by Jon Cohen
Arnie walked to the end of Krupmeyer’s walk, to the last unfinished stretch, the foot of snow Krupmeyer died trying to clear. Arnie bent low, leaned into Krupmeyer’s battle-scarred shovel, and began to clear it. He moved slowly, meticulously, in a final snow-shoveling tribute. When he finished, he redid parts of the walk where the ambulance crew and the gawking neighbors had trampled. At last, he looked up and down, satisfied; it was the way Krupmeyer would have done it. Then he walked up the path to Krupmeyer’s front porch and leaned the shovel beside the door to the empty house, empty because Krupmeyer lived alone with no one to mourn him but Arnie. Arnie was about to go, was halfway down the steps, when he suddenly turned and reached for Krupmeyer’s shovel, his sword, lifted it, and brought it down hard across his knee. Then he carefully laid the two pieces side by side on the steps.
God, his hook ached. He felt the winter’s cold again. Everything ached. He was old. Old. He walked slowly across the street to his own house. When he reached the front door, he lightly touched his chest again, then pushed the door open, and quietly entered the dark.
PART FOUR
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
CHAPTER ONE
IN THE spring of the first year following Atlas’s death, Louis fell out of his second-floor bedroom window. He landed, one bright early May afternoon, in full view of the neighborhood (which for Louis might as well have been in full view of the whole world), in a small bed of yellow and red tulips which bordered the front walk. For Kitty Wilson, passing by the Malone house, her aqualined eyes as always trained on its windows in hope of catching a glimpse of Louis, it was a fantasy come true. She would have been satisfied with just a hint of a shadowy movement at the edge of a curtain, which is what she sometimes got if she was very lucky. But suddenly there he was, Louis in his baseball hat and scarf, sailing headfirst out of a second-floor window.
Kitty was not the only person on the block to witness Louis’s abrupt defenestration. Bev and Bert Howard saw it too, as they stood across the street from the Malones’, chatting with Carl Lerner, enjoying a bit of afternoon gossip in the warm May sun. And Francine Koessler saw Louis, and so did Minky. Francine had been walking Minky on a leash and was no more than ten feet from Kitty Wilson when she saw Kitty turn pale and let out a whoop. Francine and Minky both turned when Kitty whooped, in time to catch the last half of Louis’s downward flight. Francine whooped too, and Minky puffed out her fur and hissed—the scarf in particular attracted Francine’s attention, and probably also Minky’s, who had held that very scarf in her feline jaws some five months earlier.
Louis saw all of these people very distinctly, saw Minky, and even the three or four neighborhood kids playing kickball in the street, during his rapid descent. For sixteen years he had avoided all human contact, and now, he thought as the tulip bed fast approached, here I am about to land right smack-dab in the middle of a not unsizable group of them.
It must have occurred to him, just before he hit the tulips, that perhaps this sudden and accidental return to the world was not quite as accidental as it seemed. Since the summer, since his brief exposure to humanity on the afternoon of Atlas’s funeral, Louis had been experiencing an uncomfortable longing. He’d assumed he longed for his father, since the feeling had begun almost from the moment Louis had stepped out of Jim Rose’s funeral limousine and walked back into the house with Gracie. When the door had closed behind him, he felt a great wash of sadness. When would he walk through that door again? For Gracie’s funeral? Is that what it would take to get him out into the world again? Though he watched from his windows, and still made secret night trips into the neighborhood, it no longer seemed enough. With Atlas gone, he’d lost half his contact with Waverly, lost one ear, and one eye. That’s how he felt the loss of Atlas, as something physical, a part of himself missing. And when Gracie died, he would be left deaf and blind, and mute too, for who would he talk to?
He had been thinking like that at the moment of his fall from the window. A moment of panic, a sense of absolute and overwhelming confinement, caused him to lean far out of his bedroom window, in full daylight, in front of people, caused him to extend himself beyond all the boundaries he’d known for sixteen years, to attempt to perceive a farther distance, to view what could not ordinarily be viewed from the window frame with its white wooden ledge worn from the countless secret hours he pressed against it year after year, seeing, seeing, seeing, but not being seen.
