Still

by Charlee Jacob

  By Noom Chambers.

  So what sort of name was Noom? Other than being the word ‘moon’ spelled backward, that is?

  Chambers was born in England in 1867. He was 21, working as a slaughterman in Aldgate in London’s East End, during The Ripper murders. Later he emigrated to America, got an education, and wrote his memoirs of the ’orrors of ’88.

  The title was taken from a song Mary Kelly, one of The Ripper’s victims, had been heard to sing the night she ended up dis(re)membered.

  A selection:

  When did a temper tantrum become murder and vice versa? It needn’t to have been premeditated, moving along in a continuum of yellow fog. Perhaps the women, beheld in the dense serpentine mists, suddenly didn’t appear human. He mistook them for frightful will-o’-the-wisps such as opium or poisonous gin might generate. Or, providing he was a sailor as some suggested, mistaking them for sea monsters.

  Sexual mania, national security, religious fanatacism. Peculiar appetites all. Philosophical and medical definitions for a plethora of social diseases. Smell of blood, flavor of heart muscle or kidney, texture of the purloined soul.

  Who was this person, gathering violets from graves?

  I might have passed him in Mitre Square, out for a quick week’s end thrill. I could have sat across from him in the Ten Bells Pub, both of us stinking of beer and a bit of time on our hands. We might have knelt side by side at St. Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch, seeking forgiveness from a god rendered deaf by too many screams and made apathetic by endless degradation.

  After every murder, just knowing I might have brushed elbows with this fiend made me sick, itchy. I wanted to bathe. I wanted to shake him from my sleeves and off the soles of my boots. I wanted to stare at myself in a mirror and say I was nothing like him.

  Damned interesting. It happened to be August 31, which was the day when they found Polly Nichols, The Ripper’s first “official” victim.

  Sirens. Pearly looked up, distracted from his reading and annoyed. A car damned near as big as a Sherman tank built in some Detroit war zone screeched around the corner, pursued by cops.

  Little Emily Kaplan on her pink bicycle went flying forward, arms out, feet still going round and round as if trying to pedal toward the sun, two red braids tweaking in the air.

  Pearly jumped to his feet, his toes clenched at the curb, tilting his head back as she sailed up. He identified her silhouette almost gracefully suspended, then brought the point of his chin almost down to his chest when she fell, sprawled in front of the same frankenstein sedan that had struck her out. She curled under its front right tire which was big around as a harvest moon. No, wait, a hunter’s moon. Still summer, too early for that.

  He couldn’t hear the bones breaking for the sirens. Didn’t hear Emily’s scream. No, he never heard anybody scream, not if it preceded their dying. If it was a death shriek and Pearly was present to see their faces as the lips stretched back to imitate the rictus and as their teeth showed, then—for him anyway—the noise always fell on deaf ears.

  He knew other people heard them. The night old Franky Meacham got shot in front of his pool parlor for pocketing a few too many backroom gambling receipts beyond his cut, then Lester Depke, a boy Pearly’s age who had seen it, too, whispered after the shooter fled, “Wow, old Meacham sounded like some broad, didn’t he? I got the gooseflesh. Lookit. Prickled up like the pox, huh?”

  Pearly had turned to Will Breslau, a kid who lived across the hall who was a year older than he. He asked Will, “Did you hear Franky scream?”

  Will had nodded, sucking up the run from his nose as he always did every few minutes. “Yeah. Damn near as loud as the shotgun, wasn’t it?”

  Now Emily’s grandmother suffered a stroke on the sidewalk, for she had heard the child’s scream and saw two red pigtails reaching in vain for the questionable safety of the gutter. And Emily’s twelve-year-old brother, Donald, ran down the walk, abandoning his hula hoop, picking up empty bottles, hurling them at the car. He, too, had heard Emily’s last scream.

  Pearly didn’t know if they saw the woman come out of the beauty parlor at the identical moment that the car came screeching around the corner to hit the bike. Black stiletto heels, black alligator handbag, nails and lips done a sharp scarlet. She tap tap tapped those high heels, opened her elegant purse for three or four seconds, then snapped it shut and walked away.

