by Nik Cohn
Outdoors on the street Anna Crow posed in a leotard and leg warmers, her whiteness made starker by sunlight and her wild hair more flaming. Extending one leg horizontally against the wall of Nature’s Nurture, the health-food store next door, she flexed her calves and palpated her thighs, groaning softly at each thrust. “Ferdousine, that freak,” she said. “Ballroom dancer my succulent asshole. Lascivious old coffin more like it, is it not strange that desire should so long outlive performance, Henry Fourth or maybe Fifth, every bone in my body aches with pushing him off me like an octopus or triffid, the more fingers you cut off at the pass the more he sprouts, you wouldn’t believe the state of my butt, what’s yellow and black and screams?”
“The name of blasphemy,” said Crouch.
He and John Joe stood loitering on the sidewalk with the green sheet slung between them like a hammock, Crouch at the head and John Joe at the feet. “So you two have met, I see,” Anna said, and she gripped Crouch by his arm, turned mock-conspirator. “A man of mystery, our Maguire,” she said, stage-whispering. “He has this birthmark on his thigh, a raised weal like a cattle-brand, it shows a black swan.”
“You shit me.”
“With spread wings,” Anna said. “And throat upflung.”
Natty was the word that John Joe formed, seeing Crouch by daylight for the first time. Even clothed in coveralls and a shower cap, there was something in his motions, the delicacy with which he tucked a dangling arm back beneath its sheet, that made you think of a song-and-dance man, a shuffler in a vested suit with gold watch and fob, a brown derby. “That a fact?” he said.
“Botch me with cellulites if I tell a lie.”
When Crouch walked on, John Joe was forced to follow, it was his duty. Patches of damp had soaked through the green sheet, staining it a mucoid yellow, and John Joe’s hands were coated in brackish ooze. Nothing in the job description had prepared him for this. Feel free to be my prisoner was all Miss Root had said. Not one word spoken about death coming down.
By the time they had trundled across Broadway and arrived in Riverside Park, he felt greasy as melting wax. But Crouch had stayed bone-dry. Pausing at a fire hydrant, he laid his burden down with a dull splat, a soft wet cracking. “This is no righteous way. There is no glory here,” he said, and turned the hydrant loose. “A job of work, that’s all it is.”
At the water’s gush the green sheet was flooded, swept aside. Underneath was the statue of Marilyn Monroe.
In Crouch’s attic the night before she’d looked sculpted from wood but in the park by the river she was revealed as pulp. Her colours were running, flesh and fabric churned together to a dark slime. Whole sections of the torso had already decomposed; eyes, nostrils and mouth were merged in a single maw. And at bottom of this quag, peeping through in slivers and eyes, was a shining field of styrofoam, the colour of bubblegum.
“Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed by water, perished,” said Crouch, and hit Marilyn with the hydrant’s full spate, obliterating all trace of her, her face and limbs, her panties, even the soft golden down that covered her inner thighs, till all that remained was a scrubbed pink mannequin.
Again they moved on, John Joe and Crouch, climbing high above the river till they reached a steel grate like a manhole that Crouch raised and slid inside, pulling the mannequin in behind him. A flight of steep stone steps led down into the dark. Some were broken, some missing altogether. Icy wetness brushed at John Joe’s cheeks and throat. He grabbed a rusted pipe to save himself from falling, the pipe came away in his hands, and when he touched bottom he was in a disused railroad tunnel, with a bonfire glowing redly in the distance, barely bright enough to steer by.
“For the day of his great wrath is come,” some stranger said in the dark.
“And who shall be able to stand?” Crouch answered.
All that showed of the stranger at first were eyes. Then a figure detached itself from the blackness and worked its way towards them. As John Joe’s sight began to adjust he made out the glint of the tracks, and the tunnel’s walls with a rash of little alcoves hollowed out in its bricks. People were sitting and lying in these, people watching. “I brought the new model,” said Crouch, and he thrust the mannequin towards the stranger’s bosom. But that man did not seem to notice, he was busy staring at John Joe’s bad eye. “What man is this?” he demanded.
“He bears the mark,” said Crouch.