Louis’s eyes remained open even as he tore through the red and yellow petals of the tulips and hit the soft earth. The soft earth is what saved him, and he had Gracie to thank for that. She was a relentless mulcher, her flower beds were as light and yielding as a kiss. Louis might have jumped right up and run back inside the house, might have hidden there for another sixteen years, because hiding was always his first impulse, was what he knew how to do, but despite all that good soft Gracie mulch, he broke his right arm. It was the impulse to hide that had caused his injury. Even as he was tumbling out of the window, he had thrashed about trying to keep his hat on his head and his scarf around his face. And so he landed, hat and scarf in place, but with his right arm twisted beneath him. He heard the arm go, the gristly pop of bone. The pain kept him on the ground, kept him from doing anything more than staring at the front door, the front door he never thought he’d walk through again, except for Gracie’s funeral. And now here he was on the other side of it, on the outside looking in, back in the world of Waverly.
Kitty Wilson was the first to react. “He’s gone and killed himself!” It must have looked that way to her, Louis suddenly at the window, and then out of it, launching himself into thin air. The air did seem thin, like you always say but never really think about. For some reason this crossed Kitty’s mind even in all the excitement—with a body hurtling through it, the air was as thin as thin gets. And Louis didn’t utter a word, a cry, a sound even, so it had to be suicide, his silence an act of will, connected to the act of will that caused him to leap out of the window. That’s where it had already gotten to in Kitty’s mind, from accident to intention, falling to leaping. She went even farther with it. She thought, He waited until he saw me to do it. All these years he was playing, keeping my interest up, appearing and disappearing at his windows, because he knew it would keep me looking, that my eyes would be right there, open and ready, primed for the occasion. He chose me to be his witness. Kitty stared at Louis, his body motionless, his face turned away toward the front of the house, his hat askew but on his head, his scarf flowing straight out behind him as if he were falling still. Kitty stared and thought, And he wants me to be the first to look at him.
Five seconds after Louis landed, Francine Koessler’s panicked brain began to function. That horrible deformed thing, that monster who has terrorized this neighborhood for sixteen years, he was trying to get me, me and my Minky, because of what happened last fall with the scarf—poor Minky getting all tangled up, trying to run away from him. Why hadn’t she called the police, that creature loose in the neighborhood, trying to strangle pussycats with a scarf? He saw us walking by… Francine licked her lips, imagining Louis’s inflamed berserk lunge through the second-floor window, as he spotted his victims and something snapped. Whatever thin thread that had kept him fettered indoors snapped, and he took the quickest route, right out the window, thinking he could actually reach them, thinking it even as he was falling straight down to his death, because she saw him struggling with that hideous scarf, trying to pull it off so he’d be ready when he hit the ground, ready to get my pussy, and get me too. Francine’s legs wobbled, and she dropped down to one knee, pulling Minky close to her.
Bert Howard watched the whole thing, his mouth rounded to a perfect empty O. Bert was not a quick thinker, even under the best of circumstances. His mouth remained open, even as Louis lay across the street in the flower bed. Finally, as the seconds ticked by, a first thought trickled into Bert’s head. Bert was a very meticulous gardener, what with his bear and elephant topiaries, his row
s of prized dahlias, and his two beds of Waverly Festival first-prize-winner John F. Kennedy roses, so when he looked over at Louis, he thought, Why would a man want to do that to a stand of tulips, jump out of a window and land right on top of them?
Even as Louis tumbled from the window, before he even hit the ground, Bev Howard had him dead, in the back of Bill Rose’s hearse, and on his way to the grave at Waverly Cemetery freshly dug, the mourners assembled. When Louis actually hit the tulip bed, that was merely dotting the i and crossing the t as far as Bev was concerned. No, she saw him start out of that window and her mind raced ahead to recipes, or more specifically, to food for the bereaved. Poor Gracie would be especially bereaved, losing her husband, then her son, both in the space of a year. Well, I’ll definitely do the sweet potato casserole with the marshmallow glaze again, and maybe a ham. Or maybe potato salad—no, that was probably too picnicky. And then, as Louis, tumbling, hit the ground—I know, a pineapple upside-down cake.
