He wears no shirt at all, but a smoky-beige vest fitting snugly, fringed at the bottom. The center of his chest and stomach, extending down to and below the navel, is dense with blond hair, as kinky as a Black’s. There is no earring in his ear, but surprisingly he wears two of them elsewhere; both nipples have been pierced and from each hangs a glittering gold ring. Around his throat, wound five or six times, is a thin leather thong, looped loosely in the front, the ends reaching to his waist.
There is fascination and shock to his appearance, for he is simultaneously ugly and beautiful, attractive and repellent. To Angel, more than anything, he is just one thing: dangerous. And that he has appeared out of “nowhere” and must have carefully followed him, always remaining out of sight, makes him doubly dangerous and suspect.
The boy glances about rapidly, astonished that he could have been so stupid. The high walls of buildings surround him, but there are two possible exits. To the left, up some broken stairs, is the black, yawning door of a vast warehouse, and directly behind him, a narrow, brick-strewn alley, though it bends before he can see to what it leads.
However, there is a good distance between him and the cowboy and, standing still, each waiting for the other, Angel feels no immediate threat. He remembers also, with some small comfort, that he has the black drunk’s switchblade in his pocket, if it comes to that.
So his heart stops hammering and his breathing slows. Puzzled, diverted, wondering what the cowboy wants, he decides to sweat the man out.
He hasn’t long to wait. Lazy, playful, half bored it seems, there is a terrible sureness in the cowboy’s manner as he shifts the weight of his sensual body from one foot to the other. There is also a peculiar outward bend or thrust to his lean frame as if he could only stand and walk with his hips protruding, pushing his sex into the face of the world.
The smile he settles on Angel seems almost kind, and the voice, if the boy could hear, low and pleasant, caressing.
“—Hi, there!”—with surprise, soft pleasure, and quite as if they knew each other well. “I’ve been lookin’ for yuh. Some . . . friends of mine tol’ me where yuh’d be. Been trailin’ yuh half the night”—a zigzag motion with his hand— “in and out the shadows. —Hopin’ yuh’d come to a nice quiet place—like this”—looking around with a short, pleased laugh.
“Din’ know I was there, didja’?” Whispering; intimate—“Sort of a—surprise!”
Pause. “Life . . . is full of surprises— wou’n’t yuh say? Why—” a slow grin and a gesture “—all yuh hafta do is look aroun’ . . . behin’yuh.”
Angel half turns to look, and there, ten yards or so away, rising from behind a heap of rubble like dark specters, black ghouls from a grave, are Fenister and Star-Glory. Both, having had to be so creepy-silent, following and sneaking up on the boy, suppressing their delight and enjoyment of their growing success in cornering him for the cowboy, now give vent to their feelings, exploding with shrieks of laughter, posturing, doubling up, falling all over each other in a wild excess of mirth and hilarity.
Their antics grow into a psychotic seizure as they speak between gasps, their gestures fantastic with grimacings, mouthings, self-induced shakes and shudders, as well as wet, smacking kisses, and gropings, handling or holding of each other or themselves genitally.
Curiously, Angel is not the spoken-subject of their mirth.
“Yoh’ll lose yoh sequins, Blanche”—Star-Glory spreading his palms like a startled mammy’s. “Yoh’ll catch yoh death of cold. Heah—lemme wrap this heah shawl ’round yoh shoulders. . . .”
They play-act the scene, Fenister shrieking— “Oh . . . oh! Stanley!—yoh touch on mah baauh skin! Fuck me, please. I want to get all them colored lights agoin’. . . . Oh . . . ! Jes’ liike the Fo’th of Jew-laigh . . . !”
Click! The switchblade glitters in Angel’s hand as he bounds up the warehouse steps, turns and freezes, facing all three from the doorway.
Blanche and Stanley are instantly sobered, and for some moments, they, and the cowboy, and Angel, are a tableau as real, or unreal, as any on a stage.
Then, with fake surprise, Fenister’s thin eyebrows arch. “Well, I declare!”
And Star-Glory—“That boy must be out of his cotton-pickin’ mind.”
