by Nik Cohn
Through the plate-glass window on the terrace, he saw the pied-pearl bird again, fluttering with wings outspread. It did a back-flip, drifted as if hang-gliding. The fat white woman looked at him head on. “Eight cherry tomatoes, halved. A quarter pound green beans,” said Mrs. Muhle. But Willie D had been there, and gone.
All afternoon he drove and drove without direction, set adrift in alien neighbourhoods, Flatbush, Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy, where no one knew his face or name, till he came to a park with a snot-green lake where you could paddle with bare feet, and there he stayed among children pushing model boats and old women feeding the ducks, waiting for the light to soften and fade, the evening to come and protect him.
At dusk in the West Village he left the Spyder idling outside a boutique with a moron name. A Shoe Like It, some kind of play on words.
The fragrance of footloose shoes inside was gamy, lush, abandoned. The girl that served him, the name printed on her breast was Mariella, and she said she came from the Philippines. Somewhere like Cerveza, it sounded like, but Willie couldn’t tell for sure, her voice was so low and she swallowed her words. When she bent her head to tend to him, her hair was a long black veil that hid both her hands and his feet.
She had the gentlest touch. Her fingers moving on his ankles, then his insteps, felt like whispers in the dark, and her hair smelled of horse shampoo.
Roberta Gold’s smell.
His Freshman year, it must have been. The year she’d sat at the desk in front of his. American History or maybe Algebra. The only girls he had smelled before were his Cousin Humberto’s castoffs, and all of them had wigs or processes, or they slavered their hair with abusive substances. With all the garbage they sprayed on, you couldn’t ever tell their real scent from bottled. But Roberta Gold, you knew without asking, she was all her own work. She wore her hair styled thick and tangled on top, cropped close against her cheeks, with one side flipped up in a curl like a crescent moon, and the texture was kind of coarse. You knew without thinking that her pussy was a Brillo pad. But the hair on her head, ash blonde, was only fuzzy; a dense fur.
It wasn’t that she was pretty. The moment she turned round she was just another Jewish princess with braces and zits, a shape like a fire hydrant. Only her hair signified, the way she smelled like a horse, and the tiny sweet spot like a bud exposed at the crown, dead white.
From where Willie sat, he could number each blanched strand where it sprouted from that bud’s opened pores. All he’d needed to do was reach out and pluck.
He never had.
Or rub them the wrong way. Make the hairs stand up stiff like hackles or the nap on a cat’s back. Or bury both hands to the wrist, and scratch till he got satisfied.
Never.
His erection in A Shoe Like It was not so shy. It bobbed against Mariella’s cheekbone, the shell of her ear. Still she did not cease to minister. The dead shoes were laid to rest in a plain white box, nothing ostentatious. Muzak played, and cool air soothed his soles. Looking down through the dark cascades of Mariella’s hair, he glimpsed virgin armadillo.
What was that line Mouse Williams used? “Good shoes talk, great shoes walk.” Willie D had never rightly known what he meant till now. When the armadillo’s mouth kissed his heel, and he felt himself slide under, his left foot swallowed whole. And then the right, slick like oil, sweet as Tupelo honey. And when they raised him up of their own volition, twin powers greater than he could control. When they walked him outdoors and away for free, and Mariella never moved.
The streets were night now, and everything starting over. In the Spyder, rolling uptown, the metal brightness of noon seemed days ago, all its messages false alarms. Willie felt drained, out of blood, but pacified. Armadillos swaddled his feet, and the rest of him lay at rest. Null’s the void. Sandman Ames had told him that. Or was it Warren White?
Sheherazade’s dim blue light burned halfway along a neon block on Eighth Avenue, squeezed between a pawnshop and a porno house, two floors above a noodle shop.
Upstairs behind a beaded curtain was a room tricked out with anchors, fishing nets and Greek travel posters left over from when the club had been the Taverna Phaedra. Anna Crow drank brandy at a bar festooned with bazoukis and orange ceramic lobsters.
She stood in a dancer’s pose, left foot angled out, tight belly thrusting. Below the frizz of her wild hennaed hair, her face showed chalky white. “My love, my heart,” she said.
“Pernod and blackcurrant,” said Willie D.
