Chapter 26

  

The Beatles song "Fool on a Hill" summed by Catholine Lambert, although down deep he was no fool. He came to America in 1851 when he was 17 years old with less than five Scottish Pounds in his pocket and a younger brother to take care of.

     In Boston, he worked so hard that by age 22, he was a partner in the silk firm where he had been employed    at which point he got the idea in his head to go to New York. From his perch in Manhattan, Lambert had a vision, predicting that Silk's future was in the City of Paterson. While raw silt still arrived in New York City from Italy and the orient, and New York City still served as the principle marketing center, Paterson had the water power and man power to make the finished product.

     Lambert took the money he earned in his New York based business and invested it in a Paterson Mill. Luck aided his endeavor as when the Civil War struck and the Union Army needed silk trimmings for officers' uniforms. By corning the market, he became one of the great silk barons of Paterson, a label he never felt comfortable with, although he did his best to imitate the English Lords he had served when a child.

     In this effort, Lambert decided he needed a castle to mark his position and chose Garret Mountain because from its side he could look down on the Mills which had made him rich. His wealth only partly compensated him for the agony life produced. Although married by 1850, Lambert had watched eight of his children die before 1870.

     His castle annoyed the masses in a way he never fully complemented. He did not completely understand their needs nor their resentment towards him, as he surrounded himself with fine art. His collection of paintings was so vast he needed the castle to fit it all. While he finished construction of the castle's basic structure by 1893, he was forced to add an extension three years later, just to accommodate his collection of art.

     The growing resentment among the masses boiled over    not just at Lambert and his castle but at all the master's of silk early in the century and resulted in the 1913 silk strike. This destroyed the city's industrial base and Lambert's empire along with it. Lambert sold his art off to save his castle. He grew bitter, and protested the fact that he had someone become the strikers' symbol for the evil's a capitalism. Those people who knew him best considered him an honorable man, and someone who had cared deeply about his workers.

     Lambert remained bitter until his death in 1923. In 1926, his song sold the castle to the city for $120,000. A few years later, the city sold the castle and its associated tower and property to the county for use as a park.

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

     Unlike the exterior, the inside of the house had changed dramatically since that week when Maxwell and Puck had hidden here. The walls of the hall now boasted panels of imitation oaks, the kind Maxwell had seen in numerous finished basements around town. While an overhead light hung over the arched ceiling, it remained unlighted, with small flickering orange candle style light providing the only illumination. These lights projected from the paneling in someone's warped sense of historic reproduction. Between each slight hung several framed prints straight off a Woolworth discount rack, one of a sailboat rushing across a stormy waterway with a back drop of rocks and thickly clouded sky. The other prints took a moment for Maxwell to make out in the dim light, since they both were images painted on a Blackground of black velvet. Squinting carefully, Maxwell    to his astonishment    realized they bore the image of people fucking.

     "Some boss you have," Maxwell told Red Bone. "He is a man of impactable tastes."

                Red Bone shrugged. "I don't get paid to be his art critic," he said.

                "Which way now?" Maxwell asked, even though Patty had already taken the lead, climbing up one arm of the horse shoe shaped stairs, her sneakers squeaking on the polished marble. Maxwell followed more slowly, trying to sort out the building he remembered from the abortion it had become. While the stairs remained unchanged, imitating marble walls rose around them, climbing to the castle's second floor with the swirl of the steps. So cheap was the construction that portions had already begun to decay, leaving the Boss' house of splendor looking a little shabby, and hinting of a return to the ruins Maxwell remembered.

                The paneling continued along the upstairs hall, which circled around the stairs and the gap over the hall below. For the first time, Maxwell saw clearly the chandelier -- as tattered and ragged as when he first saw it, still here after all these years, defying all attempts at renovation, as it had defied vandals when he was a boy -- renovators and junk men unable to figure out its vast connection, and thus unable to remove it without destroying most of it in the process. Since its pieces of glass had little worth except collected in one unit, the renovators had left it as a monument to the past.

                "Hey Longfellow," Patty called from a quarter turn ahead of him around the circle. "I didn't bring you here to stare at the scenery, come on."