“Now I consider that right unfriendly.” And, lapsing back into their exaggerated southern accents—“Don’t yew, lover-man?”—this to the cowboy. “Yew always allow yoh wife to behave in that outrageous fashion? Why, it would chill me raight to the bone.”
The cowboy now moves, “arranging” his body: beautiful and disgusting. His hips hang forward, his shoulders become squarer, slightly hunched, his arms separate a bit, hanging loose; he has acquired a readiness, a pose of power and potential. And if a brutal, mindless, habitual hunger for sex sensation and gratification had an odor, he would now begin to stink.
Softly—“Maybe she needs a lesson.”
That’s all Angel needs; he has read the clear purpose, sees the menace in the man’s body, and with a leap is inside the building, running through alternate patches of bright moonlight and deepest shadow, the light patter of his feet echoing up through the vaulted gloom of vast empty rooms and crumbling spaces.
But it was a mistake to have come in at all: the stairwell up through which he hoped to escape to the roof and then to another building has rotted away into an immense vertical tunnel of twisted metal and fallen stone. He can see a scatter of blue stars above, and far below, through a gaping hole, there is an explosion of tiny red stars: the glinting eyes of an army of startled rats scampering to safety.
There is only the ground floor; three long rooms, through which he races, hoping to find a door, a window, a hole through which to squeeze. There are none, only, finally, the last room, partially roofless and heaped with broken brick and rubble, half of it blazing white with moonlight, the other half melting gradually into shadow that becomes almost totally black against the final wall.
Angel feels an inexplicable necessity to remove his shirt, perhaps better to fight, then, with breath shallow, blood racing, limbs trembling with anticipation, he flattens himself against the wall, knife in hand; there, almost hidden in the deepest shadow, he waits.
The cowboy could be an actor on a stage, so precise, so measured is his entrance, as if each stance, each step and movement were thought out, considered, totally shaped by some genius of a director. And behind him, like spectral hand-maidens, are the two black fairies.
After the cowboy settles his eyes on the boy, barely seen in the shadows, he unwinds the thong from his throat and threads it through the nipple rings forming a triangle to one hand holding it below his navel, allowing him to control as he pulls downward, any degree of sweet pain as the cool thin rings of gold rip and tear at the hardened points of pink tissue.
The other hand is free and used to fondle and massage the swelling pouch between his legs, undo the buttons, stroke and caress the thickening, lengthening penis pushing up and out until it’s bone.
Along with this as he draws closer and closer, goes an astonishing ballet, a dance of jerks and psychotic writhings, of jolting, uncontrollable spasms of hips and joints, shudders forward and back, tics, moans, and a chant—a litany of strange soft words.
“Hey, boy! Hey, sweet baby! There ain’t no use hidin’; none at all. I’m going to get you in the end—” a tittering from the fairies “—so don’t fight me, please. I won’t hurt you, hardly at all; not if you’re a sweet baby . . . not if you’ll give it to me like a sweet boy should. . . .”
It is a dance of love, fantastic, obscene: the fringes of his vest fanning out and whispering about him, his Seven Gates of Hell jangling a weird accompaniment, his chest dripping blood like a doubly wounded Jesus.
Child of the streets, witness to a thousand acts or crimes of love and hate and violence, Angel has never in his life experienced anything of the nature and complexity of what is happening before him now; not only before him, but to him, because he is the adored, t
he desired, the only object of the dance. It couldn’t exist, neither could the cowboy, if he didn’t, providing from deep inside him, like a sleeping secret seed, the potential counterpart, the opposite that creates reality. And the fingers that grip the knife begin to loosen until it clatters to the floor, while his head against the wall tosses from side to side, the eyes rolling upward, half into the head.
The moment has come; he can endure what is happening, but not what he wants to happen. It is impossible. And in a sweet rush of wind and leaves, the dream-fantasy of the forest is shimmering about him, so real even the taste of it is sharp against his tongue. And mixing with this: the first degrees of the transformation: the elongated tooth, the golden eye.
The cowboy has already severed Angel’s belt, torn the light jeans from his body. The thin fingers of the fairies circle his arms; he feels the warm pressure of their palms on his hips, coaxing, urging his body around, but giving it part freedom to turn by itself.
