Keys of Babylon

by Minhinnick, Robert

  Try the pepper now, smiles Maria. I grew it in my window box. Don’t worry, I scraped all the seeds out. And saved them.

  A trucker took me to the Paradise Valley, she says. He was hauling lavatory pans, I remember that. I sat up front and he gave me a Hershey bar. Welcome to the US of A. Then another ride got me to Phoenix. Big, bad Phoenix. Belly of the beast. With all those swimming pools. You ever have a swimming pool, Larry? Hey, three cheers for swimming pools. All those cleaning jobs they create.

  The lavatory guy dropped me near the Greyhound station and, you bet, there were others like me there too. Oh yes. I washed in the Greyhound toilets and talked to the cleaners. Everyone spoke Mexican. But there were Indians too. And these people who’d come all the way up from Chiapas. And some from Guatemala, riding on top of freight trains. Little brown people. Like dolls. Hair cut straight across their foreheads, wearing serapes as if they were back in their villages. Their language was strange. Couldn’t read or write they said. But they could work. So where was the work? Let us at it was their attitude.

  And at once I started to feel better. Because all these other people had done what we’d done. Me, Juan, Juanita. I had kept thinking we were unique. But others had come further. Puerto Penasco? they laughed. That’s just down the road.

  But what surprised me was that Americans were so good. People are good, Larry. Or they want to be. The truck driver who took me to the station even had a sticker in his cab that read ‘The US is full up’. But he said I looked like I could use a ride. He knew, Larry. He knew.

  And that was years ago and it’s still not full. When I tried my luck in Flagstaff I lived in the forest. There’s nobody there. When you’ve been in the Altar you might be scared of the forest. It’s a different kind of loneliness. A different silence.

  Maria pours him a glass of water.

  In the desert we thought we’d never see people again. We slept one night at an abandoned mine. It was still the eight of us then. Juanita was afraid to sleep in the mine entrance; she said there might be dead people. I went in and found part of an old book. It was Robinson Crusoe. We’d never read it but we knew what it was about. Juan said there was a movie, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, that was filmed in the desert. Just over the border, he said, in California. We’d go to see it in Hollywood, Juan promised me. Or watch it in our own apartment when we owned a videotape machine. With popcorn and sundaes. Juan liked ice cream.

  I worked everywhere. Cleaned up in Wendy’s. It had just opened. Ever had one of Wendy’s old-fashioned hamburgers? I might have flipped it for you. At Pizza Hut I crushed all the cardboard to be collected. Heated the plates. But I took the pizza crusts back to the room I was renting.

  Larry looks up. His chin is shining. But after the third mouthful he hasn’t touched his food.

  You married? he asks.

  No sir. No sir I’m not.

  You should be married.

  Why?

  He studies her now. In her blue uniform with the Sunset crest. In her sandals that he hears slap down the corridor when she leaves his room. Bigfoot. He used to hear her on the night shift. Slap, slap. Before the new medication. Before they took away his phone.

  Because.

  Because what?

  Just because.

  I wanted children, says Maria. If I’d stayed home I would have had children.

  How old are you? he asks.

  Coming up to forty. Or is it fifty? Ha ha.

  Larry sucks in his cheeks. I used to take my son to Wendy’s, he says. Maybe not Wendy’s but some diner in Phoenix. My son, Jacob. It was a treat. He liked root beer too. He always wore these big thick glasses. Made him look like a bug.

  They’re moving to Anthem this week, she says quietly. Exciting for them.

  He prods the food. All my father brought to this country, mutters Larry, is a violin. A poxy violin. He played it on the ship coming over. He played it walking down the gangway, his ass hanging out of his pants. Then he never played it again.

  He must have been proud of you.

  The old man is scowling.

  I bought a violin for Jacob. He never touched it. Always had his head in these encyclopaedias we had. He could reel off every president’s name and dates. The capital of every state. Augusta, Maine. Sheesh. My wife bought them from a door-to-door salesman. Took up a whole shelf. You got kids?

  No. I told you.

  Why?

  Because.

  Because what?

  Just because.

  Maria looks out of the window. The Goliath truck is there again. The heaps of white sacks. From her pocket she takes the stone she had thought to show Larry. The black stone she had sucked in the desert. One round stone.