Anna was not dressed so much as costumed in a long black Edwardian dress with lace frills down the front, a red shawl, and Spanish combs in her hair. “Guess what you’ll never guess,” she said. “I got a job.”
“With a twist,” said Willie.
“One of those Verse-o-Grams. All I have to do is go where I’m sent and no questions asked on people’s birthdays, anniversaries, at Xmas or Easter dressed to order and recite their favourite poems, say Trees or Blowin’ in the Wind, The Lake Isle of Innisfree on St. Patrick’s Day, some speech from Shakespeare even, who knows? Like today for instance there was this Irishman whose wife died, she was a Gogarty, and I had to go to Downey’s, where all his buddies were drinking and singing and weeping buckets except for him, he sat over a ginger ale with his face like a well-kept grave, but whose fault was that, not mine, it was a sweet poem anyway.”
In a spotlit circle that served as a stage a woman in see-through underwear did a belly dance for one table of Japanese tourists, another of drunken sailors. “I will live in Ringsend,” said Anna Crow, and stiffened her spine, “with a red-headed whore and the fanlight gone in where it lights the hall door, and listen each night for her querulous shout as she streels in and the pubs empty out. Funny word, streels, where was I? Pubs empty out, that’s right. To soothe that wild breast with my old-fangled songs till she feels it redressed from inordinate wrongs, imagined outrageous preposterous wrongs, till peace at last comes shall be all I will do. Now listen. Where the little lamp blooms like a rose in the stew, and up the back garden the sound comes to me, and here’s the bit I like comes to me right here of the lapsing unsoilable whispering sea, I don’t know what it’s meant to mean exactly, unsoilable sea, but it sounds sort of noble and sad, don’t you think? I do.”
Willie never should have come here.
He’d known it up-front. Every time he saw her it got his nerve-ends disordered. Yakety-yak, don’t come back, whose poem was that? And humping her was worse. All angles and bones where no bones should be, black nails ripping at his butt. “Tomorrow it’s Coleridge,” she said. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a stag party for the Sons of Neptune, I get to go as a mermaid, and flash my tits, my bazookas, my heavenly spheres.”
“What tits?”
“I hope you die screaming.” Her breath when she kissed him was rank, half-starved. Fucking mermaid was right. Or it would have been, only Deacon Landry had told him once that Men of Power never used foul language, not even in their sleep, it sapped their strength.
The woman belly-dancing detached her bra and threw it across the spotlights. It landed askew on one of the drunk sailors and clung to his ear, white strap dangling. Each time that Willie drew his toes in like claws, then slowly released them, he could feel the armadillos move with him, their soft bodies rippling and slithering in rhythm, sinuous as snakes.
Looking out towards the anchors and fishing nets, he watched the dancer’s breasts rolling lazy like buoys at low tide, and fingered the unspent banknotes tucked in his hip pocket. “THOU ART THE LION GOD,” he thought, took one sip at his drink, and instantly his stomach turned, his mouth was flooded with bile.
That bird. That fat white woman. “Who does the bitch think she is?” cried Willie D.
The year she was seventeen, a senior at Mrs. Sweetwater’s in Charleston, there were days she danced ballet in a high white room under two chandeliers; and nights, moonlighting, she danced on King Street bartops in a red garter and G-string, and at spring break she drove home to Sava
nnah in the Mustang her father gave her for not marrying the bass player with Easy Greasy.
Her father then was Chief Wigwam, he manufactured toys and novelties, Red Indian knick-knacks like rubber tomahawks and feathered weather-bonnets, buffalo-head bronzes and flaming spears, inflatable squaws complete with sex parts, his family called him Arnold, and they lived in a Spanish-style mansion called Camp Pocahontas, hard by Bonaventure Cemetery.
A pinch-mouth man he was, stiff as one of his own wooden Indians, though he wore feathers and warpaint for the St. Patrick’s Day parade and solid plastic peace-pipes for a living, ate animal crackers for his breakfast, still he called his daughter a whore. Which was a lie, she ran a little wild was all.
