The Walther if he needed it nestled in his lamb-leather briefcase. He sometimes wished he hadn’t indulged in lamb. Attractive appearance but didn’t wear well. Every scuff showed. Impossible to clean. Next time a pebbled black finish. Impervious to hard usage. So what if it made him look like FBI or CIA.
Next time?
He’d promised himself he’d never use the pistol on a human being. He purchased it as a deterrent. To halt the growing spiral of violence. In dire straits he’d draw it to scare off a thief shoo away one of his old comrades who held a grudge. Never any intention to harm a soul. And absolutely no way, even though the gun is conveniently close and efficient, he’d blow his own brains out with the Walther. He tightens his grip on the smooth handle of his lambskin briefcase, blinks the black face and black-printed white card into focus. Reads this street person’s tale of woe.
I am a vet. Lost voice in war. Please help.
Corey contemplates stopping here and now, reciting his own gory story. Would the black derelict listen? Would he laugh? Take pity? Be outraged and angry? Would he understand one word? Maybe they could start all over again. Both of them with time to spare. He had no pressing engagements before noon. And this floater dunning him the very image of idleness. Corey could tell the long version of his tragic history. How he’d been born blind, under a cruel star. Then learned to see. Then taught others to see what he’d seen. Second sight. The beautiful Tree of Life. Lions and lambs lying down together under the rainbow arc of its branches. Then struck blind again. Everything grainy and jerky as a silent movie when his vision was restored. Oh shit. Oh shit. I’m so sorry. He spilled his guts to the cops because they were the only ones with power to kill the terrible seeds he’d sown. Weeds bred from the seeds were choking the city. Columns of greedy black insects, fattened on the weeds, were marching through his veins. Gnawing at the gates of the temple of reason. The Life Tree is wizened, gaunt, crooked, dying at the top, dripping sickness in dead leaves that are drowning the city. I was born under an unlucky star, doomed to a terrible fate. Wicked little hoodlums, kids who should have been home in bed at that hour, stomped me. Treated me like dirt under their unlaced sneakers. My name and Cynthia’s name winked from the marquee, our faces in lurid color leering from all the coming attractions. I watched her grovel and snivel on the pavement then forget to cover her shame. I was embarrassed. Bikini panties. Orange, frilly etched. Snatched down on one hip so they slant across her tummy. You couldn’t see all that by the time the crowd gathered. Her naked belly with its fleshy folds already. They’s why he’d never marry her. Only twenty-five and you could pinch an inch. She’d rolled over to her side and a triangle of orange underwear showing but thank god not the tubby belly.
Was there time to narrate the long version of his life? Maybe over coffee in the White Castle. A place where this fellow traveler would feel comfortable.
You see. my friend, when you think about it, when you go beneath the skin, beyond appearances, we’re very much alike. Brothers of sorts. Don’t you agree? We’re victims, aren’t we, both of us? Stuck playing roles we have been programmed to play. You never had a chance; neither did I. We’ve turned out the way we were supposed to. And soon we’ll both be dead meat and the same wagon will scrape us both off the street and the same high-stepping, high-heeled shoes will trot over the stains we’ve left. Brothers after all in this City of Brotherly Love. But let me begin back at the beginning. Then you’ll understand what I mean. Two coffees, please. And a couple of those delectable double-Dutch chocolate-fudge goo-goo doughnuts for my amigo here. What did you say your name is?
J.B. does not say. J.B. plays deaf and dumb. Thrusts his calling card in the dude’s face. But this cat’s far out. A goddamned stingy Republican like most of these three-piece private-enterprise trickle-down pee-pee commuters. J.B. wants to scream at the owlish incomprehension. Can’t you read, motherfucker? Goggle-eyed white boy’s on another planet. Don’t see card, don’t see J.B., don’t see shit he don’t wanna see. Peckerwood like some groundhog pop up here blinded in the light. J.B. would curse the sombitch out but then somebody else might hear him and call a cop when J.B. lays his handicap card on them. So he shakes his head and moves on, a wave of pedestrians parting before him like he’s brandishing Moses’s rod.