Backlit by the bonfire down the tracks, the man’s shape ringed in fire showed one huge globe for his body, a smaller globe for his skull. Twenty stone or more he must be, John Joe reckoned, three hundred pounds let’s say, wearing something swaddling that almost passed in the dimness for a monk’s robes but turned out to be a schoolmaster’s gown, its wide sleeves ripped and draggling. “Is this true?” the man asked.
“It’s only a birthmark, sure.”
“Weal or wale, it’s all the same. Do you tote the brand? Are you printed with the trademark?”
John Joe had no idea. Furthermore, this class of talk did not sit well in his ear. For preference, he would have chosen to climb back up the stone steps where he’d come from, but he couldn’t locate them in the weeping walls. All he could see were bricks, and eyes, and the stranger’s head thrust forward against the light like a buffalo’s, that seemed to spring with no neck or nonsense direct from the great darkness of his chest.
Midnight purple, topped by a knitted wool cap, this head looked a black hothouse grape ripe to bursting. But the voice that came from it was high-pitched, almost girlish. “The name is Master Maitland, the fiery flood approaches,” this voice said. “In the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.”
There’d been a man years ago in Dunkineely, that arsehole of nowhere, who had used to state matters along the same lines. A most intemperate speaker, John Joe had always found him, too full of himself by half. A bit of a tosser, if truth be known. And this Master Maitland seemed cut from the like cloth.
Lightly and politely, to cause no offence, John Joe began to back away, but the man had his arm firmly hooked, he could not shift. “Only those of us that are freed souls, they alone may rise exempt,” the Master said. “When the flaming tide arrives at their toes, they alone are raised on high, given wings, and what becomes of them then?”
“I wouldn’t care to venture an opinion.”
“They turn into black swans.”
THIRD
One month had passed. It was the end of August now, but the heat did not let up. Willie D had another dream he could not remember. Then he was between sleeping and waking, and he was dying again on Kate Root’s leg, just like he’d died in Ferdousine’s Zoo.
Her left leg, lower.
She was standing on a stool, reaching over her head to feed a bird, and Willie was watching the swell of her calf. It was surprisingly shapely. Big but firm and strongly made, the rising slab of its muscle still springy. Its flesh was layered like two coats of paint, lush cream underneath, a coarse glaze like pink stucco on top, and there wasn’t a trace of hairiness, not even a shaved stubble. Except in one small patch of white, right above her anklebone. Some old scar that had lost its pigment, he guessed, with three long and limber hairs, reddish-gold, that sprouted from the open pores like reeds. And Willie was caught up by craving. To blow on them, soft, soft. To make them riffle and sway.
He couldn’t do that, of course; she would be bound to notice. So he forced himself to start climbing. He scaled the roughened red shale of her shin, then tackled the lazy outward curve like a kite’s wing above. But these spaces seemed immense. There was no oxygen, no place to rest. By the time he reached the roll of fat behind her knee, with its foolish crease that had no function, no possible point, he felt like a rock-climber without pick or crampons, clinging to a greased ledge by his fingernails, slipping away through his sweat and hers till the last of his strength failed him, and he tumb
led through air.
Same thing happened every time. Night after night, the same sleepless dream. Then he’d rise up under sweat-soaked sheets, throw off their ropes and choking knots, and try to work out, one more once, this thing that had happened to him.
He didn’t know where to start.
That whole day with the knives had been anarchy. A series of blind jumps with no rhyme or reason. All he could say for sure, it had begun with Pacquito Console in Crotona Park. They were in conference re the carwash, and Pacquito was arguing against the tygers. “Mermaids would be more apropos,” he said. “Carwash, water, sea, mermaids, it’s more conceptually evolved.”
“Tygers are more dynamic.”
“But mermaids work for scale,” Pacquito said, and Willie felt too cheapened to dispute him. He was looking over Pacquito’s bald head at the wall calendar in his office, Tremont Tool & Die, and Miss July was dressed or undressed as a pirate. He saw that she had an eye-patch; he needed air. So then he was on the Major Deegan headed south, and two redneck mothers in a Dodge pick-up with a bumper sticker saying God, Guns and Guts Made America—Let’s Keep All Three kept cutting him off.
