Don’t answer him, they would shriek. Be mysterious.
But nobody telephoned Starwoman. She would sit with her tofu and pak choi, which was 48 on the menu, and her own plastic chopsticks that she always reused. The Big Little Man liked that. In Huangshan, his family had eaten with their fingers. The riceballs were like moons. His little sister held up a moon and he had put out his hand and snatched it. He didn’t think about it. It just happened. The rice moon filled his mouth. How his sister had cried until his father had smacked his cheek and grandmother hissed like a goose at him. Grandfather wanted a pig brought into the house. Mother sat with her face in her hands.
Sometimes, the Big Little Man asked customers, the older men, the women in pairs, about the terrible north. The far north where the prairie became lakes and trees, where granite seas rose and fell into the darkness and wolves howled in the tamarack. And sometimes the lonely men would tell him lonely stories, and he would pause with his mop and J cloth and nod his head and see the empty roads and the ice burned dark as marrowbone.
One day he picked up courage and asked Starwoman if she had ever been into the north. She raised her eyes, mauve as the prairie crocus. How she whinnied then, like a horse for its mealbag.
Why would I go there? she laughed. She laughed and laughed showing her square mare’s teeth. Then she got up and never came back.
But the Big Little Man himself was already a traveller. He had made a great expedition and landed at the port on the west coast. In the day he mopped floors and cooked noodles and in the night he pored over his Jack London books. After a year, someone said there was work to the east. So he had taken the Grey Goose and arrived when the mountain was being built.
Sometimes he travelled further. He owned an old green Plymouth now, a barge of an automobile. The prairie galleon, people called it. One year, for his holiday, he drove to Moose Jaw. Another year to Medicine Hat. Then one year, he decided, he must keep going. Just continue cruising those straight highways. So he did. After a while he came to a place called Wild Horse. It was cold. He could cross the border here but there was nothing down the road that he could see. Nothing but the grey snow, the pelt of that desert, and a sky that would soon become a winking lid of water like the bottom of a well.
The Big Little Man got out of the car. Yes, he could see for miles in every direction. But so what? asked a voice of exhaustion in his heart. A cloud of dust lay ahead, as if a herd of bison had passed. Maybe there were coyotes on the prairie, maybe the last of the wolverines was looking at him from the prairie sage, a forty-pound, black and dirty white wolverine. But no, he thought. The wolverine would be asleep now, dreamless in its den of old bones.
The Big Little Man looked up. If there was any place in the world they would come for him, it would be here. On the road to Wild Horse, a road sharp with gravel and porcupine spines long as knitting needles, the road that crossed the border from nowhere into nowhere. Yes, If they were ever going to take him, it would be now. And he was ready. As ready as White Fang, as ready as Jack London himself, stamping outside his smoky bivouac. The Big Little Man got out of the car. He stood in the emptiness in his camouflage clothes, grey and brown, like the snow, like the wolverine’s fur. Looking around, he thought the sky would surely fall.
The next day at the Prairie Wok, he was squashing boxes of stale prawn crackers into a rubbish bin made from black recycled plastic. A man came up to him and said he was sorry but the restaurant would be closing for a week. When it opened again they would be selling English food. English breakfasts and English teas. English Sunday dinners of roast beef and Yorkshire puddings. The fish and the chips. But we think you’re a good worker, the man said. We want you to stay. The staff training is next Thursday. The new restaurant will be called Rule Britannia. Okay?
Okay, said the Big Little Man.
On the McGoverns’ seat he wedged the flask of Bushmills between his knees. The sun was sinking and the sundogs flaring. He looked north. That was the sundog trail, that was where the sky would tremble and glow. The Big Little Man remembered running out of his house in the street of clapping doves and running and running down into the town. He could see the mist clearing from Nine Dragons Peak. He ran past an open room. In this room was an iron wok burned black upon an open fire. A few chairs stood around for the customers who always came. One strawhatted man was eating rice with yellow peas.
