First there was a concession stand. A woman with a moustache leaned over its cluttered counter; newspapers, candy, cigarettes flanked her—framed in glossy magazines suspended by clothespins on wires. He bought not quite twenty dollars’ worth of Snickers, Baby Ruths, Three Musketeers, Milky Ways, and paid for them with one of the bills Hannah had given him. Candies thrust into the pockets of his overalls, Henry acknowledged the woman’s comment, “mighty hungry,” by ripping the paper wrapper off the end of one and starting in. Henry knew that for him the horse and the candy went together—that was the way it had always been. The critters don’t like horse, and they don’t cotton to candy, neither. Why’d they come around now? now that they’d been gone so long?
One critter had told him straight to his face, Cradle’s gonna fall out of the tree baby-O.
Was that why he was here?—was this what he’d come downstairs to think about?
Another critter, just as fond as his mates of communicating to Henry in nursery rhymes and children’s ditties, saw that Henry had not understood the first critter, and spoke in a soft soprano voice, making sure not to let it slip into song, Four little, three little, two little Indians. One little Indian boy. Get it baby Henry?
Henry did get it. It was evident in Maddie’s and Hannah’s behavior. He thought, I don’t need critters to tell me that, but just as he held the thought, the first critter continued it, saying simply, You’re a bad boy Henry. And Henry thought about this and saw that yes he was nice to the Italian Lupi, because he liked him, because he could see that this was not a bad-hearted man—but the critter interrupted, You’re spoiled spoiled spoiled boy you don’t know how to say thank you. Thank the lady, Henry baby.
Henry looked up into the eyes of the woman at the counter. They were runny, behind a thick pair of glasses. “Don’t cry.”
The woman shrugged, another nut.
“Well, thanks,” he finished, listening for more words from the critters. They didn’t answer, and besides, most of them had gone ahead to the park.
Thanks—just what he’d told Hannah, what he always said on wage day. Henry was grateful to Hannah; no, he was devoted. Hannah had taken them in, sheltered them, had given Henry this job, working with the animals, doing the chores—a tidy, narrow, protected, calm life with Madeleine a farmer’s wife, elegant brave Maddie. Remember that night when the first of the animals was brought in? how it seemed so huge and sleek and beautiful, how it settled down by the touch of his brush across its coat? Then some of the birds were brought in. They took to that old beat-up berlin right away—and after Henry had gone to so much trouble constructing a proper coop. The makeshift dumbwaiter used to bring down feed from the silo he rigged up, with sliding doors and heavy rope for rigging. He replastered the rooms in the loft, using sand and good unslaked lime and cattle hair to bind it. He set up the grain room, the shed, the stalls, the drainage furrows for the barnyard. 200 pounds 10-penny nails; 100 pounds 20-penny nails; 50 pounds 8-penny nails; 75 pounds 5-penny nails. He hammered together the movable plank floors for the stalls and prepared a secret chamber for the beasts to be hidden in if the ranch were ever to be penetrated. A bench, a sink, an oil stove, hoods, ventilation flues to gather, cocks in the tubs he placed high so as to allow for water being drawn into pitchers. He spread the macadam grit and shoveled soil for the garden on the roof, laid the tar roof on the bunkhouse, mended a broken cornice on the water-tank tower with Sakrete and advice called up from below from Hannah and Madeleine who he could see was happy for the first time since they ran away. She had always loathed the South, its marsh earth and bayou air, hated its hatred of her, young white woman who’d taken this decision with Henry, who had experienced in half a lifetime as much racial prejudice as most of Henry’s friends and members of his family, who themselves were resistant at first; slow; leery.
As these were the best of days those were the worst—the boxing camp and the critters; primarily the terror of the critters. He’d succeeded in keeping them at bay until the accident, but then it was as if the lock on a door had been broken, the door removed, the walls, the roof taken away, and a new house, made of critters, put up in its place, with a brand-new lock and key for the door.
