Dancer 4
I didn’t know whose house we came to until I saw the man open the door, his weary face a sagging version of one most of us saw on posters around town, a face many of us mistook for the face of the city, although many kids mocked him as the Czar of the Parks.
Christian Hutchenson had climbed out of bed to answer the door bell and looked very annoyed when he discovered to find Puck was the one pushing it.
“What do you want?” he asked harshly.
“The cops are after me and I need a place to hide out until I can get a permanent place,” Puck said, pushing his way into the foyer, where the smell of cloth coats and rubber boots filled the air.
“You shouldn’t have come here like this,” the gray-haired man said, eyeing me as if he thought I was as disgusting as Puck was. “Go away.”
“No way!” Puck said, edging closer to the man, pistol in his free hand, but not lifted. “You owe me.”
“I owe you nothing,” the older man said. “Maybe I owe your father something, but you’re an ungrateful little terrorist and if you don’t go away I’ll call the police.”
“And have me tell the cops what’s been going on between you and that old faggot?” Puck asked. “I don’t think so.”
The older man studied Puck’s face for so long I thought he might have fallen asleep, except for the growing flicker of fear deep in his dark eyes. “You’re mean enough to hurt your own father by exposing me, aren’t you?” he said finally.
“I’ll do whatever it takes to stay out of jail, and with all the cops in this city hunting for me, I need a place to hid, and you’re going to provide it, or I’m going to let this whole fucking city know that you stick your dick in my old man’s ass.”
Even I – from the older man’s expression – could tell there was something more to it, but I didn’t know what.
“All right,” he said. “I get the point. I’ll help you. But I don’t have as many resources as youmight think I do, nor do I have many places that can serve you as a hide out.”
“All I need it one,” Puck said.
“I have one. But it’s half way up the mountain and doesn’t have electricity or heat.”
“What do I care?”
“You might if the weather reports are accurate,” the older man said. “We’re supposed to be in for one hell of a snow storm tonight.”
“Just give us the key and keep your weather forecasts,” Puck growled.
Hutchenson was not a bad man.
I think he even felt sorry for us, providing me and puck with his son’s coast as the temperature plummeted outside, and even gave us a ride to the foot of the mountain where we could access the path to the abandoned mansion his commission still lacked money to restore.
I didn’t know it at the time, but Hutchenson had also provided Puck’s father with a job as the tour guide to the local sites near the Great Falls.
But for all Hutchenson’s kindness, Puck seemed to grow worse, sagging even in the relative warmth of the car.
. It was a terrible night for anyone to be out. Even with the car heater turned all the way up, I could feel the wind through the car door. I kept staring out the window, stoned, and still upset, about what had happened back in the cemetary.
Hutchenson drove towards the mountain taking the back way, passed the Railway Diner and over the tracks, passed the A&P and St. Mary's School for Nuns, and into the backwater of South Paterson where he eventually came out on Hazel Road, where he left us out.
"Now don't you go telling anybody where we are?" Puck warned Hutchenson,
"Who will ask?" Hutchenson said, attempting to act unaffected by the implied threat, but apparently too scared to just roll up the window and ride off.
"Someone might, and if you talk, I know how to find you."
Then Hutchenson engaged the gears and started away.
“I’m sick" Puck muttered. "That fucking river made me sick.”
“What do you want me to do?” I asked aware of Hutchenson looking back at us in the driver’s side mirror before his car vanished.
“We’ll set up here until Red Bone comes up with a better place.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Then, I’m going to take it out of his hide.”
“Maybe we should go back and see him now.”
"And give him the satisfaction of having me crawl to him twice in one night? No way."
"Maybe I should take you to the hospital?" I said
"And have the cops bust me. That would be the first place they would look. We'll take this place for the moment and see if Red Bone lives up to his side of the bargain."
"But you hear the old man this place won't have heat.”
“Will you stop complaining, I’m the one that’s sick, remember. Besides, I’ve slept in those places before.”
“So have I,” I said, recalling previous visits to some of them, decaying relics from Paterson’s glorious past, rotting on the side of the hill from where past silk barons left them.
***********
We did not have to work far up the hill from the road, even though trees have over grown the drive, branches intertwining above us so that we seemed to be walking through a tunnel.
Puck faded with every step, pausing frequently to catch his breath and he seemed to float in and out of a haze, sometimes mumbling about people and things I knew nothing about, other times, surfacing long enough to question me about where they were and how far they still had to go before they found warmth.
"I'm so cold," he complained. "I got river water in my veins."
"It's not far," I assured him, but I was alarmed by the flecks of snow filtering down through the trees.
Puck squinted into the dark which was illuminated enough by the glow of the city lights against the low clouds beyond the trees. He seemed to be able to make out the vague outline of the mansion.
“Castles?” he said, shaking his head as if he'd never noticed them before.
"That's where we're going," I said
"They're supposed to be haunted."
