Chapter 7
CHARY
July
There was no summer pause at Wright Glass.
Four days a week, in the Bowery mid-mornings, when the Bleecker St. saloons were just starting to shut down and the respectable Broadway coffeehouses were pulling up grates, Chary sat down before the mirror of the vanity in his rooming house and pried off a false wig of a beard.
Today, though, it wouldn’t come. He braced his hands on either side of the miniature sink of the communal toilet and tried to steel himself.
His back ached. His thighs. His buttocks.
His feet throbbed to every toe. His wrists burned, and when he swiveled them, they crunched alarmingly.
He grasped anything, and the muscles around his elbow went twang, like a taut string snapped.
The skin on his forehead was tight and dry and smeared in places with iron-black.
But those weren’t the worst things. They were the usual things. The worst thing was still stuck to his face.
Chary took a deep breath, reached up, and grasped the very edge of his wet, glued-on, slightly singed fake beard.
And he thought he would rather die.
Between yesterday’s beard application and now, he had grown his own cursed facial hair upon his own cursed face. It’d never really been a problem before.
Now he imagined, vividly, every one of those dirty-blond beard hairs ripped free, the real with the fake.
The problem was that instead of plain old spirit gum, in his hubris, he had used casein glue.
It was what was used to affix paper labels to glass jars, and he’d modified the recipe to, unlike spirit gum, stand up to the constant heat of the furnaces.
And when he got the acids and bases in proper proportion, its solvent was a soak in cold water.
Usually. He must have got this last batch backwards somehow and made it waterproof instead.
Chary turned the tap, scrubbed at his lip furiously, immersed his face in cupped hands. Tried once more to pull at the mustache, and only ended up bent over and moaning.
“Heavens,” he muttered, forehead against porcelain. What the dickens am I going to do?
If he could sit and soak in his own bath… eyes out, like a frog…
…but he couldn’t. He couldn’t go to the townhouse like this, furnace-burnt and fake-bearded; he wouldn’t make it through the front entry. They wouldn’t recognize him, for that was the point. Or they would recognize him, and never again would he be able to be who he needed to be.
There was a knock on the bathroom door. More of a bang.
A voice came: “Toilets ain’t for jerkin’ off!”
Cripes. Chary slithered down onto the tile and plunked his head back. “Go away!” he said hoarsely.
The interloper thumped the door once more, kicked the frame. “You got company?”
As though he ever did—
“You want company?” the voice said, quietly, more significantly.
Ah, the Bowery. “Piss—off!” Chary yelled.
At last this seemed to do something: whoever it was shuffled off.
Chary sighed. He couldn’t go home. But neither could he stay there, reclined against a filthy toilet in the rooming-house bathroom. He’d sleep first. Try again later.
He stood up. Dried his face with his shirt. Unlocked the door and peered out.
No interloper.
But when he rounded the hall corner to the narrow stair, there was a man he didn’t recognize leaning against the curving handrail.
Not tall, not short. Legs crossed at ankles, long fingers clutching a flat cap and a newsprint.
A bowed, fair head, which appeared to be minding its own business, attention far down the stairwell.
Chary tallied his presence as unproblematic and nonthreatening, and hurried past.
“You didn’t take it off.”
Chary’d already made it down ten steps; he caught himself and whirled.
“Sorry?” He craned his neck awkwardly. There were no electric lights there. The man had become a shadow. Had he been the one to bang on the door? Surely not.
“Sir? I beg your pardon?”
He was swiftly joined on the stair. The man stopped a mere step above him, close to the handrail—it brought him exactly to Chary’s height and let the faint glow from the stairwell’s nethers light his dark, deep-brown eyes like a glimmering sea-cave.
Laurie Moore met his stare, curious and steady. “Can’t say I like the beard.”
“You!” Chary gasped.
Laurie brought with him a New York incongruity of lemony crushed green, rotary-cut grass, earthy musk.
Chary wouldn’t have thought him the type to wear scent, although he looked like he belonged in an advertisement for it, perfectly outlined in a black-and-white suit.
