The Gypsy

by Stephen Brust

  A wooden door opened almost in his face and a burly figure in a red plaid jacket walked away from him. He noticed the jacket and thought. Is it cold, then?He could see his breath, and there was a light coating of snow on the sidewalk, so it must be. He looked at his own clothing and saw only a very thinly woven cotton shirt, pale yellow with a few blue threads for embroidery. He wore baggy blue pants of the same material, and high doeskin boots. These should not be enough to keep him warm. Perhaps he ought to go inside. A sign above the door said ST. THOMAS BAR, which meant it was a public house. The door had opened before him, which could as easily be a Sign as it could be a Trap or nothing at all, and the siren, which ought not to have anything to do with him, was getting closer. He opened the door and stepped inside, entering another alien world, which is what any new place is, after all, isn't it?

  Cigarette smoke, an anemic blue, hung over a pool table, entwined with a neon BUDWEISER sign, and crept over to a long bar where a fat man in an apron was talking with a smiling patron. The fat man's features were not unpleasant, and his nose had been broken at least twice; the patron hunched his shoulders as if the world had been too much for him for along time, and he had a large scar down the side of his neck-a knife scar.

  The fat man noticed him and said, "What'll it be?"

  "I… that is, brandy."

  "How d'you want it?"

  "How-?"

  "You all right, buddy?"

  "I think so."

  "Want me to call someone?"

  "No. Just let me sit down."

  "Sure. Sit down. Maybe you shouldn't have anything right now."

  "Maybe you're right."

  "You driving?"

  "What?"

  "You got car keys?"

  "Car… keys? I don't think so."

  "Good. Just sit there for a while and I'll call you a cab. You got any money?"

  "Well, I-I don't know." He put his hands in his pockets and began removing things; An oddly formed lump of heavy grey metal, the key to room fourteen of some hotel somewhere, an empty bottle for sixtyfive milligram pills of Darvon, a nickel and three pennies, He stared at this collection, wondering if it had any significance. The pill bottle; he remembered something about that-he had just been trying to get more pills, when-what happened? He shook his head, frustrated.

  The fat man said, "Shit. Never mind, now. What's your name?"

  "Ummm, Chuck-Charles, I think."

  "Yeah, you look like a Charles. Okay, just sit tight. No one here will hurt you. You'll feel better in awhile. I'm Tony, by the way."

  "Thank you. Tony. Do not write the letter."

  "What?"

  "Do not write the letter. It will bounce three times and bite three times and leaving you kissing dust."

  "Is that a poem or something?"

  "It is for you."

  "What letter are you talking about?"

  "I don't know."

  The man with the scar looked up. "He some kind of nut. Tony?"

  "Hell if I know."

  "Did you write a letter?"

  The bartender paused, glanced at Charles, then back at the patron. He cleared his throat. "I just told you about my daughter."

  "The dyke?"

  "Shut the fuck up."

  "Hey, you said it first."

  The bartender stared at a soapy glass in his hand."I was gonna write and tell her not to bother coming home for winter break, but…"

  "This guy gives me the creeps. Tony."

  "So go to the other end of the bar. He ain't bugging nobody."

  "I guess not."

  But Charles, after replacing his possessions in his pocket, decided he should be the one to move to the other end of the bar, as a result of which he spotted the policemen before they spotted him. His throat tightened. They can't be looking for me. They can't be looking for me. Can they? One was very young and made Charles think of the phrase, "One hand grabs for the reins while one foot runs for the ditch." Who had said that, and in what language? The other policeman was like an old wolf-leader, whose eyes miss nothing even if they appear closed.

  Charles turned away, hoping to be missed in the blue fog, but he felt the old policeman's eyes seize the back of his neck. This was pursuit, and pursuit led to capture, and capture led to-

  No, there was no time for that, now, either.

  The room was heavy with tobacco smoke; it could become heavier, he knew that. He could hide himself in it, although there would be a price to pay.

  He did what was necessary, vaguely aware that he was losing something as he did.

