Barking Man: And Other Stories (Open Road)

by Madison Smartt Bell

  That was the word he used, case history, and it was around about there that I hung up. I went walking stiff-legged back across to the counter and just let myself sort of drop on a stool. Prissy had been covering the counter while I was on the phone and she came right over to me then.

  “What is it?” she said. I guess she could tell it was something by the look on my face.

  “I lost him,” I said.

  “Oh, hon, you know I’m so sorry,” she said. She reached out for my hand but I snatched it back. I know she meant well but I was just not in the mood to be touched.

  “There’s no forgiveness,” I said. I felt bitter about it. It had been a hard road for me to come as near forgiving myself as ever I could. And Davey forgave me, I really knew that, I could tell it in the way he behaved when we were together. And if us two could do it, I didn’t feel like it ought to be anybody’s business but ours. Tim walked up then and Prissy whispered something to him, and then he took a step nearer to me.

  “I’m sorry,” he told me.

  “Not like I am,” I said.

  “Go ahead and take off the rest of your shift if you feel like it,” he said. “I’ll wait on these tables myself, need be.”

  “I don’t know it would make any difference,” I said.

  “Better take it easy on yourself,” he said. “No use in taking it so hard. You’re just going to have to get used to it.”

  “Is that a fact,” I said. And I lit myself a cigarette and turned my face away. We had been pretty busy, it was lunchtime, and the people were getting restless seeing us all bunched up there and not doing a whole lot about bringing them their food. Somebody called out something to Tim, I didn’t hear too well what it was, but it set off one of his temper fits.

  “Go on and get out of here if that’s how you feel,” he said. “You think you’re the most important thing to us in here? Well, you’re wrong.” He was getting red in the face and waving his arms at the whole restaurant, including them all in what he was saying. “Go on and clear out of here, every last one of you, and we don’t care if you never come back. We don’t need your kind in here and never did. There’s not a one of you couldn’t stand to miss a meal anyhow. Take a look at yourselves, you’re all fat as hogs …”

  And he kept on, looked like he meant to go for the record. He had already said I could leave, so I hung up my apron and got my purse and I left. It was the first time he ever blew up at the customers that way, it had always been me or Prissy or one of the cooks. I never did find out what came of it all because I never went back to that place again.

  I drove home in a poison mood. The brakes on the car were so bad by that time I had to pump like crazy to get the thing stopped, but I didn’t really care all that much if I got killed or not. I kept thinking about what Tim had said about having to get used to it. It came to me that I was used to it already, I hadn’t really been all that surprised. That’s what I’d really been doing all those, months, just gradually getting used to losing my child forever.

  When I got back to the apartment I just fell in a chair and sat there staring across at the kitchen wall. It was in my mind to pack my traps and leave that place, but I hadn’t yet figured out what place I would go to. I sat there a good while, I guess. The door was ajar from me not paying attention, it wasn’t cold enough out to make any difference. If I turned my head that way I could see a slice of the parking lot. I saw Susan drive up and come limping toward the building with an armload of groceries. Because of the angle I couldn’t see her go into their apartment but I heard the door open and shut, and after that it was quiet as the tomb. I kept on sitting there thinking about how used to everything I had got. There must have been God’s plenty of other people too, I thought, who had got themselves accustomed to all kinds of things. Some were used to taking the pain and the rest were used to serving it up. About half the world was screaming in misery, and it wasn’t anything but a habit.

  When I started to hear the hitting sounds come through the wall, a smile came on my face like it was cut there with a knife. I’d been expecting it, you see, and the mood I was in I felt satisfied to see what I expected was going to happen. So I listened a little more carefully than I’d been inclined to do before. It was hit hit hit going along together with a groan and a hiss of the wind being knocked out of her. I had to strain pretty hard to hear that breathing part, and I could hear him grunt, too, when he got in a good one. There was about three minutes of that with some little breaks, and then a longer pause. When she hit that wall it was the hardest she had yet, I think. It brought all my pots down at one time, including that big iron skillet that was the only one I ever used.

