by Nik Cohn
She was stuck then, immured with a flock of birds, a nest of serpents and their accumulated shit, what Ferdousine called the fruit of their feculent visitations. Their din and their stink, and the heat, this ceaseless swelter. As a rule she barely noticed it, took it as a given. Today she felt it throttle her.
Limp as last week’s lettuce, that had been Fred Root’s saying. But he had been speaking of English summer, sizzling at seventy. The day he took her to the cricket, a Saturday league game behind Bellamy’s Brewery. The two of them sitting in uncut grass that smelled of brown ale and barley wine, drinking sweet milky tea out of a thermos, him with his Gold Flakes, her with her Space Blasters, and the brewery sign across the field, Bellamy’s Beer Cures What Ales You. “Hot as Hades,” Fred Root said, a word she had not heard before. Looking past his nodding head she saw the crimson ball rise high, turn into a red-winged bird.
Sick fancies.
She needed a day away, that was all. Or even an afternoon at Van Cortlandt Park in a deck chair, keeping score. Or she could have used a trip upstate to those thirty-five acres near Glens Falls, the acres she’d never got around yet to visiting, though she’d owned them fifteen years, must be. Since way back in the Ansonia era, at any rate, when Prince Claessen had come to her and she hadn’t known if she should call him Your Highness or simply Sire. She’d got herself all flustered, till it turned out that Prince was not a title, only his father’s conceit, and the man himself trained racehorses.
Which was certainly a switch. Kate was forever plagued by horse players seeking winners. All voyants were, they couldn’t have paid their rent otherwise. But a trainer, that was a twist. And a trainer in luck, what’s more. Jaipur Johnnie had already won the Wood Memorial for him, and the Travers up at Saratoga, and was favoured in the Great Suburban. Horse of the Year seemed a near certainty, and then millions in breeding fees. Plus the man had a dazzling wife, a partner he’d trust with his life, a family who adored him. His existence seemed so blessed, it terrified him. So he came to Kate, to have her search for a flaw.
One look at him, of course, and she’d found it. She saw his wife run off with his brother, Jaipur Johnnie break a leg, his partner busted for embezzlement, his family turn to jackals, and Prince himself dead, a suicide, his pistol in his mouth. But she didn’t tell him that, not in so many words; it wouldn’t have been good for business. She merely advised him to watch his step around guns, and have a nice day. But the man was not so simple, he smelled a rat. Started asking questions and wouldn’t stop. The more she stalled, the deeper he probed. When his session was finished, he booked another, and another. Soon he couldn’t move without her. What guns? he kept on asking. Pistols, she told him at last, and he paid her bill, went home. Added a brief codicil to his will, then walked into Jaipur Johnnie’s stall and let himself be kicked to death. Anything to cheat the trigger. Leaving Kate the thirty-five acres near Glens Falls, plus a gelding named Baloney Breath. For services rendered, the codicil said.
Take it in the spirit intended, Ferdousine had told her. But she’d never been clear what spirit that might be, so the farm and nag had gone unused. Baloney Breath, at last hearing, was still alive and kicking. Kate thought of him with distant distaste.
Not today, though. On this afternoon she’d have tramped the length of the New York State Thruway for one good ooze of slop between her toes, a single whiff of horseshit hot and strong. And that was a danger signal. When a woman her age, who didn’t know grass from green shag, started pining for Mother Nature, it might be time to speed the friendly bullet. Ladies of equinoctal years, Ferdousine called them. You never could trust these old boilers.
Besides, how could she take a powder? When she knew that the Zoo was history without her, would fall apart the moment she wasn’t around? After all, be honest, who else was equipped to preserve it? Crouch? Maguire? Ferdousine himself? Well, who, then? The burden was hers, and hers alone.
Pity about Maguire, but what use to pretend? The first moment she had laid eyes on him, she thought that he might come in handy; the second, she knew he never would. Nincompoop was a fine word, jobbernowl another. Still he seemed to belong in this place somehow. He went with the colour scheme, all ninety-nine shades of it. Once in, it had seemed unthinkable to boot him out. And then, in certain lights, he seemed familiar. Something about his posture, the set of his head maybe. But no, she couldn’t define it, she was probably dead wrong. Most likely he was simply one more stray off the streets. Another ball and chain.