He ran past a redsmith who stood in the steam of a slack tub. He ran down hill and passed the chestnut peelers and a woman who always laid out sunflower seeds on a straw mat. No one looked up. He was running away from home and his mother’s tears and away from the pigs who wore rings like half moons in their snouts. He ran with a stitch in his side, a thorn in his foot and the shape of his father’s hand on his cheek. But after a while he ran only for the joy of running.
The Big Little Man ran past the men playing mah jong and the men playing checkers and he ran all the way into the square of Huangshan. He only stopped at the wall around the pool, the fire still in his side, in his mind’s eye his grandmother’s pigtail dragging in the soup as she leaned across the table. Ha ha, he laughed. Ha ha.
In the pool the carp spoke to him as they usually did, rising from the weeds in their peeling gold to bring him the news, the news of empires that had been, that were to come.
Ha, ha, he laughed again, as the fish blew him kisses, and spoke to him of poets and astronauts. He peered into the pool. The other children said it was miles deep and that a little girl had fallen into it and never been found.
The next day, or maybe it was the next month, the Big Little Man found himself standing under the television that hung from a wall bracket at Rule Britannia. There was a Union Jack behind the counter and a picture of the Queen. But the chairs were still bolted to the tables.
He felt sad. If Starwoman ever came again she would not be able to use her plastic chopsticks. Does it matter if she returns? asked the voice of exhaustion in his heart. But one of the lonely men was there, putting soy sauce on his chips. How he shook and shook the Blue Dragon over his plate. The four girls with the four cell phones had also arrived. They all wore half price Husky shirts from the sports shop that was closing: 26. 38. 76. 98. A phone rang and the girls pounced to see who was calling. Don’t answer him, they squealed. You’re not ready to leave.
On the television an English king sat up in bed. Such a bed. The Big Little Man thought about his couch at home. How hard it was. In the street of clapping doves he and his sister had slept on a wooden shelf that was taken down in the day. But it was better than sleeping with grandfather in the pigs’ sty.
The Big Little Man’s back hurt. So did his legs. But he was planning his next holiday. He thought about Wild Horse. It had snowed there, a dry snow like polystyrene pellets, and the wind had blown. So why had he worn those camouflage clothes? No one could have seen him. In the next place he would not be hidden. He would drive his green car over the prairie, the only colour visible from above. And his clothes would be brighter than the dragonflies that hovered over the bottomless pool in Huangshan.
Yes, he would go north to where the great rivers met. How their ice would groan and grind, the grey floe meeting the brown floe, the grass snapping under his feet, his breath a beard of fish scales.
Ha ha, he laughed. With such whiskers he would look like his grandfather pulling the pigs by their nose-rings into the house. In the north the Big Little Man would find a seat like the McGoverns’ bench and he would sit under the sky of inexhaustible stars. Or better still, he could build a bed. A huge bed like the English king’s. He could lie amongst its furs and cushions and gaze up at the pandemonium of lights. Then he would whisper, as he always did.
Here I am, he would whisper. Please take me. I’m ready now.
The tunnel
The banknote lay at his feet. The man had paid for drinks and dropped a two-dollar bill. Nobody had noticed yet. But they soon would.
Juan drew a little closer, looking the other way. Then he gl
anced again. No, it was a twenty. When had he ever seen a two dollar in this country? It was a twenty, there on the floor. The man was talking to the woman, their barstools pulled together. Looked like tourists, tall and blonde. Swedes, he thought. Maybe Dutchies. Their clothes were good and they were showing off their English. But they wouldn’t stay. One beer each and they’d head over to Time Square, stand in the neon noon, photograph themselves and send their Samsung smiles to friends at home.
Yes, it was now or never. As he passed, he bent over and palmed the bill. And kept going, heading for the restrooms.
No word of protest. No call. Of course not. Dave’s Tavern was so dark sometimes you couldn’t see five feet away. In the shadows, the perpetual twilight, nobody had noticed. This morning, Peevo had already arrived but he was standing out on the sidewalk, staring at something. At nothing. The open door was a dazzling slash, the only evidence it was, at the latest, 11 a.m. Yes, must be about that. The weekday ritual was starting.
Mary Mack slid the DVD into the machine. And there they were, straight into the movie. According to Mary the best movie ever made. Or fillum, as she called it. The greatest fillum of all time.