Still it was one thing, and then it was another thing, throwing up on Monsignor Bayliss, driving the Bentley into the swimming pool, sniffing coke with the hired help, nothing more than rites of passage really, but Chief Wigwam took it personally, he said it was like to kill him, and so it did, right in the middle of lunch, he was eating alphabet soup and suddenly turned purple, rose halfway out of his chair, “You have to be kidding,” he said, and fell dead as he’d lived, face-down in his soup where Anna found him, fresh home from Mrs. Sweetwater’s, you wouldn’t believe the guilt.
Such a start it gave her, even after the funeral and all she couldn’t seem to settle, let alone go back to Charleston, she didn’t even want to dance, only moped around Camp Pocahontas with its turrets and colonnades, vine-draped balconies, English maze and Chinese pagoda, which was how one day by the boating pond with all the azaleas in bloom she met a boy called Chase trying to float a canoe. And this boy, he was half-naked, just shorts and sneakers with earth-brown hair down past his shoulders and his flesh the same burnt brown, not tan but burnished like something wild, maybe dangerous. “Nice day,” said Anna, and the boy looked back at her across the glittering pond, blinking sweat out of his eyes, his face smeared black with ashes or grease. “Nice enough,” he said, and Anna was lost.
In those days, of course, she was loveliness itself, a racehorse all sinew and nerve, long dancer’s muscles and her ass so pert, so spry she could carry a full cup of Earl Grey tea on its shelf and never spill a drop. Hardly even a drop.
In the middle of the pond on a rock was the concrete pagoda where Chief Wigwam had stored the feathers for his headdresses in a massive copper vat bigger than most houses. So they paddled their canoe, they eloped. Inside the pagoda was a balcony with a wrought-iron railing that circled maybe twenty foot above the vat full of feathers and when you looked down it was like drowning in colours, every bright shade in creation. But Chase didn’t look, did not even glance, just put one hand on the rail and vaulted off into space, spinning down all arms and legs into the copper maw, feathers flew up in a fountain, the vat’s sides roared like the noise-maker backstage in Macbeth at Mrs. Sweetwater’s during the witches’ sabbath, and still he went down, rolling tumbling on his belly, on his back, on his fool head, sucked in deeper and deeper as if magnetized till he was socketed snug, enwombed you’d say if you were that way inclined, and everything resettled except for one green feather, halfway between chartreuse and aquamarine, that drifted on high, wafted right into Anna’s hand.
What could she do? What choice did she have? Climbing up on the railing, she dived herself, a jack-knife with tuck, 2.5 degree of difficulty, with such perfect form that she made not a splash when she went under, she just went down down down and did not come up.
Not for days, weeks, months. There must have been moments when they surfaced for food or bodily functions, there had to be, but she had no memory of that, no sense of anything outside the vat where time had no function, nothing did, except for the great banks of feathers floating and drifting, then swirling in slow swelling waves, in all of their savage colours with all those savage names, carnelian and gamboge, plumbago and azulene, heliotrope curcumine miloro, indigo malachite verdigris prune. And even today after thirteen years, there were some mornings when Anna passed through Ferdousine’s Zoo on her way to work, when Kate Root was feeding the birds and some caique or painted bunting began to strut and spread its wings, luxuriate, then she had to bite her hands, count to ten, not to fall on it bodily and rip out the brilliance in her bare hands, rub it into her face, her belly, her cunt, for all those times she’d twined herself on him like a standing tree, dark and dangerous, and Chase when he spunked, he cried out in tongues, Alas, alas the great city, he said.
It had seemed an odd thing to mention.
Or maybe not. The way of the world these days, maybe it was just common sense. This very evening, coming out of Downey’s after the wake, her passage had been blocked by two boys, they hardly looked old enough to jerk off, intoning through a megaphone, And I stood upon the sands of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of Blasphemy: “What could their mothers be thinking of?” Anna said.
But Willie made no reply. He hardly ever did. Nights like this she wondered why he bothered showing up. When he couldn’t seem to abide her, could hardly tolerate her kiss or even touch. Just stood there like a parking meter waiting to be fed, and what did she do, like an idiot of course she fed him. Kept reaching out and babbling, guess what you’ll never guess, it was so sick. Gushing like a flushed John, or the lapsing unsoilable sea, and all for what? A handful of gimme, a mouthful of much obliged.