Terribilis est locus iste …
Some creature was moving behind the ferns. It couldn’t be a bird, the eyes weren’t bright enough, it had to be a customer. A rare sighting in these dog days, the heat mostly held them at bay. The hottest July on record, so Ferdousine said, with the worst fires and the most heart attacks. But this character seemed to thrive on it. A stout party in beard and baggies, guts cascading out of a Lollapalooza sweatshirt, he carried a can of King Cobra, breathed its fumes all over the zebra-tailed lizard and the Mojave rattlesnake. “A hundred three in the shade, they’re dropping like flies out there,” he said, and poked a fat finger through the bars of a sleeping garter snake, thamnophis cyrtopsis. “Is this one poisonous?”
“Deadly,” said Kate, and blew a smoke ring. “He rubs his venom on his cage, one touch and you’re fishbait.”
Terribilis est locus iste hie domus Dei …
Left alone, she turned back to the TV. A bleeding man in a white bedrobe was pushing a nurse into an empty elevator shaft, his rubber gloves were around her throat, she was screaming but no sound came out. General Hospital, Kate thought. Was it really that late? Hie domus Dei et porta coeli.
On the counter next to Pearl, who was snoring standing up, the red morocco box stood open, the rusted knives glowed dimly in their crushed velvet beds. She knew they were no use to her. No good could come of them, she should sling them straight into the garbage. But it was beyond her power. She could no more resist them than a nest full of chocolate truffles. With nobody to see, not a soul to know or tell. Her fingers curled like talons. Hovered over one blade, then another, then settled on a third. Prised it free, handle first, and weighed it in the palm of her hand. Felt its balance, the harmony of its parts. Pressed its dulled point into the ball of her thumb, it was as blunt as a rubber nipple. Dangled it and let it swing, a pendulum, a censer.
Its grey gleam in the Zoo’s darkness was fat and cynical as any whipsnake’s eye. At the butt of the haft the last owner had scratched his initials. They were grown blurred and faint with age, Kate had to strain to make them out. AB, she read at last. Abel Bonder. Then her hand had slipped, and she was bleeding, and Pearl would not stop squawking.
“Have a macaroon,” said Ferdousine.
“A dizzy spell,” said Kate.
“Or a slice of Melba toast.”
They were in Ferdousine’s sitting room. Each afternoon he took high tea here, framed by a stage-set that masqueraded as a scholar’s den. “A buttered scone,” he said, his voice still stuck in prewar Westminster, all drawled vowels and spat consonants, and a sniff before each phrase, as if savouring its scent. “A cucumber sandwich,” he said. “Or perhaps a potted shrimp.”
It was not an act that age had improved. Across the years his dryness had turned dusty, his nicety gone to fuss. He kept on fiddling with the details—a high-winged starch collar here, a pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez there—but the pose of Persian sage as English gentleman seemed more and more untenable. The phrase that Kate used to herself, he didn’t ring true. But she had no heart to tell him that. Besides, it was too late. At his age, what other part would he have time to master?
At least the props were solid—the high, strait windows, the parquet floor, the antique silk rug from Shushtar, the Spy cricket prints and the scenes from Farsi myth, all slaughter and sex. Heavy oak bookcases were lined with reference books, from The Book of Thoth to Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage; custom-built pine cabinets spilled over with files. An A-Z of miracles and thei
r mediums: Conchita Gonzalez of Garabandal, and Joseph of Copertino, Marija of Medjugorje, Padre Pio, the weeping statue of Syracuse. Stuff that bored Kate stiff, yet she felt comfort here, it was always easy to drowse.
All she’d ever asked was not to see. And in this room she felt blindfold, secure. So she stuffed herself with pork pies and luncheon meats, while Ferdousine sucked at a sohan, a large flat disc of caramel with squashed pistachios that his cousin sent him from Isfahan. It made a noise like a bird’s bones breaking as he nibbled, quick pecking bites just so.
“And this young man, John Joseph I believe the name is,” said Ferdousine, sniffing. “What might be your intentions there?”
“To make a man out of him,” Kate replied.
“Heh heh.” He still carried his head cocked sideways, but the curious bird’s eyes were not yellow now, they were a dishwater grey. “To make a man,” he said, and sniffed again. “Heh heh.”
The project that he was presently engaged on involved a Magdalena Santos of Alajuela, Costa Rica, just twelve years old, who’d been surprised by the Devil in her bath, and had then flown backwards with so much force that she smashed clean through the bath-house wall, hurtled across the back yard and out into the road, narrowly missing a passing truck and finally coming to rest against the steps of the local cantina, bruised and shaken but otherwise undamaged, still holding tight to her bar of soap.
