Diablerie

by Walter Mosley

  Mona took a step toward me and I, afraid of the knife on the table and in my mind, took another step back.

  "What's wrong, Ben?"

  "Why aren't you calling me 'Benny'?"

  "You told me that you didn't like it."

  "That never stopped you before," I said in the voice of an accusing attorney. "It didn't stop you from introducing me to Harvard as 'Benny.' "

  "What's this thing about Harv?" she asked.

  "Yeah, that's right, Harv," I said. "I'm sure you're on first-name terms with his dick too."

  "Don't you use that kind of language with me," she said, suddenly rigid.

  "Okay," I said. "Then try this: Fuck you, you cunt."

  I walked by her and out the door before anything else could well up out of me. I stormed down the street, walked all the way to work and right past the entrance. I just kept on going toward the west side of town.

  I was swinging my arms like some kind of mentally challenged inmate suddenly free on the streets of New York.

  That was a Wednesday. Svetlana had classes all day and one at night. She said that she hoped I would be there when she got home. I suppose I could have gone to her house, but I was afraid of my hands and my mind. I was afraid of what I would say or do or allow to be done to me. It was as if I had been possessed by, by . . . Star.

  Things began going wrong when I met her. She had claimed that we knew each other, she had called Mona at work—who knows what she had said?

  As I came into Times Square I realized that my feet and fingers were numb. This was a familiar feeling but I had forgotten when I had last experienced that sensation.

  I stopped at a Starbucks and got a triple espresso. Then I went to a movie starring Bruce Willis. I forget the title—actually I can't even remember the story; there was a lot of screaming and shooting and a few funny moments. I laughed way too loud and the people around me moved away.

  Lunch at a French bistro was good. I ordered a glass of red wine but didn't drink it. After I left, I bought a pack of cigarettes. I smoked three of them. I had to have something to see me through that day.

  At four o'clock I found myself at Lincoln Center. A guard pointed me to a phone booth at the lower level of the main hall.

  I didn't own a cell phone at that time—never thought I needed one. I was rarely anywhere but work or home and I had no close friends. Anyway, cell phone users on the street seemed like idiots to me. Here they had their one chance to be alone and contemplative walking down the street and they'd get on the phone talking to whomever they had just seen or were going to see.

  I settled in the phone booth, took a deep breath, and started entering digits. First was the 800 number for my carrier, then the long-distance number I wanted to call. I had to enter my home phone and then a secret PIN before the machine would allow the call to go through.

  "Hello," she said in the wary tone that the elderly have whenever they have to deal with the outside world.

  "Mom?"

  "Ben?" she asked, amazement replacing her caution.

  "Yeah, Mom. How are you?"

  "Why are you calling me, Ben? Is Mona sick? Is it Seela?"

  "I just wanted to say hi, Mom. What's wrong with that?''

  "You haven't called here in seven and a half years," she said. I was sure that she could have told me the exact number of days.

  "I wanted to talk with you, to ask you some questions."

  "You haven't called since before the day I called your house to tell you that your father had died. You never even got on the line. It was Mona that I talked to."

  It couldn't have been that long—could it? I remember thinking about calling her on her birthday, more than once.

  "You didn't come to the funeral," she said. "You never call, but Mona did last year."

  "She did?"

  "She said that she was thinking about me. She tried to apologize for you but I told her that I was just happy to have a granddaughter and a daughter-in-law who called now and then."

  "I'm sorry, Mom. I wanted to—"

  "Your aunt Justine died two years ago," she said.

  "I'm sorry to hear—"

  ". . . so I had to quit my job, because she was my ride to Westwood. I just sit in the house all day now. Your brother's in jail again, but you probably know that. I guess at least you aren't a criminal like Briggs. And I have your father's retirement from the city, and his health insurance. You know I had a knee replacement."

  "Are you okay?"

  "Not that anyone cares, but I can walk to the Vons on my own. You never even came to your own father's funeral. Briggs at least got a pass from prison . . ."