                Patty motioned him on with a staff wave as she made her way towards two wide doors -- doors like the chandelier had stood here since the creation of the house, their scarred face abused but not broken by the incompetent contractors -- the cuts from years of use filled in with putty, then refinished with a varnish that did not match the original wood. One original and tarnished brass handle remained affixed to one of the doors with a cheaper, more shiny handle attached to the other.

                "He's in here," Patty announced, as Maxwell and Red Bone caught up. "This is his room. He spends most of his time in here."

                "You mean like a throne room?" Maxwell asked.

                "You got it, Longfellow," Patty said, shoving in on the doors. "What we got here is the King of Paterson."

                ***********

                But those doors opened onto no throne room. If anything, the room again struck Maxwell as little better than a finished basement with a child's playroom gone amuck. Again dim light filled the space, produced by another series of candle-like lamps stuck at intervals along the walls. Maxwell made out the shape of a bar, behind which a large mirror reflected the rest of the room. Slot machines, video game machines, old fashioned pin ball machined blinked and flashed in a dazzling and disturbing sequence of colors, giving off the impression of a psychedelic madness. Each peeped, clanks, whooped, booped, moaned or groan in a mechanical invitation for someone to come play.

                These machines encircled the room, leaving a vast emptiness at the center, filled only by a single greed-shaded ceiling light that hung over a regulation-sized pool table, and beside this table, chalking up the tip of his stick, stood a long thin figure who face was half-illuminated, and yet whose features Maxwell could not have mistaken with even less light.

                "Puck?" Maxwell said, stopping half way between the door and the pool table. "You're the Boss?"

                The man with the pool stick grinned, the way he had a thousand times previously in Maxwell's memories, a haunting pathological grin that sent chills up Maxwell's spine.

                "It took you long enough to look up your old friend," Puck said, laying the stock down softly on the felt surface of the pool table, though his thick fingers still touched it, rolling it back and forth between the table's remaining balls.

                "Wait a minute, you two know each other?" Patty said.

                "We're old friends," Puck said.

                "Friends is too strong a word," Maxwell said. "We hung out together as kids."

                "Got into some deep shit as I remember," Puck said with a laugh.

                "That was not my doing," Maxwell said.

                "You went along with it..."

                "Hold it!" Patty said, holding the back of her hands up to her cheeks as if feeling for a fever. "This doesn't make sense."

                "Of course it makes sense," Puck said, still laughing as he came towards Patty.              He wore jeans, sneakers and a sleeveless t-shirt. "Max has always stolen things that were mine. He stole my father when we were kids, and now he's stolen my girl."

                "I'm not your girl any more," Patty said. "That's what I came to tell you."

                "And here I thought you came to make up," Puck said in a voice so sweet it sounded unreal.

                "Stop being sarcastic," Patty snapped. "I'm serious."

                "So am I," Puck said, gripping her arm in a hold so hard she cried out. "I'm not through with you."

                Maxwell made only a slight move in Puck's direction, then stopped, the click of the safety from Red Bone's pistol just loud enough above the rumble of the play machines to serve as warning.

                "Well, I'm through with you!" Patty said, tearing Puck's fingers free with her sharp nails.

                "Now you can see why I love her, Max?" Puck said, glancing up with the same frightful grin. "She's the only person -- except for you, of course -- who ever said no to me, and that drives me wild."

                "Get over it," Patty said. "You and me are through."

                "Are we?" Puck said, turning his attention solely on her again. "You have a very bad memory then. We weren't just lovers, we were business partners, too."

                "So?"

                "So you're still dealing in town, and I don't like it. I didn't mind as much when were friends. But I won't stand for competition."

                "Too bad, this is America," Patty said. "Competition is what life is all about here."

                "No, this is Paterson. I worked hard to take over this town, and I took over because I didn't let anyone -- not even a bitch like you -- get in my way. And I won't let it now."

                "Is that why you had Longfellow beaten up? Because I was competition?"

                Puck's grin returned as he glanced at Maxwell. In the dim light, Puck's eyes danced with the confusing images, the flashes of the game machines, the flicker of the flames, deep shadows filling in those brief moments when all was dark. In those eyes, memories lingered full of pain and pride, a furious murderous sense of self defying the world with only one or two vulnerable spots where an enemy could hurt him, and enemy -- or by accident, a friend.