  It was the first time they’d ever managed to knock that skillet down, and I was so impressed I went over and stood looking down at it like I needed to make sure it was a real thing. I stared at that skillet so long it went out of focus and started looking more like a big black hole in the floor. That’s when it dawned on me that this was one thing I didn’t really have to keep on being used to.

  It took three or four knocks before he came to the door, but that didn’t worry me at all. I had faith, I knew he was going to come. I meant to stay right there until he did. When he came, he opened the door wide and stood there with his arms folded and his face all stiff with his secrets. It was fairly dark behind him, they had all the curtains drawn. I had that skillet held out in front of me in both my hands, like maybe I had come over to borrow a little hot grease or something. It was so heavy it kept wanting to dip down toward the floor like a water witch’s rod. When I saw he wasn’t expecting anything, I twisted the skillet back over my shoulder like baseball players do their bats, and I hit him bang across the face as hard as I knew how. He went down and out at the same time and fetched up on his back clear in the middle of the room.

  Then I went in after him, with the skillet cocked and ready in case he made to get up. But he didn’t look like there was a whole lot of fight left in him right then. He was awake, at least partly awake, but his nose was just spouting blood and it seemed like I’d knocked out a few of his teeth. I wish I could tell you I was sorry or glad, but I didn’t feel much of anything, really, just that high lonesome whistle in the blood I used to get when I took that Dilaudid. Susan was sitting on the floor against the wall, leaning down on her knees and sniveling. Her eyes were red but she didn’t have any bruises where they showed. He never did hit her on the face, that was the kind he was. There was a big crack coming down the wall behind her and I remember thinking it probably wouldn’t be too much longer before it worked through to my side.

  “I’m going to pack and drive over to Norfolk,” I told her. I hadn’t thought of it till I spoke but just then it came to me as the thing I would do. “You can ride along with me if you want to. With your looks you could make enough money serving drinks to the sailors to buy that Quik-Sak and blow it up.”

  She didn’t say anything, just raised her head up and stared at me kind of bug-eyed. And after a minute I turned around and went out. It didn’t take me any time at all to get ready. All I had was two boxes of kitchen stuff and a suitcase and another box of clothes. The sheets and blankets I just yanked off the bed and stuffed in the trunk in one big wad. I didn’t care a damn about that furniture, I would have lit it on fire for a dare.

  When I was done I stuck my head back into the other apartment. The door was still open like I had left it. What was she doing but kneeling down over that son of a bitch and trying to clean his face off with a washrag. I noticed he was making a funny sound when he breathed, and his nose was still bleeding pretty quick, so I thought maybe I had broke it. Well, I can’t say that worried me much.

  “Come on now if you’re coming, girl,” I said.

  She looked up at me, not telling me one word, just giving me a stare out of those big cow eyes of hers like I was the one had been beating on her that whole winter through. And I saw then that they were both stuck in their groove and that she would not be the one to step out of it. So
I pulled back out of the doorway and went on down the steps to my car.

  I was speeding down the road to Norfolk, doing seventy, seventy-five. I’d have liked to go faster if the car had been up to it. It didn’t matter to me that I didn’t have any brakes. Anybody wanted to keep out of a wreck had better just keep the hell out of my way. I can’t say I felt sorry for busting that guy, though I didn’t enjoy the thought of it either. I just didn’t know what difference it had made, and chances were it had made none at all. Kind of a funny thing, when you thought about it that way. It was the second time in my life I’d hurt somebody bad, and the other time I hadn’t meant to do it at all. This time I’d known what I was doing for sure, but I still didn’t know what I’d done.