  The void reaching out from my shoulders into my brain carried the taint of a madman in its tendrils. All kinds of obscenities rose up in my throat.

  ". . . I never thought I'd feel that I regretted my own son's birth but—"

  I hung up and walked away from the phone booth. You couldn't blame my mother. She'd only seen me twice in fifteen years and both those times they had come east.

  Outside, on Broadway, I lit a Lucky Strike and inhaled deeply, feeling the release of the nicotine. I closed my eyes, let the sun warm my face. There were horns blaring and scuffling feet all around me, voices talking, talking, talking and bird cries. I heard the faraway roar of a jet engine coming in for a landing at La Guardia. A whining siren moved sinuously in my ear, and various slams, rumbles, and hisses arose in my imposed darkness.

  I took another hit off the cigarette and the calm went deeper. Nineteen years since I'd had a cigarette. I quit because Mona said that she'd leave me if I continued to smoke around our child.

  The killer weed instructed me, composed me. I squatted down on the busy sidewalk, my elbows on my knees and the cigarette between my fingers. I was a solitary scout on a Western plateau, alone and satisfied with life. Far down in the valley, behind my closed eyes, a cloud of dust warned of strangers in my nearly hemispheric domain.

  I entered all the codes again. This time another woman answered, "Marston Group."

  "Idelle?"

  "Yes? Who is this?"

  "Ben Dibbuk."

  "Oh. Hello, Mr. Dibbuk. How are you?"

  "I guess I wouldn't be calling you if I was okay."

  "You'd like to make an appointment with Dr. Shriver?"

  "Yes, ma'am, I sure would."

  "I'll have him call you," she said.

  "Thanks," I replied, thinking about inhaling more smoke.

  "Jericho Detention Facility," a clipped, efficient male voice declared.

  "I need to speak to an inmate," I said. "Briggs Dibbuk."

  "Hold on a minute," the voice said.

  This friendly turn surprised me. I expected at least a few bureaucratic hurdles at a federal penitentiary.

  A few moments later he got back on the line and gave me a number to call.

  That number was busy for quite a while. It was a nuisance because I had to enter all those codes to make the San Diego call. Jericho prison was a special detention center for criminals who had turned state's evidence against other, supposedly worse, offenders. It was minimum security and most of that was there to protect the inmates from retaliation by those they had double-crossed.

  Briggs had been smuggling heroin from Mexico into Texas. He moved quite a lot of product for highly placed diplomats and military men on both sides of the border. When he got caught, those influential gentlemen allowed my brother to present evidence, that they supplied him with, about lower-level dealers. So Briggs had turned in guilty men with whom he had never worked.

  He was happy with his eleven-year sentence.

  "Gives me time to reflect," he told me the one time we discussed his situation over the phone. "Maybe I'll get some kinda degree so I won't have to deal drugs no more when I get out.''

  The phone rang on the fourteenth attempt.

  "Jericho eight," a voice answered.

  "Briggs Dibbuk," I said.

  A space of time elapsed.

  "Hell
o?"

  "Hey, Briggs."

  "Benny, Ben. Hey, brother. I thought you said that you didn't wanna have anything to do with me."

  "I don't. But I need something."

  "Why the fuck should I help you when you won't even let me call your house?"

  "Because I send you a check for two hundred and fifty dollars every other month," I said. "Because you know you're going to need my help again one day. Because you're my brother and you know why I keep my family away from you."

  "Just hurry up, man," he said. "Tell me what you want."

  "Do you remember when I left Colorado to come to New York?"

  "Yeah."

  "Did I call you back then?" I asked, a tremor playing on my diaphragm.

  "You mean one'a them midnight rambler calls you was so famous for?"

  I hadn't thought about those calls since my drinking days. They were a symptom of the alcohol—the only really hard evidence I had that I was experiencing blackouts.

  At first I only phoned my parents in the dead of night from my L.A. apartment and, after that, from Colorado; I would call them, waking them up. I'd blather and cry, curse and condemn them. I could not remember later when they'd tell me about it.