                "I got sick of people taking things that were mine," Puck said. "I decided to put an end to it."

                "You should have killed me," Maxwell said. "That's the only way these things ever stop."

                "I can still do that," Puck said. "I can order old Red Bone to put a bullet in your head. No one would ever know."

                "Red Bone won't do it," Maxwell said. "He gave me his word."

                "If I order him to do it, he will."

                Maxwell shook his head.  "He's got too much honor," he said. "You'd have to do it yourselves or call in your other cronies -- but they can't hurt me."

                "They broke you nose."

                "I was unprepared. I won't be again."

                "You've become an arrogant snot since the last time we met," Puck said with a sharp laugh. "Yet you remain as innocent as ever -- even after all these years. I've never met anyone like you."

                "You've never been out of Paterson," Maxwell said. "Most people live their lives in relative peace, coming and going from work, worrying over money, suffering through broken hears. We can't all live constantly on the edge of doom the way you do."

                "Doom?" Puck exploded, but not with a laugh. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

                "I'm talking about your petty little empire. You live like a king, but it's all for show. The only one of your people you can really trust is Red Bone, and he's getting old, and slow. You don't have anybody else to watch your back. That's why you didn't kill me. That's why you've let me go as far as I have with Patty. You're still trying to recruit me, the way you tried when we were kids. I'm supposed to take Red Bone's place when he gets slow enough for Hutch or one of the others to bump him off."

                Puck stared, his eyes glinting, his tongue moving slowly across his thin lips. "Well then?" he said. "Do you want the job?"

                "No," Maxwell said. "You're sick, Puck, and you scare me. But I'm not scared enough to side up with you."

                "What if I let you have my girl?" Puck said.

                "I'm not your girl!" Patty snapped. "And don't even hint that you can give me away."

                "The girl is the key, isn't she?" Maxwell said. "You really do love her, and its thrown off your whole game having to use her to get to me. I can see the same look in your eyes now as when I lived with your father..."

                "Shut up!" Puck shouted.

                "But it's the girl that's your doom," Maxwell went on. "She got to you a long time ago, and you've spent so much time contemplating her, that you let down your guard. You've forgotten the basic rules you made when you took over the town, breeding people around you that will eventually eat you alive. And now, when you've woken up to the fact, you find that you have to give her away to buy yourself protection."

                "I'll kill you if you don't shut up!"

                "You'll try," Maxwell said, then grabbed Patty's hand. "Let's get the hell out of here. I've seen quite enough."

                ***********

                "I wouldn't come back if I were you," Red Bone said when he had led them back to the car. "Neither one of you."

                "You sound frightened, Richard," Patty said, recovering from her own apparent shock -- though she still eyed Maxwell with some suspicion.

                "I've been scared for a while, Miss Patty," Red Bone said. "The Boss hasn't been himself since you threw him out. He spends most of his time banging at those pleasure machines. He doesn't pay much attention to business. God knows I've tried to step in and sort through all the problems, keeping this joint running or that operation going smooth. But I'm not him. I'm a fighter, not an organizer, and there are people who just won't listen to me, and others just waiting for their chance to muscle in on the Boss' game. People fear the Boss to his face, but plot as soon as his back is turned."

                "You can't blame me for his stupidity," Patty said.

                "I'm not blaming you," Red Bone said. "Or even the poet. But you two shouldn't be waving any red flags in front of his face. Only God knows what he'll done once he's riled. He's liable to start shooting people, and not care a great deal about who."

                "As I remember that's the way he always acted," Maxwell said.

                "When he was a kid maybe. But after he took that tumble into the river, he changed -- grew less wild. He seemed to be on a mission of some sort, and put his mind to taking over things all over town."

                "That surprises me, too," Maxwell admitted. "As I remember him, he seemed a loner."