Mary Mack ran Dave’s Tavern. Mary Mack had run Dave’s for forty years and boy, she had run it down. Well, that’s what Juan thought. Did he care? You bet. It was a job, right next door to his other job in the Port Authority. Handy. He walked from one darkness into another. Also, if Dave’s closed, he would lose his lodging. Juan rented a room upstairs, a midtown room, smack in the centre of the centre. Mary told him he was a lucky little sod. Told him over and over that the bohos and the computer nerds and the artists would kill for such a room. Such an address. Manic midtown, throbbing with the heartbeat of America. All those Hell’s Kitchen heroes wanting his ten by twelve, his mattress, the immovable mahogany wardrobe where his life was hung.
Yes, Mary, Juan would say. You been good. You been so good.
Old soak, he thought. But she was right. He had arrived two years previously. Arrived through the tunnel. The first thing Mary had made him do was clean the windows. Soon he would have to clean them again. He had borrowed a ladder from the Port Authority, taken the bucket from behind the bar, and climbed as high as he dared. The glass had been black. The grime was a centimetre thick.
American dirt, he thought, as he saw the water in the pail darken. You could grow money in it. All that traffic smoke coming out of the tunnel. All those buses lining up, their exhausts thick as drainpipes. That’s where the dirt came from. And those windows not washed in years. In his own room he’d sometimes sit at the glass and stare outside. It always seemed foggy and sometimes there was a real mist off the Hudson, Greyhound headlights big and ghostly in the gloom, the cockpits of the coaches maybe blue lit from the on-board TV.
And if he couldn’t see at least he could hear, hear voices below raised in terror or supplication, or the growl of buses he knew were coming in, the Montreal, the Chicago, delivering their riders into the darkness.
But mostly it was the crust on the windows that made things grey. The crud. How he laughed at that word. Maybe crud was his favourite English word. Mary relished telling him to clean the crud off the lavatory pan rims, the crud in the sink which was a mixture of ketchup and carbolic and that sweatsweet Gallo from the winebox. The inescapable crud that everybody left behind wherever they went. Evidence of their passing. Proof of terrestrial life. Blast it, Mary would say, waving her brown coffee cup with the Bailey’s in it. Blast the fooken crud. And she’d cackle and go back to her fillum.
So Juan had wiped the windows and the glassy shamrock bolted to the wall that Mary claimed was a genuine antique, and then the letters above the door. Dave’s Tavern, now white on green again. With a gleaming apostrophe. Just like a teardrop, Juan had thought. A tear for Dave.
Juan should have been cleaning the restrooms. He flicked the lights and waited for the roaches to hide, the waterbugs that seemed to be made of metal. They ticked like something electrical. But the rooms didn’t look too bad. He put the twenty in his pocket and pushed a mop over the floor in the Men’s. The Women’s could wait. Or maybe he’d polish the mirror there. He breathed on it and swept the glass with his sleeve. If the Women’s was used, the mirror had to be clean. In one of the cubicles the lock was missing and the hole in the door filled with tissue. The mirror was even more important than that. Someone had scrawled Hilary for President on the wall. Someone had written She is, stupid beneath it.
Juan worked five straight nights in the bus bays under the Port Authority. Where it was always dark. That week all the underground staff were talking about what had happened on a bus in Manitoba. A madman had decapitated the passenger in the seat in front. Juan had shrugged. It was a crazy time.
Those nights in that nether world he scraped oil from the concrete, cleaned mud from wheel arches and polished wind-shields, removing the excess before the buses went through the mechanical wash. Sometimes a driver told him there was skunk meat on the muffler and it was stinking the bus out. Get it off.
Yeah, Juan thought. Roadkill. Singed deer hide. Racoon guts. On another shift he had been assigned the grille of the Trailways down from Binghamton. It was caked with black snow and rocksalt. When he looked closer there was a bird impaled in the frets. Some kind of hawk. He thought it was dead but saw its eye follow his hand. An eye like a papaya seed. Hey, he said. Where you get on?