  Pearly observed a slender, long bone coming like a pop-up scimitar out of Emily’s ribcage, spearing the right tire. He did hear the pop of that tire. Apparently Mrs. Death didn’t want the screams of dying car parts.

  He’d read in Chambers’ book that some described having seen The Ripper as a man carrying a black bag. Maybe this hadn’t been The Ripper. Just Mr. Death trailing along in his awful wake, collecting the death screams of whores.

  She looked back at the boy, head down, seeing him through her eyelashes of pale sunlight. He felt a lump in his throat, coppery and hard. He wanted to follow her yet couldn’t make his feet go. They seemed set in the concrete he stood upon.

  Mrs. Death paused for five and a half heartbeats. She spoke to him with those lash-veiled eyes. Was she waiting for him to say something to her?

  Pearly didn’t open his mouth. He couldn’t. So she walked on, high heels tap tap tap. How was it he heard this above all the other, far more strident sounds of a car chase with sirens and indignant people shrieking about the dead child? It was lifted tap tap tap out of a proper place in the scheme and shape of a very loud event until for seconds, five and a half heartbeats, it was all Pearly was aware of.

  Mrs. Death strolled out of the picture, Emily Kaplan’s scream in the black alligator bag.

  Two police cars came up behind the limping vehicle as it dragged the girl underneath it for a few more agonizing inches. It wasn’t speeding anymore. The driver had slammed on the brakes. Two more patrol cars appeared at the opposite end of the street, blocking both lanes. Donald hurled one of the bottles, hitting the windshield. The driver tried to get out but a gathered crowd moved up fast, pinning him inside his killermobile, not liking fat rich assholes in Cadillacs running down their kids. They stormed the car and began rocking it back and forth, shrieking curses at him. This didn’t do the child’s body, wedged beneath, any good. But they knew she was beyond help. What wasn’t out of reach was justice of a more immediately soothing nature than grief.

  Pearly heard the fellow screaming inside the car, shaking and shaken in his chestnut colored fedora and camel hair coat. He’d been running from the police but now he hollered at them to rescue him from the mob. “Get ’em off me! I’ll talk! Just get ’em off me!”

  Pearly smiled at this, suitably impressed by the irony. He got well out of the way as cops began to beat people to get them to move back. More patrol cars arrived. It was a riot. The car’s windows were smashed. The windshield had been easy since Emily’s bicycle coming down had cracked it. Somebody managed to reach through and slash with a knife the driver who was already cut by glass.

  Pearly glanced across his shoulder. Unc and Salem had come outside to watch the action. Obviously intent upon not becoming a part of it, they remained near the doorway to the apartment building, four feet behind the boy. Uncle Danny scratched at a glob of cheese in his armpit. By his posture, no one would have ever guessed he’d been in the military. He slouched, leaning forward as if on a perpetual drug rush. He’d lost weight, about burned out. He wore a blue dress and had rouged his cheeks and mouth.

  Salem stared at Pearly, eyes half-lidded and sleepy but crafty. He didn’t look away self-consciously as the kid glared in return with every ounce of defiance he could muster. Dan’s boyfriend had been doing this a lot lately: eyeing Pearly, eyeing the bearded drummers and guitar players on the corner, eyeing the girls in black leotards who came to the parties at night. Eyeing practically everybody and everything. Unlike Unc, Salem always stood leaning back a bit, as if he was just about to fall into space and ready to grab the nearest person to take along fo
r the ride.

  He smiled at Pearly, lips barely turning up at corners beneath a flimsy mustache.

  Back to the fray. Granny Kaplan had been dragged away before she could get trampled. She lay where put, unable to move as the police fought the neighborhood to put the killer in protective custody for the death of Emily, as well as whatever they had been chasing him for to begin with. Granny’s eyes stared, glassy. Could she even see what happened? Had she died? She looked all kinked up and stone cold.

  “My sister! My sister!” Donald yelled as he stood on the hood of the Caddy, kicking at the man through the jagged windshield.

  Pearly wondered if the guy had robbed a bank. If the cops hauled him off and the mob followed, he could tiptoe up to the Caddy and see if there was a satchelful of money in there.

