Gun Machine

Tallow toweled off his stinging skin and went to his bedroom. Under the bed was a suitcase, and in the suitcase was a black suit. The suit he wore to funerals. In the living room, he found an olive shirt and a thin black tie. His old hip holster was in an Amazon.com box half stuffed with CDs (Charly Blues Masterworks issues that he’d forgotten he owned), two levels down in the stack of boxes that stood in the far corner of the room. Tallow put it on, pushed away the suit jacket with the back of his wrist, and slid the Glock into it. Lifted it half an inch and reseated it.

The suit accentuated the fact that his leanness was turning into gauntness the longer he plowed into the wrong side of thirty. He decided that he was okay with that.

Tallow went back out into the world in a funeral suit.

Seven

THE HUNTER stood still on the street, watching them take his treasure away.

He’d known something was wrong. The day had started out badly. He was having trouble seeing both his Manhattans, and it was a wrenching effort of focus to see what he thought of as New Manhattan. Not forests but buildings. Not horses but cars. Some days it didn’t bother him. Today he felt out of joint, and abstractly concerned about his state of mind. Perhaps he was getting old, and his brain was not as plastic as it used to be. Once every couple of months, he’d awake wondering if he might be genuinely ill.

He’d taken ketamine once, as a younger man, and on processing the experience realized that its first effect on him was that he was no longer worried about having taken ketamine. He never invited that loss of perception into his life again, but on those occasional weak days, there was a sick sense in the pit of his stomach that he’d spent weeks unconcerned about being unable to see New Manhattan.

The day had started out badly, and so he walked the trail to his cache, signposts and trees flickering in and out of view, to ensure it was secure. The walk had taken an hour longer than it should have, not least because of the difficulty of seeing and avoiding CCTV cameras. Sometimes his mind transliterated them into Old Manhattan elements, but today, nothing was on his side, including his own brain.

He watched the men and women in blue jackets loading his treasure into vehicles. Years of work disappearing.

He was armed. He could try to stop them. Even if he hadn’t been carrying a gun, he was a hunter. He could take them down bare-handed if necessary, or fashion a weapon from whatever was available. But he would be seen.

His anger built. Parts of New Manhattan dropped out of his sensorium. He could smell oak, pine, and sweet birch. Heard a flock of plovers clatter out of the treetops in fright. Bark crawled over the fasciae of the buildings he faced, under light dappled by forest canopy. He looked down at the ground and had to summon hard strength to force the wet grass under his feet to turn back into dry sidewalk. A red-back salamander, without dewy blades of green to slip through, elided away into mist and was gone.

The hunter stood still and watched them take away the last evidence of his life. Apart from the bodies.

Eight

THE PERIMETERS of the 1st Precinct form a shape like a cracked arrowhead pointing out to sea. It totals one square mile of Manhattan. Tallow had to go in the other direction, away from his mile, and that never filled him with joy.

At this moment, Tallow did not feel like he had friends at Ericsson Place. Or, perhaps more correctly, he felt that any aid he’d get there would come from pity. He told himself that pity would lead to half-assed work, but in his gut there was a churn of humiliation and offendedness at the thought. And when he considered going back to the house on Pearl Street to canvass the residents, he felt sick. So he spent ten minutes with his laptop on ACRIS, the online city register, and grabbed the name and office address of the building’s landlord.

It was going to be a long drive uptown. Through the narrow, coldly shaded streets of the deep 1st, just now starting to get that sweetish, sweaty scent of halal gyro and shish from the early phalanx of street vendors setting up their shiny, flimsy carts and their piss pots for their sixteen-hour workdays.

Tallow felt uncomfortable in the driver’s seat. A constant juddering sense of being on the wrong side of the car. He hoped that the long drive would retrain his brain a little.

Past the holes-in-the-wall offering sixty-minute divorces, and the strangely denuded storefronts that Vice continually begged for the budget to surveil for drug traffic. Past Ground Zero, this morning sound-tracked by the gunfire snapping of badly secured plastic tarps in the breeze and the cursing of the mini-entrepreneur suckfish trying to stop their 9/11 picture postcards from blowing off their folding-card tables by the fence.

And then out, into the territories of others.