  There was a back way, and he found it, and he was gone. His headache returned, bringing with it the memory that it had been an almost constant companion for a long time. He felt pursuit, and it frightened him, but at least now he knew it was not an irrational fear which had gripped him since-

  –Since-

  Blind man's night is music to the deaf, and everyone has two paths, not one, whence comes tragedy and comedy, forsooth and damn straight, son.

  He stood just within the flap of the tent and the old woman saw him and he saw her and the statuette,and it would be hard to guess who was more surprised of these two strangers who somehow knew. And, oh, the things they said without speaking or moving; the anger, the pain, the justifications, all silent, perhaps all imagined, until he ran, once more,never stopping until he reached the river, which agreed to carry him, once more, away from one set of troubles into another. Out of pangs of the heart and into torments of the flesh.Hell of a way to run a coach service.

  –Since-

  After all, they had entered the bar, and, more importantly, he must trust his instincts, which had gotten him out of as many fixes as they'd gotten him into. The same could be said of his knife, and perhaps there's a moral there.

  Was this time going to be any different? Of course.They all are. He was breathing heavily but not painfully, his strides were long and even, though he was tired. He stopped and rested for a moment beside a high wrought-iron fence, with a lower chain-link fence outside it, then he walked on, looking back frequently.

  There was a gate in the fence, and someone stood beside it. His first thought was. It is Luci; I am caught.But no. He could make out little of her form in the gloom, but her face had the stamp of beauty with suffering etched into the lines over her brows and next to her eyes. A squirrel at her feet chittered loudly as he approached, started to run, then relaxed. The woman turned at his footstep. He looked into her eyes and she into his. He felt a slight tingle at the base of his skull. Her eyes glittered. She said, "You are hereto replace me, that I may rest?"

  "I don't understand."

  "Why are you here?"

  "I am merely walking. Running, in fact. You?"

  "I guard this place, so none may pass who should not. You should not, I think, unless you are to replace me."

  He looked past her, through the high wrought-iron fence, and understood. "No, I still live. You must wait for the next to die to take your place."

  "How then can you see me?"

  "Because I am who I am."

  "Who are you?"

  "I'm not certain. Who are you, and how did you come to die, so young?"

  "Leukemia," she said dreamily, as if it made no difference to her at all, and perhaps it didn't. "My name is Karen."

  "How long have you stood vigil here?"

  "I'm not certain. Only a few days, I think. I relieved a tired old man who had been here four days."

  The squirrel jumped closer to him, then back again.

  "You will not have to wait long, I think. Then you may rest."

  "Yes," she said. "Will you see to my man? We lived together for three years, and he was very kind when I was dying, but it was hard for him. Harder than for me, I think."

  "What is his name?"

  "Brian MacWurthier. We lived at three twenty-seven Roosevelt, upstairs."

  He repeated the name and address to himself, so he wouldn't forget it. "Very well," he said. "I will-"

/>   "A light fell upon him. He turned and his heart jumped as he saw the police car. He began to run, knowing already that it was too late."

  "I'm sorry," he heard her say. The squirrel bolted between the bars of the cemetery as if escaping from a cage.

  "It is nothing," said Charles softly as the two policemen took his arms and threw him against the chain-link fence. Their hands were rough and thorough as they searched him. What are their feelings at such times, he wondered. Boredom? Professional pride?

  "My head hurts," he said softly. They didn't seem to hear him.

  The older one found his knife and let it fall with a gesture half careless and half deliberate. Charles winced as he heard it strike the sidewalk. The younger one held his upper arms in a grip like steel. It was painful- He thought about resisting then and there,but he couldn't decide, and soon it was too late, for they wrenched his arms behind him and put handcuffs on him.

  This felt familiar. Why? A piece of the Sight, or the shards of real memory? The policemen pushed him into the back of the car. He had to sit sideways because of the cuffs. He tested them, and found that they were connected by a rigid bar, rather than a mere chain. They knew him then. He frowned, his shoulder pressed uncomfortably against the seat back.There was a time when it would have pleased him that they showed such fear. There was a time,…

  He walks aimlessly upon the Old Manor Way, his feet twisting in the coach tracks. He sees her before him-the one whom he had loved, and who betrayed him to marry a rich man.

