As a last resort, or at least the next illusory compensation, he had taken to the stem of an empty pipe, sucking without the remotest pleasure the stale, slightly woody taste of it, or tapping the tip of it, often unconsciously, against his front teeth like a woodpecker gone mad.
He had crushed three stems between his molars, each time spitting out a mouthful of splinters. He also used the end of the pipe in various fetishes and rituals that included scratching the side of his nose, the back of his head, under his chin, the lobes of his ears—everything but sticking it up his ass! Nothing helped. Giving up smoking was a genuine, deeply felt loss; there was no other word; it was a death in the family; and he grieved, at moments intolerably, actually ready to cry when his chest seemed to burst in its ache to suck down that soothing, loving cloud of nicotine and tar, formaldehyde, carbolic and prussic acids, carbon monoxide, arsenic, and all other and sundry delectable anathemas and sweet, sweet poisons!
Irritably, almost baring his teeth like a teased dog, he heard himself barking: “What!? What!” for he had not really heard much that Art had been saying—something about that seniority business, a subject on which he hadn’t shut up for the last three days.
Also, he was suddenly aware that the woodpecker was tapping like a frenzied idiot, and in a burst of accumulated anger, he tore the mother of a black bastard from its porcelain perch and flung it away.
It landed at the doctor’s feet who, knowing what it was all about, tsk-tsked a few times, shaking his head sadly, and returned it gently to its owner.
They smiled at each other, Jim rather sheepishly. He nodded toward Art, whom the doctor had never met.
“This is Art Davis. We’re together now.” And to Art—
“Dr. Rivers; George Rivers.”
There were handshakes, and nods, and rather grim smiles all around, for the business at hand was now clearly at hand. But the doctor said nothing. Jim had to throw out his hands, affect astonishment of sorts.
“—Well?!”
Prodded, the doctor started to speak; at least he opened his mouth, then closed it, shrugging helplessly. He tried again, this time succeeding, if rather lamely.
“What can I say? Only . . . what I already told you. And what you could see for yourself.” He glanced back at the area where the body had been found, shaking his head. “Fantastic! Unbelievable! Really.”
Jim frowned, dissatisfied and unhappy.
“Tell me again. Tell Art. He didn’t hear.”
The doctor seemed surprised.
“Again?”
Jim nodded.
“Yeah. Why not? That’s the way it works sometimes. We hear the same story again, and again—and maybe suddenly there’s a tiny piece that we didn’t hear before, and it means something. New. Or leads to something.”
The doctor shrugged good-naturedly and glanced at Art.
“You looked at the body?”
Art’s faint smile was puzzled, as if he thought it a stupid question.
“Of course. All of it. Every inch. Every hair.”
“And—?”
Art laughed.
“You mean—you want me to— Me? I’m not a doctor, or a lab man.”
“You don’t need to be.”
“But what can I say?”
“That’s my point exactly! What can anyone say? If we were in Africa, or New Guinea, there’d be no problem.”
The connection eluded Art, who was sometimes a bit slow.
“How’s that?”
The doctor smiled, rather enjoying this pleasantly simple, open-faced young man with disheveled hair, bloodied and mud-splattered from head to toe.
“She was obviously, and please note the word—obviously—attacked, killed, torn apart, the body half eaten by a pack of predatory, carnivorous, half-starved animals.” He turned to face Jim. “I say half-starved because I don’t think more than a third of the corpse is left. He nodded to dispel Art’s look of surprise. “Yes. Much of the bone is exposed and appears to have been gnawed. Visible tooth marks. All the long muscles gone, the fatty tissue. The neck was broken, by the way.”
Jim’s eyebrows raised slightly.
“Oh? You didn’t mention that. Does it mean anything?”
The doctor shrugged.
“I don’t suppose. There’s a lot of embedded rock around. Maybe she just hit the ground with terrific force. If they hit her from the front and she fell backward . . . well, that could have done it.”
Jim’s eyes brightened a bit.
“They? Why do you say they?”
The doctor laughed.
“I must!”—then, teasing—“Or maybe not. Would ‘it’ suit you better?” His eyes played with Jim’s.
