Need

by Nik Cohn

  Of all of him it was the fragment that Anna craved most, the flaw that completed him. Across the booth while Willie droned on about Tyger Lilies and how every man had to start some place, even giants began with baby-steps, like Lincoln splitting rails and Elvis driving a truck, Berry Gordy was an autoworker, even Deacon Landry had been a messenger once, she could hardly follow the words for aching, the hunger to touch it, squeeze it dry.

  The arrowhead was upside down, pointing up. When Shanda Lear brought Willie’s Pernod and blackcurrant, her wig dislodged a speck of glitterdust that landed on the arrow’s tip, clung there like a gilded snowflake.

  It looked just like a scab.

  And scabs were Anna’s passion. Squeezing blackheads was good, sucking the poison out of bee stings was better, but scabs were best. Those years she was married to Padgett when he shucked oysters, he’d used to come home nights with his money hand a jigsaw of nicks, whittles, slashes, and she preyed on him like a buzzard, no band-aid could keep her off, curses neither, it was love.

  “Warren White raised gerbils on Staten Island, Mouse Williams licked stamps,” Willie said, and he knocked back his drink in one, a sudden rush of alcohol that raised his body-heat. His cheeks and throat flushed, his nose likewise, causing the speck of glitterdust to melt, fuse with the arrowhead beneath, and the red welt seemed to swell and harden as Anna watched. Not that she was that way inclined, of course, but still and all she was human, and girls would be boys sometimes in Mrs. Sweetwater’s dorms, they couldn’t help themselves, nor could she. So her fingers snaked out of their own accord and felt the swollen nubbin, no bigger than a gnat, “Pardon me,” Anna said, she heard herself say. “You have a clit on your nose.”

  Willie didn’t hit her. All he did was look in her face. Examine the skin that was thirty-three, well, call it twenty-nine, but already too taut across the cheekbones, she knew, too slack around the mouth, too many blue veins too close to the surface, any day one would burst, and then where would she be? Not with Willie D, that’s for sure. Not trapped in those black sticky eyes and his stillness that was not really stillness at all, more a furious containment: “Sandman Ames sold enemas door to door,” he said.

  Uptown somewhere in the Barrio there was a cockfight scheduled. Deacon Landry had a bird showing, so did Warren White. When they left Chez Stadium for the pit, Willie followed behind.

  All the way up inside the red Spyder he never spoke, just kept pushing the rocker switch, making all the windows go up and down, the roof retract and swing back, while a voice on the tape-deck with sugared plums in its mouth intoned an ode to empowerment, and Anna mended her mouth. “Would you look at those fires! Oh God, I never saw the like,” she said, but that was a lie, one year she’d been in Detroit for Devil’s Night when the whole city burned like a tinderbox, two hundred fires at once, three hundred, four, in lumber yards and abandoned buildings, slum properties the landlords had torched for the insurance, warehouses and factories, shelters, it was a holocaust, and the beauty took your breath away.

  The cockpit was set up in a disused gymnasium behind the Kanawah Political Club, the pit surrounded by rough wooden walls and five rows of bleachers so steep you seemed to look straight down on the birds as they warred.

  At three in the morning when Willie streeled in, Anna two steps behind, a Tulsa Red was fighting a Butcher Boy. The moment their handlers unloosed the cocks they flew straight at each other and met in the middle air, the steel gaffs like spurs flashing on the stumps of their legs. For a few seconds they were merged in a tangle of feathers and bloodied plumes, indivisible, then the Red was on top, the Butcher Boy was falling spinning on his back, one of the Red’s gaffs had pierced his right eye, he was dead before he hit the ground.

  “Cordova’s Red wins. Nineteen seconds of the third pitting,” the referee declaimed. The bleachers were a green wash of banknotes, somebody threw a bottle against a wall, the explosion sounded like a petrol bomb going off, and in the pit the Red pecked idly at the Butcher Boy’s draggled head, crowed his victory.

  In Savannah when she was a schoolgirl cockfights had been for crackers and niggers, they did not occur on Victory Drive. Anna nibbled at her black nails for comfort. Deacon Landry was watching her. “Popped your cherry?” he asked, not unkind, a coffee-coloured man with a diamond pinkie ring and a porkpie hat, one eye squinted against invisible smoke. Perched on his wrist preening was the cock of his dreams.

