Chapter two

 

 

            On Saturday, June 20, 1812, Rev. Hooper Cummings, of Newark, came to Paterson to preach at a Presbyterian church on the north end of town. He and his wife, Sarah, had been married about two months and decided to combine business with pleasure, vowing to see the legendary falls before they returned to Newark by mid‑week. During services, the next day, a bird "as black as a raven" flew into the church through an open window. After flying around the interior of the church three times, it alighted on the high pulpit above the minister. The bird let out an ominous croak, then flew back out.

            On Monday, June 22, the rev and Mrs. Cummings climbed the hundred steps to the solid ledge overlooking the falls and the cataract of white froth ensuing from its top. Both remarked on the marvels of nature. Both stationed themselves at the brink of the brow where thousands had stood before. When they had looked for a while, the reverend suggested they go and turned towards the path ‑‑ then he heard the scream.

            A young man grabbed the reverend from leaping after his fallen wife, leading the man down the stairs to the foot of the falls. Here the reverend broke free and ran towards the surging waters of the basin. The young man tackled him.

            The search for Sarah continued through the day and night, and the next morning searchers found her body stuck on rocks 42 feet down the chasm from the top. After they recovered the body, the reverend took her back with him to Newark. Many of the older Dutch settlers claimed her death was no accident, believing the reverend had pushed her over the falls. Songs to this effect sprang up, and were sang by kids in the streets pointed to the formerly healthy tree that overhung the chasm, which turned twisted and withered after the murder.

 

************

 

 Maxwell  turned down spruce street, taking the long way to the club. The dancers didn't start for hours yet, and the early crowd, sitting in the dim light, always made him feel uncomfortable. Too many of the truly lonely men came early, sitting mumbling to themselves over their drinks, their pain painted clearly across their faces, making them look grotesque. Wolfman rarely turned down the lights until near to when the dancers came on, and so, Maxwell's scribbling became too obvious, and they resented his writing, asking him what he thought he was doing. Those times when he did go early, he lied, drawing a laugh out of the men by saying he was creating love poems for the dancers.  Brick towers hung over spruce street where it met Market, like a great red cliff or palisade, long worn down by wind and rain, or the slow plod of weary workers over the previous two centuries. The city restored Rodgers Train Manufacturing Company building for use as a museum, though the windows remained dark and its halls mostly empty. Nearby, the 1827 Union Works stood, in much less pristine condition, used now as a Christian school with toddlers stumbling in and out during the day. But in the growing dark, both buildings looked like the dead remains of some fallen giant, windows like penny‑covered eyes, while the more ragged and unrecovered buildings behind and beside them, looked like the ruins of the castle against which the giant had stormed, doorways and broken walls strewn with trash, marked black by the lick of various fires ‑‑ junkies attempting to keep warm on cold nights The Paterson Evening News ranted and raved about the deplorable conditions. The politicians vowed to get something done. But all who lived near by, watched this part of historic Paterson crumble bit by precarious bit into dust.

            Although some blamed Mayor Graves for the disaster, the real inspiration came from his Republican predecessor, Pat Krammer, who came up with the dubious scheme to restore Paterson's greatness by emphasizing its past, the way the tall ships had during the bicentennial celebrations around the foot of the statue of liberty. Hadn't Washington and Lafayette come here? Hadn't Alexander Hamilton envisioned great things here? Why couldn't Paterson make itself over into a historic site, drawing thousands, maybe millions of tourists, even year?

            So the busy beavers in town hall tried to replicate the deeds of their forefathers, channeling money from the deep well in Washington DC that would flood the old city with new federal revenues, stirring dying cesspools to life. The cash came. The town council passed resolutions designating a whole section of the city as historic. Yet for some reason, the city fathers still haven't fathomed, those businesses ,the federal money was supposed to draw into the old city, never materialized. The torrents of tourists never came. SETA funds did produce a brief arts revival, grants for poetry, painting and music flourished, shaping this part of the city into a kind of potential SOHO.