The driver rolled his window down and started to yelling language, dissing the Spyder, and Billy Ray Cyrus was on the radio. Achy Breaky Heart, Willie loathed and despised that tune. So he took his pistol and shot the asshole’s tyre out. Or was asshole language? Borderline, he guessed. A judgment call.
And he didn’t even like guns.
Not that they bothered him or anything, they just didn’t suit his clothes. If it wasn’t for respect, he wouldn’t even carry. As it was, he used one of Deacon Landry’s pieces, a stainless-steel Walther PPK-S. That was James Bond’s gun of choice, it had history on its side. Still you couldn’t say it pleasured him. It was a tool, nothing more.
A tool he never should have exposed, not in the morning rush hour, leave alone put to work. It wasn’t politics, he knew that. Not his style at all.
But then, what was his style these days? He no longer knew for sure. Every move he made felt foreign to him, he couldn’t trust himself for a minute.
In the world according to Deacon Landry, the one absolute was control. You had to give off certainty, or you were dead meat. And these bitches, of course, could scent the lack in a nanosecond. That’s how come Ivana had raised up her nerve to rip him off. From the moment that Kate Root nailed him, his smell must have changed, his taste as well. Sour milk, sloppy gravy; weak shit. So Ivana was freed to betray him. Use him with impunity. All of it was the fat woman’s fault.
The only thing he knew to do was face her down. Confront her in her own lair, and force her to turn him loose. Sliding down off the Major Deegan, he put away his firearms, set his mind on repose. Water Thoughts. Release the Prisoner. Then he was in Ferdousine’s Zoo, and Abel Bonder’s knives were under his arm, tucked up tidily in their beds.
The moment he was inside, he knew he’d made a mistake. He hadn’t programmed his moves, had failed to prepare himself. He’d thought he would walk in whistling, flash the knives, maybe throw a couple, and walk out again. Then Kate Root would know him for who he really was. Stop looking at him funny, leave off bugging him, and he’d be shot of her. End of story.
Simple. Except that it wasn’t. For one thing, he hadn’t figured on the Zoo itself. Pets were not toys that fell inside his territory. Old women, fags and families had them, and he was none of those. So he was not trained to handle them. When suddenly they surrounded him, he had no defence.
The stench alone knocked him sideways. Looking round, all he saw were birds and snakes, a lot of plants, but what he smelled were cats, the same rancid reek that used to fill the old Jew lady’s apartment on Fifth Avenue when his mother was a nurse who played cards with her and he rode his blue tricycle up and down the corridors. “I heard you know knives,” he heard himself say, but his voice didn’t come out right, he sounded womanish. “Anna Crow, I’ll slaughter the slut,” the woman replied, but she didn’t look at him, she was too busy watching TV.
Some soap. The garbage on daytime TV, he wouldn’t stoop to soil his brain, and those black-and-white Zeniths anyhow, you couldn’t see squat for snow. “I never was around knives before, they always seemed so dangerous,” he was saying now, like some pantywaist, a pillow-biter; he was mortified. But at least this time Kate Root looked up. At least she showed him her face.
It wasn’t so old.
Hardly old at all, in fact. Once his eyes had adjusted and he could see past the pudding-bowl grey hair and not a trace of make-up, she looked almost unused.
What had he been expecting? Lines and wrinkles, drastic damage. But there was only a faint tracery around her eyes and mouth like the painted cracks on those ornamental Russian eggs they sold underneath the El in Brighton Beach, and the rest of her was freckles; she could have been some kid.
Her green eyes were childish, too. They didn’t angle or slide, just looked straight past him at something outdoors. “At least let me show you my equipment,” Willie said, not so much like a flit this time, more like some used-car salesman kissing ass. But Kate Root refused to look, she turned her back. Climbed on the stool that led to her bird, and shut him out, leaving him to roam the aisles.
He tried to track down those cats, their stink was eating him alive, but he couldn’t find them anywhere. In the end he came full circle, and that was when he saw it: the white patch on Kate Root’s leg; the three reddish hairs.
Just one blow. One little puff.
A sigh would do.
Then he was outside the Zoo. And now a month had gone by. The summer, this burning season, was almost done, but still this craving rode his back. This monkey he could not spank.
