11

 

        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 you might 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 cemetery.

        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.

 

                                         ***********