“Murders in the Rue Morgue.”
Art was lost.
“What’s that?”
No one would tell him.
“And that’s it—everything?” Jim’s pipe was raised, about to start clicking, but he remembered in time and pocketed it.
“For now.” The doctor walked toward his car. “If the lab turns up anything. I’ll let you know.” He slammed the door of his shiny black Triumph, settled back into its red-leather bucket seat. After it had shot off, revved up to create a momentary spectacular roar, Jim turned to Art with a somewhat sour pout under his bushy mustache.
“What kind of car did you say you owned?”
Art looked thoroughly depressed, picking hopelessly at a few ragged spots of mud and blood on the front of his new three-ninety-five cotton-and dacron drip-dry shirt.
“A 1964 Chevrolet four-door sedan, with one window busted, a fender smashed, and four paper-thin tires.”
They were hot, sticky, indescribably dirty, and bone-tired. Jim’s blue shirt clung wetly to his back from belt to neck, quite as if he had stepped from a river, and Art had a raw itch at one side of his crotch he’d gotten from a pair of too-small swim trunks he had worn to Jones Beach the Sunday before, which, stung with the salt from his sweat, was driving him wild.
Yet they remained, as if some secret were still there, waiting to be found, watching a police truck gather up the last of the wooden barricade horses. Surely they had said everything there was to say, yet Jim persisted with a sigh and mild sarcasm.
“Well, Sherlock? —or do you prefer being called Mr. Holmes?”
Unhearing, bemused, conjuring his own weird pictures while shaking his head in awe, Art did not reply, instead half whispered—“A pack of wild, half-starved animals.”
Jim had decided that his pipe was a menace to his sanity after finding himself thrusting it into an ear, and deliberately broke it in half, throwing the pieces into the underbrush.
“You don’t believe it —The animal part.”
Art shook his head.
“No. I don’t. I mean—” laughing, groping, “I do; yes—in my mind. How can you dispute what the doctor said, and what you could see for yourself. But—” He touched his head. “Something says no; it’s impossible. Jim—” Disarmingly, with such a great staring earnestness it was almost comic—“Jim— This is New . . . York!”
Like a number of irritating people Jim had known, but never before Art, the young man pawed his arm, tugged at his sleeve to guarantee absolute eye-to-eye attention.
“New . . . York . . . City!”
Jim faked alarm, freeing himself as if the other were a raving psychotic.
“All right, all right! I believe you!”
Art turned, lifting his head, looking up and out over the treetops to the long sweep of apartment house buildings that made up the faintly blue, smoke-hazed skyline on the west.
“And to think . . . that it happened here . . . in Central Park . . . where kids play ball . . . and jump rope . . . where kites get busted and balloons fly away. . . .”
“And two lousy cops—” Jim’s face was sour “—can’t come up with even one single mother of a clue.”
“Or even a sister or brother.” Art’s jokes were always pathetic. But his expression was concentrated and s
trained, the mouth tight, the brow deeply furrowed. Then suddenly his features relaxed, becoming open and smooth as the idea he’d been struggling with burst upon him with the quality of a conversation.
“Do you know what I think?!” Almost shaking with excitement—“Hey! Jim! Listen to this!” Pawing him again—“Did you ever see a dog go bad? I have. Rotten. Mean. They do, you know. What happens— They get lost, or run away, or families abandon them; and then, somehow, they find each other. First there’s a pair, then three or four; maybe more. They live in—”
For a moment he couldn’t think where, but then he got it.
“—Caves; like in the park, some of the rocks are honeycombed; or empty sewers; or beat-up, abandoned buildings, like in Brownsville or parts of Spanish Harlem; you know, the city’s loaded with them; why, I’ve seen streets that look like a bomb had hit.” A moment’s pause. “Well?!” Then rushing on—“That’s where they live, or at least—sleep, in the daytime, hidden away, like vampires. At night they hunt, and they learn to hunt together—for food, garbage mostly, knocking over cans, nosing off the lids, but other things too. They’d attack a human. They would, Jim, you’d better believe it. I know. I seen it. I got followed once by four of them; four: ugliest, mangiest things you ever saw; half crazed from neglect, disease.”