  But, hell yes, Pearly could tell. Even as a couple of burly rebel types in jackboots, jean jackets and motorcycle club hats swung at the police, and the badges knocked them down with their clubs or the butts of their pistols. He could tell this guy would be okay for now. As long as Pearly could hear him scream, the man had nothing to worry about but broken bones and scars.

  ««—»»

  About twenty people were arrested for the melee.

  There was no party that night at Unc’s. Dan felt it would be improper since much of the neighborhood was in mourning for Emily Kaplan and her grandmother—who had died before the ambulance could get through the street-fight to help her. The Vagabonds didn’t usually pull together like that, but they had a common enemy and cause for the moment. Being their general hatred for the police and believing the authorities had caused this by recklessly endangering their kids with the chase.

  Not even Salem stayed, saying this bummer had taken away his beatitude.

  Dan had shot up earlier and ridden a cool wave. Then he started to look furtively around the corners of the room. He’d begun to do this frequently after nursing his addiction.

  “What’s wrong?” Pearly asked him the first couple of times, thinking he was only seeing things he’d painted on the plaster turning into cockroaches the size of which he remembered from when he fought in the Pacific. Or maybe he glimpsed Japs he’d killed in the jungles or the mush of faces he’d accidentally stepped into while storming the beaches.

  “Don’t you see her?” Unc would ask, his tracks seeping raspberries.

  “Her who?” Pearly wanted to know.

  “The succubus. She’s like Marilyn Monroe, all blonde and pouty, although she doesn’t always look the same. Korvo says he’s seen her, too. That she attacked him in our bathroom,” Dan explained. “Salem saw her last night, well—it was just before dawn actually. I guess you would still call it night. It was dark anyway. She stood over the bed.”

  This was about the time he’d started dressing up as a woman.

  Tonight Dan wore a sweater and a skirt with a poodle on it.

  He hadn’t cut his hair in a couple months, evidentally trying to grow it out.

  “She’s a demon and I want her to think I’m a woman so she’ll leave me alone.”

  Pearly could have told him: man or woman, it didn’t mean a thing to Mrs. Death. “Want me to start calling you Auntie instead of Unc? Maybe it’ll confuse her further,” the kid offered, a tinge of sarcasm in his voice.

  “Sure,” Dan replied with a silly grin. “Every bit helps.”

  Dan painted, the record player going but only turned down low. Some really old—to Pearly anyway—music was playing. Bessie Smith, singing, “Gimme a reefer and a gang o’ gin. Slay me ‘cause I’m in my sin.”

  The child sat on the couch, legs folded like an Indian swami, one foot jerking back and forth. Reading from Chambers’ book.

  They counted Mary Kelly last. Her door locked and nobody able to get in because the key had been lost or stolen a couple weeks before. Just an old rusted key maybe half the size of the knife that done her.

  We had mostly been out for Lord Mayor’s Day, for the parade rolling by with gilded carriages and all. Damned medical students were running about, shouting like the priveleged damned. One knocked my hat into the gutter and scampered off fast as I whirled about to strike at him. I watched another leap onto a copper, carrying both of them to the cobblestones. The policeman tried to bring around his club to whale on him, but the student grabbed his wrist and bit him on the thumb until he dropped the billy.

  We abandoned the procession when we heard about the latest crime at Miller’s Court, newsboys shrieking, “Another ‘orrible Murder!” We rushed off, full of beer and hot blooded.

  A carrier’s cart pulled by one tired, swaybacked nag rattled into Dorset Street. In the cart was a well-used and used-up coffin. Dirty, scratched all to hell. Had other girls done by this same murderer been taken away in this very box?

  They carried the body out, covered up, stiffening with rigor. If she’d had much of a face left—which she didn’t, poor thing—then her mouth would have begun that macabre grin only Death and The Ripper found funny.

  We men took off our hats, out of respect for Mary. The women wept.

  Pearly frowned. So, if the body was covered, how did Noom know about the condition of the face?

  “Whatchu readin?” Unc asked him.