            Then Ronald Reagan was elected president, and the trickle of federal dollars came to a stop, leaving two converted factories and a half a dozen gutted ones. Work on the historic district ceased, leaving a disaster area more intense than when before the restoration. A whole new populations moved in. Homeless people took up shelter in the ruins. Prostitutes populated the doorways of the area's store front doorways at night. Police eased through the unlighted streets with hands on their pistols ‑‑ or when on walking patrol ‑‑ with pistols drawn. Unarmed pedestrians who wandered into the area at night found themselves dragged into the shadows, raped and robbed, and sometimes murdered. Junkies and winos set up shop here in winter, the lights of their open fires visible through the gutted windows like flickering flames inside a jack‑o‑lantern. Suddenly, the city that had supplied the world with its manufactured cotton and silk produced nothing but human waste.

            The artists, poets and musicians gradually faded away, and the galleries and clubs that had come with their arrival turned into porno houses and strip tease joints where prostitutes and pimps suckered in the working men from other towns such as Clifton.

            In the end, in a perverted way, the dreams of the former mayor, Krammer, did come true. Paterson had prospered. The drug traffic increased as the town became the supermarket where the wealthy kids from places like Wayne could do their shopping. New federal money arrived in block grants for drug prevention, crime fighting and pay raises for the county jail's staff. The size of Paterson's police force tripled under the new Graves Administration. But so did the number of crimes this force tried to stop.

            Maxwell's footsteps echoed off the walls of these brick canyons as he eased down into the dark streets. The smell of refuse and human feces rose around him, even though the temperature was under 50. If he turned his head a certain way, he could catch the smell of marijuana wafting out from the few inhabited dwellings that occupied the lower portion of Market street, or the more exotic perfumy scents he couldn't always identify. Shit, piss, dope made up a permanent texture of this new Paterson, and that even more terrible smell of human decay Maxwell often caught from the bodies strewn in each doorway, the moaning and groaning masses of human waste that stirred long enough as his passing to beg him for change. These were the true and lasting pieces of Paterson's art, manufactured out of those people who had once worked in the factories here, laid off from their jobs, put out of their houses, finding easier comfort in a needle or a bottle than from the government, miserable, slimy creatures who crawled from door to door without hope or motive, with even the most basic tendencies such as self‑survival in doubt. Their faces mocked the pretentious and artificial artists that had walked these streets before them.

            Half a block down in the dark, shadowy figures stirred among the crumbling ruins, dark shapes slowly emerging from the rubble as Maxwell neared, figures as silent and deadly as sharks, the petty street punks who claimed this block or piece of block or string of dilapidated doorways as their turf. Six grim Latino faces (they could have been black or white, this district served all races and colors, and drew criminals from every part of the world like a magnet) seemed to turn towards him, their glinting eyes studying him as he passed the set of deteriorated stairs upon which they gathered. They studied him, and in the corner of his eyes, he studied them, making note of where they kept their hands, and whether or not the six young men were poised to spring. They were not. If fact, they seemed to lose interest in Maxwell as soon as he was beyond them, the nearest figure kneeling over a patch of dirt at the foot of the stairs, where he flicked a six‑inch stiletto, striking the same spot again and again in an endless and pointless repetition, one of those acts that reminded Maxwell of the pacing tigers in the zoo, exploring a space far too small, growing slowly crazy.

            If the gang noticed Maxwell at all, they also noted no ring or necklace worth their effort to snatch. He didn't even carry anything more interesting that a notebook, for which they had no use. And as he faded into the darkness beyond them, he faded from their short memory, just another wanderer among the streets of Paterson, coming through the canyons into what once served as the center of the Italian neighbor but had over time given way to the growing Black populations from the south, who in their turn gave way to the Latinos, as the Latinos now gave way to the Arabs and Eastern Europeans, each of whom built their own little empires, each of whom caused their own problems for the police.

            Maxwell remembered a time when everything here had been Italian, with Italian children drooping out upper story windows on either side, calling to each other in rich tones only the people in this neighborhood could understand, or at best, people from other neighborhoods just like this. A child then could wander a dozen blocks in any direction and not hear a word in any other language, not even English, or meet a face that did not look like their own.

            But Maxwell also remembered a time when all that changed, when the blacks came, when they brought with them on their backs a life long history of segregation, and wore in their eyes hope of change here, and disappointment at finding the whites, Italian and other nationalities, no more receptive than in the south, but angering the Italians more than any for the invasion that pushed them out of their neighborhood homes. And the Italians fled before the blacks and Latinos. At least, the rich ones did, building new houses in new neighborhoods in towns looking down the mountain on Paterson, gaudy, tasteless houses reflecting the typical tastes of men and women who knew nothing better, who lacked the WASP sensibility of class distinction, blue collar workers with capital but no conception of class. Those too poor to flee the city altogether, huddled in the corners, setting themselves up in Hillcrest or Lakeview or South Paterson, arming themselves as if they believed World War Three had already begun.