He looked into the older man’s face closely, seeking any motion of muscle or line for reaction, but found none. Jim didn’t seem the slightest impressed. Angered, he added a sadistic nuance—
“One of them was almost hairless, with a running sore on its back as big as a soup plate, like raw meat. . . .”
That part did reach Jim. “Oh come on!” He turned away in pique and disgust.
Vaguely embarrassed, Art lowered his voice, some of the hope and conviction in his tone gone.
“All I’m telling you is God’s truth. And it could happen. Maybe that’s what did. A whole pack of half-crazed dogs! Not three or four, but, who knows, maybe ten—or thirty! And if some woman is nutty enough to wander into the park in the middle of the night, and they corner her. . . .”
He stopped entirely, sighing and discouraged, but secretly convinced it was a brilliant theory.
Jim smiled and placed his hand affectionately on the young man’s shoulder.
“Well—it is an idea, isn’t it. And I’ve come up with nothing better.” He paused, thinking, his eyes sliding in a sly glance at the other. “Of course, there were no animal footprints around . . . only lots of kicked-up mud and countless prints of barefoot kids from the day before. Hm? But it rained crazy hard toward morning, didn’t it—so it’s not easy to tell about anything.”
A sudden wave of desire for a cigarette swept over him, hitting him hard, leaving him breathless and bent over, yet it seemed considerably less severe than the last time and, straightening up, he felt a small wonder and growing pride. What had they been talking about? Ah, yes. He concluded the thought—
“Still—rain or no, you’d think there might be at least one good paw print, wouldn’t you; particularly since there were dozens that children had made. . . .” He paused. “Bit of a puzzle.”
Art was not above sulking. He kicked a stone down the path before them with the anger of a small boy whose father had just told him he was not to get this week’s allowance.
“Well—” He was determined to cling to straws. “I still say it’s possible. Explains a lot of things. You heard the doctor.”
Another kick and another stone plummeted downhill. “—Two-thirds of the body eaten away; the bone exposed and gnawed. My god—!”
Two stones, three stones, four.
“—It’s got to be an animal; it’s got to!”
THE STREET
AT THE END of the street, or the beginning actually, if it is entered from the south where the numbers, if there are any, run upward, the buildings are unoccupied.
Uninhabitable is a better word.
The doors are gone; the windows long ago shattered and smashed.
The roofs expose jagged patches of blue, and most of each floor has been eaten away, leaving only a vast crosspatch of beams and two-by-fours spliced with the knuckled slime of broken and crumbling plumbing, so blackened they look charred.
Occasional kids play in and out if the smell is tolerable—faint enough to wrinkle a nose in quick disgust and forget it.
More often the stench is unbearable.
Bums and drunkards and wandering derelicts stumble in to piss or bend down and shit in the shadowed corners.
Starving cats, sometimes a dog or two drag in carrion to munch on, slit-eyed and growling in the dark, while an army of rats, often crazed with hunger and disease, fight among themselves, eat their dead, leaving what remains to rot until the stink is so strong it would gag you as easily as if it were being fogged out into your face from a canister of teargas.
Time, decay, neglect, indifference; lack of feeling and of love: these create a bomb as deadly as the atom, and indeed, ruins that are far more beautiful.
In Bedford-Stuyvesant, or on the fringes of Black or Spanish Harlem, block after block, sometimes mile after ragged mile of these hideous buildings, viewed from a distance, say on a clear and moonlit night, have all the ghastly, ghostly beauty of Berlin, or Dresden after the holocaust.
Farther on up the street, there are doors on the buildings, and even glass in most of the windows; or if not glass, plastic or plywood or even cardboard—any makeshift barrier to keep out the rain.
That’s because people have begun to live here —fractional humans first, half alive, half dead, or two-thirds into another world: the absolute loonies, the elusive, dangerous heads mixing, as the social hierarchy improves, with the harmless alcoholics and spaced-out junkies, merging finally into the teeming thousands of lesser deviate and destitute humans that finally constitute the heart and center of the street.