  His name was Diablo. He was a Landry Grey, a strain that Deacon had spent a dozen years refining. His chest and shawl were a shade of granite, the tips of his long wings were vermilion like flame, so were his thighs and head feathers, and his high curving tail gleamed peacock blue. His beak was lemon, his feet and legs bright orange. “This bird is a bird no bird can beat. No bird alive,” Deacon Landry said.

  “Did you have him blessed?” Willie asked.

  “I went to the Babalawo, he was gone from home.”

  “You should have him blessed.”

  “I know it,” Deacon said. “The man was gone.”

  Tossing his head back and crowing aloud in Anna’s face, the cock beat his wings together. “I could bless him. I’d be happy and proud,” she said. “I bring good luck, the best, I always have done, I blessed the Georgia Bulldogs once and they won eleven straight, it’s just a knack, I guess.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “You could look it up.”

  Inside the gym full of embrocation and smoke the air was so dense she couldn’t seem to catch her breath, she felt her face flushed and those red blotches that sprouted on her cheeks like consumption spots, she put her hand on Willie D’s elbow for support but he was flaunting his left profile. Beneath the brim of Deacon Landry’s porkpie hat, the squinting eyes tightened, measured her. But she blessed the bird anyway, “Gesundheit,” she said. With all her heart, and welcome to it. And Diablo understood, she knew he did. The way he looked at her with his bright yellow eye rimmed in black so proud and clear, you couldn’t mistake a thing like that, you surely couldn’t.

  Sitting in the bleachers waiting for Diablo’s fight and staring down into the pit it was like sitting inside a drum with the banknotes flashing from hand to hand, the bottle passing in brown-paper sacks, the feet pounding like thunder on the wooden boards, the heat, the halitosis air, the men sweating and the men cursing, the men praying to God, and Willie D still talking and talking about his carwash, equity, a balanced portfolio, until she thought her head would split for silent screaming, and her eyes skittered sideways. Then she saw his new shoes, gentle Jesus, what were those things? Road kill?

  The cock that Diablo was matched against was a Palmetto Muff, a scarfaced streetwise character with a dismissive eye, you could tell he thought he was God’s own gift, and the instant that he was let loose he turned into a blur of motion, shuffling and showing off like Muhammad Ali, no Cassius Clay, darting forward and back with flurrying wings, raining sharp short blows with either gaff, too fast for Diablo to counter.

  From the way Diablo foundered Anna thought he might be sick, and who could blame him if he was? Right before the first pitting Deacon Landry had blown cigar smoke in his eyes, not even a proper Havana, but something foul from a packet like White Owl or El Producto, it was a calculated insult, though Willie D said it was just to make him fighting mad, still he did not look furious, only befuddled. That beautiful cock all peacock-blue and granite and flame, with its proud head born to kingship, she couldn’t hardly bear it. To watch him plod and blunder with no direction, while around him and above him the Palmetto Muff whirled and capered, spun in circles, leaped high in the air, slashing one gaff to the breast, another to the throat, a third to the skull itself. Until Diablo’s comb, which had been such a rich deep red, turned a watery pink and his plumes were masked by blood. Yet he kept on coming regardless, dead game, lashing out at shadows like a blind thing. But the Muff just stared at him with that cold sneering eye and skipped away, let him fight himself out, then rose up sheer as a cliff-face a
nd drove a gaff into his spine, deep, deep, pinning him to the pit, paralysed, and his beak formed one last peck, he yawned, he died.

  When Deacon picked him up and carried him away, his long neck hung down limp, his head banged against the bleacher steps. “Some blessing,” Willie said.

  It was Broadway before she stopped grieving. Inside the Spy-der some man’s voice with sugared plums in his mouth did not stop droning. She couldn’t make out on the words, but they carried that sound of patient weariness as if addressing a retard that only those bone-dense themselves used. “Till peace at last comes shall be all I will do,” Anna said. So they came to Ferdousine’s Zoo.

  A nightlight was still on in Kate Root’s room.

  Double parked by the fire hydrant like déjà vu all over again, Anna found herself with hands clamped in armpits, they felt like they’d been scalded. “If not a witch, what?” Willie asked.