            While still, the even poorer Italians hung on, clinging to their shoe stores and pizza pallors, clinging to their ethnic pride, looking to heaven and quoting the bible as if to say: "This too shall pass," only to discover that passing would not occur in their life times and that they would have to live side by side with a new people, speaking a new language, and their children would have to learn to get along.

            Yet for all the dire predictions made by the fleeing families, little had actually changed in the neighbor, except the skin color and the spoken tongue. And if the economy hadn't declined, if the department stores hadn't fled, and the factories hadn't closed, and the master's of industry hadn't decided they needed cheaper labor in places like El Salvador, life would have continued unchanged here as it might have in places like Passaic, or Hoboken or Jersey City, with store fronts and rear apartments making up the ground floor along most streets, and tenement style apartments housing rooms full of screaming kids upstairs.

            Even as Maxwell walked, much of it looked unchanged from when he wandered here as a kid, Spanish signs just as incomprehensible to him as the Italian signs had been, hanging in the windows of the various shops he passed. Signs put up with scotch tape that had gone yellow over time. Shops with the same dilapidated sense of poverty, as if anyone of them would fall at any moment, leaving only dust. Even now, he could see the lighted rear apartments and the worried faces huddled over meager supper, mothers, fathers and children discussing strategies for keeping themselves off the streets, sweating working people who feared becoming one of the walking dead. These were the people Maxwell admired. The people with blistered fingers and troubled souls, people like his Uncle, Charlie.

             Another block closer to downtown, the bars began, and these, too, accommodated the new mixed population, each open door broadcasting a different ethnic music, and cast a different lot of inebriated characters onto the street. Slick‑haired, big‑breasted Latino women mingled with silk‑shirted, gold encrusted Latino, men, the smell of Main Street's cheapest perfumes and colognes doing battle with the traditional brewery scents of the pubs, hops and whiskies turned unreasonable sweet. The overly made‑up faces of the women turned as Maxwell passed, thick lips scarlet red, eye‑shadow applied like coats of paint. Amid the chatter of their voices rang the jingle of their jewelry. Maxwell's high school Spanish could barely translate what went on between the groups, new words sang out in a kind of verbal music to which each was inclined to dance, as the bar doors emitted a tinny Latin pop music.

            And just as suddenly as he had come upon it, Maxwell moved on, out of that orbit and into the twilight that separated cultures, the gray world at the edge where he could still find the mixture of Italian, and the invasion of the black, where he found drunken men seated in the doorways of closed business establishments. He, the son of English and Irish immigrants, as foreign among the Italian world as he was the Latino, floating through them like an asteroid rushing through their pathways on its rush towards the sun. And here, a few of the Italians glared at him, resentful at his liberties, as if sensing his ability to move from one world to another, hallow‑eyed me with Mediterranean colored skin nearly as dark as the Latinos and the blacks, with thick mustaches and short‑sleeved shirts.

            Their women looked dark, too, though less flamboyant, wedged into dark doorways with suggestive stares. Their bars less loud, with a more melodious music oozing out, like strands of the old country. Many of these women wore no makeup at all, especially the younger girls, their plain features so startling beautiful to Maxwell that he nearly stared back, though he sensed the disaster of their lives, the eagerness to escape that would eventually get them all in trouble, condemning them to bad men's beds or repeated visits to cheap hotels. Many would lose their virginity and their beauty with the same breath, seeking answers in producing babies, growing broad and fat and ugly, taking out their vengeance on the children who they bred. All day and night they would call to their children, names echoing through the brick‑faced canyons, as those children wandered among the company of dope dealers and numbers dealers and dealers of illegitimate sex.

            Then, Maxwell shifted worlds again, reaching the bars predominately occupied by blacks, though a few bottle blonde Italian women, and a few decked out Latino men mingled in, part of the cross‑cultural cool the street adopted here, the sweating black faces and steady black eyes following his passage more carefully than any in the other neighborhood, their gold chains glittering on their broad necks, their thick arms hinting of the hours of exercise, as they jostled and joked, in utter seriousness, many of these men blue collar workers by day, playing the roles of street wise by night, as scared of invasion by white men as the Italians were as scared of them, all of them struggling to maintain their place in the rapidly vanishing industry of the town, where black and white were pitted against each other in a battle to keep shrinking jobs, coming to hate each other rather than the father's of industry. Each wore the same sad expression of quiet desperation, and fought like all good men fought to keep their families from the street, knowing how easily they could make the transition, envying the apparently easier life of their brethren who made their money via street life.

