“I tell you what,” Loman said. He pulled out a cigarette stub and lit it shakily, tightening his lips inward so as not to burn them. “It keep up this way, Brother Henry, you might find me climbing on that van.”
“Do what you want to,” Hal said, and paused. “But just don’t call me that.”
“What’s the matter, you don’t like it?”
“My name is Hal,” Hal said. “Just Hal, that’s all.” He pushed himself away from the balustrade and took a couple of steps down the stairway.
“You gone?” Loman said. “Hey, I didn’t mean nothing.”
“I just got something to look after,” Hal said. “Catch up with you back here tonight.”
A waist-high iron fence went from the corner of the building along the edge of the park, and he ran his fingers over the spear points of the vertical rails as he moved toward the opening onto the sidewalk. When he came to the loose one he stopped and lifted it an inch or so out of its socket, then let it drop back with a clank and went on. Most of the shop gates on Bayard Street were half raised, with Chinese men ducking under them, setting up for the day. The bakery was already open and busy, its windows steamed, and his stomach balled up briefly as he passed through the vaporing smell of the food. At the corner of Elizabeth he stooped over to peer in the window of Jeannie’s Cocktail Lounge. The bar was set below the level of the street, and after his eyes adjusted he could see that both of the dragon ladies were already down there, moving along the length of the counter in the violet glow of the television set at its far end. He stayed bent over, hands braced on his knees, until one of them looked up and motioned him to wait.
He stood on the corner for five or ten minutes until the truck arrived, then spent the next half hour carrying liquor crates down through the narrow trap into the sub-basement. The work warmed him, though moving between the heat of the room and the outer cold started his cough. When he was done he closed the trap and waited while a dragon lady counted four one-dollar bills out to him with a long enameled fingernail. In the short entryway between the barroom and the street, he paused and added three of the bills to the roll tucked in the tear of his jacket’s blanket lining. The fourth he shoved down in his front pocket, fingering its folded edges as he walked up to Canal Street.
From a clock on a bank he saw that it was seven. He threaded his way through the snarl and fume of Canal Street traffic and went up Mulberry, past Hester Street, past Grand. A delivery truck was already parked outside Catania, and Frank, the bartender, was leaning against the driver’s door, going over a shipping list. Hal spent the next forty-five minutes or so jockeying another set of boxes down another rickety ladder. When he was done Frank gave him a five-dollar bill and he passed it back and asked for quarters. Going out, he pushed the bills and coins down in the same front pocket.
There was nothing to do, nothing, for hours. It was way too soon to go to the EAU, and the thought of the gray empty time made him break out in a clammy sweat, though it was still cold on the street. At the corner of Grand there was an Italian grocery where he went in and, under the suspicious eye of the cashier, selected a loaf of prosciutto bread, paid for it and went back out. The sun was all the way up now, centering a dot of faint warmth between his shoulder blades. Lower in his back, the pain had been rendered more precise by all the lifting. He tucked the long loaf in between two of his shirts and walked across toward West Broadway, turning his change over in his pocket, separating the quarters from the other coins, then letting them fall back among the rest.
On West Broadway almost all the stores were still shuttered down and there was hardly anyone around, only a few sets of feet poking out of doorways, none he recognized. The wind had faded and the warming light lay the length of the empty street. The bread slipped back and forth across his rib cage as he moved. At a corner grocery he bought a cup of black coffee and went on, sipping slowly and warming his hands on the cup, across Houston Street and up into Washington Square.
There was a little fugitive birdsong high in the trees. He made a circuit of the dead fountain, stroking his fingers along the basin’s rim, then dropped the coffee cup in a bin and climbed the steps to the raised railed area the skateboarders used in summertime. Below, the park was nearly empty too. At one end a police car quietly hummed; at another, a few dealers’ runners waited sullenly, hands in pockets, shuffling their feet. When Hal turned away from the railing, a crack vial spun away from his shoe, and the thought of Judith came to him again, whole and sharp. He touched the roll of money through the lining of his jacket: forty-one dollars, no, forty-four now. What was it for? And how did you know someone was dead for sure if they never let you see the body?
