From Potter's Field

'You know, I haven't been to a museum since I was a kid. Wait a minute.' He looked surprised. That's not true. Well, I'll be damned. Doris took me here once. I thought this joint looked familiar.'

Doris was his ex-wife.

'I'd just signed on with the NYPD and she was pregnant with Rocky. I remember looking at stuffed monkeys and gorillas and telling her it was bad luck.

I told her the kid was going to end up swinging through trees and eating bananas.'

'I beg of you. Their numbers are dwindling and dwindling and dwindling!' The tour guide went on and on about the plight of sea turtles.

'So maybe that's what the hell happened to him,' Marino continued. 'It was coming in this joint.'

I had rarely heard him even allude to his only child. In fact, as well as I knew Marino, I knew nothing about his son.

'I didn't know your son's name was Rocky,' I quietly said as we started walking again.

'It's really Richard. When he was a kid we called him Ricky, which somehow turned into Rocky. Some people call him Rocco. He gets called a lot of things.'

'Do you have much contact with him?'

'There's a gift shop. Maybe I should get a shark key chain or something for Molly.'

'We can do that.'

He changed his mind. 'Maybe I'll just bring her some bagels.'

I did not want to push him about his son, but the topic was within reach, and I believed their estrangement from each other was the root of many of Marino's problems.

'Where is Rocky?' I cautiously asked.

'An armpit of a town called Darien.'

'Connecticut? And it's not an armpit of a town.'

'This Darien's in Georgia.'

'It surprises me I haven't known that before now.'

'He don't do anything you'd have any reason to know about.' Marino bent over, his face against glass as he stared at two small nurse sharks swimming along the bottom of a tank outside the exhibit.

'They look like big catfish,' he said as the sharks stared with dead eyes, tails silently fanning water.

We wandered into the exhibit and did not have to wait in line, for few visitors were here in the middle of this workday. We drifted past Kiribati warriors in suits of woven coconut husks, and Winslow Homer's painting of the Gulf Stream. Shark images had been painted on airplanes, and it was explained that sharks can detect odors from the length of a football field and electric charges as weak as one-millionth of a volt. They have as many as fifteen rows of backup teeth, are shaped the way they are to more efficiently torpedo through water.

During a short film we were shown a great white battering a cage and lunging for a tuna on a rope. The narrator explained that sharks are legendary hunters of the deep, the perfect killing machine, the jaws of death, the master of the sea. They can smell one drop of blood in twenty-five gallons of water and feel the pressure waves of other animals passing by. They can outswim their prey, and no one is quite certain why some sharks attack humans.

'Let's get out of here,' I said to Marino as the movie ended.

I buttoned my coat and put on my gloves, imagining Gault watching monsters ripping flesh as blood spread darkly through water. I saw his cold stare and the twisted spirit behind his thin smile. In the most frightening reaches of my mind, I knew he smiled as he killed. He bared his cruelty in that strange smile I had seen on the several occasions I had been near him.

I believed he had sat in this dark theater with the woman whose name we did not know, and she unwittingly had watched her own death on screen. She had watched her own blood spilled, her own flesh sliced. Gault had given her a preview of what he had in store for her. The exhibit had been his foreplay.

We returned to the rotunda, where a barosaurus fossil was surrounded by schoolchildren. Her elongated neck bones rose to the lofty ceiling as she eternally tried to protect her baby from an attacking allosaurus. Voices carried, and the sounds of feet echoed off marble as I glanced around. People in uniforms were quiet behind their ticket counters as they guarded the entrances of exhibits from people who had not paid. I looked out glass front doors at dirty snow piled along the cold, crowded street.

'She came in here to get warm,' I said to Marino.

'What?' He was preoccupied with dinosaur bones.

'She came in here to get warm,' I said to Marino.

'What?' He was preoccupied with dinosaur bones.

'Maybe she came in here to get out of the cold,' I said. 'You can stand here all day looking at these fossils. As long as you don't go into the exhibits, it doesn't cost you anything.'

'So you're thinking this is where Gault met her for the first time?' He looked skeptical.

'I don't know if it was the first time,' I said.

Brick smokestacks were quiet, and beyond guardrails of the Queens Expressway were bleak edifices of concrete and steel. Our taxi passed depressing apartments, and stores selling smoked and cured fish, marble and tile. Coils of razor wire topped chain-link fences, and trash was on roadsides and caught in trees as we headed into Brooklyn Heights, to the Transit Authority on Jay Street.

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