A few blocks farther on, in the alley behind the golden arches, sits the best Dumpster for half a mile in any direction. Full of boxes and packets that seal flavor in. Almost like buying your own meal. Surprise. Surprise. You open a discarded orange-and-yellow-striped box and anything could be inside. Hunks of snow-white bun, lettuce, pickles, cheese, tomato, special sauce in finger-licking good puddles. Plastic envelopes with seals unbroken. You bite into them and smear the virgin goodness over your lips. Ketchup. Mayonnaise. B-B-Q. Sweet and sour. Mustard. French fries you’ve come to prefer cold, the way you find them mashed and broken in the boxes, salty grease stiff as icing you save under your fingernails and suck later. You’re grateful for boxes which keep the treats safe inside the Dumpster’s rotten maul. You feel blessed because someone packages each morsel, each ingredient in its own individual container. Grateful for paper and plastic that protects each meal, that preserves and delivers leftovers a second time around. If worse came to worst, you could probably live on boxes, napkins, bags, packets and sheaths. Enough food smeared, soaked, micro waved, wiped, slopped on them you could survive just chewing the wrappings.
J.B. is about to turn a corner into the Dumpster’s alley when he hears a siren. Very near. Is it a squad car dispatched to prevent the late-morning garbage raid? He thinks not. Cops must have better things to do: collect payoffs from the dealers and numbers runners, hit the whores up for booty, chase black kids out department stores. But also thinks it’s only a matter of time—one bright morning they’ll decide to come for him. If not today, tomorrow, soon. His life no use to anyone and just by breathing and taking up space he’s breaking every law on the books, according to some important folks. Just a matter of time. J.B. and his tribe of gypsies shuffling like zombies through the streets to cop a meal. Boom. Pow. One big net snares them all. Police wait till they settle down with their little piles of boxes, the whole scummy swarm back in the alley getting down to business, peeking into their bags and boxes, chitchatting, catching up on who’s in, who’s out, who’s gone to glory overnight. A big net sails over them, captures them unawares, this one chewing, that one running a finger round a cardboard rim, Phoebe mining grains of gritty meat from a napkin crumpled elaborately as a conch shell. Caesar smiling and stuffing a transparent bubble of honey in his pea-coat pocket. Kwame bemused by the timpani of his guts. J.B. recording everybody’s business, in no hurry to explore his share of the loot, saving what he’ll find in his nearly intact box, daydreaming its contents. Maybe he’s hit the trash-can lottery. A five-course meal, shrimp cocktail, T-bone steak, soup, salad, fries, baked Alaska and somebody’s Cartier watch, credit cards and keys to a new BMW.
Gotcha. The noose slips silently over their unwashed, uncircumcised necks. They cry like babies. Cops herd them with cattle prods into the holds of unmarked vans. Black Marias with fake shower heads in their airtight rear compartments, a secret button under the dash. Zyklon B drifts down quietly, casually as the net. Don’t know what hit you till you’re coughing and gagging and puking and everybody in a funky black stew rolling round on the floor. J.B. dies frustrated, wondering how his life would have been different if he’d availed himself of the opportunity to open that last box.
Two kinds of people in the world. The ones who eat the part of the meal they like best first and the ones who save the best for last. Gobblers or savers. Humankind divided into those two species. Observe a person and it won’t take long to figure out whether they are gobbler or saver. J.B. the King of Savers. If all the fine women pouring out those office buildings and stores on Chestnut Street at the end of the day begged J.B. to fuck them, he’d line them up naked and the one looked best to him, he’d save for last. Working his way through the others
, he’d be anticipating what was still to come, knowing there was more and better ahead while he’s humping the one whose turn it is. Savers enjoy the best lots of times before they get to it. Licking their lips. Saving the best for last.
Siren’s overheated now. Must be stalled in traffic. Bleating, squealing, the red knot on its forehead pulsing, ready to burst. Other cars don’t know whether to stay still or move out the way. Siren screaming at drivers, drivers screaming at each other, pedestrians jammed up at intersections, afraid to step into the tangle of vehicles.
The snarled cop car jolts forward, skitters sideways, jumps a curb, bears down on some poor fool in the wrong place at the wrong time. Cop car spurts through two lanes of traffic where there didn’t seem to be spurting-through room. Gone again, the yo-yo wailing of its siren crashes against brick and stone, shatters them, brings down the walls.