  FINDING NATASHA

  “HEY, CAPTAIN,” STUART SAID. He’d seen the dog as soon as he turned the corner, stretched over the door sill of the bar in a wide amber beam of the afternoon sun. “Hey, babe, you still remember me?” He hesitated just outside the doorway in case the big German shepherd did not remember him after all. No doubt that Captain was a lot older now, shrunken into his bagging skin, the hair along the ridge of his back turning white. A yellow eye opened briefly on Stuart and then drowsed slowly back shut. Stuart took a long step over the dog and was inside the shadowy space of the bar.

  He had expected Henry to be behind the counter and he felt a pulse of disappointment when he saw it was Arthur instead. On Saturday nights Arthur would often cover the bar while Henry and Isabel went out to dinner, but ordinarily they wouldn’t have left so early, not at midafternoon. Stuart sat down at the outside corner of the bar. When Arthur got over to him Stuart could see he didn’t remember who he was.

  “Short beer,” Stuart said, not especially wanting to get into it just yet. There were two people sitting at the far end of the counter, he couldn’t quite make out their faces in the shadows, and nobody else in the place. He swiveled his stool back toward the door, and as his eyes adjusted to the dim he saw the new paint, new paneling. It had all been done over, the broken booths and tables all replaced, a new jukebox right where the pay phone used to be. The opposite wall was practically papered with portrait sketches of the Mets.

  “Hey, what’s going on?” Stuart said. Arthur had put down the glass of beer and picked up the dollar Stuart had laid on the bar. “Hey, you even got new glasses too? Henry and Isabel do all this work?”

  “They retired,” Arthur said, staring at Stuart like he knew he ought to recognize him now. “What, you haven’t been around in a while, right? You move in Manhattan?”

  “Farther than that,” Stuart said. He pushed the beer glass a little away from him. A weird little bell-shaped thing, nothing like the straight tumblers Henry had used.

  ‘“Who would it be but Stuart?” said one of the men at the far end of the bar. Stuart peered back into the dim. “Give him a shot on me, Arthur.”

  “Clifton,” Stuart said. Arthur was reaching behind him for a bottle of Jack. He’d remembered that much now, at least.

  “Nah,” Stuart said. “No thanks.”

  “What, you don’t drink anymore either?” Clifton said.

  “I drink,” Stuart said. “It’s a little early.”

  Clifton was on his feet, walking up into the light toward him now. He looked like he’d had little sleep and there was reddish stubble on his face. Stuart shifted to the edge of his stool and put one foot on the floor.

  “You’re back, hey?” Clifton said.

  “Righto,” Stuart said.

  Clifton parted T-shirt from jeans to scratch at his shriveled belly.

  “Miss your old friends?”

  “Some of them,” Stuart said. “Any of them still around?”

  “Like the song goes,” Clifton said. “They’re all dead or in prison.”

  “Ah, but I see you’re still here, though.”

  “Yeah. Partially.”

  “What about Ricky?”

  “He’s around, sometimes. Moved over to Greenpoint, though.”

  “And Rita?”

  “I don’t know, I heard she went to L.A.”

  “Thought I saw Tombo over around Tompkins Square …”

  “Probably you did. He’s still around there, as far as I know.”

  “What about Natasha, then?”

  “Ah,” Clifton said. “You know, I can’t remember when I last saw Natasha.”

  “She still doing business with Uncle Bill, you think?”

  “Uncle Bill got sick and died,” Clifton said, and glanced up at the clock. “Speaking of which, I got to make a little run …

  “Yeah, well,” Stuart said.” Great to see you and everything.”

  “Yeah,” Clifton said. “What do you need?”

  “Man,” Stuart said, “you can’t talk about that in Henry’s place.”

  “You been away quite a while, babe,” Clifton said. “It’s not Henry’s place anymore. So, you know. I can be back in a hour.”

  “Not to see me,” Stuart said. “No more.”

  “Yeah? We’ll see you,” Clifton said. “Dig you later, babe.” He stepped over the dog and went out through the bar of sunlight reddening in the doorway.

  Stuart raised his hand and let it drop on the counter.

  “They moved too?” he said. “They moved out of upstairs?”