Like a humming, the cowboy continues his soft chant. “. . . It’s time! I need it. Hey, boy! Hey, love! Give it to me, baby! Give me what I gotta have. . . .” And his hands reach out, like the darkness itself, gently touching Angel’s back and hips, lovingly rounding the buttocks, a finger pushing, probing between and underneath to find the yielding warmth.
With a deep, snarling growl and jolting swiftness, Angel flings both fairies aside, turning to knee-kick the cowboy back into the moonlight where he stumbles and falls, cracking his mouth against a stone.
The stunned man rises, lips bloodied, eyes wide. The animal sound is so inexplicable that it is simply not to be believed, one did not hear it, so after the barest hesitation and a puzzled, blazing look at Angel, crouched in the blackest of the shadows, he gathers himself together to go at the boy again.
It is too late for a single step, because in the next instant Angel half-leaps, half-scuttles, crab-fashion, into the wash of moonlight: metamorphosed: fantastic beast-child and child-beast, incredibly long-toothed, golden-eyed, razor-clawed, and snarling, spitting like the greatest of the great cats, the mouth cavernous with howling, ranting death.
Shouting, screaming, falling, stumbling, slobbering with panic, insane with fright, the cowboy and the fairies flee.
The cowboy makes it. And Fenister, too. Nohung is caught, seized by Angel the way any predatory, carnivorous beast seizes its prey: by a stunning leap at the throat, sinking in its fangs, shaking it violently, while the victim erupts its life from open neck and mouth, unable to scream, only to writhe and kick and struggle until it lies broken and still.
Angel feeds on the body in the moonlight, gulping down shreds of torn flesh, starting at the soft underbelly, burrowing into the entrails.
Now that all is quiet, there is a drip of water from somewhere in the building, a faint ping! ping! of silvery sound.
Angel lifts his blood-wet face from the mangled flesh that was once Star-Glory, listening curiously, cocking his head from side to side the way animals do.
THE PARK
HARRY MEYERSON, CPA, age forty-two whose wife Sarah has been buried three days—seventy-four hours, nine minutes, and (Harry looked at his watch) twelve seconds to be exact, tied his poodle “Yippity” to a park bench and led his small round daughter Rosalie to the playground swings.
“Where’s Mummy?”
The voice seemed to have the regularity of a metronome; he must have heard the question a thousand times, always in the same bright rhetorical tone that contained no trace of interest or concern, quite as if the inquiry were being made about a missing button from a coat.
Harry was so numb, so grieved, so tired, so thoroughly shocked and puzzled by the immense, astonishing intrusion of death into his life, that his mind, he had to admit it, had become silly and perverse—perhaps to preserve itself. When the child asked the question, he always answered it, not aloud, since no answer was required, but in his head.
“Where’s Mummy?”
“Where’s Mummy—? Well, sweetheart— If you really want to know— Mummy is dead—just like Yippity’s two little puppies—do you remember what happened to them—” he lifted his daughter into a swing “—when Daddy’s automobile ran them over?—all their stomachs squashed out on the sidewalk? Well, that’s what happened to Mummy—almost the same thing— oh, not by a car, but by five, no seven nice doctors —all handsome and young. . . .”
“Where’s Mummy?”
“Where’s Mummy—? Well, dear— If you really want to know . . .” He pulled the swing back and let it fly. “Mummy caught a strange disease—not on the outside—it wasn’t like measles (do you remember when you had those funny spots on your face?) but more like a thousand hungry worms all sewn up inside her. Well, love— The doctors didn’t know what to do. So they sawed open her skull and snipped out a tiny thing called the pituitary; that’s what makes everything in you grow, or not grow. You see, they thought if they took it out, all the little worms would have to stop eating Mummy. Only they were wrong. Because the worms ate Mummy all up. . . .”
Suddenly the man had to sit, or fall in a faint. He collapsed next to Yippity, and while the dog licked his fingers, he stared at the rosy-cheeked, well-fed being that was his dauthter, with no other image than that she and the swing were a giant pendulum coming to rest.
“Push, Daddy; push!”