  "You have destroyed me," he cries. "You have broken my heart." He reaches into his chest, then, and pulls his heart from his body to show her, but she, filled with shame or pride, won't look, so he flings it down onto the road.

  Soon, an old dry-nurse comes along and sees it. "Well, "she says. "We can't have this." And she calls three times like a raven and screams three times like an owl, and a shape appears beside her. The apparition, a woman who is younger than the nurse and older than the lover, takes the heart from the roadside, and brushes the dirt from it and holds it to her bosom. He looks closely, and sees that it is the ghost of his mother, still watching out for him from beyond the grave.

  Lover, dry-nurse, and mother all vanish into the mist,into the dust. He takes back his heart and replaces it in his chest and continues on his way.

  The holding tank was seven paces by nine. The walls were of tile, to chest height. The floor was of cement, with a large drain in the middle so the place could be hosed down. A tiled bench, perhaps eight inches off the floor and eighteen deep, was built into two of the walls. Across from it was an aluminum toilet, all of one piece. Charles, realized, after a moment's thought, that this was to ensure no one could use the toilet seat as a weapon. The sink was also aluminum. There were neither soap nor towels. The cold water worked, the hot didn't. A chest-high wall next to the toilet provided a token measure of privacy from the thick, wired-glass window next to the door.

  Two pair of fluorescent light fixtures, two bulbs in each, made the tank very bright. The fixtures we recovered in heavy plastic shielding. To protect them when the place was hosed down, perhaps, since the ceiling was far too high for anyone to reach.

  There were two others in the tank with him. For just a moment, Charles thought of his brothers, but,though he no longer remembered what they looked like, he knew these were not they. One prisoner was in his later thirties, perhaps. He had already been there when Charles was brought in. He was tall,stringy, with dark hair that was graying just a bit at the temples. He was sitting on the bench and he wore a black tee shirt. The other looked to be in his middle fifties. He'd been let in just a few minutes before, and Charles had the impression that this wasn't his first time in this place. His grey hair was slicked back, he had a bit of a potbelly. He wore a faded red shirt with fake pearl buttons, very old jeans, and cowboy boots. He paced in a lazy oval near the door. He was shorthand he stank very badly when Charles got too close.Charles wondered if he'd been fished out of a sewer. All three of them avoided proximity with each other, so staying away wasn't difficult-

  He tried to reconstruct the events since he'd been picked up, but they blurred and faded and slipped through his fingers. He had been thoroughly searched by two bored guards with a camera watching, and there had been an old, sour-faced woman who took his picture and fingerprints while a fresh-scrubbed clerk with a weak attempt at a blond mustache had asked him questions he mostly couldn't answer, and then his possessions and even his boots had been taken and he'd been put into the tank by a guard who looked like a Nazi and carried the largest key Charles had seen since-

  –Since-

  He'd been a child, and his mother carried a huge ornate key on a chain around her neck. "What is that for, Anya?" he had asked.

  "It is the key to our palace," she said.

  "Palace?"

  "We are royalty, you know. And someday we will take our place, and you will be a great king." She smiled and winked as she said it.

  "Will I like being a king?" he had asked, all somber and earnest.

  She had smiled, like the rippling laugh the fiddle made when Sandi led the csardas. She said, "Ah, my little man, sometimes I think you will never like anything you do, because you must suffer to be happy."She hugged him, and his face pressed against the ornate iron key she wore, and he wondered.

  –Since-

  He sat down on what could perhaps be called a bench, and looked at his companions. He wondered what their crimes were. It came to him then that not everyone put in this place was innocent. A shiver began somewhere low down on his spine and shot up it like a rocket. To be innocent of a crime and to be in this place, stripped of identification, dignity, and shoes, with people who smelled like pigs, behind wired glass, yes, that would truly be damnation. A man could panic in here-think that he'd been forgotten, that no one would ever come for him. There was no way to see the sky, nor was there a clock.