            And here, too, Maxwell stared, the dark beauty of these women most attractive of all, as if the heart of the city beat inside of each, silver jewelry highlighted against their jet black skin, the glitter of the street lights glowing brightly in their eyes. And they seemed to catch is admiration, some grinning back at him as he passed, some saying hello silently with their painted lips, and their men, angry men with righteous indignation, catching the exchange, cuffing their women and glaring at Maxwell, as if to question what right a white man had to come and look like that at their women, when they had made the journey north, when they had freed themselves of slave masters and all the sexual trash slavery and post slavery had brought to them in the South.

            Even their music moved Maxwell, in a way little other music could, not primitive, the way Puck claimed it was, but drawing feelings up in Maxwell long squashed by civilized life. Something in the beat or the bass or the melody line stirred him, whether Motown, blues, traditional jazz, even rap. When this faded behind him, he missed it, tempted to find a shadow of his own nearby in which he could listen to it forever.

            Instead, he crossed over Market Street to the south side, wearing between the double and sometimes triple parked cars, crossing the lane cursing infuriated drunken factory workers, each seeking to find a parking space where none existed, red‑faced for want of another drink. The sidewalk was spacious by comparison, with only a few street souls wandering up that part of block Creeley called "Religious Row," where a string of store fronts competed with the bars, religious statutes staring eye‑ball to eyeballs with posters advertising near nude dancing girls. Each religious store had its line of Madonna’s, women with Christ children slung in their arms, lined up like new cars in a show room lot waiting for some poor soul to purchase them, each a new variety of the same old design. Yet there, imprisoned in the glass, each fact preserved its culture integrity, Latino motifs in one window, Italian in the next, black Madonna’s and Christ children in the third and so on, and so on and so on, each face bearing the image of its creator, a Latino Christ for the Latinos, an Italian Christ for the Italians, and a black Christ for the blacks.

            Maxwell stopped before the black Madonna’s, awed by the deep mahogany wood from which these were carved, mother and child lacking all the phony additions Maxwell found on the faces in the bar, no misery in their eyes, no lust in their souls, no artificial color at all. Instead, the artist seemed to have captured the heart of the African flavor in the eyes and mouths of his subjects, and their stares struck a strange chord in him, as if they were more than wood, as if they could actually see him standing on the outside of that window, and could see down deep into his soul, the stirring of passions even he didn't completely understand, the uncertain desires he felt but suppressed. Maybe these statues even caught as hint of his faith, that old magic he had learned in religious school before Charlie's death had robbed him of it, before the street had taught him not to believe in God, and those faces asking him: What are you doing here?

            Then, something stirred in the door way and a shaky, wrinkled gray hand emerged into the light, palm up.

"Spare ch‑change?" the figure asked ‑‑ the face which followed the hand as wrinkled and corroded, twisted features marring its life side as if a candle helped up to a flame, the skin around the eyes, nostril and mouth melted and hardened again. Saliva slobbered out that lipless side, clinging to the jaw before leaving its wet trail down the front of his ragged shirt.

            "S‑Spare ch‑change, s‑s‑sir," the figure asked again, advancing still farther into the light, his right hand extended as his left hand and harm hung limply at his side, clearly victim to the same crime that had robbed that side of his face. He hobbled rather than walked, shifting his right foot forward as he dragged the left to catch us. "Just a little bits of ch‑changes? We needs some coffees to keeps us warm, eh?"

            Maxwell stared at the hand and the man behind it, his own face ‑‑ whose reflection showed in the glass ‑‑ nearly as distorted with the horror of seeing the man.

            "What?"

            "Spare changes. s‑s‑sir," the figure said, hobbling out another precarious step into the light.