                "That's my influence," Red Bone said. "He had been sick for a while, and then came to me after he got better, telling me he wanted to learn everything about how the town was run: who did what, who had the real power. After I taught him what I knew, and took him around to look at things, he just started taking over. He didn't pump heads with the mayor or the mob. He built connections with them both, and used them against each other and others for his own advantage. Sometimes, he formed alliances with gangs outside the city, just too keep people in the city honest. He bought off politicians, found out dirt about people, and slowly became more and more powerful. For a long time, he ran the mob's operations, while slowly buying up go go clubs and trash companies and newspaper distributors. He even got the sole concession on Goddamn Christmas trees, burning down the shacks of people who didn't do business with him."

                "People put up with this?" Maxwell asked.

                "Yeah. Because the Boss had something that shook people up or made them admire him. But I don't think anybody really saw where his ambition intended to take him. The Mob, the mayor and various other people thought they could use him for their own ends. They didn't see him using them until it was too late, when he didn't need them any more."

                "No one tried to stop him?"

                "Some people tried," Red Bone said. "But the Boss built his empire right off the street, using puck kids and other gangs he knew from his days wandering around -- those kids who'd been on the fringe all their lives and had no more use for the mob than they did the city. Hutch is one of them. There are hundreds of others, running his go go bars or his drug deals, watching over his operations big and small. Each time the Boss took over a new operation, he got rid of the people there and put the kids in their place -- kids who at the time looked up to him like he was a God."

                "That must have made Puck a lot of enemies," Maxwell said.

                "Some," Red Bone said. "But not as many as you'd think. People love a winner. Most of the folks he replaced wanted to get on his payroll again, trading away their loyalty to other people from a place in his new empire."

                "That part's a bit shaky."

                "Only on the way down," Red Bone said. "As long as he kept things going good, nobody complained. But as I said, the Boss has been fucking up lately, and now those sharks he hired on are looking to carve out their own piece from his empire. The Boss can't see it, but the whole things could crumble out from under him at any time. Certainly, the old mayor's been making noise. So has the mob. Even the street punks -- the Boss' most loyal followers like Hutch -- are starting to talk about setting up shop on their own, thinking they might be smart enough to build what the Boss built."

                "Are they?"

                "There's only one Boss," Red Bone said. "When he goes, Paterson falls into chaos -- which is why I'm telling you to law low and stay away from here. You and Miss Patty could trigger it."

                "That's kind of you, Richard," Patty said.

                "I don't mean to be kind," Red Bone said. "Not to you. Not to the Boss. I'm looking out for myself. I'm old. These punks hate me. If the Boss goes down, so do I. I'm too old and tired to survive in the kind of Paterson that will be left afterwards -- even if I lived long enough to get situated. Just lay low, don't go flaunting your love in front of him. Maybe things will calm down again."

                "You really think things will get calm."

                "No," Red Bone said. "But I've got to try something."

                ***********

                Young Puck mumbled in his delirium, but spent two whole days in limbo, burning up from his dunk in the river and his walk through the cold streets. Maxwell made little sense of the ranting, doing what he could to keep Puck warm. He wanted to call Creeley and explain things, after having failed to do so during his first trip down the hill into Paterson. He was not certain the older man would understand, nor could he risk a second trip. The further Maxwell went since was to the woods, gathering up wet wood to dry by the fire. Food and warmth became an obsession. God knew Puck deserved to die, but Maxwell refused to become God's instrument. Despite the indelible impression the LSD and the graveyard murder had left on him, Maxwell would keep Puck alive, and then, when certain Puck had escaped Death as he had the police, Maxwell would leave and never see Puck again.

                Maxwell didn't dare sleep for fear that death would creep in and steal Puck while both boys slumbered. Whenever Maxwell nodded off, he would bolt up, mid-dream, thinking the fire had gone out or worse, spread, thinking he had heard Puck cry out or choke.

                Puck constantly mumbled, through real words didn't emerge until later, and even then, Maxwell could not always make out what the boy said, or understand the meaning of the words when he did, catching snatches, bits of conversation and repeated names of people he did not know. Often, Puck called out "Momma."

                "Don't go, Momma," Puck yelled at one point. "He didn't mean it, Momma. It was my fault. I told him it was okay. I wanted him to love me. I..."

                Then later, Puck cried out again.

