Need

by Nik Cohn

  This made no sense, it must have been after-shock, a form of whiplash. It wasn’t what she wanted, God forbid, and she did her best to fight it down. But she was not able. Right at this minute, she lacked the strength. Some lunatic urge to share and give, fatal words, had got her by the throat, and she dug out the noosed rope, she tossed it on the counter, she spread her hands in abdication. “Take it,” she said. “It’s yours.”

  FOURTH

  That last night in St. Martinville when Mary said goodbye, Kate had been in the worst mood. For months she and Charley Root had dragged the back roads of Louisiana, peddling postcards and leftover scented candles out of the back of a broken-down Plymouth. Business was lousy, prospects were nil, and only this afternoon she’d caught Charley Root mixing up a batch of Amarillo Virgin Tears in the bathroom sink.

  She had screamed out loud. Not at the act itself, which seemed almost routine by now. But at the moment she’d discovered him, he had looked back at her across his shoulder with exactly the same expression he’d worn that first night in Tarpon Springs, the time he’d got stuck zipping up his corset. The look of an ancient tart surprised at her toilet, at once sheepish and coquettish.

  Kate could not endure this, not a second time. So she’d screamed, and punched at him with closed fists, and in return he had scratched her face with open claws. For a few seconds they had struggled and thrashed together, two she-cats in a hissy fit, and then Charley Root had broken free. Snatching up his beaker of Virgin Tears, he made to throw it in her face like acid. Then he stopped himself. It was money, after all.

  They were staying at the Acadia Motel, a mile outside city limits, having driven in that afternoon from Eunice and Ville Platte. St. Martinville was the small town where Evangeline had once met her lover at an oak tree in some poem, but now she manufactured hot sauce and the air was peppery with capsicum. It stung Kate’s eyes, made them hot and red.

  An old child’s swing was strung between two locust trees in the motel yard, and she rode it till the stinging stopped. Warped and rotted as it was, with its rope half eaten away, the swing’s motion was hopelessly skewed. Instead of a smooth pendulum, it described a broken circle, dragged Kate at every angle but true.

  At one edge of the circle was a dusty bush with sharp red spikes, she never knew its name, but the branches were like chariot spokes wreathed in thorns, and each time that the swing’s course brought Kate around, these thorns galled her legs, her bare knees.

  At first she tried to keep away. She drew her legs up to her chest, she shrank back in modesty. But with each circuit her efforts slackened. Normally, pain was not her pleasure, that was the last thing she sought. This evening was not normal, though. The image of Charley Root’s hips flirting, plus the pepper tormenting her, made her reckless, and she started to push herself forward. To offer herself, allowing the spikes to cut and lash at her, till her legs were riddled with puncture marks.

  Blindly seeking, she let herself imagine how the blood would taste, salt and sweet at the same time, and how it would feel like balm on her burning eyelids. So then she swung harder, she bore down so fiercely that one thorn tore the flesh above her ankle. Her eyes flew open at the shock, and Mary was sitting in a live oak across the yard.

  It was dusk, and the girl was wearing a dark dress the same colour as the light, so that only the whiteness of her face and hands was clearly visible, and the radiance of her eyes. That radiance was dimmed by grieving, however. For a flash Kate thought it was her own doing, and she was mortified. To be caught defiling a bush, it was obscene, she couldn’t imagine what had possessed her. Then the pepper stopped burning her eyes, she could see clearly, and she realized that guilt was irrelevant, this sorrow went way past shame.

  The girl had come to go, it was as simple as that. Out of the kindness of her heart, she hadn’t wanted to leave Kate without a word or sign, just dump her, but the basic message boiled down to the same. The Virgin Tears had been the last straw, probably, or maybe she’d already made up her mind. Too much tackiness, one too many betrayals, she just couldn’t stand the stench any more, and who could blame her? Not Kate.

  The parting was not dramatic, that was never Mary’s style. She simply sat in the branches of the great oak that was draped in Spanish moss, looking down across the yard at Kate now motionless on the swing, the dusty bush with its torn and ruined red spikes, the tufts of parched grey grass that surrounded it, a couple of chickens pecking in the dirt, and an old blind dog playing dead, its eyes milky-white with cataracts. And she spoke her mind. Though she rarely talked, preferred to listen, she started to tell Kate everything. Don’t fall in love with suffering, it is the deadliest disease, she said, and that was just the start, there was plenty more where that came from, you could tell.

