Barking Man: And Other Stories (Open Road)

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “Maybe not,” Tombo said. He snorted, pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose. “Allergies, man,” he said. “It always gets to me around this time of year.”

  “What are you giving me that line for?” Stuart said. “I’m not a cop.”

  “Right, I forgot,” Tombo said, glancing over at him under his eyelashes. “You still clean?”

  “Yeah,” Stuart said.

  “They do a pretty good job on you up at Millbrook, huh? It sticks?”

  “So far,” Stuart said. “One day at a time and all that kind of thing.”

  Tombo shifted around on the bench. “I’d been thinking maybe I might go up there sometime myself,” he said.

  “Well,” Stuart said, “when you decide to go, then you’ll go.”

  “People tell me you’re looking for Natasha,” Tombo said.

  “Do they,” Stuart said. “Everybody likes to talk to you about my business, seems. Why, you haven’t seen her, have you?”

  “Not in a year at least, nope. Sorry, bud … What are you looking for her for?”

  “I quit looking for her,” Stuart said. “You can’t look for somebody around here, it’s ridiculous. I’m just … I’m just waiting to find her, that’s all.”

  “Interesting strategy,” Tombo said, standing up. “Well, good luck.”

  With the improving weather, Stuart started making trips to Brooklyn, back to what had been Henry’s place, though he didn’t much like the feel of it, not after the remodeling. Why he kept going out there he didn’t really know, maybe just for the inconvenience of it, for the journey. Clifton had stopped coming in, the new bartender was a stranger, there was seldom anyone he knew there except the dog. They still hadn’t opened up the restaurant section. Sometimes Stuart’s visit would coincide with Henry’s, who tended to drop in most Thursday and Friday afternoons. He’d take Captain out around the block and then come back and sit at the bar, drinking white wine on ice from one of the old straight glasses they’d apparently saved just to serve him with. It pleased Stuart that this one little thing was still the same, and he felt happier in the place when Henry was in there too, though they didn’t have much to say to each other past hello, and though the old man looked all wrong, sitting on the Outside of the bar.

  Whenever the weather was good enough he walked back across the bridge and caught the subway at Delancey Street on the Manhattan side. He was in a lot better shape than he’d been in the old days, but it was still enough of an effort that doing it fast set his heart slamming. That sense of an urge out in front of him was familiar, though now he wasn’t going for a fix; the energy he set out ahead of him had become its own point. The walkway was a little more run-down than he remembered it. A lot of the tiles had come loose and blown away and now he could look through cracks in the steel plating and see all the way down to the place far below the roadway where the water slowly turned and moiled. But the rise of excitement was the same as it always had been as he pushed himself up to the crux of the span, where the howling of the traffic stopped being a scream and became a sigh. Arrived just there, with the afternoon barely past its daily crisis, he stopped and looked farther across at the tall buildings limned explosively with light, exultant, thinking, This is what you always will forget, this is what you never can remember, this is what you have to be here for.

  It’s not the first but the fifth or sixth day of spring when Stuart finally finds Natasha. All winter he’s felt old and moribund, frozen half through, but now a new green shoot of youth begins to uncurl inside of him. It’s a fresh and tingling day, the weather so very fine that it alone would be enough to make you fall in love. Everybody in Washington Square has bloomed into their summer clothes and they all look almost beautiful. Stuart walks around the rim of the fountain, hands in his pockets, a cigarette guttering at the corner of his mouth, smiling a little as the fair breeze ruffles his hair, he’s headed straight for Natasha before he’s even seen her, and then he does: she’s tapped out there on one of the benches just at the bottom edge of the circle, head lolled back, mouth a little open, hands stretched palms up on her knees. When he gets a little closer, he can even see her eyes darting under the closed lids, looking at the things she’s dreaming of. Man, she’s way too thin, she’s got bad-looking tracks, infected, and it’s a fifty-fifty chance she’s dying, but Stuart won’t think about any of that right now, just keeps on walking, up into the moment he’s believed in for so long.