It was three days now. He left the park on the northwest diagonal, feeling the cops’ eyes glide incuriously across him as he went past the car. A pile of rags on the circular benches in the corner of the park caught his attention, but there was no one inside it. After three days he more or less believed that she was dead, but he still wanted the tactile proof, though he no longer expected to get it. Benny had believed it the first day, probably without much question. He was unsentimental for an eight-year-old, even about his mother. Hal jangled the change in his pocket. He’d got the quarters to make more calls, but he didn’t want to make them.
For a time he stopped the thoughts from coming by concentrating on the slap of his shoes against the pavement. On Sixth Avenue the chains of traffic rattled and jerked uptown and the sidewalks were segmented among the crack panhandlers, damming the pedestrian stream with outstretched hands and rote requests. Hal slipped through the crowd and walked up Greenwich Avenue, then turned on Perry Street, cutting toward the river. By habit he was cruising the cans, and when a bright flag of white cloth caught his eye he stopped.
A laundry bag. He unfurled it, held it at arm’s length. It was reasonably clean and the hole at the bottom corner was insignificant. Wadding the bag, he went around the corner and stopped to examine it again. His pants were held to his waist by many turns of a knotted nylon cord, and after a little fumbling he undid a length of this and fixed it to the cloth bag in a sling, closing the tear at one end and making a drawstring around the mouth at the other. There was a smiling sun emblem printed on the bag, and it lay facing out from his hip when he slung it to his shoulder. He loosened the drawstring, slid in the bread, refastened it and moved on, flushed with optimism for the first time that day. This was a good area for scavenging; he’d found his shoes not far from here. Solid black brogans, whole and a perfect fit, the shoes were the best piece of luck that had come his way since he lost the roof; their discovery had freshened his belief in God.
At the end of the street he turned north and walked parallel to the West Side Highway. The rush hour traffic had abated and the cars came by at near top speed, with an enormous sheering sound. Beyond the highway the river turned the sunlight back as sharply as a mirror; past that, the low New Jersey skyline was hard-edged, as if cut into the horizon with a knife. The wind was much stronger along the river, sweeping away the sun’s furtive warmth. He turned back east on Gansevoort Street.
Behind the windbreak of the warehouses it was definitely warm, the air still fresh but no longer bitter. In two or three weeks it would be real spring. Ahead of him, near Hudson Street, two spectral figures stooped in the shadow of a restaurant dumpster, piled over the rim with remains of T-bone steaks.
“Jackpot,” one of them called to him. Coming closer, Hal saw that it was Dirty Will.
“There’s more than enough,” Will said.
Hal peered over Will’s shoulder, but he didn’t know the woman with him. She might have been young but you couldn’t tell it through the dirt and meat grease on her face. Her eyes glazed over and her teeth worked at a steak rind.
“That’s turned off,” Hal said, glancing at the blackened shreds of meat that clung to the T-bone in Will’s right hand. “It’ll make you sick.”
“Not so far, it don’t.” Dirty Will grinned, disclosing a black ill-smellin
g cavity where his front teeth should have been, then gnawed at the bone with the side of his mouth. A smear of grease climbed along his cheekbone. “Don’t know what you’re missing, pal.”
“You can have it all,” Hal said.
Will dropped the bone among a scatter of other discards at his feet and stretched up to the rim of the dumpster for another. Turning back, he briefly met Hal’s eyes. “You get any news of Judy?”
“They just give me the runaround,” Hal said, and cleared his throat. “It’s sure enough she’s dead now, though. They won’t let me see her, since I’m not kin.”
“Think she froze?”
“No,” Hal said. “She was still in the center on Katherine Street there. Any time they tell me the same thing twice, they say it was an OD.”
“Crack attack,” Will said neutrally, and raised the new bone to his jaws.
“We’ll see you,” Hal said, snapping the cord of the found shoulder bag as he stepped out. “If that rotten meat don’t kill you first.”