When he wasn’t even her style.
That’s what she kept forgetting. That she was a dancer, and a dancer was an athlete, and an athlete belonged with other athletes. Weightlifters and jocks were her speed, prize-fighters, truck-drivers even, great slabs of meat with abs and glutes and pecs, deltoid development. Men with loose sloppy grins and red hands that picked her up bodily, could toss her like a cow-chip. Dumb animals, that only knew one dumb-animal thing. Not this halfhand runt that thought he was Kid Signify, Man of Power, when he was only …
… beautiful, she guessed.
Well, agreed. But lovely like a girl, a maiden, a fucking damsel for God’s sake, with those almond-slanted odalisque’s eyes wet and sticky as molasses, and the olive flesh that glinted pale blue and green by her bedside light so that he looked amphibian, a fishboy, and even his dick hermaphrodite almost, slithering and sly, serpentine.
But his hair. That was the item she couldn’t slide past, the gaoler of her soul, whose poem was that? Midnight-black and racehorse-sleek, silk when she ran it through her fingers, cotton candy when she puffed it high in a pompadour, black wings when she lost herself, “Who does the bitch think she is?” Willie said.
“Which bitch?”
“The blowfish. The bag with the bird.”
“What about her?”
“Who does she think she is?”
“I never asked,” said Anna Crow. “She wouldn’t tell me if I did.”
“So how come you said she was a witch?”
“Just something I heard, don’t ask me where, or maybe I made it up, I probably did, the way she looks at you on the stairs, never blinking, that white moon face with no more expression than Monterey Jack, could you blame me?”
The drunk sailor with tasselled bra dangling from his ear like a crooked lampshade pinched the fat dancer’s ass on his way through to the men’s room or rather Pointers as the sign said at Sheherazade, the women’s said Setters, that was the kind of place this was, and Anna squealed extra loud to change the subject. Because if there was one topic she certainly did not intend to waste her night discussing, that topic was certainly Kate Root, the old bat, the bag with the bird, she must remember that.
Six nights a week she danced in this dump herself, she was Zenaide from Zonguldak, the Turkish Typhoon, but this was her night off, she didn’t know what she was doing here. “Fly me to the moon,” she said. “Failing that, Chez Stadium.”
It was their place. A dingy dark haven of leatherette and naugahyde, with clouds of nylon butterflies glued to the lowering ceiling, th
eir spread wings bright with glitterdust, and every time your waitress brought you a fresh drink, a shower of sparkle shook loose, gold and blue, that drifted down like dandruff to settle on your shoulders, in your glass.
The men that gathered here had names and games out of some bad thriller, Mouse Williams and Sandman Ames, Deacon Landry, Warren White, Willie called them entrepreneurs, but Anna knew what that meant, panders with pretensions was all. The style of older men who were not riper, simply older. New Jacks past their sell-by dates, festooned with gold chains and bracelets, and the hostess dressed up in tights and tails, her name was Shanda Lear.
The word, she guessed, was louche.
In Charleston that time she’d danced in a revue at the Low Country called Louche Lips Sink Ships and the Citadel cadets charged the stage in a flying wedge, she thought they’d tear her limb from limb, “I could use a kiss,” she said. “Anna wants a little kiss.”
“About the carwash …” said Willie D.
“Just fucking hold me would do.”
“What I was thinking, it needs an angle, some kind of tease, to make it stand out. Maybe dressing the girls up like flowers and when the water hits them the petals fall off.”
“What kind of flowers?”
“I thought roses would be nice. Pink and yellow roses in layers. But then I thought, the cost. So what about lilies? And change the name to fit? Call it Tyger’s Topless Carwash. Spelled ‘y’ for a touch of class. Then the girls could be Tyger’s Lilies.”
“Love it,” said Anna. “Just love it to death.”
The way Chez Stadium was lit, there was only one weak bulb per booth, hardly more than a nightlight shaped like an ice-cream cone and painted rose-madder, the colour of the Painted Desert at Sunset in a Forties postcard, and its glimmer fell slanting across Willie’s temple, directly onto the bridge of his broken nose where it thickened, where there was a faint reddish welt shaped like an arrowhead.