On Ferdousine’s working table was a small mountain of press cuttings, scraps of letters, numbered stickers for cross-reference, and foolscap sheets of yellow notepaper handwritten in purple ink like a brasserie menu. A hooded light fell on his hands blotched with liver spots, his fingers clawed by arthritis. “A most remarkable simulacrum,” he said. “An eidolon without parallel.”
“Pass the jam tarts,” said Kate.
“One thinks of Charmaine Dupont of Maine, perhaps of Isabella Moffo.” But she was no longer listening, no amount of jam tarts could bribe her. All this slicing and dicing, these boneyard speculations, it wasn’t decent. It is an evil generation that asks for a sign. Who had she told that to?
She must have been eating too fast, her head had started to throb. Maybe closing her eyes would ease her. Then again, maybe not. The sneaking schoolboy had been bad enough, his box of knives worse. But Abel Bonder? That was past toleration.
Whispering Death, that was how he’d been billed. On stage his movements had been so restrained, so understated, that the knives seemed to glide self-propelled, and when they hit the board, you hardly heard a sound. Just a hiss, a muffled sigh, like a fish slipping into boiling water.
The season she’d known him, it was the year after Tarpon Springs. Charley Root had retired by then, no promoter would hire him any more, and they were living above a bakeshop in Palmetto. Kate’s mother was dying in the back room.
Kate had not known her well, they’d never talked much. While she was still working, she had seemed no more than one of Charley Root’s appendages, a figure in some other room, crossing herself at mirrors, drenching her own feathers at the sight of knives. But now that she was bedridden, she seemed to hog the whole apartment. The murmur of her prayers, the sicksweet reek of candles and blown flowers from the altar she kept in her room—you couldn’t catch your breath for sanctity.
Charley Root himself could not stand to stop indoors. He ran a book out of his garage, greyhounds and jai alai mostly, and soused on Rebel Yell. When other knife-throwers came through town, they used to stay in Kate’s room, she’d have to sleep on a Laz-E-Boy downstairs.
Knife-throwing was a figure of speech. Impalement was the technical term, the word preferred by the pros, though Kate liked blading better, it sounded more sporting somehow. She had recently turned twelve, all freckles and teeth-braces, with a flat English drone that she’d picked up from Charley Root, an infection she couldn’t kick. But Abel Bonder seemed not to mind. He used to stand in the doorway, filing his fingernails, and watching her watch TV. A lean and whittled man—blade-thin, Charley Root used to say for a laugh—in a black suit and black patent shoes.
He had the loveliest hands. Not a whole lot of wingspan, but long and slender with tapered, girl’s fingers, and the moons of his nails a faint ghostly blue. A symptom of heart disease, Kate had heard, but how could that be true? If he’d had a heart, Charley Root would not have reverenced him. Would never have made him a present of his own knives. Not his Harvey McBurnettes.
Elvis was on the Steve Allen Show, the Jimmy Dorsey Show. But with Abel Bonder watching her, and Charley Root glugging Rebel Yell, and her mother’s dying smell in the back room, Kate couldn’t cream undisturbed. So she took refuge in the bakeshop downstairs.
Pasquale Brito’s Sweet Tooth. A sallow-face man with a smoker’s cough, a smile like cracked glass, you’d never have guessed he had so much yeast in him. Or icing sugar, either. But he was the finest master-baker in the Panhandle. Plaited loaves and sourdough hearts, wedding breads all cinnamon and wild honey. And his pies. Sweet suffering mother of us all, those pies! Strawberry and rhubarb, frangipani, four-and-twenty blackbirds, mud and moon. Every sugared thing under the sun. Beignets and brioches, cannoli, pain perdu, bullfrogs, marzipan logs, pinocatte alla perugina and cornetti con panna montate and biscotti di novara. And ma’amouls. Of course, his orange-blossom ma’amouls.
They were his speciality; had won prizes from Kissimmee to St. Pete. Little tartlets no bigger than your thumb, stuffed with almonds, walnuts, pistachios and dates, and slathered over with a white cream made of rose-water and pulverized Bois de Panama, Pasquale Brito called it naatiffe. He’d got the recipe from his Syrian girlfriend, a nurse built like a Mack truck, used to come see him every afternoon late when surgery got out, and they’d retire to his kitchen. Leaving Kate in charge of the bakeshop. Up to her tits in meringues.