Carl Lerner, who had moved onto the street only a few months ago, was the only one of that group of onlookers, excluding the kickball-playing neighborhood kids who’d scattered when Louis fell, as if, being kids, they somehow might end up being blamed—Carl was the only one to spring into action. When Louis began his descent, Carl, not being weighted down by sixteen years of having pondered his terrible presence, took off across the street with his arms outstretched as if he truly believed he might catch Louis before Louis smacked into the ground. Carl wasn’t being entirely absurd. He had an actual record of catching human beings who were falling out of windows. Once, on a high school field trip to see Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, he was standing at a street corner when a city bus pulled up beside him. A woman suddenly cried, “My baby!” and the next thing Carl knew, a toddler, who’d been allowed to lean too far out of the hot bus, suddenly fell into his arms. The reason Carl’s arms had been in position for the catch was that he and a classmate were snickering about a chesty woman who’d just passed by. Carl had had both of his hands cupped and his arms out, and had just finished saying, “Did you see those big bazooms?”
So Carl ran, fleet of foot even though he was forty years old and sixty pounds overweight, his arms out and ready. He was not afraid of the person he hoped to catch, and even if he had been, hell, he still would’ve run across the street to help, because that was the kind of person he was. Somebody falls out a window, you catch him, who cares if he’s got something wrong with him, who cares if he don’t ever come out of the house, isn’t that his business, after all? Carl was gaining speed like a great racehorse with a quarter lap to go. My God, I’m going to make it, he thought. But then, just as he’d crossed the street, he caught his foot on third base, the third base the kids in the neighborhood had been using for generations. First was the telephone pole, second was the manhole cover, and third was the funny hump of asphalt the size of a grapefruit next to the curb. God knew what the street department of Waverly had tarred over—the boys always said it was a rat or a Chihuahua or some such thing—but anyway it was third base, and Carl caught his toe on it and went crashing into the gutter, arms outstretched, arms that most definitely would not be rescuing Louis.
Louis was dead, Kitty knew it, Francine and Minky knew it, Bert and Bev knew it, and Carl Lerner, sprawled and despairing in the gutter, knew it. Everybody but Louis knew it. Which is why they all nearly jumped out of their skins when Louis slowly lifted his head and turned his eyes toward them.
CHAPTER TWO
FUCKING ER. It was Iris’s turn to be pulled to the Emergency Room, and she was definitely not in the mood. The patient census in the Intensive Care Unit was low, had been all week, and the Unit nurses were getting pulled to work on floors all over the hospital, wherever staffing was short. Iris knew she was in line for the next hit, and she’d been hoping for a regular medical-surgical floor, or maybe Rehab. Not that either was much to hope for. On a med-surg floor, she’d have eight patients, not one or two like in the Unit, and though they weren’t as sick, you still ended up running your ass off all shift. Everything was too spread out, you spent your time traipsing up and down the long hall getting nickeled and dimed to death. Rarely a real emergency—unlike the often incessant flow of emergencies in the Unit—mostly handing out pills, changing soiled beds, feeding patients, turning and wiping, then more pills. It didn’t take a lot of brains, but it was still hard work. By the end of a shift, answering the endless call lights that blinked on above the patients’ doors, Iris felt like she was one of those metal balls inside a pinball machine, bonging from light to light. Rehab, where the amputees and stroke victims recuperated, was a little better, but still not what you’d call a winner. Rehab required a nurse who could move slowly and patiently, which Unit nurses were psychologically incapable of doing. Iris liked to go, to move, to get things done; to stand there, barely assisting as a Rehab patient learned to put on a brace by himself or to use a knife and fork again, was a unique form of torture. Iris wished them well, she truly did, but the fact was she liked the patients better when they were in the Unit, very ill, and dependent on her skills and speedy interventions.
She had walked into Barnum Memorial Hospital feeling almost good, the warmth of the May afternoon still in her when she approached Herb, the security guard, and punched in to work. In fact, she felt so good she made the mistake of smiling at him.