  Only Kate was not fated to hear it. Before Mary had the chance to say another word, the jukebox started up inside the motel bar, an eruption of raw noise so violent that the chickens flew away squawking, even the blind dog raised his head.

  It was Charley Root, of course. She didn’t need to catch him in the act to recognize his touch, or feel the malice that made him punch up an Elvis, Are You Lonesome Tonight? Across the yard she could see Mary’s lips moving, but the only words that reached her were Does your memory stray To a bright, sunny day?, and the dog rose up, began to waddle towards her where she still sat, as if paralysed in the swing. A repulsive, flea-ridden creature, it was, slobbering and snuffling with its white eyes staring at nothing, the furthest thing from Pompey, and it must have smelled the blood on Kate’s legs, it stopped to sniff, then it started to lick. Is your heart full of pain? Elvis sang, and usually this was Kate’s favourite song, she could listen to it all night, but right now it sounded foolish, it was ruining everything. With every line the girl’s image in the oak tree got fainter, more translucent, till Kate could see clear through her dress and white hands to darkness. The dog’s tongue was rough as sandpaper on her shins, it smelled like swamp, and its milk-white stare stung worse than pepper burning. Will you come back again? Elvis was singing, not knowing what he did, and Kate couldn’t stand it, she shut her eyes. Just for an instant, hardly more than a blink, but when she looked again the girl was gone.

  There was only the gathering dark then, and this useless apology for a swing. When the number ended, the jukebox went dead, the chickens resumed their pecking, the blind dog waddled out of sight, and Charley Root stood backlit in the bar-room doorway, glugging Dixie beer from the bottle. He had won.

  Next morning Kate woke up sick. Glandular fever, the doctor said, and sent her to the hospital in Lafayette, where she hoped to decease but failed.

  She stayed there seven weeks, which was a blessing, she needed the rest, but nothing much happened until the night before her release. For supper she had mushroom cream soup and crackers and spam salad, creamed chicken with cream of spinach, lime jello with whipped cream and a cherry on top, then she fell fast asleep and when she woke, it was dead of night.

  Somebody was rattling.

  At first she thought it was the man in the next bed who was dying of something he couldn’t pronounce, but he was peaceably snoring. Besides, the rattle didn’t come from the west, it hung directly above her own bed. A crackling, a dry choking, that seemed to float in aimless circles like a plastic boat in a bath and whenever she tried to pin it down it bobbed away on a tide of ripples.

  This disturbance kept her awake. She needed rest for her nerves, she wasn’t feeling so good. Truth to tell, she might have eaten too much. All that cream lay on her stomach like dead weight, she felt bloated. Then she started to suffer cramps. Her guts were growling, she had to use the bathroom, but her bed was so cosy, so warm, it seemed ungrateful to leave it. To put her feet on the cold slick tiles and go walking in the dark. With that rattle on the loose.

  For the longest time she lay with her eyes shut, willing both the cramps and the croak to leave her be, but it was no use, neither one of them would shift. So she set off down the ward, doubled over ag
ainst the spasms. And the rattle travelled with her. It wafted above her head like a blasphemer’s fake halo, chattering and choking, and no word Kate knew had the power to silence it.

  Charley Root called bathrooms The Necessary, and just this once he wasn’t wrong. Reaching safety, she opened the door a crack, squeezed in sideways and turned the lock double-quick, but the rattling passed through wood as easily as air, it never paused for breath. If anything, it sounded louder and more aggressive. In this enclosed space it seemed to echo, and the echo was mocking, deliberately offensive. So cocksure, in fact, that the cramps were intimidated and faded, and Kate was sick instead.

  She shot her supper chapter and verse. Soup and salad, creamed chicken and spinach, lime jello and the cherry on top, until she was vacated, utterly forsaken, staring down into the bowl at what had once been part of herself, with the rattle peering over her shoulder. Kneeling beneath it, she could feel its breath hot with triumph crawling on her neck, its croak now almost a crow, and she knew its name.