  Suddenly desperate to take his mind from these thoughts, he addressed his companions. He said carefully, "Do either of you know how long they're likely to keep us here before something else happens?"

  Echoes echoes echoes, banging around inside his head, which now hurt so badly he wanted to scream. If the police, for some reason, wanted to listen in to conversations in this place, they would be unable to hear anything but echoes, Charles wasn't sure if his companions had understood his question, but he had no wish to repeat it. The one who stank glowered at him, and Charles was startled by the deep blue of his eyes. The younger, taller one shook his head and went back to contemplating the floor between his arms.

  Charles closed his eyes and took two deep breaths.He assessed his options as best he could. From the way he was treated by the policemen, and the diligence of their search, he was considered dangerous,and was wanted for a serious crime. Had he, perhaps,killed someone? His feelings gave him no answer, except that the idea of having take a life filled his heart with no sense of denial.

  If he left himself in their hands, could he expect justice? Did he want justice? The answer to that was:Yes, but it was doubtful that they would see justice in the same way he did. The bench was hard, but the floor not as cold as he would have expected. He waited, his eyes fixed on the door, hardly blinking,hardly breathing. The younger of his companions spared him one curious glance, almost a grimace. The older continued to pace.

  Charles could not say how long it was before the door opened once more. A policeman with a straight back and a grey mustache stood with the huge key in his hand and called out, "Jeffrey Simmons." The taller one stood and moved toward the door. The policeman said, "Vincent Petersen," and the smelly one looked up and shuffled to the door. The policeman's eyes locked with Charles' for just a moment, but he couldn't see anything in them.

  The cell door shut, sending off echoes like a stone thrown into a pool. The echoes, hard and metallic,set off a ringing in his ears. The ringing continued,too high to sing comfortably, like the long screeching note of the violin at the end of a wild csardas. I
n his mind, he filled in the tambourine. Doom teka teka teka doom teka tek. Doom teka teka teka doom teka tek. His throat burned and he tasted his tears. He reached out,as if to touch his home, and then squeezed, as if to tear apart anything that would keep him from it.

  Doom teka teka teka doom teka tek.

  The ringing became louder still, until it filled all of the world that was or ever could be, and he breathed with the imaginary tambourine.

  Doom teka teka teka doom teka tek.

  He wrapped himself in his arms, and, as he did,the rhythm became buzzing of bees and the ringing became church-bells. He let it take him, fill him, expand him, and move him in a way that was more physical then he would have thought.

  Movement?

  Music.

  His headache was gone.

  The fiddle came to accompany the tambourine once more, and, just for an instant, he remembered his brothers. But then, the instant was enough, that time.

  Doom teka teka teka doom teka tek.

  Doom teka teka teka doom teka tek.

  Doom teka teka teka doom teka tek.

  Doom teka teka teka doom teka tek.

  ONE

  A Wolf, A Man, and an Old Gypsy Woman

  05 NOV 17:30

  My partner is an asshole,

  my ex-wife is a bitch.

  My daughter is a hooker,

  the suspect is a witch.

  "STEPDOWN"

  "Will you guys pipe down?"

  No one noticed. The background buzz and rattle in the squad room, loud for a Sunday, didn't even falter. Bad enough that his desk was out in the middle of the room, with other guys always walking behind him, spooking the hell out of him on bad days. Did it also have to be butted up against Dumbshit's desk? He lifted his eyes from the smudged keys of the Smith-Coronamatic and the multilayered sheaf of paper that he'd just crammed in its maw and found himself looking at Durand's butt. Dumbshit was sitting on his own desk, his back to Stepovich, his feet on his chair, for all the world like a high school punk bullshitting his way through study hall. The kid had about twenty extra pounds of gear packed into all the shiny leather pouches on his Sam Browne belt. Including the nonregulation and probably illegal sap Stepovich had to take away from him earlier,when he'd wanted to use it on the gypsy. Dumbshit Durand hadn't been content with throwing him up against the fence, he'd wanted to sap him, too. Asshole.