            Now, Maxwell could see the door way behind the man, and the rusted open gate which led to a small cave‑like space, more suited to a rat than a human being. A soggy green army‑style overcoat had been spread across the old fashioned floor of criss‑crossed tiles to soften it into a make‑shift bed. A blue nylon knapsack rested against the glass of the inner door. Nearer the light, a brown paper bag with protruding bottle top waited like a picnic lunch, the smell of alcohol oozing up and around the man, mingling with the usual, disgusting odor of street which so appalled Maxwell.

            "Get away from me!" Maxwell cried and staggered back towards the curb.

            "Buts we's hungry," the figure said, matching Maxwell's stumble with a hobble of his own. "We's needs money to buy us some foods."

            "Food? You mean booze," Maxwell snapped, managing to stare at those portions of the man's face unmarred by the melting. From these, he guessed the man's age at sixty, and these displayed the usual lack of care, a week's stubble on his chin and a crusty layer of brown on the back of his good hand suggesting an even less frequent bath. "I don't give bums money for food or booze. Now get away from me before I call a cop."

            "Nasty! Cruel!" the man howled, advancing again with each accusation, though pain showed in his one good eye, as if Maxwell has touched upon an old wound. "You's nasty to poor told Nathaniel. We's done nothing to hurts you. We only asks for food."

            "You wanted money, not food," Maxwell corrected, taken back slightly by the sharp accusations. "There is a difference."

            "Yes, yes, there's always a difference, yes," Nathaniel said, hopping forward once more as Kenny backed into a parking meter. "With you it's always different, yes. Moneys, moneys, moneys, that's all you talks about. Don't gives no moneys to nasty beggars, no. Don't let the nasty beggars live for free. Bah! You's all the same."

            Then, just as suddenly as he had advanced, Nathaniel twisted himself around and began to hobble, back towards his small alcove.

            "Hey!" Maxwell said. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to..."

            "Sorry? Sorry?" Nathaniel howled, voice as shrill as a siren and nearly as loud. "The nasty mans says he's sorry!"

 Nathaniel turned, staring over his good shoulder with his good eye, his glare as painful and sharp as a shard of glass.

"All's you are sorry," he muttered, the shrill aspect lost to a tone of self pity. "But no one every helps poor Nathaniel. No, no, no one helps."

            "I did say I was sorry and I mean it," Maxwell said, stepping towards the man as he yanked changed out of his pocket, spilling it as he thrust it towards the sad figure. "Here."

His palm glinted with three quarters, two dimes, a nickel and a multitude of pennies, all of which would have otherwise found its way into the jar at home for eventual deposit into his saving account, money that would provide his grub stake in Nashville. At one time, Maxwell had made more regular deposits, setting aside a specific amount from his pay check every week. But lately, with his once or twice a week visits to Wolfman's bar and the growing repairs on his car, only his spare change added to the $2,500 he had saved so far.

            But Nathaniel did not turn, standing now at the brick of the doorway with his shoulder hunched forward. "We don't wants it," he announced.

            "What do you mean you don't want it?" Maxwell asked,.

            "We means you don't wants to give it."

            "I'm handing it to you, aren't I?"

            "Not because you care, no, no, nobody cares for Nathaniel."

            "Fuck you!" Maxwell growled and thrust the change back into his pocket as he marched away, the jingle of the coins increasing his guilt as he came near to the new string of bars, and the new rasp of alternating ethnic music eased out of their doors. But Maxwell could not put the vision of Nathaniel out of his mind, or the gravel of the man's dreadful voice.

            For some incomprehensible reason, the voice reminded him of Creeley's, not in the same self‑pitying tone, not even in the squeal of outrage, but in some underlying sense of Paterson contained in it rhythm and beat, one thread in this complicated tapestry that made this city what it was. Creeley belong, Nathaniel belong, Officer Wilson belong, even Jack ‑‑ the newcomer from capitalistic Kansas belong. Only Maxwell seemed out of place in these streets, a walking, talking oddity that stopped people when he passed, and Maxwell had grown up here, had wandered here from the South side of town from the moment he could toddle.

            "What are you going to do, stay here?" Creeley asked, knapsack over one bony shoulder, his long gray hair let down for a change, making him appear the man Maxwell had met at the headshop in 1968. The VW van putted at the curb, loaded top to bottom, front to back with the elements of the elder man's life, artifacts and manuscripts collected and stored in the loft for years, displaced by the move to Western New Jersey. The loft itself lacking something vital without them, like a man suddenly deprived of memory and personality, needing to start everything again from scratch ‑‑ but as an adult.