As plate glass explodes around him and clouds of black dust boil higher and higher, J.B. sings the blues: Poor boy long way from home. Poor boy long way from home.
Picture the man of steel in a cartoon. He shoots from the pavement, a blue cannonball into the Gotham sky, one knee flexed, one arm ramrod straight, aiming for the stars. Pow, a crimson jet stream hisses from his toes in their streamlined red booties. Now reverse the film, slam the superhero into the cement as fast as he rose from it. Watch him plummet backward, watch the stream sucked back into his feet. Watch him explode on impact. A fountain of blood whacked from his wrecked insides. Bright tub of blood big enough to swim in. As we look down on what’s left of him our vantage point is nineteen stories above the city streets, a window in the Penn Mutual Savings and Loan Building, same window our hero, Corey, exited after enjoying one last extended view of the dying, ungrateful metropolis he had attempted to save from itself.
Poor boy long way from home. Poor boy long way from home. J.B. knows what goes round comes round and what goes up must come down. And what comes down comes down sometimes a whole lot faster than it goes up. And when you least expect it. Unless you could fly like a man of steel, getting to the nineteenth floor CEO suites takes as long as it takes, but coming down, shit, any fool can step out in the thin air. Zoom. Express don’t stop till the bottom. And don’t really stop there. There’s down under down down under there.
Because he skulked at the rear of the crowd, as close as he cared to be, as close as the crowd wanted him to approach, J.B. saw what they missed, a mutilated lamb briefcase under the fender of a Buick Regal where it had bounced and skittered and ended up throat slashed, scalped, but cradling its load still, a gunmetal blue gun, the Book of Life.
Two hours later even the most desperately curious have departed the death scene. The fans who had attended live and in person, while the body still as warm as theirs, were long gone about their affairs, retailing the tale to whomever will listen, embellishing it, exaggerating their role in the urban drama, growing increasingly confused as the event subsides, the body cools, about what they’d actually witnessed on the corner of Sixth and Market and what they wished they’d seen. Early shift replaced by fresh faces as news spread. Each wave of spectators moves on quicker and quicker as the props of the scene disappear. No body, no cops, no emergency vehicles, fire engines. The crowd thins, the story flutters like a last gaspcandle in fourth- and fifth-hand recitals. Finally, only a vague hesitation, an undefinable uneasiness, then rapid strides away from the scene of the crime, as passersby sense something’s wrong here, but don’t really remember what.
Thank god the Buick hasn’t moved.
J.B. retrieves the souvenir no one else noticed, stuffs the briefcase under his T-shirt, into the elastic band of his camouflage pants. In spite of the heat he wishes for the anonymity of his suit of many coats, multiple pants, many layers, folds, pockets, tunnels, habitats for livestock, warrens, hives, caves, the labyrinth of his winter gear that could swallow the briefcase without a burp. No telltale bulge to betray him to his enemies. Looked like a pregnant kangaroo now. Good news was nobody left milling around to pay him any mind. No ambulances, cops, meat wagon, no TV camera crews, sirens, stretchers. They’d immediately draped a rubber sheet over the corpse, so only a lucky few observed firsthand what a wreck the jumper had made of himself. One young woman couldn’t stop crying. Weeping and wailing and people trying to prop her up, sit her down. She drew her own miniaudience, stares and whispers and good samaritans because she was large busted, trim legged, attractive, doubled over by grief or fear or sick at the stomach, her long hair distraught. She’s not dressed for hysterics in the street, she’s one of those women you know you couldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole when they click past you downtown. But suddenly she’s somebody else. She’s vulnerable after all, and the crowd loves it.
No one notices a funky derelict emerging from an almost invisible wedge between two buildings, an alleyway J.B. had chosen as his vantage point to outlast crowd and cops. No cop with nothing better to do than hassle a bum is around now to spot a suspicious-looking figure lurking in a shadowy recess. Hey you. Stop right there. What you got under your shirt? Up against the wall, scum. Spread em.