He seemed tired, though. He drew a hand through his hair, pushing it up off his forehead; it fell back into its side-part and coif. “Good morning, Chary. Can we talk?”
Chary, speechless, marveled at how easily Laurie’s unremarkableness had just been…
shrugged off him. How easily he’d donned it in the first place, even dressed as he was.
And how handsome he was, even fatigued, handsomer than Chary remembered, which seemed like a feat—wasn’t memory supposedly flattering to reality?
“You were in there quite a while,” Laurie said. “Couldn’t you get it off today?”
Six inches. It was the height of the stair-riser that separated them, precisely how much taller Chary stood than the other man. They were on equal footing. And yet.
“Today? What do you mean? What are you doing here? Have you been following me?”
“I didn’t expect to find you slumming it in the Bowery, of all places. Not when I left you in Nowhere, Maine.”
“I’m not slumming—”
“No.” Laurie smiled, not nicely. “You’re not.” He leaned in. “Labor spy,” he said softly. “Why are you working in your own factory, Chary Wright?”
He knows. How? He knows.
Chary about-faced and ran down the stair, his steps stuttering—his muscles were that stiff, and shock seemed to have turned them further vulcanized. It was like riding stilts.
He heard a muffled curse, Laurie’s pursuing steps, decidedly not stuttering, but Chary was already out the back door to the courtyard.
There was a rare outlet to 1st Street behind the tenement on the corner; he wove through laundry and outhouses and clustered garbage cans with lids akimbo and found it, and turned his way northward on 2nd Avenue, skittering around three surface cars on their rails.
The arched gate to the marble cemetery was ajar. Unrepentantly, he ran across the green to the backside of the red-brick YMCA, where a tiny footpath opened up to the yard behind an old, cathedral-like bank.
On the greater Bowery, outside of the shadowy loom of the Third Avenue El, the sunlight’s sharp attention drew Chary up from his pell-mell run and into a strait-laced, hard-breathing walk with the crowd, fists at his sides. He had to have lost him—
“Chary” was hissed behind him.
Lord. He was surprised—all right, not very surprised—that Laurie had been able to follow him, but ignored the beckon.
A hand twitched over his arm, pulled him firmly back.
Chary slipped free, bumped into a woman’s feathered hat in doing so. “Why are you following me?”
He veered left, beneath the clatter of the El. He’d run all the way to Broadway if he had to. But the hand came back.
“Chary, wait a moment—you’ll get yourself run over.” Laurie was panting, sweating from his run. “Remember where we are, for chrissakes.”
A cab rocked past, rattling on the cobblestone, and Laurie’s hands were on him again, tugging—
“Oof.”
Laurie wrapped him around the waist like a football player and hauled him back against the cast-iron El support.
It was gritty and black with coal soot, quivering from an oncoming train, and Chary’s alarm hiked up like a cat’s back.
He was taller, but Laurie was strong, and Chary didn’t like to fight.
He did anyway.
“Let—go!”
“Dammit— Stop— A scrap’ll draw the cops on us— Is that what you want?”
“Shall it? Here? What I’m doing isn’t illegal—”
“It should be—”
Pedestrian traffic parted warily around their tussle. Eyes avoided him as though he, Chary, would turn upon them next. Street boys catcalled and hissed noxious, fricative things. Laurie firmed his grip on Chary’s shoulders and spoke something in his ear.
Chary didn’t hear it. Above them, the train rattled on past, slowing as it neared the station. Vibration settled gradually out of his teeth and joints.
“Please let go,” Chary whispered.
To his surprise, Laurie complied, stepping back. “Just don’t throw yourself before a streetcar, alley cat. Geez.” He straightened his suit.
Was that what he worried for? “I wasn’t… I’m not suicidal,” Chary hissed.
“Sure. I mean, you could be, the way you ran across Second.” Laurie removed his hat, ran his hands over his hair, replaced it again. “Why the hell’d you run away from me? I just want to talk a minute.”
