Frog

by Stephen Dixon

  “She’s on her way to shop when she sees, two buildings down from hers, something funny going on inside the vestibule. The door’s all glass, little iron grillwork on the front but no curtains or anything to stop her view, and a man’s on the floor with his pants half off and the top of his backside showing and going through what seems to be the sex motions. She doesn’t want to look hard, since in this neighborhood sometimes it can be anything you think it is and often much worse. But his hands are hidden so maybe he’s just doing it to himself, bad enough but not something threatening to her. Or maybe he’s having heart seizures on the floor or whatever they are like that. But then she sees another pair of hands—different, a woman’s or older girl’s—shoot up around him and one of them tears at his shirt and the other reaches for his hair as if to grab and pull it but never gets there, his head always backing away when her hand gets close. Maybe they’re both doing it together, high on drugs or something, not tenants there of course but from the outside, permanently or temporarily out of their right minds. No matter what it is someone should go to the door to see and possibly help, and she looks around but nobody is on the street up or down or if they’re far away she can’t see them, and if they’re in the windows looking at her she also can’t see them because of her bad long-distance eyes. She wants better to just get away. But then if the woman’s unwilling in all this, and that those hands aren’t part of the sex act but her fighting against it, she has to do something immediately like scream to attract attention or just to let the man know someone’s watching and maybe he’ll stop and get off her and go away. She walks down a step. He turns around—maybe he saw her shadow, because she thinks she walked too lightly for him to hear her—and sees her and pushes the door open a little with his foot and says ‘Mind your own business, lady, or you’ll get the same thing to you.’ Then he turns back to the woman he’s on and starts pumping harder as if to get the thing over with right away. The woman yells ‘Please, don’t go, stop him,’ and tears at his clothes. He punches her and she’s quiet and then he looks around again while he’s pumping on her and says ‘See this?’ and balancing himself on the door with one hand, picks up and holds out a knife. ‘I’ll cut your head off if you don’t get out of here. Go to your fucking place where you live and lock yourself inside it for the next ten hours and shut up forever about everything you saw.’ ‘But you’re on the street … doing it.’ ‘You heard me?’ and he swishes the knife in the air. She walks back to the sidewalk. The woman screams. The man’s still on top of her, doing it harder and holding her face down with his hand it seems. She hurries down the steps, bangs on the glass with her keys while she yells to the street ‘Help, someone, fire, fire,’ she heard she’s supposed to yell if she wants people to really take notice and come. ‘Help, please, fire, a woman’s getting raped, mauled, burned and raped. Fire, fire.’ He gets up, turns to her, penis erect, grabs it and jerks it back and forth a few times and then points to her and laughs, zips up, opens the door as she reaches the top step, woman’s on the ground pulling down her skirt and crying and clutching her neck, runs up the steps and grabs her from behind when she’s gone maybe five feet, hits her head and she goes down. Then he grabs her head by the hair and smashes it on the ground. All she remembers. He must have done it several times by the injuries she got but she only remembers it that once. Later in the hospital her son says ‘From what the police suggested the man had finished raping the woman and took her wallet. Then after he knocked you out he took your handbag and must have spit on your head because there was saliva all over it, or maybe you got it from the sidewalk when he knocked you down and beat your head against it. No one from any of the buildings around called the police.’ ‘That doesn’t mean they saw and didn’t call. It could mean nobody might have seen or heard anything.’ ‘Really doubtful, but OK. The woman who was raped was the first person to come to you. She sat you up so you wouldn’t choke from your bleeding and busted teeth and stopped a car to get the driver to call an ambulance and the police, both for you and her. Look, from now on no stepping in when you see something suspicious looking or terrible happening. Don’t even call the police from a street callbox or from your home or anywhere. The attacker might know where you live or go to great lengths to find out to get even with you. You did enough of that in your life. Let others take over. Now do you understand me? Just no more, and Jerry tells me to tell you the same thing.’ I can get a whistle,’ she says. ‘One that’s on a chain and looks like a nice pendant, so when I go out I can wear it around my neck without anybody much thinking about what it is. I’ve seen them advertised in the better jewelry stores—Fortunoff’s and Tiffany’s. If I don’t blow it immediately when I see something wrong going on, I’ll go down the street fifty feet to blow it. Every tenant on the block and maybe in the immediate neighborhood should have one or just carry a regular police whistle, but that I shouldn’t expect. But just think of it. Suppose I blew my whistle, someone heard it and blew hers. Then someone else heard that whistle and blew hers, till on and on this whistling went till the sound of it, altogether or just a few of them or one or two last ones, reached a policeman walking his beat or in a car. It might for now be one of the best ways to beat these crime things. And the rapist or mugger, or just a car thief, by hearing the whistles will have to know he’s a caught man if he stays. I’m going to bring it up at the next block association meeting. Or even contact the association’s president to call a meeting to talk about the growing crime on the block and my whistling idea.’”