  "You call up here usin' all kinds of language," my father would say to me. "Cussin' your mother, tellin' me that I'm the reason you dropped out of college. Sayin' that we hurt you in your mind."

  Not long after I moved to Colorado they stopped answering the phone past ten. I think that they must have unplugged it. And so then I began calling my brother. He was just a pot dealer at that time and the police didn't pay much attention to him. He'd call me a few days later and tell me what I'd said. In that way I kept up with myself, my brother being a kind of auxiliary memory device.

  "Yes," I said. "Did I call you around that time?"

  "Uh-huh. You sure did. I remember because it was a collect call. But I didn't think it was one'a your drunk rambles. You sounded stone-cold sober."

  "What did I say?"

  "You wanted to know how easy was it to get blamed for a crime," Briggs said. He was enjoying the talk now, now that he was in charge.

  "What crime?"

  "That's what I asked you, but all you would say is, 'Somethin' serious.' "

  "What did you tell me?"

  "That the best way to catch a man is his fingerprints or an eyewitness."

  "What about a witness?" I asked.

  "You cussed out some woman, said that she wasn't about to say a thing."

  "What woman?" I asked.

  "It was a long time ago, bro. I didn't write it down. I figured you stole some shit or somethin' like that. You know you always was small-time. Oh yeah," he said then, "I remember. The woman's name was Star."

  The blood felt as if it were congealing in my veins. I slammed my fist down on my knee and ground my teeth until they hurt.

  "Are you sure of that?" I asked.

  "Oh, yeah. You said, 'that bitch Star,' about a hundred times. I guess that should'a told me it wasn't one'a your rambles. But otherwise you sounded sober as a judge."

  I wandered after that for some time. My head ached but the feeling was far-off, inconsequential. Barbara Knowland knew something about me that I myself did not know. I had called my brother and told him that it was a crime. But that was more than twenty years ago. How bad could it have been?

  I didn't know.

  I thanked God for my Lucky Strikes; without them I might have run out into traffic or down in front of a train.

  I woke up with her kissing my ear. She kissed it again and again, cooing softly. I had no idea where I was or whom I was with.

  "Ben?"

  I turned over to see Svetlana lying next to me.

  "Are you better?"

  "Better than what?"

  "Last night when I came in, you were in the bed crying." She reached out, cupping my jaw with her hand.

  "Did I say anything?"

  "Not that I could understand. But you were so sad. I held you for a long time."

  I sat up, hurting everywhere, it seemed: my face, my chest, my feet from all that walking.

  "What time is it?" I asked.

  "Ten, a little after."

  "Don't you have a class?"

  "I did not go," she said. "I was worried about how you felt." That set off my sobbing again. When I started crying, I remembered the night before; not why, but that I was crying, moaning, sorrowful beyond measure.

  Svetlana held me, humming along with the song of lament. Her strong hands were a solace to me but I could not tell her that: I couldn't speak. After what seemed like a long while, she put on her robe and prepared breakfast: cornflakes with skim milk and black coffee.

  When I lit a cigarette, she was startled.

  "What is this? You are smoking now?" she asked.

  "Oh . . . yeah. I need it. I need it bad."

  "But you have quit for so long," she said.

  "The stuff on my mind is from so long ago that only smoking and drinking can get to it," I said, realizing that there was more truth to those words than I had considered.

  "You are drinking too?"

  "Not until I'm ready to die," I said.

  "Ben," she said, a cry in that deep shadow of my dream. "Ben, why are you so sad?"

  "I don't remember."

  "What do you mean?"

  "My mind," I said. "Something happened a long time ago. Something that I've forgotten. There's a woman who I ran into who knows what that something is. She thinks I remember too. When I told her that I forgot, she got worried."

  "Can you ask her what this is?"

  "I'm afraid to."

  Svetlana's response was a smile, then a toothy grin.

  "This is funny to you?" I asked.

