. "Is anything safe? Is walking across the street safe? Is sleeping in a bed safe?"

                It was the kind of answer that still annoyed Maxwell, which meant it was no answer at all, more than typical of Charlie who seemed to enjoy watching Maxwell squirm -- at least squirm long enough for Charlie to take pity, then the man would drop the phony philosophy and talk more seriously.

                "No, Max, it is not safe," Charlie had said, as the engine rumbled and shook, making it seem as if the whole world shook outside the car as well. "This is a powerful car. It goes very fast. But it is only as safe as you make it. Get careless with it and it would be the most dangerous thing you ever deal with, get stupid in it and it could get you killed."

                As in Karate, Charlie told him, everything’s is a matter of self-control, and conscious care.

                "If you learn to use the machine correctly, testing its limits only at need, you're safe enough," Charlie said. "But don't ever trust it completely. It is a machine, and you need to watch it, maintain it, and learn its in and outs. But no one ever learns it all. It'll always have a subtle surprise for you when you least expect. The only thing you can really rely on is your own brain."

                And from that beginning, Charlie taught Maxwell everything, from how to change the car's oil, tires, air filter, and wipers to how its engine rain and how some fool on a Detroit assembly line put it together half asleep. Charlie thought Maxwell how to drive it, how not to drive it and how to keep it from driving him. But during that first time, with Maxwell gripping the dashboard and door handle, Charlie showed him what that car could do.

                The fright of that first ride had never left Maxwell, no more than the fright of his first bout on the karate mat with Charlie, each situation seeming to test something inside Maxwell that had nothing to do with the car or karate.

                Yet when Maxwell found the car in the junk yard years later, he felt like shit.

                He still couldn't explain why. But seeing that poor metal beast with mud up to its fenders made him feel as if he had uncovered his uncle Charlie's grave, the broken headlights like open eye sockets out of which the eyeballs had already rotted.

                "Well?" Patty asked sharply. "Are we going for food or do you just want to sit here daydreaming?"

                Maxwell blinked away the vision of a dead Charlie, grinned, then engaged the gears, the car sliding out into the road like a prowling shark, all of its power suppressed, all of its rage waiting for Maxwell's feet and hands to let it loose.

                But when he went to press down on the gas, a sleek black Trans Am zoomed passed, the roar of its engine sending shock waves through Maxwell's car.

                "It's that fuck again!" Maxwell yelled and slammed Charlie into another gear, his car roaring after the black car as if echoing Maxwell's rage, his headlights illuminating the tinted glass and the Florida license plate on the car ahead.

                "NO!" Patty yelled, clutching at Maxwell's arm. "Don't go after him."

                For the first time since meeting Patty, Maxwell saw real fear registered in her eyes, fear that called up a history of things that only Patty knew.

                "You mean to tell me you know that bastard?" Maxwell asked, suddenly as annoyed at her as he was at the driver of the mysterious Trans Am.

                "You mean to tell me you don't?" Patty said, some mental eyelid sliding down over her look of fear, leaving her with only an expression of surprise.

                "I only know him from the last time he pulled a stunt like that," Maxwell said, glaring out at the fading rear lights as Charlie slowed and the Trans Am didn't. "Who is he? An old boyfriend of yours?"

                Patty stared at Maxwell, her gaze working up his face from his mouth to his eyes, then with her own expression seemingly even more perplexed, she shook her head.

                "Yes, he was a boyfriend once, sort of, and he wants to be my boyfriend again. But I won't bore you with the details, or let him ruin our time together. Drive on; I'm hungry."

                Maxwell did not looked happy or convinced over the limited explanation, yet nodded slowly and slowly regeared the car so that it moved more quickly, glancing twice into the rear view mirror for another possible ghost emerging out of the dim dawn light. He glanced at Patty, too, but she stared straight ahead at the road, her face as blank and untroubled as any stranger on the street. Yet, behind her closed eyes, secrets glinted, secret of the bar, secrets of the private side of her life she rarely spoke of.