  For Wyn Cooper

  DRAGON’S SEED

  MACKIE LOUDON LIVED ALONE in a small house made of iron and stone on a short street west of Twenty-first Avenue. She had lived there, alone, for a long time. Old ivy grew in a carpet across her front steps and in her yard the grass was tall, with volunteer shoots of privet standing in it. The street was old enough to have a few big trees and the houses were raised on a high embankment above the sidewalk. It was quiet down the whole length of her block, almost always very, very quiet.

  Indoors, it seemed that inertia ruled, though maybe that was just a first impression. The front room had once been a parlor, but now, scattered among the original furnishings were all of Mackie Loudon’s sculpture tools. There were pole lamps, a rocker, a couple of armchairs, some fragile little end tables, also hammers and chisels and files and other devices, and a variety of sculptures in wood and stone. In former times people had come from the North to take the sculptures away and sell them, but it was a long time since their visits had stopped. She did not remember the reason or care about it, since she was not in want.

  The things she didn’t need to use stayed put exactly where they were. In the kitchen, on the gas stove, an iron skillet sat with browning shreds of egg still plastered to it, a relic of the very last time Mackie Loudon had bothered to make herself a hot meal. Asians had moved to a storefront within walking distance of her house, to open a store and cafeteria, and she went there to provender herself with things she never knew the names of. She bought salt plums, and packets of tiny dried fish whose eyes were bigger than their heads, and crocks of buried vegetables plugged with mud. She dumped the empty containers in the sink, and when it filled she bagged them up and carried the bag down a rickety outside staircase to a place in the alley from where it would eventually disappear. There was one pot that she used for coffee and that was all. On the window sill above the sink was an old teacup, its inside covered with a filigree of tiny tannin-colored cracks. Each morning, if the day was fair, a bar of sunlight would find a painted rose on its upper rim, warm it a moment, then pass on.

  She wore flowered cotton dresses, knee length with no shape, and in winter a man’s tweed overcoat. With the light behind her, her legs showed through the fabric. They were very slightly bowed, and her shoulders were rather big for a woman, her hands strong. She had a little trouble with arthritis, but not so much she couldn’t work. Her features were flat, her skin strong and wrinkly like elephant hide. A few long white hairs flew away from her chin. The rest of her hair was thick and gray, and she hacked if off herself in a rough helmet shape and peered out from underneath its visor. Her right eye was green, her left pale blue and troubled by an unusual sort of tic. Over five or so minutes the eyelid would lower, imperceptibly and inexorably closing itself till it was fully shut, and then quite suddenly fly back open in a startled blue awakening. Because of this, some said that Mackie Loudon had the evil eye, and others thought she was a witch, which was not true, although she did hold colloquy with demons.

  Before the fireplace in the parlor was a five-foot length of a big walnut log, out of which Mackie Loudon was carving a great head of Medusa. For a workstand she used a stone sculpture she’d forgotten, mostly a flat-topped limestone rock with an ill-defined head and arm of Sisyphus just visible underneath it. She stood on a rotting embroidered ottoman to reach the top of the section of wood, and took her chisels from the mantelpiece where they were lined. The front windows had not been washed in years and what light came through was weak and dingy, but she could see as much as she r
equired to. Her chisels were ordered from New York and each was sharp enough to shave with. She didn’t often need to use her mallets; wherever she touched her scoop to its surface the walnut curled away like butter. She carved, the strange eye opened and closed on its offbeat rhythm and the murmur and mutter of her demons soothed her like a song.

  There were two of them, Eliel and Azazael. Each made occasional inconsistent protestations of being good, or evil. Often they quarreled, with each other or with her, and at other times they would cooperate in the interlocking way of opposites. Eliel reported himself to be the spirit of air and Azazael the spirit of darkness. Sometimes they would exchange these roles, or sometimes both would compete to occupy one or the other. They laid conflicting claims to powers of memory and magic, though Mackie Loudon could always point out that there was little enough in the real world they’d ever accomplished on their own.

  Azazael was usually hostile to Medusa. You don’t know what you’re getting into, he said. You’re not sure yourself just what you’re calling up, or why.