The rancid smell of the soured bones hung in the back of his throat for the next few blocks, making him slightly nauseous on his empty stomach. He walked to Eighth Avenue, turned north and crossed Fourteenth Street. In the middle of the block there was a police car double-parked, and he saw two cops bend over to lift a man from the sidewalk. His face was blue beneath his beard and dirt; Hal didn’t know him. The cops were trying to load him into the back seat of the car, but one of his arms had stiffened at right angles to his body, and it was not an easy fit. A cop cursed and straightened up and began to turn to look at Hal, who automatically began to move, as if the look itself propelled him, like a piston or gear in a big machine.
He realized it was late enough, time to turn back. If he didn’t hurry, he’d arrive when he’d planned. He went across Sixteenth Street to Broadway, then down, slowly, to Houston, then over to Forsyth. At a corner bodega he bought a single stick of Hotel Bar butter, dropped it in the bag and went on. In the middle of Chatham Square he stopped to rest, leaning with one palm against the arch commemorating the Chinese-American war dead. The bottoms of his feet were warm, but he didn’t think they had blistered. These shoes were a gift with their good fit. A serious case of blisters would put him out of commission, had done it before now. He rested, looking over at the small trapezoidal cemetery raised behind a wall on the south side of the street. A plaque on the iron gate said it was the oldest in New York. Among the pale stones a little thin grass was just beginning to green.
He pushed himself away from the arch and went down Oliver Street, passing through a Chinese playground with a merry-go-round and a jungle gym in the form of a pagoda and another in the form of a large snail. Below, a Chinese man in a padded jacket was raking dirt into neat rows in a small garden plot at the edge of the sidewalk. Hal crossed the street and climbed to the porch in front of the Family Respite Center, clenching his hands in his pockets as he went softly in the front door. He stood in the shadows, away from the guard desk, staring at the hand-lettered list of prohibitions taped to one post of the metal detector: no weapons, no drugs, no alcohol, no teenagers … It went on. There was the usual wet-concrete smell, mixed today with a faint whiff of cabbage. It was five or ten minutes before the rent-a-cop at the guard desk looked up.
“Hey, buddy, you can’t stand there. Got to either check in or move on out.”
“Waiting for somebody,” Hal muttered.
“Can’t wait here.” The guard shook his head.
Through the inner doorway behind the desk, Hal caught a glimpse of Benny, still wearing the same Masters of the Universe sweatshirt he’d had on the day before. “Hey, Benbro,” he called.
The boy came out and stopped just back of the metal detector to rub one eye. His reddish hair was sticking up in five directions and the sweatshirt had ridden up to expose his bellybutton. The guard swiveled in his chair as if to stare him out of existence.
“Let’s go,” Hal said, patting the bag. “Lunchtime.”
The guard turned back. “You’re not authorized to take him out of here.”
“Come on, now,” Hal said. Benny walked through the metal detector, and Hal reached over and pulled the sweatshirt down.
“You know we don’t even have to take him back,” the guard said. “Not when you come along and take him out and you’re not authorized.”
“Yeah, I know that,” Hal said. “It’s what I get told just about every day.” He turned the boy with a hand on his shoulder and piloted him out the door. A woman with a stroller crossed their path, headed for the processing area at the far end of the porch. Through that doorway, the shadows of functionaries floated behind a Plexiglas barrier, bristling with forms.
“All right,” Hal said. “Should we go back to the park?”
“Yeah, okay,” Benny said.
He stepped out from under Hal’s hand and led the way around the corner of the building to a small concrete playground, where some benches, a toilet hutch and an unornamented jungle gym were grouped around a greenish bronze statue of various animals, all somehow balanced on the back of a small bear. At the south end of the square was a low fence and beyond it another area of the park reserved for use by winos. Benny climbed up onto a bench and straddled its back.
“You hungry?” Hal said.
“Sorta,” Benny said. “Yeah.”
“What was for breakfast?”
“Oatmeal. It’s always oatmeal, remember?”
“You eat it?” Hal said, loosening the drawstring of his bag.