  Hey, the sky’s really red, she says. If you feel like it I’ll take you out tomorrow. To our tree. Or you can watch the Cardinals game. Could be close, I hear. Now eat your nopalitos, Larry. They’re going cold.

  A welcome for the river god

  It was on the blackboard. So, I thought, it must be true. On a little blackboard at the back entrance, facing the car park. I was coming out of the Spar and the Polski Sklep and I had my provisions already, if you know what I mean. I was stocked up, and feeling good about things.

  Because the town wasn’t bad, and the weather had been dry all month. But better than anything was the sea. I could hear it as I looked at the blackboard. A sucking, a sighing. Big swell, they had said, for the next few days. I could imagine the spray with the sun in it. The ocean showing its muscles. And the smell of it. That was the difference. The shock. Even after a month, I wasn’t used to that smell. Salt and catpiss and redcurrant leaves. Or boiling tar. Tar popping in its barrel.

  Dangerous, really, the sea. That’s what I think when I walk the promenade. All these pensioners and school children come to gaze at it. But the sea is threatening. Imprisoned for a thousand years, but capable still of killing its jailer. Yes that’s the sea. Whispering in its own language. Waiting for something to happen as it loiters under the green railings. That’s what the sea does. It waits. The sea has patience and will never run out of time. But I can feel the minutes pass. The days. Gone like bubbles of black tar. Gone like pounds and pennies.

  The day I first went in I’d been nervous. You never know what idiots you’re going to meet in places like that. Or, rather, you do. The failed and the flakey. The ugly and the deformed. The men whose first instinct, even at that time in the morning, is violence.

  Most especially the women. The women will be few but they will be noticed first.These are women who by their very presence are exposed immediately as beyond salvation. Because walking into a place like that is an admission of guilt. Or desperation. Being seen there incites a verdict. For a woman, the walk up that pathway, out of the car park and past the dented keg, over the fag ash thick as cinders, is a long road.

  Eight a.m. the blackboard said. It was 8.05 when I first stepped in. Yet the place was full. I’d say it was seething. But not like a workmen’s café at that time, when there’s a frenzy to life. Where you see men in plaid shirts starting enormous breakfasts. Swigging tea out of white enamel. All the coming, the going, the familiarities. In a café, there’s an expectation for the day. Unimaginable things are going to happen. Fateful things.

  But at the Seagull Room it’s a different busyness. The act of entering says this is the day’s highlight. Reached already. That this will be for you, the one who dares enter, the best part of that day. Before even the school buses have appeared. The locks drawn in the banks.

  When I went in I was carrying two plastic bags, my coat over my shoulder because it was already warm, and I had a three-inch bolster in a side pocket of my jeans. Heavy, blue steel. Edge of brickdust on it. Scabs of concrete. But I’d recently had it under the grinding wheel and there was no burring on the blade. It’s not something you’d want waved in your face. Which, I’m afraid, I had to do last week. To some waster. Some wanker.

  I was on the hill going down towards the fairground. Th
ey call that stretch the Ghetto. It was about eleven, throwing-out time, and I was just wandering off to watch the waves. What’s wrong with that? Maybe buy chips. Then out of this alley come three of them. Two kids and their dad. It was obviously their dad. Stubbies of Stella in their hands, so not hard up. Money to piss away.

  One of the kids shoulder-barged me off the pavement. For no reason. Believe me, I was sober and I was orderly. He was only a kid, but it hurt and I stumbled. The three of them laughed, but I had the bolster out in a second and under the father’s chin. Blue steel, like I said. Heavy in the hand. Serious heft.

  Okay, that was a stupid thing to do. But you can’t let yourself become a target. I learned that a long time ago. He was fat, clean shaven, the father. Nice white shirt, properly ironed. And he smelled of cologne. As sweet as a lemon. As it was dark he couldn’t have known what I was holding. Only that there was a cold blade against his Adam’s apple. A very big blade. Something immediately dangerous.

  I looked into his face and ignored the boys. Boys? Eighteen, twenty. Big, drunk, unutterably ignorant. They could have floored me then and there. Imprinted their trainers on my face. But they froze. Surprised by the unexpected. By my reaction. And dulled by the booze.