                She seemed to live her life under layers of stories, talk about the New York Giants, talk about other men. In her way, she reminded Maxwell of Creely, with the same sensation coming over him now driving through the streets of Paterson as when Maxwell had first met Creeley in the downtown headshop called "Stop the World."

                Maxwell remembered the smell of the incense, that smoky sharpness so thick his eyes watered when he eased through the door, black lights altering the reds and purples and blues of the posters into an odd radiance, as if the grey ordinary downtown outside the door had led him to an alien landscape lightyears away.

                Over several years, he would come there often, visiting the high priest of Paterson the way Catholics might a cardinal or pope, Maxwell among the many hippies who found this small island of hip the way Arthur had found Avalon, there in the mists, real to those who were willing to accept its reality, raided weekly by the police who mistook the mysticism for narcotics.

                Even Charlie had had little good to say of the place, before his going off to war, warning Maxwell to keep his distance, little realizing that Maxwell had already made the pilgrimage and had already succumbed in some important, yet immeasurable way to its influences, disturbed by something that was not on display it its glass cases, was not a hash pipe or rolling paper, not a head band or string of beads, though each of these things added flavor to that thing he could not name.

                He remembered having to squint through the smoke to make out the gaunt face seated on a wooden bench behind the counter, to make out the face of a man who already looked old, and yet not old at all, the long white hair and bushy white eye brows unable to age the sharp blue eyes that seemed unaffected by the smoke or lack of light, a figure dressed in a purple Nehru shirt with neck so thick with beads he might have been a Native American Indian dressed for ceremony, and his vest so full of buttons he might have been a Madison Avenue bill board advertising the new culture.

                Maxwell, of course, has seen such images before, displayed on the nightly news with the nearly constant reports of campus unrest, the TV cameras dollying in for closeups of the agitators, only on the younger radicals, the buttons and beads had seemed like artificial adornments. Even during that first moment glimpsing Creeley, Maxwell saw how appropriate they were to the older man, as if he had worn them before any one else had thought them up, with him, seated like he was in the center of Paterson waiting for the world to catch up with him.

                "Knowledge is power," Creeley told Maxwell many years later, when the grey had turned to white, and he looked as much like Merlyn or Gandalf as any picture Maxwell had seen. "You keep it until you need it, and you never give it away."

                "But that's crazy," Maxwell protested. "That goes against everything this country preaches. What about public education? What about fighting ignorance?"

                At this, Creeley actually howled, then slowly because a diatribe Maxwell had heard many times about America's need for its ignorant masses, and how public education was a farce. Although the exact details escaped Maxwell now, the meaning remained, fixed in the back of his head even as he drove through the winding streets of North Paterson with Patty at his side.

                "So where are we going?" he asked, abruptly breaking the silence.

                "Can I trust this rust bucket to drive on the highway?" she asked.

                "Yes."

                "Then get on Route 80 east," she said. "I'll tell you where to get off."

                "We can't go too far, I don't have much gas."

                "It's not far, I promise," Patty said, in such a tone of voice that Maxwell half expected to find himself in New York City or a point even farther east. Then, something dark turned onto the street behind them, a wraith of a car with its headlights turned off. Maxwell didn't need to see the Trans Am decal to how which car it was.

                "Our friend is back," Maxwell said in a flat voice.

                "WHAT?" Patty said, twisting around in the seat, squinting back into the dark street behind. "Where? I don't see anything."

                "About a block back. He has his headlights off."

                "Is he following us?" Patty asked, her voice cracking.

                "I do believe that's the idea," Maxwell said.

                "Oh God!"

                "Do you want me to lose him?"

                Patty glanced up, her eyes now so dilated all traces of the blue ceased to exist. "In this piece of shit?"

                "This car might not look as good as a Trans Am, but it can blow that car off the road, especially if I can get onto the highway."

                "And get us killed trying," Patty mumbled.

                "Would you rather I pulled over and flagged him down?"