If you stink bad, the cops don’t like to touch you. Won’t frisk you. Except with their nightsticks and boots. Less personal. Hurts but you like it better than the pawing, slapping, shoving, their fingers punching through your skin.
You would have thought it was the birth of Christ the way people fought for a view of the dead man. Crowds smell blood. Like sharks. Like mosquitoes. Everybody craves a piece of the action. Like it makes people feel better to see one of their own kind mangled or dead. Another one gone and thank goodness it’s not me. No. Blood and guts everywhere, but not mine. Yes sirree it’s dangerous and mean in this city of brotherly love, but I’m still here. People dropping like flies. But not me. I’m holding on.
Tape measurements and photographs. A figure chalked in the street, where the suicide made his clean landing. With cars parked both sides the street and high-noon traffic and pedestrians, how’d he miss hitting something, somebody on the way down? Didn’t get runned over, either. No second or third superfluous death. Roasted in a torched car. Drowned by a berserk hydrant. No extra work for the meat-wagon crew. Smooth sailing through the needle’s eye. Happy landing right on target. J.B. was proud of the jumper. Whatever else the guy’d fucked up, he’d done this right. A slick, professional job. Bet the dude’s wearing clean underwear.
Only one consequence of his own inevitable wipeout in the city streets bothered J.B. The goddamned morgue people thinking they’re superior to him just because his underwear’s not clean. If he had one thing to say about the fatal accident with his name on it, he’d ask to be wearing clean white underwear the day it comes down. Dishrags, newspapers, rummage sale, Salvation Army castoffs, feathers, fur, didn’t give a fuck about what covered the rest of him, but please, Lord, when they peel down to the skin, when they laid him on the cooling board where they hose you down before cutting and sawing and pulling out your guts and setting them on the scale, he’d love to shock the sonbitches, remind them they ain’t so smart, ain’t no better than other folks. Clean underwear. Where’d this one find clean underwear? Who is this masked man?
Shake em up a little bit. One flunky with big scissors and a clothespin clamping his nose holes shut, snip-snipping away, and, look out, up pops the devil. Clean white drawers. Oh shit. This other shit must be disguise. They stop in the middle of what they’re doing. Wonder for once who they’re doing it to. J.B.’s revenge.
Honk, hoot, and ohhh, ahhhh. Ooop-poop-a-doop. The jumper sure gave them something to talk about. Bet he makes the six o’clock news. White, well dressed, a gentleman caller dropping in unexpectedly. The whole world in his hands, what’s he got to go do something like this for? In the middle of the city so we have to step around him, over him. So we have to gawk and squawk and tie up traffic for blocks. Commuters home two minutes later than usual. You can calculate the cumulative effect of accidents like this one, the ripple outward that stymies the flow of cars
emptying the city at rush hour. Disturbances, chaos like this don’t just quietly disappear. They shake up the whole shebang. Put all our plans at risk. Disrupt the schedules of trains, buses, planes, spacecraft. A wild hair. A willful, selfish plunge upsets countless applecarts. Good citizens should pass the corpse stony eyed. Refuse to be discombobulated. Resent the intrusion. Don’t give him the satisfaction. Who does he think he is, anyway?
J.B. can relate to being despised and ignored. Commiserates with all those lonesome corpses, uncovered, unattended except by flies, buzzards, creepy-crawlies. Were you sporting clean skivvies under your nice suit, my friend? J.B. envies him if he is. Of course they wouldn’t produce the same effect as clean white shorts on J.B.’s crusty behind. On a gentleman like the dead man immaculate undergarments taken for granted.
J.B. stares at the drawing of the jumper, the crude chalk outline barely visible now, larger than life, in the center of Eighteenth Street, the door the dead man slammed open in his hurry to get through to the other side. Whatever other side there is, lurking under the asphalt. The drawing’s not very accurate or flattering. All square corners, straight lines. Nothing round and squashable. The officer executing the drawing didn’t have to bend. His chalk marker was attached to the end of a long stick. He paced around the body, outlining it with his magic wand. Sketched something that resembled a kite, a mummy case. A hopscotch shaped vaguely like a man. Man shaped obscurely like a hopscotch.
Philadelphia Fire Page 19