            "For now," Maxwell said, clenching his hands behind his back like a school kick lacking the proper answer on a test. "Until I get enough together to go to Nashville."

Creeley expression soured, deep lines puckering up with his mouth. "You're still on that kick?"

            "I never left it," Maxwell said, unwilling to go through that old argument again. The two had wasted many hours arguing the point, though he could hardly think of a subject they did not fight about, from philosophy and art to the history of Paterson.

From the day Maxwell had him, Creeley had acted like a man with secrets, holding out information Maxwell wanted desperately.

"But that's crazy, Max," Creeley told him, refusing to let the matter go as easily as that, taking this one last chance to impart his words of wisdom. "You're too old to become an overnight success story. Country music has more than enough youngsters going to that Mecca every year."

            "The two of us together might make it work," Maxwell said. "You're all packed. I could pack my stuff up in a day. Then both of us could drive to Nashville."

            "And do what?"

            "Make music."

            "An old man and a middle‑aged fool, camping out on their steps of the Grand Ole Opera until we starve or get arrested."

"We can play our music and show how country ought to be done."

Creeley's eyes flickered with long‑suffered pain, as he shook his head. "I supposed you'll write the lyrics to my music and I'll write the tunes to your poems."

            "It would work."

            "It's daft! Country Music is for young men. They're the only ones who have the energy to put up with all the bullshit."

            "I suppose you'll find something better to do up by the lake?" Maxwell asked sourly. "Like contemplating your navel."

            "I'll be meditating on the future of the universe," Creeley corrected Maxwell, "and working on my craft."

            "Magic is not a craft," Maxwell snapped, repeating these words, too, in a non‑stop echo of past arguments.

            "I do not engage in Magic," Creeley said, clearly offended.

            "A rose by any other name..."

            "Magic is a trick," Creeley went on, taking the professorial tone adopted when attempting to make an important point. "What I do is more than that."

            "Tarot and that stuff doesn't pay the rent."

            Creeley smiled indulgently. "Is that all you worry about? Making rent?"

            "I don't intend to wind up on the street."

            "If you believe in the spiritual element of the universe, you'll get by."

            "And if you believed so much in that, you could have a little faith in our ability to make good music."

            "That's different."

            "How so? You're junk always sounded like religion to me."

            "Faith is not religion. Spirituality is more than a list of do's and don't's. Besides, I hardly see your path as providing you with much more subsidence than mine."

            "I won't always work at the Greasy Spoon," Maxwell said. "If you won't come to Nashville with me, why don't you stay here a little longer until I'm ready to go."

            Creeley shook his head, his gaze taking on a weary look.

            "You may never leave," he said. "And I'm too worn out on this town to wait. I used to love this place. I used to think it would turn itself around. But now I know better. There's a dark cloud hanging over this city, Max, and that cloud is ready to burst. If I don't escape now, I may never, and neither will you. Come up to the lake with me. I have more than enough room."

            Maxwell wiped his face from the forehead down with the palm of his hand, coming away with sweat and tears.

            "No," he mumbled. "When I leave, I'll be going to Nashville. No place else."

            "You'll regret it," Creeley said.

            A horn blared. Maxwell blinked. A pair of headlight bore down on him like two yellow eyes as he stepped for the curb, the vision and the stink of the bum from the doorway clung to him like a fog. He leaped back as a truck hit its brakes ‑‑ the squeal sounding for only an instant as the driver of the pickup hit the gas again. Two grinning cowboys stared out the windshield at him, the nearest ‑‑ on the passenger side ‑‑ rolled down the window as the pickup passed.

            "Watch it, asshole," the cowboy shouted, his red and white New York Giant's t‑shirt a blur that lasted longer in Maxwell's memory than the grinning face. "What are you trying to do, get yourself killed?"

            Both men laughed and the truck sped on, leaving a wake of smoke behind, its real bumper thickly decorated with stickers: Reagan/Bush `84, NRA means freedom to shoot, POW‑MIA.

Maxwell stared after the truck for a moment, still blinking his eyes watering from the onslaught of fumes and light after several blocks of near darkness. The truck reached Main Street, paused at the red light, then plunged across, into the jaws of the legal district that surrounded City Hall, and then was gone. For a moment, Maxwell thought he saw the driver's face, a face that looked like his uncle, Charlie.

            But that was crazy. Charlie was dead.

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