  Hey, all right, he laughed. The fat man laughed but I could hear the shock in his voice. The fear. Sorry, butt, he said. Only messing like. It’s all right.

  And they walked off. Slowly, but they left. Swearing, red-faced, bollocky men. Dad bandy-legged as a pitbull in his powder-blue, low-crotched Levi’s, his riveted belt, the Samoan tattoos on his arms. Yes, some role model. Dad dragging his sons away. I expected them to throw the bottles but it didn’t happen. What they aimed at me were the usual words. And unlike glass they were impossible to avoid.

  Ten minutes later I was down on the esplanade. The sea was under the railings. And I was shaking. I was nearly crying too, then laughing, then everything together. And there was the bolster in my pocket. A dead weight. A deadly weapon. A comforter. Get caught by a bolster’s edge and it will excavate your face. Its blade will depress and fracture your skull. Yes, I was laughing because I had won, but I was crying because I might have killed that man. And I was shaking because he could have killed me.

  But now I think they were just playing rough. Rugby men, used to the scrum, bulked up by the weights machines. The boys swearing vengeance, one of them foaming, the father thinking it all over and, if he’s sensible, shrugging it off. Oh yeah. If he’s sensible. With his cologne on my skin.

  When I enter, no one speaks but the room acknowledges me. Already I am a familiar and already I have my place, my back to the wall, my eye on the door. The barman puts a pint on the counter. I feel the cold beads of its industrial dew. The barman is another shaven man. Bulging, implacable. He smells of smoke, this man, and a few of the customers have cigarettes. It’s illegal of course, but so is the violence of their streets, the pills and wraps they deal here, up this track behind the car park, the render coming off the brick, the pipework oxidised in the salt air. The Seagull Room they call it, though there is no such name front or back. Yet its protocols are stern.

  Now seagulls I understand. They crowd the landfill. They harry one another for foodscraps. Even when a gull has swallowed a morsel its companions continue pursuit. They swoop on its vomit. They cry like the insane in the hospital in Naujoji Vilnia. But even seagulls, they say, are rarer now. Endangered species.

  What I pay for the one drink could buy me four in the Spar, the Sklep. But I like it here. Money is a problem but it’s not the only problem. And slowly, the routine begins, the regulars’ routine.

  Pancho’s in with his guitar. It’s good busking weather and has been all month. So Pancho’s flush. In more ways than one. Sometimes he even sings in here and is tolerated, a sixty-year old with a duct-taped guitar, the hair on him long and thin, a man in jeans and a denim shirt, a necklace, a bracelet, what few teeth he’s got left tobacco-stained.

  Pancho washed up here years ago and liked it enough to stop moving. I see him on the street and laugh and put some pennies in the open guitar case, a case with stickers of towns where he’s worked the streets. Torquay, Torbay, Saundersfoot they say. And all that’s left of that case’s turquoise silk is a rag around the rim.

  And Pancho will laugh too and go on with ‘Visions of Johanna’. Every verse of that song. His great song he calls it. His prodigious feat of memory. Or I’ll hear him tuning up on the gum-blistered pavement when I come out of the Sklep and then that line, the best line, the only line I listen to. How does it feel? Pancho who maybe once had a voice, still believing in that line. Still asking the question and knowing its answer. That’s Pancho, who’ll tell me this morning what it’s like to be a rolling stone. And when he’s finished he might add his own story of what it is to sit on the dock with the night fishermen, to lie under the esp and breathe good Moroccan draw into the lungs. Right down until it’s too hot to hold. As if his body was full of sparks. Pancho who’s still asking how it feels. Cracking that word into four shiny pieces. Fee. Ee. Ee. Eel. Who should wash his hair. Maybe his shirt. Pancho with his caved-in chest. The only troubadour of this town.

  Roly’s in too. Strangely, I met him first on the street. I was doing what I do, I was watching the sea. Then this sports car hammers past, brakes, turns round. When it reached me it slowed and the boy in the front passenger seat shouted.

  You fucking shit, he shouted. You ignorant shit.

  Then the car speeded off again, did a handbrake turn and came back. A black Mazda. This time it was the driver who yelled.