  "No, darling." It was the first time she had ever called me darling. "It is just that you are like a new boyfriend to me. Dark and filled with secrets, smoking at my table and crying in my bed. You are a new man for me, a second secret lover who throws me down on the floor and takes me."

  We made love after that. And when we were finished, she kissed me, got dressed, and walked out the door without saying good-bye. Ten minutes later the phone rang. I answered, certain that she was calling to mend the oversight.

  "Yes?" I said into the receiver.

  "Who is this?" a man with a heavy Russian accent asked.

  "My phone, your name," I said.

  The caller hung up. It was no wrong number, surely. The Russian accent meant that it was some &end or acquaintance of Lana's. While I pondered this, the phone rang again.

  "Yes?"

  "IS Svetlana there?"

  "Who's calling?"

  "Who are you?"

  "My phone. Your name first."

  "I am Sergei, Lana's . . . friend."

  "I am Ben. I pay for this phone." After these words, I hung up. There was a cold darkness in me. Not the darkness of race but the moonless night of a hunter looking for warm blood. There was no mistaking the thrumming in my chest. My fingers wanted to close on a throat, any throat.

  It wasn't that I felt jealousy. I didn't care if Lana had a "friend." She was young and very pretty. I was getting on toward the later years when the body, mind, and heart start to wind down. I wanted to hurt someone, but not for revenge.

  I reached for my Lucky Strikes, but the pack was empty.

  * * *

  Four blocks away I stopped at a kiosk to buy cigarettes. It was a very small stand that sold chewing gum and newspapers, instant lottery tickets and racing forms. I bought a pack of filterless Camels. Three blocks later I picked up a free copy of the Village Voice. I took the paper over into Central Park and sat down at another bench.

  It occurred to me that Lana was right. I was a much different man than I had been just a day before. Yesterday I had been all herky-jerky, skipping down the street and lamenting my wife's betrayal. Today I had woken up devastated, blubbering like a child, but now I was as calm as a contract killer on the old TV show Kojak, waiting for hi
s next job.

  I smoked three cigarettes, found what I was looking for in the performances section of the paper, and watched a big blustering pigeon try time after time to mount shy and reluctant hens.

  I wandered around for a long time, finally making it home at a little after three. I was planning to pack a bag and go to a hotel. There was a small place on Thirty-sixth Street, the Reynard, that rented rooms by the week. It wasn't far from Mrs. Valeria's apartment but she'd never know I was there.

  I wanted to get in and out quickly but Mona was there sitting on the sofa that faced my river-watching chair. She was wearing a white skirt and a black T-shirt. Her white hair and copper skin made her seem somehow transcendent.

  "My ancestors were the Indians who lived in the Caribbean before the Europeans came," she once told me. "They had red skin and straight hair. Not like the slaves."

  "But your skin has a lotta brown in there," I said. "And you straighten your hair."

  There I was, saying everything she didn't want to hear. No wonder she took lovers.

  "Hello, Ben."

  Without speaking I went into the bedroom, took out my small traveling suitcase, and gathered together my socks and underwear, jeans and shirts.

  "Ben." She was standing behind me now, blocking the exit from our small sleeping room.

  I snapped the latch on the bag and turned toward her, waiting patiently for her to move aside.

  "You can't just walk out like this," she said.

  There were rebuttals in my head but my mouth refused to utter them. I looked at her feathery white tresses and soulful deep eyes. She was as much a stranger to me as I was fast becoming stranger to myself. Our actions and words seemed to come from other players, understudies who had completely different takes on the roles of our lives.

  "Talk to me, Ben," she said.

  "You don't want to hear the words that come from my mouth . . . my gutter mouth," I said, feeling a profound satisfaction at being able to throw that term back at her.

  Her face took on that rigid expression she used with such success in business, child rearing, and our marriage.

  "You see?" I said with a smile, "all I have to do is remind you of the way I talk sometimes and it makes you mad. But tell me something, Moan. When your lover tells you to suck his cock, do you tell him that he can't use that language on you or do you get all soft and wet and call him 'baby doll'?"