“Daddy is tired.” Did he speak it or think it? It’s impossible to tell, because at last, at last he’s beginning to cry, at least his eyes are flooding and the stone he’d been saving in his heart with which to kill God if they met, is melting with the tears.
Yes, the world is silver-blurred and swimming, overflowing majestically like dream banks on the Nile. If only it would wash away that one last image of his wife’s shaved head, all the crisscross, blue-stained stitches above those bewildered, haunted eyes—laced into her upper forehead like a spider-built railroad track, twenty bloody games of tick-tack-toe. . . .
By the playground fountain, a stout, red-haired woman is allowing her Doberman to drink, paws up on the basin, its long red tongue slurping noisily.
A governess with a baby in her arms and a thirsty, chocolate-mouthed little girl at her side, is aghast at the sight.
“You allow a filthy, germ-ridden animal to drink at a fountain where children. . . .”
So the fight begins, to become quite loud and animated, attracting a small crowd and a police officer who can quiet but never settle the issue because there are so many fountains and dogs and thirsty, chocolate-mouthed children. . . .
Across from the fountain, a young man of erotic intent dressed in the uniform of his persuasion: tight Levi’s and a body shirt, is cruising for someone of his own sex to relieve his anxiety. For this purpose it is good to sit not too far, not too close to the men’s room, thereby exposing oneself well and clearly intentioned, but not indiscreetly so, to the in-and-out trade.
A priest passes—certainly someone with a turned-around collar—who glances back at the young man twice. Once can be an accident, twice is a signal. The man of God hurries toward the door marked MEN but whether from a full bladder or with something more stimulating in mind is impossible to say. However, when he doesn’t come out, the young man rises, glancing about so supercasually that one is sure he is wondering whether to buy strawberry or vanilla ice cream from the nearby vendor, before he saunters to the lavatory, deciding that as long as he’s passing he might as well pee, even though he doesn’t have to, very much. . . .
There is a spray fountain in the center of the playground, and a cluster of children dancing in and out of it with the pulse of a sea anemone, or the human girl-flowers in an ancient “Gold Diggers” movie. Beyond the reach of the water, on a scatter of benches, the mothers, fathers, baby-sitters, and sundry guardians of children sit, reading Time but also making absolutely sure with minimal glances up, that the innocents in their charge are not lured into the trees by sinister figures to be murdered or raped, either of which is indeed quite possible in a city where with som
e regularity children are thrown off roofs, blasted with guns, drowned in bathtubs, doused with gasoline and set afire, or otherwise beaten, starved, mutilated, or persuaded, somehow, to participate in or succumb to a variety of sexual attack. . . .
Over the chain-link fence of the playground are the hills and valleys of a wilder section of the park; beyond this, one of the larger of the lakes and a complex of buildings that take care of a number of human needs: places to fill one’s stomach, to empty one’s bowels or bladder, to rent boats, buy balloons, play tennis, or simply lie on the grass and read a book or make discreet, inoffensive love. Since it is Sunday, the place teems like the day of the winged Swarming of the Ants; indeed, if you could get away, say rise a half a mile or so up into the air and look down, you’d see a thousand tiny specks moving in and out, aimlessly to and from. . . .
Not far away a dozen small sweaty boys play baseball on a dusty diamond and unless you shut out the sound to concentrate on your Shakespeare, or the Daily News, or Strange Sexual Rites Involving Human Sacrifice, you’ll hear the music of that particular kind of love: “Foul . . . ! Strike . . . ! Who’s up . . . ? Don’t fuck me . . . ! Shit, man, who made up them rules . . . ? !”
In short, it is perhaps any day in any park on a lazy Sunday afternoon in August.
Except for this: “the small, cool secret cave Angel had found high up in a remote, mountainous part of the park where a shaft of immense rock jutted out over a stream.”
The sun splatters a leafy brightness at the entrance, but deep inside the shadows multiply, and there on a bed of leaves and wilted grass, five children sleep. Or are they children?—naked, curled one into the other in tangled, selfless intimacy, breathing with a single soft breath.
One body jerks in a spasmed shudder. The animal dreams, its strange eyes opening and closing in slanted mirrors of green and gold.
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