Henry had no clear memory of how it had happened. He was wearing his old headguard. Such a flurry of smart jabs to his face he had never been forced to ward off before, but nothing hurt. The fast little middleweight had drawn a bit of blood out of his mouth and nose—not enough to cause the trainer (a slip of a man, wisps of hair beneath his battered porkpie cap, mouth pulled far into the left cheek beneath his nose, crimpled, where a mirror of bubbles percolated under his hoarse yelling) to stop the round. The kid was getting a good workout, his rhythm was on. Work was his second sparring partner that day; everything seemed to be in order. The trainer growled, clapped hands, shouted, spat, whistled, and the sallowbrowed waterboy cheered. That flurry of punches was all: it seemed every time the kid let up and Henry relaxed back into an easy bob, block, duck, jab, on he would come again, backing this rugged flatfooter up toward the ringposts in the corner. All the commotion Henry heard like memory as they gamboled, fed-back, rang and vanished into nothing. Sometime came the backward trip and tumble, and at the base of his head there the turnbuckle flew up to hammer his skull; one clean blow was all it took.
Flash cards, Henry could remember. Flash cards, with little color pictures on them of a shoe or a doggie, and those what them dogs do hate, those kittycats. A cob of corn, for instance. An antelope, a cantaloupe, sun, moon, Plymouth Rock. Who was the first President of the United States, Columbus. Who had ever heard of Leif Erikson? Cobs of corn were easier to name than shoes. Cobs, and robin redbreasts. A gun, an apple. Apples, do they go woof, meow, boom, or? No they crunch when as you eat them. Doggie? gruhf. Gun? boom. Is Crunchy a candy? You want a Crunchy? Tell me what color it is and Maddie here will give you the Crunchy she brought with her. Brown, the brown of chocolate, and pretty Maddie who sometimes hid herself in the closet of the ward so that after visiting hours were over she could come and lie with him in the bed for a while, how happy his answer made her, and to make her more happy he said, chocolate, chocolate, pronouncing each of the sounds of the word distinctly.
In time, came back words like cat. Came back sentences like I am Henry Work and I love my wife her name is Maddie.
Maddie took him home. She told him that they were no longer going to be able to live down here, that she had found a new home for them, one which Henry would love, because the doctor said that he couldn’t ever be hit on the head again or that would be it for him. He listened, and understood. Everything would be fine. A man had called her and seemed to know what there was to know about them (which, in fact, made her nervous, but since they couldn’t go on like this she thought it was worth the risk)—there were bus tickets in the mail, an address.
On paydays often Madeleine and Henry would have supper up in the bunkhouse with Hannah. They would sit around the table out in the garden, and eat bean salad and chicken rolled in white flour and fried in bacon drippings—
What was he doing down here in the lobby of the building, then? he wondered. Everything was so odd, all these people. He thought backwards to where he’d thanked Hannah, slipped into his pocket the money she gave him, and left the bunker to go downstairs to Madeleine, who was waiting for him. But he had taken instead an innovative turn in the stairwell, descended, purchased the candy and leaned his massive frame against the glass door that delivered him blinking in wonder into the street. Here was a place of noise and multiple movements, a place of anxiety, of pushing and pulling. The smell of something poached mingled with diesel. Above all, the sweet scent of candy, its coconut, caramel, gooey and chewy there out before his nose, which followed it, the scent, as his feet placed themselves one before the other, transporting him eastward. He thought of Maddie upstairs waiting for him to knock at the door of their small apartment, waiting for him to enter the room, hand her the envelope Hannah had given him; Maddie who’d re
move the money and hide it in the plastic bag she taped under the table. This was their saving-up money. Henry wasn’t sure what the saving-up money was being saved up against. It seemed to him there wasn’t another place on earth quite as fine as the ranch, and though he was down in the street just then, he knew he would begin to feel that old anxiousness again—those critters (he didn’t know whether he called them that or they had named themselves), the nerves that came along toward the end of a boxing round, came in different forms but mostly in the shape of ice-blue crystal-like stars which waggled at the upper reaches of his field of vision, made his fingertips, toes, and the nape of his neck tingle; the old critters on their way to visit him and he would have to run back, find the door he’d opened, and escape once more into the safety of the ranch and Maddie.
But he discovered he’d walked out the front of the building, considered the critters, looked east, west, started east, walking until he reached Fifth Avenue. He proceeded downtown, eating his candy bars one by one, pausing to read the names, pronounce them aloud before making each selection, broadcasting their colorful wrappers into the gentle breeze, until he passed under the shadow cast by Stanford White’s gray-streaked arch in Washington Square.