                "You drove her away, you son of a bitch! She caught you trying to stick your prick up my ass -- and she left. She said she hated you. She said she hated me. She said were two of a kind and deserved each other. She said she deserved better than both of us. But I'm not like you, Old Man. I don't want to stick my prick in every little boy's butt. I don't want to stick my nose in no fucking books, pretending like the world doesn't exit. You say I'm no good. Maybe that's right. But who made me that way? Who's driving me out now when I need him most?"

                And then, hours after that, Puck reverted to calling for his mother again, begging her not to go, to come back, begging for her to make the cops stop beating him.

                Maxwell listened, gripping the edge of his chair through most of it, the splintered less painful than Puck's diatribe. Sometimes Maxwell drifted into a dream state in which Puck's delirium became his own, and yet always, Maxwell jolted awake to some truly excruciating cry. Then, he would remain awake for a time, too terrified to return to those dreams.

                Only gradually did Puck's ranting stop, as the fever lessened and the boy's breathing slowed. After a while, the boy slept the way ordinary people did, and Maxwell fell into a deep slumber of his own, dreaming no longer of Puck's nightmares, but nightmares of his own days and nights in prison, and of a Charlie who would not wake up from the nightmare called Vietnam.

                ***********

                "Why didn’t you tell me you knew him?" Patty asked as the car rumbled back down the hill into the heart of Paterson.

                "I knew Puck once, but not this Puck," Maxwell said, "And I certainly didn't know he was called The Boss. I severed connections with him many years ago, before his empire-building began."

                "You must have had some clue," Patty said angrily. "Yet you let me make a fool of myself, let me barge up there, only to have him tell us off."

                "I have a feeling Puck is more upset than he let on."

                "Oh?"

                "It was something in the way he looked at us, at you in particular. Red Bone's right. Puck is head over heals over you."

                "You're crazy," Patty said, though she stared away with something of a pleased expression.

                "You do have that effect on men, you know."

                "Not all men. Not on you."

                "Even on me," Maxwell admitted. "I just show it differently."

                "And Puck shows it by having you beat up?"

                "Yes," Maxwell said. "It has to do with his being out of control. With other men, being out of control isn't always a bad thing. We need to learn how helpless and stupid we are at times, and how close to the edge we actually live our lives. Such moments teach us to appreciate the boring order we've established so we can do the day to day things."

                "You don't think Puck needs to learn that lesson?"

                "He already has," Maxwell said. "He was born and raised in Chaos. this empire building isn't just a lust for power the way it would be with other people. It is his sense or order. You or I would get a new job or find a new lover. We would look at ourselves and say: `let's see what do I have to do to myself to make things work better.' But Puck hardly looks at the imperfections in himself. If he wants change, he has to change the world, transforming everything around him into what he thinks is perfect."

                "So?"

                "So he's now looking at us in that way, and feels the need to change things again."

                "Which means?"

                "We should not be around when it happens."

                ***********

                No black Trans Am decorated Patty's street when Maxwell pulled his car up to the curb. Yet Maxwell could feel the sense of watchfulness. The splinters of his shattered guitar still lay near the door stoop, disturbed no doubt by the probing fingers of the bums, pissed on by wandering dogs, but -- as with most useless things in town -- left to rot or for God to remove.

                Maxwell's car idled badly, its whole fame shuddering from lack of a tune-up, and his hands shook on the wheel as he waited for Patty to get out. For some reason, she delayed, her sharp red finger nails playing with a tear in the dash board vinal.

                "Aren't you going to come up?" she asked finally. "Or has Puck put such a scare in you that you don't want to see me any more?"

                "I'm not scared," Maxwell said.

                "But you're not making a move to come up either. Maybe you're giving me up for reasons of your own."

                "I didn't know I had you to give up."

                "It's a figure of speech, Longfellow," she said. "But if you're up for it, I'd like to keep you around for a while."

                "Even without my guitar?"

                "You have others," she said.

                "But not with me."

                Patty smiled as she eased out the door, leaning back through the open window once outside. "I'm sure we can find something else to keep us occupied," she said, then paraded away, not bothering to glance over her shoulder to see if Maxwell was following.

                Slowly, Maxwell's fingers fell, twisted off the ignition, and still more slowly, he exited the car, the engine still sputtering as he reached the downstairs door and he made his way into the darkness that lay beyond.

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