  “I open the door and immediately feel a breeze in their apartment. Something’s wrong. It’s winter and this wind and my mother always keeps the windows shut in weather like this and all the downstairs rooms are lit. From the foyer I see what seem like little pieces of paper floating to the kitchen floor. A burglar, must have been going through something, her handbag, and scattered them, tissues and loose things, when he heard me and ran off. I yell ‘You’re in fucking trouble with me, mugger,’ and run to the kitchen, not there and no sound of him, look around for something to hit him with, nothing really good in sight and I open a kitchen drawer. The candlesticks in the dining room! And I run to it. They’re on the table, I grab them, bang them on the table edge and yell ‘I’m going to pound the living shit out of you with these clubs I got so get the hell out, mugger, you better get the fuck out right away,’ and with a candlestick raised to clip him I walk into the next room. No one there. Window’s open, bars pried apart, so that’s how he got in. He go out? Probably has a crowbar himself unless he left it outside. He go upstairs? Should I shut the window and lock it to keep him from coming back or make it a few seconds tougher for him to leave? I shut but don’t lock it since nothing I do with the window will be better than anything else. I check the bathroom. Empty, same with the shower stall. Stairway and upstairs hallway lights are on. He can do something to me from the top of the stairs when I walk up, so I keep the candlesticks pointed out in front of me. If he has a gun I’m sunk. If there’s more than one of them I’m probably sunk too but I have to take a quick look around to see that my folks are OK. Ceiling light’s on and all the dresser drawers are out and one’s on the floor and closet door’s open in Vera’s old room. I look inside the empty closet, toilet, under the bed. I go down the hall to the boys’ room my father now sleeps in. Door’s shut, room’s dark, closet’s open, drawers all out, but he seems to be sleeping peacefully. I get close and he’s snoring softly. I kick around under the bed, poke inside the closet with a candlestick, other in my right hand always raised. He stirs, tries to turn over; I tiptoe out. Living room’s unlit. I go through it, then back to whack the almost ceiling-to-floor drapes with the candlesticks, circle the easy chair and card table and feel under the couch to see no one’s there, go to my mother’s room at the end of the front hall. Hallway light’s off, also the ones in her room. I stand by her door, don’t hear anything. Behind me’s the baby’s room. It’s always locked, when there’s no guest occupying it, an added protection for th
em she thinks in case someone climbs in from the street. I turn the knob, doesn’t open. I say ‘Mom, Mom.’ No sound, can’t hear her breathing. I’ve done this lots before, listened at her room after my nightly check of my father, and when I didn’t hear her breathing I often thought she might have died in her sleep. ‘Mom, Mom, you OK?’ I go in, come closer to her, listen but always looking around in case the thief springs out at me. Her bathroom. I go in it, shut the door, turn on the light, candlestick ready to clip him, open the shower door. I go back into her room, both closets are open, poke around inside them, kick under both beds, bend closer to her, still don‘t hear anything, put my ear near her mouth. She’s breathing and from the little light on her face coming through the venetian blind slats seems to be all right. I check the rest of the closets in the apartment, curtains, under the piano, anyplace he could hide. I unlock the backyard door and go outside, see no crowbar or anything like that, must have been a very thin small man to get through those bars or a kid, or maybe the bars were pried apart by a man and a kid went through them into the apartment. They had to have come over one of the fences of the neighboring backyards. Two have barbed wire on them and another has what looks like razor blades on wire but nothing it seems someone with thick gardening gloves couldn’t push aside to get over or through. I shout ‘Hello, hello. Tenants on West Seventy-fifth on the north side of the street and West Seventy-sixth on the south, or just the odd-numbered buildings on Seventy-fifth and the even-numbered ones on Seventy-sixth. This is Howard Tetch, son of the Tetches in number 37 on Seventy-fifth Street. A thief’s been in my parents’ apartment. Broke into it. Pried apart the bars of a backyard window and ransacked the place. Nobody’s been hurt but the thief’s out in one of these backyards now or on a roof, if he hasn’t gotten away from the area by now or God knows into somebody else’s place, so make sure all your windows and backyard doors are locked.’ I start giving it again. Someone opens his window and says ‘Stop shouting.’ I see the window but not the man. I say ‘Didn’t you hear what I was saying? Thief in the neighborhood. Broke into my parents’ apartment just ten minutes ago. The Tetches. He’s the former dentist in number 37—his shingle was outside for more than forty years till a few years ago—and she you always see around. You must have seen her from your window there if you can see me. When it’s nice out she has coffee and a cigarette out here a few times a day and in the summer waters these bushes and her plants. My father too-reading his newspaper and even in the cold weather when it’s not too cold, sitting here with a blanket around him.’ ‘Stop shouting, people are sleeping,’ and closes his window. Some lights have gone on or are going on in other apartments, a few windows open, but all behind shades or in the dark. I go back in, bolt and lock the door, go to my father’s room. Though I yelled almost right under his window, he’s still sleeping peacefully, or maybe he woke up and went back. I check his bag. Full. I empty it in the toilet and attach it back to the tube. I check his diapers. Empty. I hate doing it but when he’s shit I change them. Those two jobs are mostly what I come here for around this time every night and to see if there are any messages my mother’s left me in the kitchen about what I could do for her or Dad the next day or phone messages I might have got here because I have no phone. I go to her room. She’s sleeping. I get down on my knees by her bed and say ‘Mom, Mom, it’s me, wake up. It’s OK, Dad’s all right, but wake up, I have to tell you something.’ She stirs. ‘Can I turn on the light?’ I say. ‘Turn it on. Everything’s all right?’ ‘Fine, considering. Listen, don’t panic but a thief’s been in the apartment,’ I know. He was in this room. I first thought it was you. But to make sure because of what’s been happening in the neighborhood lately I kept my mouth shut. In fact it happened to Aunt Bertha and Irv where they live a year ago, so I knew what to do. You remember: Rose slept through it but Irv kept quiet when the burglar lifted his wallet off the night table and slid his hand under their pillows and got Irv’s watch. So, when I heard this man opening drawers and going through them and closets, I knew it wasn’t you. I figured if he thought I was asleep he wouldn’t bother me. At least the chances of it would be better than if he thought I was awake and could later identify him. Of course if he wanted more than he got, then wake or asleep he’d beat me up till he got it out of me. But I must have fallen asleep after he left the room. Don’t ask me how. I was scared to hell and planned to just lie there for fifteen minutes and then go to your father. It’s probably because I didn’t sleep all last night, your father got me up so much with his bad dreams and making ishy. But you say he’s OK?’ ‘Still sleeping; I emptied his bag. And the man only got into your pocketbook, it seems; presumably took all your cash and credit cards.’ ‘The cards I keep hidden elsewhere. But the money, good, let him. I always keep some in there and the pocketbook in a conspicuous spot on top of the kitchen radio, just in case for things like this. Thirty-one—three crisp tens and an old single—as if that’s all I have, plus change, which might be enough to satisfy a thief to think his breakin was worth it. He break anything?’ ‘Just this,’ and I show her a candlestick. I got those from my Uncle Leibush as a wedding present. Dad and I did.’ ‘The other one’s just as dented. I did it, I’m afraid. I was going to hit him with it. I bashed the table with them—I’d come in on him while he was going through your pocketbook—so he’d be afraid I was serious and had something really lethal to get him with and race the hell out of here.’ ‘Which table?’ ‘The dinning room one.’ ‘My good table? I bought it when we moved in here. You can’t get anyone to fix those anymore or get any silver candlestick like these without paying for an expensive antique. And it’s a soft silver; won’t go back. But you got excited for a good cause. Do I have to get dressed now? Police say they’re coming right over? Usually, if the thief’s gone, they take their time.’ ‘You know, I forgot to call them. I’ll do it right away.’ ‘Maybe my insurance covers the table and candlesticks. By all rights it should. But probably they’ll say the damage could have been avoided.’ ‘So say the thief did the bashing. That he saw me come in, grabbed the candlesticks and banged them on the table and said to me “One step, sucker, and I’ll smash your head in.” I’ll tell the police that’s what he did and said.’ ‘You’d be lying. And please don’t tell Dad what you said you’d say, for that’s just what he’d want you to do too, get the insurance. And listen. If he’s not up and doesn’t get up again tonight, we should let him sleep and not even disturb him with it later.’ ‘The police will probably want to see his room.’ ‘If we can’t stop them—for what are they really going to find?—let’s let him sleep till they come.’”