                Patty glanced back into the darkness again, bit her lip, then slowly shook her head. "I'd like to avoid him if we could," she said.

                "Fine," Maxwell said, gunning the engine a little, not to get away from the shadow, but to egg the shadow on, teasing the other car with just one small burst of the vast power Maxwell had at his disposal. With the on-ramp slightly less than two blocks away, Maxwell knew both cars would have to slow to make the horse shoe turn. But once they were on the highway, the Trans Am would eat dust.

                In the rear view mirror, the set of rectangular lights snaped on, like two slitted eyes suddenly aware of the challenge. The Trans Am picked up speed, keeping close without closing the distance. Maxwell turned onto Market Street, passed the drug store on the right, and a small lot of used cars on the left. All the lot lights were out, all the store lights, too, along this stretch between Trenton and Lakeview Avenues.

                To the right, behind and above the three storied brownstones, the dim glow of the housing projects showed, windows half illuminated from within and from the rising sun, though most of the windows remained dark and dead and deadly, like some multi-eyed insect creature from the horror movies Maxwell used to watch on television as a kid, ready to pounce upon the unsuspecting as they passed.

                Then, the walls gave way and Market Street opened into the circle and plaza that marked the foot of Lakeview Avenue, Route 80 rolling along under the bridge to the right, while above and to one side, two cemeteries stood side by side behind a long stone wall running up the hill towards Clifton.

                Maxwell steered the car right onto Lakeview Avenue, rolled over the highway bridge, then took the next left at the foot of the cemetery, that world as dark and foreboding as the projects with a single huge masurium rising from the side of its hill.

                Then, with a twist of the road, the on ramp appeared and Maxwell turned the car onto it, wheels now picking up speed as it sank under other ramps that passed this way and that in a confusing arrangement. Once free of this web, the highway appeared, and Maxwell pressed a little harder on the gas as his car came level with the numerous other lanes rushing out of Paterson for the older sections of Bergen County.

                Charlie, his car, eased out onto the sleek concrete surface like a fish finally finding its correct depth of water, the speedometer rising from 30 to 40 to 50 and then to 60 with an ease that surprised even Maxwell. The beast wanted to go faster, but Maxwell held it back, bringing the speedometer down to 55, not because of the law but because he did not want to lose his shadow, at least, not yet.

                He watched for the rectangular headlights in the rear view mirror to become visible, a sign that the black Trans Am had followed them onto the highway. He grinned when they appeared, and watched them slither across the lanes from the ramp to the fast lane without a turn signal, the foul creature making its move to catch up on Maxwell, narrowing the gap quickly and without apparent effort of its own, and without any apparent sound.

                Who could have heard anything over the roar of Maxwell's car?

                Maxwell waited, and watched, until the headlights of their pursuer eased up to his rear left bumper, vanishing from the rear view mirror only to appear wraith-like in the driver's side mirror, where the car and its lights took on the aspect of an evil face, narrowed gaze studying Maxwell's car from under heavy lids.

                "Longfellow," Patty pleaded, now clearly aware of the other car. "I don't like this game you're playing. Neither will he when he forces you off to the side of the road."

                "You worry too much," Maxwell said, fingers on his right hand curling around the gear shift.

                "I have to worry. I'm stuck in this car with a mad man, and another mad man following us. Just slow down. Let him pass. Maybe he'll be satisfied with that."

                "No," Maxwell said as his hand gripped the gear shift even tighter, like a tense finger poised on the trigger of a pistol, waiting for the right moment to shoot.

                Maxwell hardly looked at the road at all, though other cars dotted its four lanes, slow-moving cars with early morning men on their way to work or late night drunks still working their way home after the bars closed. If he saw them, it was only in the corner of his eye, and with that same unconscious sensibility he might have used to avoid a stone while jogging, aware of them, but not concerned. His attention remained fixed on the rectangular lights of the Trans Am which inched up along the driver's side of the car, growing larger in the driver's side mirror where things were always closer than they looked.