The great central fountain was dry. Henry sat down on the low concrete wall that traced its circumference. He felt tired from his walk. He wished he had bought a couple of bags of M&Ms when he’d had the opportunity. He did not seek out the kid among the lively scraps of humanity floating near him, under the spell cast by the mink-black squirrel that was now pitching itself, tiny leaps at a time, across the grass. Leaves left in the trees rustled under the winter bound sun. The squirrel stopped in a shadow on the grass, fixed its eye on this large figure seated at the fountain, hands placed flat on knees, head cocked heavily to one side to return its gaze. Was there a critter hiding inside it?
After a psychotic instant that scuttled space and time the squirrel took charge. In arcing jabs it closed the space between the two of them. Henry was bewitched by its furious sanguine eyes and its tail that brushed the air at each thrust. He wanted to get up and run but was transfixed.
The litany cut across this macabre ambush like heaven-sent absolution. “Sess-sess-sess,” came the baleful hiss. It issued from a stocky short Hispanic whose face was only partly obscured along the lean line of jaw by a beard. “Sess-ss-sess.”
Sin semilla, that much he knew.
Grateful to this officer of his momentary reprieve (for the squirrel retreated to continue stalking food to bury for winter, kernels of lime-green popcorn, a hickory-smoked almond, fragments of pretzel), Henry spoke up, “What?”
“Hey, man.”
Henry echoed, “Hey.” Nodded. Okay, man.
“What’ll it be, man.”
“What?”
“What’ll it be? I mean, like what can I do you for?”
“Oh,” said Henry. Unvexed, he reached down into memory and came up with a potential word, one picked up from the trainer, the only person besides Maddie to whom Henry had ever disclosed any details about the wild blue critters and the terrible pain which Maddie never knew the half of since Henry felt that to tell her would be dishonorable, in view of all the pain she had suffered through for him. He had told the trainer about the pain, though. It was a good thing he had, he thought. They started him on the morphine, light doses at first. But sometimes this other was more easily come by. At first Henry hated the needles but when he saw how the critters dispersed and the pain let up he grew accustomed to their presence in the locker room. He was warned under threat of having the—(word? the boy still was waiting for it)—taken away not to tell his wife about the medicine. And Henry could picture him there, a placid man whose soul showed in those bloodshot aggie eyes, a golden aura floating under that frail black skin. The word was there and it was just a matter of bringing it up to the lips. It seemed like an exercise, a test. Then he remembered, it was from his trainer Henry learned the word which protected him from the critters and now he pronounced it not so much to make a request as to gratify this nervous young man’s need, as Henry perceived it, to communicate, saying simply, “Horse.”
“Huh?”
He sat mute, his expression tabula rasa.
“Hey, whoa man,” swiftly walking away, hands immobile at sides, gait angularly jaunty on the balls of his feet. He circled the fountain and came back. “So, hey.”
“Hey,” smiled Henry; the air smelled fresh, sun was warm. He threw his head back into it, stared into the backs of his lids—no blue crystals there.
“So uh hey, smack, man?” but even as the question dropped away to a caustic whisper the dealer took a step back, looked left-right-farther-right-left, masterfully jerking his shoulders up and down, paying homage to the forgotten television prototype on which he had crafted his own street behavior, the prototype designed from a bogus version of what he, in fact, was, here in this park, working the top of the circle.
“Horse,” Henry repeated.
The kid smirked, “This ain’t no rodeo, man.”
Henry laughed. If only the good old trainer—he must be dead now—if only he’d heard that.
“Fuck you man, what am I spost to say to my main man?” and his voice shifted up to black, “Hey so this dude comes up to me like, no I din notice his threads, no he din have no sick threads on man, anyway so he comes up to me and like what he wants is dope?”
Henry was confused, but the monologue gained its own momentum.
“This guy’s like about nine feet high you think I’m gonna say no man I ain’t givin you no dope man, you tellin me you say no big man I ain’t sellin you no dope, ain’t nobody here gonna sell you dope man, ludes okay sure some snow right, I mean look, mescline I say sure man. But dope.”
“Horse.”