  “Part of a police report my mother gave. ‘I was in my bank, doing my normal weekly depositing and wanting to withdraw a little cash. Suddenly behind me I hear “Nobody move, everybody get down, this is a robbery.” Really, in that order—“Don’t move, get down.” What did they think we should do? Because if you can get down without moving, you’re really doing something. It was stupid. Unfair too, for someone could get killed not doing the right thing because of these confusing orders. And if you didn’t speak English which a lot of people in this city don’t, or not well enough to understand that hurried garbled gibberish, what then? But that fits my theories about bank robbers. That they’re all stupid. If they were the least bit smarter they wouldn’t be robbing banks, for one thing. For I’m sure, what with bank guards and plainclothesmen and just armed storeowners bringing in their own money, they have more of a chance of getting shot in one than we do with so many of them robbing banks. But you don’t want my theories, so I’ll stick to as close an account as I can give. This man said “Don’t move, get down, robbery. Pull your coats over your heads or just keep your eyes shut and your face flat against the floor.” Finally we knew. We should get down—for how else can you put your face to the floor?—and not keep our coats over our heads standing up. It sometimes takes cunning to be an innocent bystander. And right after that he confirmed our hunches about what to do by shouting “Now down, down,
nobody make a move. First one to pick his head up gets it blown off.” By this time I was already getting down to the floor. I didn’t fly to it. I couldn’t. I got down slowly, one knee, then the other, then spread myself flat on my stomach and chest. If I had tried to get down quicker I might have broken a hip. I knew that and hoped the robbers would know why I was getting down so slowly. They must have. For though I was, from what I saw, the last one to get down by almost a minute, they didn’t complain. And since I had no sweater or coat for my head, though they didn’t say sweater, they just said coat, but I’m sure a sweater would have been all right, I put my arms over it and kept my eyes shut tight for the rest of the time till they left. From what the tellers said later, there must have been six to seven of them. For each line had a man or woman with a handgun, they said, and one who could have been either. And there were five lines operating. I remember that, quickly observing which one was the shortest to get on, when I came in. And behind us were two different men’s voices ordering the customers on line and all around to get down and stay there. Though maybe it was just one man with a couple of different voices: high and low, excited and controlled. Anyway, that was all there was to it for me. They told us to stay put on the floor where we were for ten minutes after they left, but most of us got up the second a teller shouted they were gone. All this a bit hard to believe, wouldn’t you say? Happening in the middle of the city, fifty customers or so in the bank and maybe fifteen bank employees, two of them armed guards in uniforms, plus another five thousand people strolling and pushing strollers and selling umbrellas and things in the street right outside and going in and out of the subway entrance in front of the bank. And to top it off, two policemen from a doubleparked police car right across Broadway having a snack in a café. They didn’t go through my pocket book or anybody else’s, the robbers. One man, after everybody got up, did stay on the floor weeping, and a whole bunch of us went over to comfort him. It seemed he’d been robbed something like this—guns, get to the floor!—just a few months before, but in that one he also was kicked when he didn’t unzip his jacket pocket fast enough to turn over his wallet. He was afraid they were the same gang and they’d rough him up and maybe even kill him because he recognized them, besides crying because it happened twice in so short a time. We told him not to worry. That this can’t be the only gang in the city robbing banks. And since this one did it differently than his last one—didn’t take our wallets and watches and things, and waved pistols instead of shotguns behind us—it almost had to be a different gang. He said that suppose it happens again? What’s he to think every time he goes to a bank? I told him that if I’ve been going to a bank about once a week for more than sixty years and this was the first time it happened to me, chances of it happening to him a third time in the next year were slight. Someone else said that the first fifty of those sixty years weren’t such violent ones in the city and so shouldn’t count, but anyway what I said seemed to calm the man. Only other thing I can remember now is how one customer started complaining, about ten minutes after the robbers left, if this meant there wasn’t going to be any bank service here for a few hours. No one else of us did. In fact a group of us said that once the police finished questioning us we’ll share a cab to the nearest Chase branch on Broadway and Sixty-third and maybe even have lunch together after to talk about all this.’”