                "NOW!" he screamed, but heard his uncle's voice from that first time when Charlie had taught him about how to work that clutch to get that extra burst of speed, roaring from apparent neutral into something resembling light speed.

                The furious beast beneath him roared, every bit of its monstrous power meshing into place at once. The moment was the moment for which it had been built, as if created not for the ground, but for flight. Indeed, only friction defied it, as the tires struggled against the ground, rubber threatening to explode into flame as it was pressed to propel the great machine forward, burning in place for that instant as if their previous speed had become a moot issue and both he and the Trans Am started from a standing position, smoke casting is pale glow over those yellowed Trans Am eyes.

                Then, with the wheels re-engaged, Maxwell's car shot forward leaving the smoke and the Trans Am behind, the yellowed eyes, while not shrinking as quickly as the scenery of Paterson, falling back despite its own surge forward and its own degree of smoke.

                Patty's head and torso twisted around, her open mouth and open eyes broadcasting her disbelief, just as Maxwell had acted when Charlie had opened up the car's potential for him that first time many years earlier. She stared back at the shrinking Trans Am headlights, then looked at Maxwell again.

                "How did you do that?" she demanded to know, her tone both shocked and suspicious.

                "Do what?"

                "Get away like that. I know that car and its driver. Neither one is a slouch."

                "But neither one is good enough to compete with me and Charlie," Maxwell said and grinned.

                "You're full of shit!" Patty said, shock fading, her expression like that of a person just witnessing a cheap carnival trick, not certain about how it was done, but feeling cheated just the same.

                "No, I'm not," Maxwell said. "At least not about Charlie I'm not. Your boyfriend’s car wasn't built to compete with monster cars like this. Environmental laws have changed, emission standards grow more strict."

                "Are you saying this hunk of junk is better than that car?" Patty asked, her voice now fully defiant. "This thing has to be 20 years old."

                "I didn't say better, I said quicker, at least in a straight out race," Maxwell said. "That car has better steering, brakes and a better ignition system, with all sorts of computer generated stuff inside. It makes up for what it lacks in power with programing and subtle exterior design. In the city, with tighter turns, it might be able to outdistance me. But out here where there aren't any turns, where it's all power against power, he can't compete."

                Maxwell let the car roar on for a while, then eased down the speed, its speedometer dropping from where he had pinned it at 130 to 120, then finally leveling off into the mid-90s. Even he didn't dare keep it so high as to test its long term endurance. He knew he could blow a valve or send a rod reeling through the block. He was shocked that it had run so smoothly at that elevated speed, not shaking the way old cars tended, or leaving a trail of nuts and bolts in the smoke along the highway.

                Maxwell hadn't finished with the hydraulics, still needing some of the tools to reach and repair those parts normally done at the factory or in the better repair shops. He also feared the police, knowing that he had passed into a more conservative Bergen Country with its radar traps set to take in strangers.         The car had dropped to 75 now.

                Maxwell's heartbeat slowed, too, and his fingers eased their grip on the gear shift.

                He glanced at Patty, who still stared at him with the same expression of total disbelief.

                "You," she said in a hushed voice, "and this hunk of junk, blew away the Boss in his own car?"

                "The Boss?" Maxwell said, glancing at her with a puzzled expression of his own, his foot easing even more off the gas, but this time unintendedly. "That was The Boss back there in that Trans Am?"

                "So do know who he is?"

                "Only by report, and only recently," Maxwell said.

                "He isn't going to take kindly to that."

                "I suppose not," Maxwell said.

                "I’m sure he's back there fuming and plotting a way to get even with you."

                "So he's as bad as people say? If someone like Tommy is cared of the Boss, then this Boss must be one mean fucker."

                 "Being afraid of the Boss is a smart thing."

                "What do you think he'll try and do to me?"

                "Have your legs broken, maybe," Patty said.  "Get off at the next exit. Even after all that I'm still hungry."

                ***********

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