“Some of it,” Benny said. “Hey, don’t pick on me, Hal.”
For an instant his voice became a juvenile simulacrum of Judith’s. Hal blinked the comparison away and put one foot on the seat of the bench.
“New bag,” Benny observed. “Where’d you get that?”
“Found it,” Hal said. “You find things, if you look.”
He tore half of the loaf down the middle and with a bent steel spoon scooped a crescent of butter and spread it on the inside, using his raised knee as a shelf. The butter had softened a little in the bag, but it was still awkward to spread it with the back of the spoon. He passed the butter sandwich to Benny, who raised it to his mouth in both hands and took a bite.
“This is all right,” he said, chewing and squinting into the texture of the bread. “Hey, it’s got meat in it.”
“That’s the idea,” Hal said. He buttered a chunk of bread for himself and bit into it. The burst of saliva at the contact hurt his mouth.
“Aren’t you gonna sit?” Benny said.
“Nah, don’t think so.”
“How come not?”
“Don’t feel like it.”
“You’re strange, man.”
Benny put down the nub of his bread on the bench’s top plank, climbed down and strolled across to the jungle gym. He paused for a moment with one hand on the first rung, then climbed to the top and sat looking north, his legs gently swinging under him. Hal reached for the bread end and blew some grit off the bottom of it and put it back in the waxed paper sack. The wind was quiet for the moment, and the warmth of the sun was stronger.
“Weather’s looking up a little, at least,” Hal said. Benny didn’t answer.
“They got better stuff at that playground up Oliver Street,” Hal said. “They got a merry-go-round … You want to go up there and play?”
“I don’t guess so.”
Benny kept his face turned away. Hal put the bread sack into his cloth bag and went over to the animal statue, whose bronze was overlaid with white flourishes of graffiti. He looked over into the other half of the park, which was in deep shadow. A statue of a man in a three-piece suit made an expansive gesture toward the pile of litter at its base. Hal made out some half-pint bottles and a few more crack vials and a small dry heap of human dung. There was a thump behind him and he turned to see Benny crouched down in a three-point landing.
“Careful how you land on your hands around here,” Hal said. “Too much glass around, cut
you to ribbons.”
Benny straightened up and briefly flashed his uncut palms. “Come on,” he said. “Something I want to show you.”
Hal followed him around the back side of the shelter to a storm-fenced playground facing South Street and the viaduct. At a corner of the fence Benny stopped and fastened his fingers to the wire.
“See it?” Inside the fence was a sculptured dolphin, its tail arcing up from a low pedestal.
“Big fish, huh?” Hal said.
“It’s a porpoise, dumbhead,” Benny said. “And you know what?”
“Yeah?” Hal said.
“Summertime, water gonna come out his nose right there. “He stuck his forearm through the wire to point. “It’s a fountain, see? It gets hot, we all run through that water and cool off.”
“Slick,” Hal said. He turned and propped his back against a sag of the wire. By summer Benny would be God knows where—in a foster home, with luck, or in some other institution without it. Now Judith was dead, they wouldn’t keep him here much longer. Every day when Hal showed up for their meeting he expected to find the boy gone. He couldn’t find out where they meant to send him either; not being a relative, he wasn’t authorized to know.
“Benbro,” he said. “Could you hide something? Hide it good?”
Benny shot him a curious look. “Maybe,” he said. “Yeah. Something small, I could. What you got?”
Hal pulled the packet of bills from his jacket lining and unrolled it. Benny’s eyes grew wide and warm.
“Yo, where’d you get that?”
“Saved it up,” Hal said. “You hang on to your money tight enough, it gets bigger. I’m thinking of splitting this with you now, promise you’ll keep it safe?”
Benny nodded.
“Don’t tell anybody?”
A nod.
“Don’t show anybody?”
“All right already,” Benny said, and stuck out his hand. Hal counted off twenty-two of the grubby ones.
“There’s your half,” he said.
“Cool,” Benny said, eyes riveted to the cash.
Barking Man: And Other Stories (Open Road) Page 21