Oddly, plumbing makes the difference. If a toilet flushes, or if you can fill a glass or tub with water, however rank and rusty, you’ve got a home. At least a place to die in.
On the crumbling steps of the first occupied brownstone, marked 69 2, the third numeral having vanished in decay, sit two black fairies.
One, the immensley tall, knobby-boned, falsely eyelashed somnambulist of twenty-two, is Fenister Octavius Brown.
The other, the short, fleshy, handsome nineteen-year-old with the frosted blue-black Afro, was christened Star-Glory Joshua Jones by his coke-high mother. The name, however, is seldom used, except on welfare checks where it is required, and verbally by Fenister, who enjoys it; “Nohung” being preferred, the nickname acquired because the boy has no testicles. One remained undescended during infancy, and the other was so crushed in an accident when he fell from a bicycle over a fire hydrant at the age of twelve, that it had to be surgically removed.
Awash in sweat, giddy from the heat and the insufferable boredom of the afternoon, Fenister is busy lacquering Star-Glory’s nails an unearthly violet-tinged rose. He pauses, pink tongue between moistened black lips to appraise his work and glance up the block where the wide mouth of an open fire hydrant has been ingeniously wired with wood to throw a two-story fountain of foaming water over tens of dancing, shrieking children. Now he turns, velvet-eyed, to speak to his neighbor, the fat woman in the faded flower wrapper nursing her baby on the stoop of the brownstone next door. Once 6900, the double “o” has long ago fallen away, leaving only something of an occasional passing joke.
Fenister can speak flawless English but enjoys affecting an exaggerated southern drawl and commensurate manners, as if he were a permanent Blanche in an eternal performance of A Streetcar Named Desire.
“Y’ole liike this heah color. Miz’ Johnson?”—exhibiting Nohung’s glittering fingers.
Mrs. Johnson is so glistening and finely wet from the heat, she appears thoroughly oiled. The over-90 temperature doesn’t bother her much, but it has covered her baby’s body with a prickly rash which she dabs at constantly with a soaked rag from a saucer of calomine, painting t
he tiny torso a pinkish-powdery white. She is actually bone-dry of milk and nurses the infant only because a pacifier is five flights up.
Grateful for a diverting moment to take her eyes from her worry, she smiles back at Fenister, admiring the color extravagantly, but mistakenly calling it purple.
“Purple! Why Miz’ Johnson—” Fenister’s thickly mascaraed, nearsighted eyes squint inches from the bottle. “Ah’ll have yew know that this heah is Fatal . . . Mauve.”
He laughs, appreciating the absurdity of it, and somehow, beneath the hidden pain, the absurdity of the situation: himself, and Star-Glory, and the whitewashed infant busy sucking at an empty breast that appears as round and ripe and full as a melon, while a bunch of skinny, mostly naked kids leap like idiots through a geyser of water spitting from a black snoot of metal sticking out of the pavement below.
He must lean closer to read the fine print, his long lashes virtually brushing the label.
“Super-vibrant fluorescent color: it glows in the dark.” Another laugh; strengthening his voice to ride above the shrill babble of sounds from the street—“Yew heah?—Star-Glory. Y’ole goin’ t’ glow in the dark t’night! Yo’ mammy sho’ named you raight!”
He blows his breath on Nohung’s nails, his heavy eyes once more lifting to the burning street The long sweep of it, disappearing into a haze of smog in the distance, seems more filled with plant life than human; sea-grown, with flesh of all colors crowding each window, lining the doors, spreading itself over every step and stoop, like coral and ocean weed over a sunken city.
His eyes return to the fountain, the nexus of all life at the moment. Besides the kids, a few adults, unable to resist, have stripped half nude, and are exposing themselves to the stinging, cooling thrash of the water.
Fenister nudges Nohung, and— “Look, Miz’ Johnson”— pointing to the Riveras, an old couple, all skin and bones, dressed in what appear to be white nightgowns plastered wetly to their bodies, standing eyes closed, holding hands, pushing their grinning, almost toothless faces into the lacey edge of the fountain.
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