  “Yeah,” Arthur said. “Out to Starrett City.”

  “Man,” Stuart said. “Can’t quite get used to it.”

  “The new guy opens the kitchen back up,” Arthur said. “That should really make a difference.”

  “What now?” Stuart got up and went toward the back. A half partition had been raised in front of the area where Henry and Isabel used to have their own meals and now there were four small tables set up as for a restaurant.

  Stuart turned back to Arthur. “Captain lets people go back in there now?” He walked back to his stool and sat. “Man, used to be if you just stepped over that line he was right there ready to take your leg off for you.”

  “I think he’ll have to get over that,” Arthur said. “He’s old for all that anyhow.” The dog heaved himself up from the door sill, walked back into the room and lay stiffly down again.

  “Yeah, Captain, getting cold, you’re right,” Arthur said. Then to Stuart: “Want to shut that door?”

  Stuart got up. It had been a mild fall day but now the air had a winter bite. He pushed the door shut and stayed for a minute, squinting through the window at the dropping sun, across the VFW decal on the pane.

  “Can’t believe they’d of left the dog here,” he said, turning back toward the counter.

  “Henry comes by to see him,” Arthur said. “You couldn’t take him out of this place, though. He would just die.”

  Upstate, the week before, it had turned cold early, and alongside the railroad track the river was choked with ice. Stuart had bought papers at the station, the News, the Post, but he couldn’t seem to focus on the print. From the far shore of the Hudson, chilly brown bluffs frowned over at him, sliding back and back. The train ran so low on the east bank it seemed that one long step could carry him onto the surface of the river, though solid as the ice appeared it could hardly have held anybody’s weight so early in the season. He stared through the smutty window of his car, the view infrequently broken up by a tree jolting by, or a building, or the long low sheds at the stations: New Hamburg, Beacon, Cold Spring. Opposite West Point the ice vanished and the river’s surface turned steel smooth and gray.

  If he’d been a fish, Stuart caught himself wondering, how much farther down could he swim without dissolving? Chemicals warmed the water down here, as much and more than any freaks of weather. What fish would swim into that kind of trouble? He’d slept little the night before, his last night in Millbrook, so maybe that and too much coffee accounted for the jitters that worsened as Tarrytown and Yonkers fell back by, and rose toward actual nausea when the George Washington Bridge, almost a mirage downriver, floated into clearer view. If he’d been a fish he could breathe
water, though the water here might kill or change him. He was headed into a hostile element, a diver for what pearl he couldn’t say. The train dragged toward 125th Street like a weight pulling him under. The couple of years he’d been away were long enough he should have stayed forever. No point to come back now, so late, unless to recover something, what? The train dropped along the dark vector of the tunnel to Grand Central, and Stuart, like a hooded hawk, grew calm.

  An hour or two and he’d remembered how to swim again, or glide. A thermal carried him up into a Times Square hotel, one of the kind where they did a take when he said he wanted the room all night, but by the week it turned out to be a bargain. Suspended in some other current, Stuart lazed back out onto the street and drifted, from a bar to a street-corner stand to one of the old needle parks to another bar, and so on. Don’t go where you used to go, they’d told him at the center, don’t see those same old people or you’ll fall. No doubt that bigger, meaner fish still eyed him from their neighbor eddies, but he wasn’t bleeding anymore, and a flick of tail or fin shot all of them away.

  The weather was still bland down here, much milder than upstate, though it began to have its bitter aftertaste of cold. Stuart cruised up into the chill of the evening, watching whores and dealers check him over before they swirled away, always wondering if he might run into Natasha. He was not exactly looking yet, but developing a ghost of an intention. If he had asked himself Why her? he would have had no answer. Just … Natasha. He had written her a time or two from Millbrook, hadn’t had anything back, not that he’d expected it. Why Natasha? Others had been as close, or closer, and he didn’t want to look for them. He wasn’t looking for Natasha either. It had been spontaneous at first, this feeling that she was about to appear.