His business was in shambles. He must have visited with Pacquito Console a dozen times or more, and a dozen times he’d lost the thread, forgotten what brought him there or why he was meant to care anyway. Tygers, mermaids, topless gerbils—let somebody else decide. The lease was up on the Spyder, and the rent was past due in Brighton Beach, and his left shoe pinched; the armadillo was raw and fraying at the heel. And the plain truth was, he didn’t give a toss, a flying fish. None of this was his concern.
Twenty-eight pairs of shoes were sitting in Regina ’s closet. Hi-tops and wingtips, loafers and Oxfords, Roscoe de Llama lizardskins, Havana flats by Miami Mort Amity, two-tone Berkeley Musser suedes and steel-heeled Kahlil marengos, green-olive canvas Piccozis, Just A Gigolo co-respondents, black-and-tan fantasies, burnt-almond Lamourettes. Everything beneath the sun but tassels, you wouldn’t catch him castrated in those. All he had to do was give Patsy O a call, and he’d have the whole collection back in a New York minute. But he just couldn’t seem to find the dime.
There were nights when he had no stomach for Chez Stadium even, couldn’t look the Deacon in the eye, and, as for Anna Crow, he couldn’t conceive how he’d ever stood to stand her, never mind feed her sex. Deep down, you really don’t like women, she kept telling him now. Which was a bare-faced lie. Women, cars, shoes, he liked them all fine. But Pacquito Console’s word was correct: right now, they were not apropos.
Most nights these days he stayed to himself in Brighton Beach, holed up in the room beside the El. Tried to catch a doze between trains. Or catch a dream, to be exact.
Time was, dreams had been his speciality. When he was a child, he couldn’t seem to lay down without popping one. He used to dream so profuse and vivid, his mother kept The Success Dream Book by Prof. De Herbert always handy at his bedside, so that they could work out the meanings the minute he woke, and the messages wouldn’t get lost. Even now he could recite the book’s equations by heart, “ABDOMEN: a sure sign of flattery, GOULASH: you will suffer from indigestion in the not far distant future, JELLYFISH: you will cause trouble on account of a slip of your tongue, LONGSHOREMAN: you will be caught stealing by your employer. Nevertheless, you will not be punished, PARACHUTE: you are a lion-hearted person, and for this reason you are going to succeed in all your undertakings. SL
AUGHTERHOUSE: you will succeed in obtaining your wishes, TWIST MOUTH: you are being scandled by your neighbours. UKELELE: you will become a great sportsman as the years roll on.”
After each image came its matching number in bold type, to help turn it into money. Many times, when a Lottery drawing was due, a wolf pack of aunts and nieces under Tia Guadalupe would sit up howling in the next room, waiting on him to dream a PALACE, dream a YARD, dream WRAPPING PAPER, and if he came across, they gave him trinkets or candies, even dollars sometimes.
He had been lord of his manor then, a household name in his own household. If not for Bombo Garcia, he could have written himself a free ticket.
The man was some breed of cousin. A semi-pro ballplayer, played rightfield with the Piscataway Pirates. He had the God-given tools to go to the top, he had everything it takes but desire. Pick any baseball cliché you like, he fitted it. He didn’t hit homers but moonshots, he had a rifle for an arm, and trying to throw a fastball past him was like trying to throw a lamb chop past a starving wolf. Major-league scouts would come to watch him play and go home drooling. All he needed was work, and he could have been the next Roberto Clemente. But work was not Bombo’s speed. He was too busy with the babes, too hungover half the time, and the other half he was sleeping. So you could write his epitaph, right there: He had the biggest dick in Piscataway, but no ass to push it with.
Babes and the booze he could have survived, but sleep was the death of him. There never was such a slugger for slumber. Man slept in the showers, in the batting cage, on the bench. He even nodded off in rightfield, dozing under lazy flyballs.
Scratch Johnson, his manager, kept trying to give him wake-up calls. You can’t play this game on snooze control. You have to give it no per cent, like your back’s to the wall, every day’s for all the marbles, there’s no tomorrow. You gotta believe, he said. You have to have a dream. All that good stuff. But Bombo Garcia didn’t know from dreams, he only knew sleep.