“You … no wait man, hold everything man. My ass man, I smell you a mile comin, narc.”
Henry laughed again, genially. The world wasn’t so bad. He felt sorry for the kid. The kid, he thought, could use some fathering, a good trip out to a woodshed where Henry himself could paddle his little back porch—not too hard, not too gently, just enough to force a few tears to the eyes for the soul’s sake, and for the conscience some fear of the belt.
“Fuck you fuckhead,” wondering how far he could go before the man turned ugly on him, but he perused his customer, measured him and was satisfied he (who regarded him with a genuinely beatific look) was not a narc. “Hey okay, fuck. Junk, dope? Lissen to me nobody carries no dope on ’em man, okay? Hang here I be right back.”
Henry studied the skirt of grass against the possibility the black squirrel might return. A soccer game, trash cans set up as goalposts, was being played on the concrete before the backdrop of the World Trade Center, to Henry’s left. He watched them play, guys in their twenties, some in street shoes, one barefooted and barechested, all freewheeling, aggressive, passionate players. One had his hair conked and dyed to an iridescent orange. Henry’s eye took in the brief conjunction, the split instant as the orange ball lofted in the air to be head-butted by this player, then the ball bounced off at a new angle. The goalie, whose earring was dazzled in sun, caught it and without hesitation dropkicked it back into the field of play.
The light slanted down on the square, on Thompson Street and on the two towers that shined silver as Kit Kat foil at the bottom of the island. They reminded Henry, these silver skyscrapers, of two gargantuan Pez dispensers.
Pez, how had he eaten all that candy? He looked down.
Again the squirrel had approached him. It was crouched, tail a jet plume, not two yards from where his feet were crossed. He nearly fell backward into the empty fountain. And yet once again the dealer intervened. He, too, noticed the squirrel.
“Go on, get outta here,” he stamped his foot. The squirrel’s black tail switched several times before it left, bounding away in a direction opposite the soccer players. The kid addressed Henry, who had recovered his balance and was now standing a shoulder over him. “Okay, chief. Ten
bucks a dec, thirty bucks a clean dec very good stuff very good.”
“Okay, man,” Henry echoed.
“You follow me, chief.”
Henry was led to a corner of the park where he made his buy—two pure decs—from a handsome man, conservatively dressed, with the melting eyes Henry knew as those of a flash-card giraffe.
“How much of that does he get?” Henry asked, indicating the kid who stood at a discreet distance, now blowing into his hands and dancing in place, foot to foot.
“How much of what,” abrupt, clipped.
Henry nodded at the jacket pocket in which the money had already been stowed.
“How much of what, I don’t get it. You got your stuff, right?”
“How much does the kid get.”
“Gets enough.”
“How much is enough?”
“Time for you to take a walk, clown.”
Having said that, the handsome man moved briskly past where the kid had taken up his position. Henry waved the kid over, not knowing what he would say if he came (he didn’t).
He tucked the packet into his shoe and strolled back to the bottom of Fifth Avenue, retraced his steps home. Up stairs, past the red light in the well, and out on the roof. The door to the bunker was open and without a word Henry walked inside. No one was there. He first snatched the tablespoon out of a drawer. The syringe he took from the veterinary medical kit and the needle—boiled with a batch of others by Henry himself that morning—he selected from the dispensary drawer. The syringe and needle were among those used to inject the dog subcutaneously with vitamins, or calcium. In the dispensary there were much larger instruments, which they used for the cattle; intramuscular injections of penicillin and antihistamine. He walked out and cut across the garden, covered with winter rye, to the silo. He had not been seen; in the impertinent peace the city can offer up to one of its dwellers, Henry was able to perform his bang, keep the critters at bay, watch the trees pitching against the band of dirty salmon that hugged the outline of the hills and skyline. It looked, the sky, like blue litmus paper dipped into the acid horizon so that the damp pink rose along the chemical-treated bottom edge … and Henry stared hard into the wide sliver of pumpkin sun like … warmth rent him through like … his eyes like teetered merrily like then the chill shook through and then the heat like … cartoon nystagmus like … this helicopter like it … made a booming … it made a tremendous booming racket rotors pommeling the island air like … pushed across the big old smiling mother moon.
Come Sunday Page 37