Herb’s wrinkled face lit up, and he smiled back at her, which put a severe strain on his dentures. His uppers popped forward, which threw his alignment out and caused his lowers to list to the right, which shifted his tongue up and to the left, which forced his uppers to be pushed even further forward until at last they shot out of his mouth altogether, and unfortunately for Iris, her natural reaction was to reach out and catch them before they hit the linoleum and shattered.
“Atta irl,” Herb shouted, meaning “Thatta girl,” reaching out to claim his teeth.
Iris made a face as he took them and began, with a great many juicy sounds, to force them back into his mouth. “Herb,” she said, “I’ve handled some pretty disgusting dentures in my time, but those things take the cake.”
“A little fuzz on the molars never hurt a man,” he said. “Iris, girl, that was quite a catch. You’re a marvelous woman, you’re my Georgia peach.” He smiled at her again, but more cautiously. “Quite a catch. You sure do know how to use your hands.” His smile became a leer and he gave his eyebrows a wiggle.
“You got a twitch, Herb? You got a problem with your eyebrows?”
He leaned his face toward her. “Think I do, Iris. How about taking a closer look?”
Iris stepped back and stared at him for several moments. “Herb, practically every female employee of this hospital is better looking than me. I don’t get it. Not once, never have I seen you come on to any one of them. Only me. Why is that? Because I’m such a joke, you think you might actually have a chance?”
It was Herb’s turn to stare back at her. He shook his head, then spoke to her in his wheezy asthmatic voice. “You think I’m a crazy old fart, don’t you? Don’t you? Well, I’ll tell you something, I know a thing or two. I got no teeth, and I got hardly no wind left in my lungs, and I got the arthritis bad—hell, there’s something wrong with practically everything I do got. But my brain works, Iris girl, and my eyes are cloudy, but they can still see. I watch you coming here to this time clock every day, and I see something I don’t see in any other of those female employees you was talking about.” He stopped to catch his breath, placed a gnarled hand on the wall to brace himself.
Iris whispered, “What? What is it you see?”
Herb took a white handkerchief from his back pocket, lifted his hat, and wiped his brow. At last he said, “I see love. I see pure, one hundred percent untapped love. You call yourself ugly. Well, you’re just looking at the package, girl, and me, I’m looking in the package. So there. That’s what causes old Herb to kick up a fuss every time he sees his Iris. He gets all excited ’cause it’s Christmas Eve, and
he knows what’s in the package.”
They stood there in the hall, eyeing each other as several nurses walked past them, punching in for evening shift. Iris turned to go and started off down the hall.
Herb’s voice reached her just before she disappeared. “Hey. You’re a peach.”
She stopped, and shouted back at him. “Don’t be thinking about taking no bites out of this peach until you get those dentures fixed.”
He laughed. “So long, bye-bye, I’m off to the dentist now.”
So when she walked into the Unit, Iris was thinking about Herb’s words, or rather, she didn’t know what to think about his words, so that when her head nurse, Gloria, said, “Iris, sorry, but you’re pulled to the ER tonight,” Iris only half heard her. After Gloria repeated herself, “Earth to Iris, you’re working in the ER tonight,” Iris came to and heard twice, which was two more times than she wanted to hear that she’d be working in ER.
“Shit,” said Iris. “Pardon my French, please.”
“Oh, come on,” said Gloria, with the eternal pep that so grated on her staff’s nerves, “ER’s not so bad. It’ll be a break from this place.”
Iris looked at her. “All them damn fingers. Who needs it?”
“Fingers?”
“You know, people coming in with broken fingers, jammed fingers, lacerated fingers, infected fingers. I had a shift there once where all I did was fingers, I’m telling you. I even had a lady who managed to put a crochet hook through one of her fingers.”
“Ouch,” said Gloria.
“Tell me about it,” said Iris. She rooted around in her locker, found her stethoscope and scissors, and headed off down the back way to the ER.
“Maybe it’ll be toes instead tonight,” Gloria called cheerfully after her.