One night he’d been told to roust out a woman sleeping in Bay 26. She was rolled in a blanket on a strip of C Town cardboard. Around her were remains of a meal: a Ray’s pizza crust, a Snapple bottle.
Hey, he said. Hey.
She rolled over and looked at him.
Hey, she said. And smiled.
This morning he was tired. Even with two jobs he had no money. When Juan came out of the Women’s, Peevo was back with his beer and installed in his corner. That corner, between counter and far wall with its tobacco-coloured stucco, had been Peevo’s for thirty years. Maybe forty. Peevo had once been the security man at Dave’s. Now he sat and sipped, almost invisible in his lair, a urinous gleam from the glass in his fist. Peevo drank draft Bud. Maybe fifty glasses a day. Last week Juan had found himself next to the Pole in the Men’s, watching him unstrapping his denim dungarees, observing him piss the colourless beer back into the bowl, one minute, two, a man venting from the white balloon of his body, three minutes of voiding himself until the next cold glass. A fat man, Peevo, an enormous sluglike man who had once held troublemakers by their lapels and tossed them on to the avenue. Yes, a swollen ghost Peevo, in his ammonia-crotched Wrangler’s. Part of the furniture, Peevo, who wrapped himself close in the fog of the bar.
Mary Mack had deserted her post. She was watching the film, a bowl of Prairie City doughnuts and yellow Jell-O on the table before her. But sometimes she zapped to the television for sleeping draught ads. So many adverts, Juan noted, to put people to sleep.
Wanna sleep? Mary would shout. Buy our bourbon.
Then she’d switch back to Midnight Cowboy.
It was always Cowboy at Dave’s. Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman becoming Joe Buck and Ratso. The hustler, the conman. And always Mary with the remote, replaying the scene when the bus comes out of the tunnel and the big blond Joe Buck finds himself in Manhattan for the first time. Joe Buck with his buckskin fringe aswing, aiming to put the man into Manhattan, rolling up the tunnel in a black Stetson.
And what does my beautiful Joe see? Mary Mack would cackle. Little ole us. Us good people at Dave’s. Oh we were here in 1969 when that fillum was out. Oh yes we were here. Dave himself was here, as I live and breathe.
Mary Mack played Midnight Cowboy every day. Now she switched back to the ads.
Juan took over. This was the best time. He was the bus driver now. He was the patron, gazing round, taking in the glint of the mirror tiles, the empty booths down the wall, the tables with their wood-pattern formica.
Hey, he said to the Pole.
Peevo peered across. She’s ge
tting her place next week, Peevo said.
That’s good.
She’s getting her place next week.
Yeah, good.
Juan refilled the fat man’s glass.
Two Sams, said a kid down the bar. His friend loitered behind.
Sam’s off, said Juan. Got Bud.
Shit, said the kid. Give us two Turkeys.
Got ID?
The students showed their cards.
Two Wild Turkeys, smiled Juan.
The boys were looking round. Told you, whispered one. This is the real deal. None of that Shooters glitzy crap here. You seen the jukebox? Awesome.
Juan refilled Mary’s cup. She was fast forwarding.
It’s coming up, she nodded at the screen. Here it is.
Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight were on a Greyhound. They were going through the tunnel on the way to Florida. Then Voight was getting off at a mall stop and buying two summer shirts.
Real fancy Florida duds, hissed Mary Mack.
The placard man was in now. He had left his boards at the door. They said ‘Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth Death’.
The Lemon Man was next. He asked for a quarter lemon. Juan passed it over and the man left. He would return two minutes later, asking for a cup of hot water. Juan would also pass that over. This happened every day but only happened because it had always happened. The Lemon Man was another Pole. Sometimes he spoke Polish to Peevo but Peevo only said that she was getting her place next week.
Juan glanced at the film. Dustin Hoffman had died on the bus, just like that passenger up in Canada. So who cleaned up after that greasy little Ratso pissed his pants? In the script they laughed it off. Called it an unscheduled rest stop. But, like Mary, Juan loved the movie. How those boys shivered on the streets, in the burning floes of cold that blew off the Hudson. How they scraped a life, from Broadway’s iron kerb to the Bronx brownstones where they might blag a bed.
Keys of Babylon Page 9