To Chary’s right came the jingle of a bell, and the door to a dime museum opened. From within came true slummers and their tour guide leading them, who, having found a spectacle, was smirking unpleasantly.
Chary had become that spectacle. He curled into himself.
Laurie shifted, casually putting his body between the party and Chary. “Fuck off onto Eldridge,” he called over his shoulder, his accent thick, “there’ll be more t’see, anyway.”
He wasn’t wrong. Slowly, the slum party moved along past, parasols bustling, eyes wide.
“I appreciate the gesture,” Chary muttered, “but what do you want?”
“Where’d you get those clothes?” Laurie reached out a finger to a suspender and pulled it taut. “They look authentic.”
A distant whistle of teeth; somebody called out something like “Man… rough an’… there’s rough, ya know?”
Laurie glanced sidelong but stayed outwardly casual, relaxed. The crowd coasted and bumped around them; the El support helped.
“They’re mine,” Chary snapped.
“Hmm.” Laurie shook his head and leaned in. “Play along, yeah? You wanna get outta here?” he said, louder, and let go the suspender; it snapped back against Chary’s chest.
“I—” Chary gritted his teeth. “No! In fact, I do not. And you can lay off your playacting until you tell me why you’ve been following me.”
A wolf howl, distinctly human, reached them, closer than the whistle. On the corner, the slum party tittered audibly.
Laurie blew out a breath. “Yeah, I was following you,” he said lightly but very low.
“And who did I find going into Wright glassworks but their owner, covered in yak hair? Then to find you rooming in the seventeenth ward? Working at your own factory? Of course I followed you. C’mon, we should go. Back to your 2nd Street… house.”
Chary, emboldened and uncaring, facing more immediate danger from the man in front of him than any street mob, refused. “Why should I?”
Laurie sighed. “I’ve got stuff to tell you. Lives are at stake. Possibly your own. Possibly more. Goddammit, I didn’t want to do this on the street.”
“No. Why should I believe you, Laurie Moore? You haven’t ceased lying from the moment we shook hands.”
“Oh, from well before then,” Laurie agreed. “Some days, it’s part of the job. But you know all about that, don’t you? Lying for your job?”
Oh, Lord. How much did he know? If he knew where Chary had been and what he’d been doing, he’d know other things. Did he know about August? Oh, Lord. He could out them all in a second, and then more investigators would follow. He could lose everything.
Laurie took hold of his arm. He wasn’t just strong but looked it too: his upper half was thickly built, like he perpetually belonged in a knit sweater. Actually, everything was thickly built. Football came to mind again. Rugby. Laurie was a fan of baseball, wasn’t he? Or had that been a lie?
“Look, Chary, I’m serious. Men have died, and I don’t want to get arrested on the fucking Bowery for solicitation. Come on.”
Chary stared as he let himself be—surprisingly gently—pulled along. “What? Died? Who?”
“Your brother, to start with,” Laurie said over his shoulder. “But others since, too.”
Others? “But surely, they have nothing to do with August or myself.”
Laurie grunted. “I can’t say it doesn’t. August’s the beginning of it all, isn’t he? I want answers. I’m going to get them one way or another, and it looks like I have to start with you.”
Chary was going to be sick. “My brother wasn’t killed.
He—” He gave up. Laurie clearly hadn’t listened the first time.
“I believe I already told you. He wasn’t murdered.
His death was accidental. And completely unexpected.
Who are you, really? Please tell me. Are you a Pinkerton?
Police? A detective? From the vice societies? Tammany Hall?”
“No,” Laurie said, with faint disgust. “I’m a journalist; that’s all.”
“That’s all!” A reporter. It was almost worse than any other thing. Was this the beginning of the end for him?
His alarm showed. Laurie looked back once more, and his expression softened. “I’ll explain. Honest to God, I just want to talk.”
“I don’t seem to have much choice, do I?”
Laurie smiled thinly. “You’re really not what I expected, Cherry.”