  You shit. You bastard shit.

  I stared him in the eye. Seventeen maximum. Dark hair with blond streaks. Good-looking kid with Ray-Bans and a big gold necklace. In a wax-polished car. A car like a scarab. There’s money here, you see. Villas with high hedges. Personalised number plates. Oh yes. I noted the number.

  So I shrugged as if to say, you got the wrong person. But he shouted again, then gunned the Mazda down the straight road towards the beaches.

  That’s when Roly rolls up.

  Take no notice, he said. I know his parents. I’ll intercede.

  I liked that word. That intercede.

  No problem, I said.

  No, he said. It’s unacceptable behaviour. High spirits because their exams have just finished. They’re under pressure at this time of year. But a poor reflection. I hope they haven’t been drinking.

  And here’s Roly now. Who is certainly drinking. Roly holding court in the Seagull Room. The barman has taken the Dewar’s off its bracket on the wall and it waits at Roly’s elbow. His blazered elbow. Roly wears a striped cricket blazer and a red bow tie. Roly is a fat man and his white flannels are stained yellow. And yes, Roly is giving the room his rape stories. Roly knows a good deal about rape. He was once a lawyer and is now a bar-room barrister. His jury grins, winces. Or maybe Roly is an opera star and this his proscenium.

  The detail Roly provides is unsparing. The ambushes, the underwear. Every loving spoonful the perpetrators can squeeze out of themselves. Girls used like tissue paper. The eighty year olds accosted with broom handles.

  Madge sucks on her Rizla.

  Get off, she says. He’s making it up.

  If Madge was a candleflame you would expect her to go out. She is a happy-go-lucky anorexic, red haired, arms like fire tongs. She sits on a barstool and I can see the cracks in her heels and the dirt in those cracks, the dirt that I know will be there for the rest of her life.

  He’s making it up, she cackles. He’s never seen a minge since his poor old mother got rid. He hasn’t a clue. Have you Rolyo? Not a fucking clue.

  But as Roly subsides, no one else feels like talking. To me, they’re a predictable bunch. A postman with his loaded pouch, bundled letters tied with elastic bands, orders a second pint. A supermarket shelfstacker is sipping the own-brand vodka he brings in himself. Dullards, for the most part. Stammerers and twitchers. Porn-addled doleys. A roomful of ghosts on this July morning w
ith the sun already hot on the tarmac and the light unbearable on the sea. And yet, for an hour, comrades of a sort. They will nod, each to each, on the street. They might even go to the same funerals.

  At two minutes to nine I walk out to the car park and at nine Justin arrives with the van. The doors are open and Justin slows down but he doesn’t stop. I get in head first through the back.

  Now perhaps this is the best time to tell you about a mistake I’ve made. A mistake about my name. My first name is Nerys. When I arrived I didn’t know Nerys was a girl’s name in this part of the world. My mother called me Nerys after the river that flows through Vilnius. I hated it. My father hated it. But my mother insisted on Nerys as she insisted on few things in her life. I was her river god. I was the water spirit. That’s what she told me.

  Even back home it was difficult. My name felt wearisome. Sometimes it plagued me. If it had been up to my father, I would have been Andrius. A good masculine name. A warrior’s name. But my father was rarely at home. He worked in an office for the Communist Party and after work he sat in bars, smoking, drinking Bajoru. That’s all I know. I suppose he commanded a desk and moved papers about. That he spoke into a big black telephone. But if being called Nerys was a problem, having a father in the party in Vilnius was worse. When he died, I tried to atone. For being the son of a collaborator. Who ate sausage when the others ate bread. Who wore good shoes.

  That was a difficult time. The Berlin Wall came down, but in Lithuania we’d been ahead of the game. Everyone was restless. There were men coming into Vilnius who had hidden in the forests for forty years. There were writers speaking on the radio when they were supposed to be banned. Or dead. Everything was changing, and fast.

  By then, my father had given up. It wasn’t long until the cigarettes killed him anyway. My mother had already been put away, locked up in that gloomy castle on Parko, hidden in the pines. So I was the only one left, the river god looking at the green Nerys with its devious current as I look at the tides in this town, spray black against the sun.