On this certain afternoon, with thick soupy rain outdoors and the bakery windows all steam, she had sat reading Heartbeat or Teen Flame, she couldn’t swear which, and when she glanced up, Abel Bonder was standing in the doorway, eating Shoofly Pie.
He looked like a black sun. Or some kind of reckoning. Stood watching in his black suit and tie, his black shoes shined to wing-tip mirrors, and all he did, he breathed in. Sucked up the smells of damp bread like a poultice still warm from the oven, the rain’s steam seeping, and the day’s last batch of fresh pies oozing sap on the pine counter, its wood stained dark with their juices. Hung there straight and still with his pinched gravedigger’s face turned half-sideways, raised at a slight angle, he made Kate think of some white-stick blind man groping for light, and she laughed. Because she was embarrassed, was all. Flushed and sweated as she was, crab-coloured, she thought, a freckled crab, and her mouth crucified by braces. Still, she laughed. And Abel Bonder handled her. He put his blade hand on her breast, and he threw her on her back. Drove her down legs-kicking in the ma’amouls, slithering and sliding through the Bois de Panama. Pile-drove her so hard that she flew right off the counter, scrambling and flailing, she skinned her elbows, her knees, she didn’t care, she was out the door and running free, and that was all of Whispering Death.
But not all of his baggage. On the next afternoon Kate was walking home from school with Maria and Bobbie Jane, they were her best friends, and they were passing McMurdo’s Hardware when she spotted a ratty ginger toupee, sitting lost on the windowsill.
All day, ever since early Mass, she had been feeling dizzy, untethered, as if nothing was in its right place. So when she saw this hairpiece, she didn’t walk on the way she should, she stopped and picked it up. A most malignant object, normally she wouldn’t have touched it with Charley Root, but some sick spirit was on her, this day she could not stay her hand.
What she remembered best about McMurdo’s window, there was a pair of stainless steel fire tongs, and at the instant her hand touched the toupee, these tongs blazed with light. At first flash she thought it was a Susie Q, but she was wrong, this was no knife glinting, it was only the girl from Tarpon Springs, the one in the plastic ra
incoat. The exact same girl, no doubt of that. Except that she wasn’t wearing her raincoat this time. It was summer in Palmetto, the sun was bright and fierce. So the girl was dressed in pedal-pushers and shorts, a halter-top.
Lounging in McMurdo’s doorway for shade, she was licking on an ice-cream cone, it looked like Rocky Road, with her white shoulders and midriff bare, and her long bare legs so gorgeous, no words could begin to describe. Then she turned her head, saw the wig like a dead ginger kitten in Kate’s hand, and the toupee burst into flame.
At least she thought it did. She could have sworn. But when she came back to herself, Maria and Bobbie Jane said nothing about any rug, denied all knowledge. Which was strange, to say the least. Because Kate had felt her hand burn, her whole palm seared where she’d cupped the plate. The pain had been so fierce and true, she kept the wound bandaged till Labor Day.
No fun in that heat. But Abel Bonder had worse. Drunk in his hotel room in Tampa, he got his hand snagged in an electric toaster, cooked it to a crisp, and the hand shrivelled up, there was no blade extant that it could hold or throw in his life again.
1958. July.
Almost forty years gone by, and still she could not face a ma’amoul; she guessed she never would. And now the asshole was back. Fouling the Zoo, messing with Pearl, intruding on Billie and Bo. Even inside this room, she couldn’t push him back.
“Have some fruitcake,” said Ferdousine.
“Glacé cherries. They give you cancer.”
“I was not aware of that.”
“I saw it on Geraldo,” said Kate. “They kill you dead.”
No place left, it seemed, that she could rest secure. When she looked down to brush the stray crumbs from her lap, she heard a muffled rippling below, something rubbery and squished, a creaking like some leaky tug rocking at anchor before a storm. It was her girdle, and it was no use, it held nothing at bay. The birds were racketing and screeching in the Zoo downstairs, the snakes were hissing for their tea, the apocalypse preachers in the street were still ranting about the beast with seven heads and on each head the name of blasphemy, and somebody was crashing and blundering on the stairs, something was kicking at the door. “Could I tempt you to broach a rock bun?” said Ferdousine. His old man’s hairless skull looked indecently exposed. “What would you say to a treacle tart?”