  Of course she did. She’d known it all along, only she hadn’t liked to admit it, not even to herself. But now she spoke the name out loud, and laid a curse as she did so, rising out of her cowering to flush it away, the name and its rattle and her supper dispatched together in one great whoosh. So she was freed. She went back to her bed and slept the sleep of the purged for twelve hours, with no dreams, and the next day Charley Root came to collect her, he took her from this place.

  They lived in Jeanerette then, no more travelling and no more huckstering, the Studebaker stayed in the driveway. Kate was not yet sixteen, she was just a schoolgirl. Elvis was in the army, and there was a boy called Acie Dotson that had the cutest smile, and the Club Why Not was a few miles up Highway 90. Only Charley Root wouldn’t let her go there, and he fired an airgun at Acie Dotson when Acie hung over the garden fence too long. Even though he was a sick man these days, poor old Charley. The veins in his legs swole up and clotted, fungus sprouted in his lungs, and he couldn’t catch his breath, he kept choking. Rattling, you might say, till one morning in The Necessary, reading the baseball boxscores, he reached behind him, flushed, and dropped down stiff as a board.

  If that wasn’t murder, nothing was.

  Or manslaughter, anyway. But Kate had felt no guilt, and she felt none now, sitting in the Zoo in front of the Zenith and scratching idly at the spot above her ankle where the thorns had scarred her in St. Martinville, it had been itching her all day.

  Talk about rattling, Pearl kept shaking and twanging the bars of her cage like some wino in a drunk tank, and she’d stirred up the other birds, the whole Zoo was in uproar. When Kate walked the aisles, trying to restore order, she felt herself tumbled on a drowning tide. The sweating walls, the hanging plants wet against her face, the gas heaters grinning in their corners, the funeral scent of the orchids, the clamour of the macaws and conures, the hissing of the pinesnakes, and the slurp like swamp underfoot—this place was a nuthouse, she saw, and was surprised that she’d never noticed before.

  The tumult was partly her own fault. All day she had been jangling, a bag of jump. Couldn’t seem to settle to any task, up and down the aisles a dozen times an hour, frittering and futzing, sweating like a pig. Though pigs did not sweat, she didn’t believe they knew how. But sweating bullets, say, or communion wine. She couldn’t even sit still for Billie and Bo, the storyline made no sense. To tell the truth, these soaps were a little silly at times, they got on her nerves. Which got on the animals’ nerves in turn. Then the air was full of knives.

  She knew that she ought to calm herself, but where was calm to be found? Every place she looked, she found mere anarchy. Anna Crow in a wheelchair, wrapped in blankets and feathers. That boy Wilfred run through by a subway train. One customer with a gas leak in his basement, and a second with creeping mould in her silver fox, and a third stone-deaf inside a year. John Joe Maguire and a saucepan of boiling milk.

  What staggered her most was the sheer profusion. After all these years in deep freeze, to be flooded by so many pictures, such a riot of images all at once, she simply couldn’t keep up. Seeing was like any other sport, you needed to stay in shape. If you didn’t, you wound up sun-blind.

  There seemed no place to shelter, or even to catch her breath. When she snuck upstairs to Ferdousine’s room for a slice of Dundee cake, she had not taken two bites before she saw the wedding feast again, the pomegranate trees and the peacocks, the aghound with his hennaed hair, those flabby yellow buttocks like weeping Dutch cheeses beneath their shalwar kameez, and the cake went down the wrong way, she started choking.

  It wasn’t decent, really. More to the point, it was not professional. If she’d had the least sense of responsibility, she would have been ashamed of herself. But she hadn’t, and she wasn’t. Somewhere down the line she seemed to have misplaced the gift of astonishment. Pictures that would have shocked her once, or left her stricken with guilt, now seemed like free entertainments.

  She felt a sort of drunkenness. In the Zoo she sold a canary to a priest, and saw him naked except for his dog-collar, shackled to his bed at the ankles and wrists, while a lady in PVC thighboots tickled him with a feather duster. The vision was so spellbinding that she couldn’t make change for watching, and she ended up blowing the sale.

  Blew it to smithereens and back, and she didn’t care. Two minutes after the priest walked out, a Rasta with waist-length dreadlocks took his place. Kate saw him tumbling in free fall from a stage into a mosh-pit, there to suffer a broken back. But all she could think was how beautiful he looked in flight, and how his dreadlocks, caught by the arc lights, shone like snakes.