  “The one sure thing is you’re a gloomy devil,” Mackie Loudon said. But she said it with affection, being so much in control this morning that the demonic bickering was as pleasant to her as a choir. “You’ve always got the wrong idea,” she said to Azazael. “You’re my unnecessary demon.” She moved the chisel and another pale peel of the outer wood came falling away from its dark core.

  Mackie Loudon was headed home from a foraging expedition, her shoulders pulled down by the two plastic shopping bags that swung low from the end of her arms. Her head was lowered also and she scanned the pavement ahead of her for anything of interest that might be likely to appear. A couple of feet above the nape of her neck, Eliel and Azazael invisibly whirled around each other, swooping and darting like barn swallows at evening. They were having one of the witless arguments to which immaterial beings are prone, about whether or not it was really raining. It was plain enough to Mackie Loudon that it was raining, but not hard enough for her to bother stopping to take out the extra plastic bag she carried to tie around her head when it was raining hard. There were only a few fat raindrops splattering down, spaced far apart on the sidewalk.

  She had almost come to the line of people shuffling into the matinee at the President Theater when she halted and sank to one knee to reach for a cloudy blue glass marble wedged in a triangular chip in the pavement. Just then there was some commotion in the movie crowd, and she looked up as a little black girl not more than five ran out into the street weeping and screaming, with a fat black woman chasing her and flogging her across the shoulders with a chain dog leash, or so Azazael began to maintain.

  Did you see that? Hissed Azazael, his voice turning sibilant as it lowered. On the street a car squealed to a sudden halt, blasted its horn once and then drove on. The line had reformed itself and the tail of it dragged slowly into the theater’s lobby.

  See what? said Eliel. None of these people look like they saw anything …

  They never see, said Azazael. That’s the way of the world, you know.

  Mackie Loudon grasped the marble with her thumb and forefinger and held it near her stable eye, but it had lost its luster. The cloud in it looked no longer like a whirlwind, but a cataract. She flipped the marble over the curb and watched it roll through a drain’s grating.

  Are you deaf and dumb and blind? Azazael was carping. Don’t you know what happens to children nowadays?

  “SHUT UP!!” Mackie Loudon cried as she arose and caught up her bags. “Both of you, now, you just shut up.” On the other side of the street an ancient man who’d been dozing in a porch swing snapped his head up to stare at her.

  In the bedroom was a low bed with a saggily soft mattress, and whenever Mackie Loudon retired she felt it pressing in on all the sides of her like clay. But if she woke in the middle of the night, she’d find herself sucked out through a rip in the sky, floating in an inky universal darkness, the stars immeasurably distant from herself and one another, and a long, long way below, the blue and green Earth reduced to the size of a teardrop. Somewhere down there her husband, son and a pair of grandchildren (that she knew of) continued to exist, and she felt wistful for them, or sometimes felt an even deeper pang.

  You chose us, sang Eliel and Azazael. Out here, they always joined in a chorus. Out here, she sometimes thought she almost saw them, bright flickerings at the edges of her eyes. And look, it’s even more beautiful than you ever hoped it would be.

  “Yes, but it’s lonely too,” Mackie Loudon said.

  You chose us, the demons droned, which was the truth, or near it.

  Medusa wasn’t going well; Azazael’s objections were gaining ground, or somehow something else was wrong. Mackie Loudon couldn’t quite make out what was the matter. She wandered away from the unfinished carving and her mind wandered with her, or sometimes strayed. As she passed along the dairy aisle at the A & P, small hands no bigger than insect limbs reached from the milk cartons to pluck at the hairs of her forearm. She wasn’t sure just where or why but she suspected it had happened before, similar little tactile intimations grasping at her from brown paper sacks or withered posters stapled to the phone poles.

  Oh, you remember, Azazael was teasing her. You can remember any time you want.

  “No, I can’t,” Mackie Loudon said petulantly. Across the aisle, a matron gave her a curt look and pushed her cart along a little faster.