  “About advertising. ‘I dreamed I captured Jack The Ripper In My Maidenform Bra’.”

  Dan could tell the kid was flipping him off but shrugged. You couldn’t leash a smart boy like Pearly.

  Knock at the door. The kid didn’t get up. Let Unc get it.

  Dan continued to paint, splashing strategic spots on what was, essentially, an already ruined canvas.

  He cocked his head, evidentally not hearing the door.

  “How would Jackson Pollock do this?” he asked himself very softly, standing back to appraise what nuance should come next.

  “Jack The Dripper,” Pearly mouthed off. Detractors used to call Pollock this. Even Time Magazine had made this comment about Pollock. He’d read this somewhere or other.

  Unc managed an indulgent smile. “What do you know from art?”

  Pearly replied, “Know nothing about art. Simple carnage, I get.”

  Knock at the door again. Dan cried out, “Come in!”

  Expecting black-clad adult trick-or-treaters, a man with grass or scag, or only a lean and hungry Salem over his chic depression. The door swung open. Five children he knew from the neighborhood peered in from the hall.

  One of them was Donald Kaplan.

  “Uh, Pearly. Can we talk? Alone?”

  Dan’s plucked eyebrows went up. Pearly didn’t really have little friends. Not that he never communicated with the local street rats but he was clearly a loner. They just didn’t come to the apartment—ever—and ask for him.

  Pearly knew they couldn’t be asking him to come out to play. At any rate, he never played. They were all aware of this.

  He marked his place and set the book on the coffee table in front of the couch. He unfolded himself from that semi-lotus position.

  “I’ll be back,” he told his uncle.

  He joined the children in the corridor, closing the door behind him.

  “Okay,” he said to Donald, giving the older boy permission to continue.

  “We took up a collection from the kids on the street. We make up a delegation to offer it to you,” Donald started out, clearing his throat every other blithering word. He was clearly reaching for the right way to do this.

  “Offer it to me for what?”

  Donald glanced at the other four kids, three boys and a girl. All were older than Pearly, ranging in age from nine to twelve. One was Will Breslau from across the hall, still snorting snot with gusto. The girl was eleven, named Coral, and she teased and fluffed out her long blond hair to try to look like Brigitte Bardot. Stuffed her training bra, too. Pearly wondered if Unc had seen her and thought she was Mrs. Death.

  If he had, he likely would’ve squeaked and run into the bathroom to put on another layer of nail polish.

  Donald shifted his sho
ulders and straightened up, trying to appear taller. To look cool like some hard ass from ‘Peter Gunn’. “To hire you to kill the dirtbag that ran down Emily.”

  Pearly hid his smile but was highly amused.

  “And why do you think I would do this?”

  A ten-year-old boy named Julio answered, sneering. “Man, you half-Nazi. We heard that. You’ll do it.”

  Should he punch this creep? Naw.

  “How much you got?”

  Donald produced a small paper bag full of quarters, dimes, nickels. “About seven bucks.”

  Pearly thought about it. Then said, “One more thing. I want a grown-up’s overcoat. I was planning to steal one myself but you know what? I want you to get it for me.”

  “No problem,” said Donald. “Shake on it?”

  Pearly shook his head. “That’s for touchy-feelies. Just give me the dough and go get me that coat.”

  ««—»»

  The guy in the Caddy had been transported to the hospital. The newspapers identified him as a nightclub owner, Theo Gegax, who’d just agreed to turn state’s evidence for immunity.

  (Yeah, but what about Emily Kaplan?)

  The neighborhood had injured him badly. He’d suffered multiple lacerations—some all the way to the bone—on his arms, face and upper body. He had a deflated lung (punctured on a broken bone, like that front tire had been) and might also lose one eye. The cops were guarding him around the clock, fearing a hit from his former business associates.

  (But what about Emily, you assholes, the locals in The Vagabonds demanded to know.)

  Gegax had been running from the police because he’d allegedly beaten up some waitress named Shirley Vetsky at his club. Stomped her half to death was more like it. She was down the hall on the same floor he was on. Her spine was damaged; she’d never walk again. There were no police at her door.