  What had she been fearing all these years? Why fight so hard to stay blind? By the time she closed the Zoo for the day she felt as though she’d run a marathon in concrete boots, she could hardly keep her head up or her seeing eyes open, she was lathered, dizzied, spent, and she couldn’t stop humming Stuck on You.

  Don’t fall in love with suffering. That had been sound advice, she should have minded it. When she locked herself inside her bedroom, and started to prepare herself for Wilfred’s lesson, she dug deep in her closet and brought out a Bird of Paradise. It wasn’t the same costume she’d worn for Charley Root, of course, she had outgrown that long ago. But Charley Root was not the only blade she’d stood to in her time. Years after his death, she had found herself back in Florida again, adrift in Sarasota, and she had met a knife named Eddie.

  He wasn’t certified, only an apprentice, but he threw a nifty True-Bal bolo, 15-inch axe, handle-grip, you could see that he had potential.

  And Kate had been negotiable. Since St. Martinville and the Acadia Motel she had been marking time. A year in England with Fred Root to get her health back, more or less, and ever since she’d been aimless. Working in fields and factories, knocking down pay checks, nothing more. She kept drudging up and down the Gulf Coast. Canning peas in Pensacola, shucking oysters in Mobile, flea-marketing in Bay St. Louis. Picking pepper out of flyshit. But she could find nowhere to settle and not a scrap of function. She had no skills, no value. No friends, and she wanted none. After Mary, all other girl-talk fell flat.

  She took it for granted then that she would never see again. According to Monsignor Beebe, visions of the Virgin always came with an exclusive contract. You saw what you were given to see, for as long as you were found worthy. But once the engagement was over, the gift of sight withdrawn, you were retired for life.

  It was an anticlimax. In Sarasota, when she wasn’t busy waitressing, Kate either got drunk or got laid. But she wasn’t much good at either. The cheap burn of alcohol that your body didn’t want. And the cheaper burn of sex, ditto. So she took to loitering without intent near St. Armand’s Circle, on the way to Lido Beach, and that was where she saw the sign.

  The Sarasota School of Impalement, it said, and when she stepped inside she found herself in a converted bowling alley, now operating as an academy for blades.

  The walls were hung with portrait
s of the masters, past and present. Frank Dean and Paul LaCross, Sylvester Braun and the great Skeeter Vaughn. The Gibsons, who brought the first Wheel of Death to America. And Adolfo Rossi, the matchless Argentine, who used to split an apple or potato on the back of his wife’s neck with a customized machete. So far so promising, but the operation proved sloppy. Target boards hung crooked where the bowling lanes had been, and the students threw unmatched knives. There was no sawdust to keep the grips dry, no alum or brine or even horsepiss like Charley Root had used, in case of cuts. Amateurs, was Kate’s thought, and she was turning to leave when Eddie appeared.

  He had good hands, nice and slow. Prehensile fingers, perfect balance, he had all the makings. They drank beer in a tavern on Orange Street, where the jukebox played Merle Haggard. It’s Not Love (But It’s Not Bad), the song was, and Kate always could take a hint.

  He needed a partner, she needed exercise. So they had a new Bird of Paradise run up, and they started working a few shows locally, Nokomis and Gulfport, Zephyr Hills, even Tarpon Springs for sickness’ sake. Strictly small potatoes, but it beat working. Until that night in Dade City when Eddie threw a triple-time combo from behind his back, zip, Zip, ZIP, and in the rush of blades Kate saw a cat on Main Street, not black but tabby, a tom, run over by a beer truck outside Sylvester’s Saloon.

  So much for Monsignor Beebe. In the morning she had a new business card printed, Your Future Is Your Fortune, Kate Root Sees All. Strict Confidentiality, Competitive Fees, and the Bird of Paradise went feet-first into her closet.

  It looked a little sickly now, a bird off its feed. All these years out of daylight had given it a jailhouse pallor, and a few of its feathers had moulted, but the main body had held intact. Not that she was planning to work in costume tonight. Live targets on a first lesson were not recommended, even with padded knives. Even so, she had a yen to try it on. Just to see if it still fitted. Whether or not it would do.