  Never mind, Eliel said soothingly. I’ll remember for you. I’ll keep it for you till you need it, that’s all right. And it was true that Eliel did remember everything and had forgiven Mackie Loudon for it long ago.

  There was a boy standing in the alley when Mackie Loudon set her garbage down, just a little old boy with a brush of pale hair and slate-colored eyes and a small brown scab on his jaw line. He wore shorts and a T-shirt with holes and he stood still as a concrete jockey; only his eyes moved slightly, tracking her. Mackie Loudon straightened up and put her hands on her hips.

  “Are you real?” she said to him.

  The boy shifted his weight to his other leg. “Why wouldn’t I be?” he said.

  “Hmmph,” Mackie Loudon said, and put her head to one side to change her angle on him.

  “Lady, your yard sho is a mess,” the boy said. “The front yard and the back yard both.”

  “You’re too little to cut grass yet a while,” she said. “Lawnmower’d chew you up and spit you out.”

  “Who’s that?” the boy said, and raised his arm to point at the house. Mackie Loudon’s heart clutched up and she whipped around. It was a long time since anyone other than she had looked out of those windows. But all he was pointing at was a plaster bust she’d set on a sill and forgotten so well it was invisible to her now.

  “Oh, that’s just Paris,” she said.

  “Funny name,” the boy said. “Real good-looking feller, though.”

  “He was a fool and don’t you forget it,” Mackie Loudon said in a sharper tone.

  “Well, who was he, then?”

  “Question is, who are you?”

  “Gil mostly just calls me Monkey.”

  “That’s not much name for a person,” Mackie Loudon said. “What’s your real name, boy?”

  The child’s face clouded over and he looked at the gravel between his feet.

  “Won’t tell, hey?” Mackie Loudon said. “All right, I’ll just call you Preston. You answer to that?”

  The boy raised his eyes back to her.

  “All right, Preston, you drink milk?”

  “Sometime, not all the time,” Preston said.

  “You eat cookies, I expect?”

  “All the time,” Preston said, and followed her up the steps into the house. She blew a small dried spider from a water-spotted glass and gave him milk and a lotus seed cake from a white waxed bag of them. Preston looked strangely at the cake’s embossed and egg-white polished surface before he took a bite.

  “What do you think?” Mackie Loudon said. She had poured a
n inch of cold coffee into her mug and was eating a lotus seed cake herself.

  “I don’t know, but it ain’t a cookie,” Preston said, and continued to eat.

  “It’s sweet, though, right? And just one will keep you on your feet all day. And do you know the secret?”

  “Secret?”

  “Got thousand-year-old egg yolk in it,” Mackie Loudon said. “That’s what puts the kick in it for you.”

  Preston bugged his eyes at her and slid down from his seat. He laid a trail of crumbs into the parlor, where she found him crouched on the desiccated carpet, lifting a corner of the sheet she used to veil Medusa.

  “Oooooo, snakes,” said Preston, delighted. Mackie Loudon pulled his hand away so that the sheet fell back.

  “Let that alone, it’s not done yet,” she said. “It’s got something wrong with it, I can’t tell what.”

  Preston turned a circle in the middle of the room, pointing at heads on the mantel and the bookcases.

  “Who’s that?” he said. “And that? And that?”

  “Just some folks I used to know,” Mackie Loudon told him. “But didn’t you want me to tell you about Paris?” When Preston nodded, she took a lump of plasticine from an end table drawer and gave it to him to occupy his hands, which otherwise seemed to wander. Half consciously, he kneaded the clay from one crude shape to another, and his eyes kept roving around the room, but she could tell that he was listening closely. She started with the judgment of Paris and went on and on and on. Preston came back the next morning, and within a couple of weeks she’d started them into the Trojan War. By first frost they were on their way with the Odyssey.

  The demons kept silent while Preston was there, and were quieter than usual even after he’d left. Azazael did a little griping about how the boy was wasting her time, but he had nothing to say with any real bite to it. Eliel was rather withdrawn, since he was much occupied with the task of observing Gil through Mackie Loudon’s eyes and storing up in memory all he saw.