The Museum of Extraordinary Things(19)

One remnant from his past clung to him. He was still an insomniac, unable to sleep for more than a few hours at a time unless he drank himself into a stupor. The night continued to call to him. Something was waiting for him in the darkness, a part of himself he couldn’t deny. Instead of returning to the taverns he’d frequented while working for Hochman, he now made his way to upper Manhattan when he felt the darkness inside. In those craggy acres where the city fell away, there was a still sense of the wilderness that had once been everywhere on this island. When he was beside the quiet inlets where streams crisscrossed through the marshland, he found himself uplifted, as if he were a believer and the wretchedness of his childhood had never happened, for at one time he had possessed a certain purity of spirit, though it had drifted away from him.

Eddie was not entirely alone on these outings, for he had the best of company; he had become the owner of a dog, an arrangement he’d never intended. Beside him trotted a broad-chested pit bull, as loyal as they come. A year earlier, Eddie had spotted a bundle of rags tied with rope floating near the pier at Twenty-third Street. When he noticed movement inside, he latched on to it with the hook of his fishing rod, pulling the bundle close to shore. He discovered a waterlogged pup wrapped up inside, ears cut into stubs. The animal was meant for fighting but had clearly been too good-natured for the terrible business that went on in cellars all over lower Manhattan where dogs were set against rats, and raccoons, and each other. Eddie called him Mitts, for although the pup’s body was brindle, all four feet were white. Loyalty bred loyalty, and from the time of his rescue, Mitts refused to leave his master’s side. When Eddie went out alone, the dog needed to be locked in a stall in the stables below the studio to ensure he wouldn’t leap out the window to chase his beloved rescuer into the chaotic onslaught of automobiles and trolleys and carriages that caused many to refer to Tenth Avenue as Death Avenue. On several occasions, Mitts had managed to leap over the stable wall, leaving a frantic Eddie to grab him by his collar to pull him back from the street. The leather collar had been specially made by a cobbler, with the dog’s name burned into the leather. Eddie imagined he was overly attached to the dog because the pup had been too young to be taken from his mother and had slept in his owner’s bed for the first few nights, a practice Mitts reverted to whenever his master wasn’t

at home.

Eddie went fishing on Saturdays, the day he would have been at prayer had he lived the life that had been intended for him. It was easy enough to avoid civilization; he simply skirted the river. Central Park, once a boggy area good only for goats and piggeries, and later populated by squatters, along with a town called Seneca Village, home to African American and Irish immigrants and destroyed thirty years earlier, had been remade into an opulent playground for the residents of the luxurious town houses of the East Side. Those wealthy New Yorkers preferred their experiences with nature to consist of clipped green meadows and waterfalls that were turned on and off with spigots. The Citizens Union had filed complaints with the parks department to stop Central Park from being popularized, which, if it was allowed to be used for sports and ball games, would ruin the greenery by giving it over to the immigrant masses. Though Riverside Park ran alongside the Hudson for several blocks, the land along the uppermost West Side was still wild, though for how long, no one dared to guess.

There was the fresh green scent of early spring. Mourning cloaks and cabbage white butterflies filled the air. Eddie had occasionally seen the prints of fisher-cats and fox tracked through the mud. It was not far from here that he had recently imagined someone had been watching him. His dog was a gleeful hunter of moles and mice, but, on this particular evening, there seemed bigger game at stake. The hair on Mitts’s back had gone up, and he’d taken off like a shot. The pit bull may have spied a deer in the undergrowth, or perhaps it was the old hermit Jacob Van der Beck, a Dutchman who lived in a rough-hewn cabin. Here was an individual so bitter toward his fellow men, so sure that the building boom in Manhattan would overtake his slice of the world, it was said he had a wolf tied up on his porch to keep interlopers at bay. His family had owned a large tract of land from the time of the Dutch settlers, with ties to the founding families, such as the Dyckmans. He still referred to the Hudson as the North River, as the original settlers had.

Eddie had once persuaded the old man to sit for a portrait in exchange for a bottle of rye. Beck had been a grumpy and withholding model; he’d crouched upon a moss-covered log and hadn’t batted an eye, vanishing back into the woods as soon as Eddie took his photograph.



On the evening Mitts ran away, galumphing through the woods, dead set on chasing after some sort of prey, Eddie had eventually found the dog in a clearing. There’d been no sign of Beck and no deer tracks, yet there was a presence. The ground was damp, as if the river had washed up into the meadow grass, leaving a soft path beaten down in the patches of trillium and bloodroot. There was no one in sight, but all the same, when Eddie returned to his campsite, he couldn’t shake the notion that he’d been followed.

Now, here it was, the last Saturday in March, and Eddie settled down with his rod. He’d left his studio in the dark, and it was hardly daybreak when he began to fish. On both sides of the Hudson the sky was struck with a hazy pink glow. He’d brought along night crawlers and crusts of bread in an old tin pail. Eddie avoided the Harlem River—it was overcrowded and overfished, even more so than the Hudson, littered with oystering boats. Several bridges had recently been built across the waters, disturbing the marsh birds. He knew it wouldn’t be long before the countryside disappeared, as it had in Chelsea, where there was pavement everywhere.