Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone

now, the one he might have to avoid in the mirror and the one he wore on the street, was another matter. Richmond Hill was an immigrant neighborhood. Most people there now simply did not resemble him. They were not fair or tall. They were not bleeders, as white boxers had once been called in the fight game. When he wore his face on the street—a face now flayed by alcohol and high blood pressure and a volatile temperament—he could imagine he was being spotted as a boozy Irishman, a slave to drink and an aging ruffian. To what might be on Lefferts Boulevard a stare of curiosity at one of the aboriginal occupants of Queens by a recently arrived Bengali or Mauritanian or Parsee and those he suspected as despisers of his kind, he showed the watery blue eyes, the rosy face. His strategy was to take his glasses off so that he would not see clearly the expressions of passersby or his own reflection in store windows. Beyond his own front hedges, which he paid a friendly Ecuadorian to trim, he truly did feel responsible for his face. Almost, he thought, ashamed.
    What caused him to have his bushes trimmed by a hired man was actually what drove him nearest to actual shame. He went on his errands step by step and only after using—or neglecting to use—his three maintaining inhalers. He had emphysema that the doctors now called severe. So outstripped on the sidewalk by people twenty years older than himself, blocking the progress of young women uttering impatient sighs behind him, he tried not to notice, or even to see straight. He felt ashamed of himself. Early on, before the diagnosis, he had stopped cold climbing the second flight of stairs at the deep-down Jackson Heights subway station. About to pass him on the way down was a beautiful young woman, one to speculate about, a babe. Dry-drowning as he was, she got his attention. “Oh sir!” she said. “Oh sir, can I help you?” He wondered if he would ever be the same after that.
    Smoking had done it, as well as and especially his useless—as he saw it—presence at the twin towers. He never mentioned that, not that there was anyone to mention it to. Plenty of people he knew had been there. Some, quite a few, had died there. Then there were those who had been there a month and a half after and talked about nothing else. There were those who had not been there and said they had. What Stack knew was the dark side of it, by which he did not mean the misled lads from afar with their faith-based initiatives, or the poor victims, God help them, but a different human dimension. Nothing was so bad it didn’t have a dark side, Stack thought.
    On a warmish morning in December he set out for the boulevard, a quarter mile downhill. It was cloudy, without the stimulation of winter. He did not need the paper to know it was a bad-air day. His tactical plan was to walk the downhill stretch, past the tidy houses of his enterprising neighbors, and buy a
Times.
He had once been a follower of events, but it was pretty much the sports section now. Besides the
Times
he would buy a
Post,
because it was Friday and he wanted the Sunday line. Stack had been firmly ordered to walk on errands rather than drive, the principle of use it or lose it.
    He walked down the boulevard with his practiced obliviousness to what he had grown up calling the candy store, where Morris had sold egg creams and reportedly run a handbook. It was owned by a Pakistani now, an old man in a white cap that showed he had made the hajj to Mecca. He had turned out to be a jolly old-timer, cheerful, even jokey, though not as hilarious as Morris had been. A glum young relative of the old man’s was at the counter this day. Stack bought the papers and took the most level route home.
    The house was neatly kept, although his household appliances needed replacing. The furniture was a museum of early-sixties style. Stack did not shop for furniture or appliances. He had bought maritime prints at one point, and they were on his walls,