  “God knows, I don’t.”

  “She has to eat. She didn’t get that size by starving.”

  “Oh, that,” Anna said. “She looks after the Zoo for old Ferdousine, feeds the animals and cleans them, keeps them decent, I suppose. Then she cuts hair sometimes in the back room, I never tried her myself.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I think she was in a circus once. Or was it burlesque? Some kind of act with knives.”

  “What kind of knives?”

  But Anna wasn’t there any more, she was halfway across the street sleepwalking, she stumbled staggering through the doorway and down the passage, up the narrow steep stairway, sixteen steps past Kate’s door, past Ferdousine’s, then fourteen steps more to her own.

  Across the landing was the room where poor Godwin had used to live with his mixed metaphors, and upstairs in the attic of course was Crouch, and when she stooped to fumble her key in the lock, Willie was standing behind her, he put his mouth on her neck.

  What was strange, he never would come here before. In the two months since she had first caught him watching himself read the Wall Street Journal in the back-bar mirror at Sweeney’s, she’d fucked him in doorways and back seats and movies, at mass, on turf and in the slop; every place, in fact, but bed, her own cot with the broken-back mattress and the sheets that wouldn’t wash clean, always came out a greyish yellow like powdered eggs, she’d never fucked him there.

  Not until this night when she was already spent, hardly even needed him, but took him anyway, what choice did she have? By firelight her room was a dim purple like a bruise, she closed her eyes against it and Willie, they would only have upset her, and grappling her hands deep in his hair like a mane she rode and rode till she got done, she came sleeping.

  By the time she woke it was daylight and Kate Root was busy in the Zoo. There was the sound of flat feet flapping on the boards, the squeak of cages sliding open and shut, bird-song, snake-hiss, the background buzz of Good Day, New York. Anna’s neck and shoulders when she rolled over on her back were rigid, outraged, and her clenched hand jarred Willie’s chin. His eyes were open wide. So was his mouth. “What kind of knives?” he asked.

  As Kate was standing on a stool with one arm upraised, feeding rape and millet to a white-fronted Amazon, she chanced to glance out through the transom and saw that the red car was back.

  It looked reckless.

  It looked the kind of car that a woman if she was just a girl with trim ankles and legs up to here in a little black dress could gun down the highway with her hair blowing free at a hundred miles an hour and when she needed gas she’d slam on the brakes at a country crossroads, fishtailing in a cloud of red dust, the boys on the porch all staring with their mouths ajar as she opened the door, extruded one tanned leg and looked up at them over her dark glasses, saying “Please, I’m lost,” with a lick of her lips and a languorous sigh, “Please, could one of you big strong men please help me?”

  Little black dress, my fat ass.

  The Zoo was a miniature jungle filled with snakes and tropical birds. Ferdousine, not liking to think of himself as a man who kept creatures in cages, had tried to camouflage the steel bars by cultivating a mail-order rainforest. Lianas and wandering jews swarmed the walls, the aisles were a maze of macarangas, and three parakeets sat in a ficus tree, their feathers glinting scarlet and bronze through the dark, dripping leaves.

  Even in this dead heat, 94° by the clock outside the Chemical Bank, gas heaters glowed from every corner. The walls oozed sweat, the floorboards squelched. Kate, dispensing soft-bill pellets, dripped tallow like a candle.

  She’d been in a foul mood all morning, since yesterday morning to tell the truth, a martyr to gas, and the style of gas that she hated worst. The kind that just sort of festered, never gathered to a proper fullness, where you could belch it loose but hung around for days, turning everything to acid. Better an empty house than an unwelcome tenant. Or maybe that was farts.

  She wasn’t in training any more. There was a time years back when gas like this had been her life partner, but that was before the Zoo. For ten years almost she’d had no visions and told no lies, felt virtually no pain. Just fed the beasts, cleaned their cages, and kept her mind on the Soaps. The only worry she allowed herself was Days of Our Lives—why Roman was siding with Marlena over Sami dating Alan, and how come Lucas had been arrested for murdering Curtis while Billie seemed to be in the clear, even though Curtis’ ghost had taunted Billie during an intimate moment with Bo.

