Dark Maze

station, doors opened and closed; people got off and people got on, as if walking in their sleep. We rolled on through the tunnel beneath the East River, Brooklyn-bound; lights clicked off and the car went momentarily black and when it grew bright again the passengers had not moved, their heads still drooping and lolling above their newspapers and open books.
    I thought of coming home last night, of milk and cookies left out for me. Imagine—milk and cookies. I thought of Ruby in my bed, and me with my troubled dreams.
    I thought about revealing lies and artless truth. And the hidden work of uneventful days. About Picasso, and murder.
    Ruby’s thoughts were far more immediate.
    “Would you mind telling me, by the way, exactly why are we traveling by subway all the way out to Coney Island?” she asked. “The police department can’t spare a car for the guy in charge of catching the Manhattan maniac who’s selling so many papers today?”
    It had not occurred to me to sign out for a car, actually. And until Ruby asked, the reason behind this failure lay deep and unspoken in my Manhattan soul (my Uncle Liam would call such a person as me a “city hike”).
    And so, I offered my confession to Ruby: “I don’t know the way by car.”
    She laughed in my face. But the way she did it made me her willing clown.
    “Just look at my man. He’ll have a dinner of chicken and cornbread at Princess Pamela’s, or else that chili mess I noticed last night all over the stove. He has breakfast every day with Pete and Wanda. He lives in a Hell’s Kitchen dump, he gets around by subway—when he gets around— and the way he dresses is never going to get him in the GQ leagues. He doesn’t put on too much of a front for a girl, does he? Are you thoroughly incorruptible, Detective Hockaday?”
    What she said about my clothes struck a deadened nerve. I was wearing a pair of nice soft tan corduroys I found for five dollars one day at the Salvation Army, a two-dollar preen jersey from the same haberdashery, a perfectly good navy blue windbreaker I found on a park bench and a pair of Reebok tennis sneakers bought at full retail.
    “I wouldn’t know any better,” I said, “if that’s what you mean.”
    “Yes, I think so. Don’t change.”
    “Don’t worry. It’s too late for me.”
    She laughed again, caramel lips taut over rows of perfect white teeth. “When I was coming up in New Orleans,” she said, “all the boys at my school ever talked about was driving around in big cars someday.”
    “I don’t like to drive,” I said. “It only gets me out of town.”
    “Where you don’t belong?”
    “That, and where I never understand the layout.”
    “How so? Aren’t there plenty of cops commuting into the city every day?”
    “Sadly so, the department is turning into a regular suburban occupation force,” I said. “We’ve now got thousands of young cops living out on the Island, in their cheesy cop towns—Massapequa and Bethpage, places like that.“
    “You’ve seen these awful places?”
    “I have, and it’s just what I mean by strange layouts. People living in neighborhoods where some developer came in and ripped down most of the trees, then named streets after them.”
    “Even so, I’ll bet everybody in those neighborhoods will swear they live where they live for the pleasure of seeing nature right in their own backyards.”
    “Well, nature is also a crowded street. I am saying hello to dear Mother Nature every day myself, and from the things she has said back to me over the years, I am beginning to suspect she’s not a fine lady.”
    We were nearing the end of the line.
    The train moved slowly along elevated tracks, over Brooklyn slums filled with sagging windows and sooty life down on the streets. It was raining now, the kind of gray rain that falls on funerals. Soon the sweep of the Atlantic would come into view beyond the tarred rooftops. I touched the pocket of my windbreaker, to be sure again; there was my wallet, where I carried the snapshot of Celia Furman and her beaux from one sunny day in the carefree year of 1954.
    Ruby slid closer to me on the vinyl subway seat. I felt the heat of her leg against mine.
    She put a hand on my arm and asked, “Hock, do you promise you won’t change?”
    By the secret code of irony in which women so often speak of and to their men, I understood this question to actually mean that Ruby Flagg had decided right then and there— on the F train to Coney