"Which makes a good hiding place for us," I said. “And they are better than no protection in this snow.”
“Just get me inside,” he mumbled.
So on we went, Puck clinging more and more to my arm as I led him up the drive, both of us stumbling over the unexpected pot holes and loose cobble stones.
“How far?” Puck asked.
“Not Far,” I old him.
At the very top of the mountain, a single tower appeared through the growing veil of snow, testimony to the turn of the century silk barons and their delusion of becoming America’s royalty.
In truth, this hill had two castles, and we were headed to the lower of the two, and I clutched the key Huchenson had given me so I would lose it as the rest of me froze.
Snow obscured the lower castle. So dark was its stone that it looked to be part of the mountain side. Closer up, I made out its single square tower and its tiny rectangular windows, half expected a 12th century army to begin shooting arrows at us.
The sharp attack of the snow made me feel as if they did.
Thick snow fell by the time we’d hobbled up to the arch and its door, through our trail barely showed under the shower of heavy flakes – leaving no trail for the authorities to follow.
My numb fingers fumbled with the key and managed after several attempt to insert it into the lock At first, the mechanism would not turn, frozen locked by time or temperature and only after repeated attempts did it finally snap open.
The creak of the metal and wood as the door opened in had all the rich flavor of a cheap horror flick, echoing through the rest of the building better than any burglar alarm.
We eased into the dark hall beyond, our wet footsteps squeaking on the thick stone floor. An aged, rotting wood scent competed with the smell of mildew and the charcoal odor of old fires set by homeless men who sometimes managed to climb this out of the city, and find some other more devious way inside.
But no one had been here in a long time, relieving me a little as I eased Puck into a room on the right which I remembered once had a working fire place.
This room – which had served as some kind of reception area – had walls made of wood, so rich we might have stepped back in time to when the Castle actually serves as a wealthy man’s residence.
Some of the original furniture remained, uncomfortable high backed chairs ingraved by thousands of young hands, but too heavy to cart off and too well made for easy firewood. I dumped Puck into one of these -- and still stoned, I tried to figure out what I needed to do next.
“I’m so cold,” Puck muttered. “I’ve never felt this cold before.”
Hard snow flecked against the lead-lined glass of the room’s narrow windows. I glanced out, but the Hackensack Valley – named after one of the Indian tripes that had resident between this ridge and the distant palisades of Jersey City – had vanished into a white haze. Even the nearby trees stood like ghostly sentinels over and around us.
“What we need is a fire,” I said – though Puck did not hear or understand me.
He got my drift only when I lit a match and set some old newspapers to blaze in the fire place, then added a few twigs someone had left from some previous stay here.
“Are you fucking crazy?” Puck asked. “Do you want the cops to find us?”
“The police won’t see the fire in here.”
“Bu they’ll see the smoke from the chimney.”
“No in this storm,” I said. “And even if they did, they’d think we’re just bums that came here to get warm.”
Puck grumbled, but seemed less insistent, letting his head lean back against the back of the chair. He blinked awake again when I made for the door.
“Where the hell are you going now?” he asked.
“To get more wood. What we have won’t last an hour. After that I’ll make my way back down to the city and see about getting us some food.”
“While you’re at it, call Red Ball, and find out if he’s gotten me a decent place to hide out.”
“Yeah, that, too,” I said, and made my way back out into the storm.
*******************
The snow had grown heavier and deeper since our climb up the hill so that I traveled in a veil so thick I could see no one and no one could see me.
Yet the cold and west seeped through the thin jacket Hutchenson had lent me, and I expected to be as sick as Puck by the time I got back.
Puck had given me a wad of bills, though I had to fish deep in the bottom of my pocket for a quarter to call Red Ball.
A female voice answered after many reings.
"Hello?" she said.
"I want to talk to Red Ball."
"One minute, I’ll get him" the woman said and put down the phone.
Snow mixed with ice flicked at the glass of the phone booth around me. Music sounded from the apartment on the far end of the phone as the woman called the black man.
"Who is this?" Red Ball barked. "And how the hell did you get this number?"
"It's Maxwell and Puck gave me the number. He wants to know if you found a place for him to go."
“Fuck that asshole,” Red Ball said. “He’s so hot, nobody wants anything to do with him – except for the cops.
"So what do we do?"
"I'd say he should stay where he is. I’m not going to find him any better place"
"But he's sick and we hardly have any heat."
"That's not my problem, it's his, if he hadn't made so many enemies around town, plenty of people would take care of him. Most people don’t care if he gets busted or drops dead as long as he stays away from them.”
"You expect me to tell Puck that?"
"No," a kinder-voiced Red Ball said after a pause. "He’d kill you out of spite. You'd better tell him I'm still working on it. Just understand, I won't likely find anything, so you ought to help him make other arrangements on his own."
"Thanks."
"It's the best I can tell you."
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