  The basic trouble with Billie, any fool could see, was that she was besotted. How any woman so outwardly smart, with sloe eyes and glossy marshmallow lips like hers, could be such a fool to herself was past all understanding. It made Kate want to slap her sometimes. But what would be the use? A woman like that was somehow fated. You could talk sense to her till the cows turned blue, she just couldn’t help herself.

  This last business with Bo was absolutely the worst. So all right, he looked good in tight pants and his eyes burned like molten coals, he was still a two-timing snake, not worthy to lick Billie’s boots. And meanwhile, face it, Billie wasn’t getting any younger. What about her future? That’s what haunted Kate.

  Some mornings, like yesterday, she’d wake herself up with the worry. Even when she was out on the sidewalk with Pearl, giving the bird its morning constitutional, she couldn’t help fretting. Her thoughts had been so snarled, she’d forgot to protect herself. Just turned her head without thinking and saw the red car by the hydrant. Anna Crow, and that Hispanic hoodlum she was hung up on, the one who looked like Prince or Glyph or whatever he called himself. Nice hair he had, still he wasn’t her cup of tea. How could he be, when the boy she saw in him was only six years old?

  That boy had bare legs in khaki shorts and a Menudo T-shirt, his hair was cropped convict-short, he rode a blue tricycle up and down the corridors of a dark labyrinthine apartment. Dustsheets covered most of the furniture, and there were heavy velvet curtains the colour of fallen chestnuts, kept drawn though it was a bright day outdoors. In the central room, beneath a corniced ceiling, two women sat at a card-table, one old and shaking in a wheelchair, the other dressed as a nurse. They didn’t talk, just slapped cards on the green-baize table. Assorted cats were under their feet, on the dustsheets, crawling the velvet drapes. The child, abandoning his tricycle, began to stalk them. When he cornered one, a Persian, it slashed him across the cheek. And Kate got gas.

  It was the embarrassment more than anything. That had been her curse all along. When she’d lived in the Ansonia, back in the days when she did visions for a living, she’d been surrounded by other psychics, the whole building was crawling with them. Spiritualists and paranormals, telepathists and psychokinesists, table-rappers, trance-writers, Tarot-readers and crystal-ball merchants, the works. And what a shower they were. Most of them, anyway. A few were not so bad, just earning a crust as best they could. But the rest of them, sweet suffering Mary! The way they preened, the airs they gave themselves. All those darkened rooms and unearthly voices, the jargon, the cant. Emanations and auras, psychic f
requencies. The Gift.

  Some gift.

  What was it, after all? When you cut away the props and poses and verbiage, when you got right down to cases? Just seeing stuff. A bunch of snapshots. And most of those snaps bad news, at that. Not a thing to brag about. The opposite, if anything.

  She remembered Madame Vronsky, who’d had visions for over sixty years, not a bad old skate in her way, if she did smell like last week’s mackerel, saying to her one time: “The Fifth Dimension, my dear,” she’d said. “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

  And Madame V was someone who’d always seen good fortune, sudden windfalls, tall dark strangers, puppy dogs. While Kate herself saw nothing but wreckage.

  That was the key, the clincher. If only she had been the breed of seer who sometimes saw happy endings, she might have endured. But some malignant fate had cast her as a mortician. Every time she received a picture, another soul went down the toilet. Strokes and seizures, abandonments, bankruptcies, serial slaughters—the graveyards were full of Kate Root Specials. Death sentences at thirty bucks a shot, tips optional.

  If not for Ferdousine, she might still be trapped. Or pushing up daisies, more like. The first time she’d come across him, in fact, she had been running from the image of a ballerina shortly to lose a leg in a skiing accident. The Ansonia and all its works so oppressed her, she felt like going out the window. Which was not her style. So she went to watch cricket instead.

  That game had always been a refuge. Fred Root, her great-uncle, had bowled for England back in the Twenties, and there had been a summer when she was fourteen when she stayed with him above the corner sweetshop he ran in Wolver-hampton, some dirty grey town in the Midlands. He was an old man then, dying of a bad heart, a dicky ticker, and he only half-filled his clothes. Still his hands were massive. She hadn’t been exactly petite herself, even then. But Fred Root’s fingers had swallowed hers like a snake vanishing a school of pink mice. And their feel, scaly smooth, had been like a snakeskin too.