Barking Man

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “Funny, almost everybody seems to say that,” Rita said.

  Her smile was not particularly bright. She was on a big ward, but curtains ran on tracks between the beds, and there were a couple of chairs pulled up to her nightstand with magazines piled on the seats. The whites of her eyes were still a funny color and she was so thin that Stuart had trouble telling what were the lines of her body and what were only wrinkles in the sheet.

  “Well, now,” Stuart said. “You look good.”

  “Don’t give me that,” Rita said. “I look like I’m gonna die.”

  “You’re not,” Stuart said.

  “Not this time,” Rita said.

  Stuart groped for a commonplace.

  “Clifton told me you went out west.”

  “No way,” Rita said, patting the mattress with a bony hand. “I been right here.”

  “When do you get out?” Stuart said.

  “I don’t know. Two weeks more, maybe. They don’t want to give me a date.”

  Rita’s folding alarm clock ticked loudly across the next patch of silence.

  “You need anything?” Stuart said.

  “Not that I can get.”

  “Well, let me know, okay?” Stuart pulled the curtain back and paused in the gap. “Hey. I been kind of trying to get hold of Natasha, you wouldn’t know what she’s been up to, would you?”

  “I know she hasn’t been up here,” Rita said. “Not a whole lot else. Last I heard she was tricking for Uncle Bill.”

  “My God,” Stuart said. “That sounds like a losing proposition.”

  “You know how it is,” Rita said. “She’s got a nice big nut to make every day.”

  “I guess,” Stuart said. “Hey, but Clifton told me Uncle Bill was dead.”

  “Is that right,” Rita said. “Clifton seems to be kind of full of bad information these days.”

  Bars and coffee shops, coffee shops and bars. Stuart circled the island from end to end of the old boundaries: the Marlin, McCarthy’s, Three Roses, the Chinatown spots, anywhere she might have come in for any reason, rest her feet, get out of the weather, kill time waiting to score. Some places they remembered what he drank, but mostly not, and every now and then he’d meet somebody else who hadn’t seen Natasha.

  “Nah, man, she ain’t been around here.”

  “Didn’t I hear she went to Chicago? I can’t think if it was her or somebody else. Memory slips a little on the fourth one …

  “Haven’t seen her in about eight months. Maybe not since last summer …”

  “Hey Stuart, what ever happened to that snippy little black-haired girl you used to hang around with?”

  Wish I knew … On sleepless nights, he’d eat small-hour breakfasts at the Golden Corner or some place just about like it, hunched down behind a newspaper, eavesdropping on the booths around him full of hookers on break, waiting for the voice or the name. By the time winter set hard in the city he’d started on the false alarms, recognizing Natasha in just about any middle-sized dark-haired white girl. It happened more than once a night sometimes: he’d have to walk right up to whoever he’d spotted and then at the last minute veer away. He did that so many times that the hookers started calling him Mr. No-Money Man.

  Uncle Bill’s place was up at 125th Street near the Chinese restaurant, just past the train trestle. A black kid with his hair done up in tight cornrows was waiting by the entry when Stuart arrived, one leg cocked up on the railing, the loose foot swinging to its limit like the pendulum of a clock. Stuart stood sideways to keep one eye on him while he studied the row of bells. The third one now said CHILDRESS instead of B.B. like it should have, but he reached to ring it anyway.

  “Man done gone,” the black kid said.

  Stuart turned all the way toward him. “What man is that?”

  “Billbro, who else?”

  “Know where he went?”

  The kid spat over the railing. “You got a cigarette on you, man?”

  Stuart passed him a single Marlboro.

  “He in the trench,” the kid said. “There’s a place just about ten blocks up can fix what it is you need.”

  Stuart laughed briefly. “You think I’m the right color to be going about ten blocks up from here?”

  The kid grinned and blew some smoke. “Long’s you go with me you are.”

  “Thanks anyway,” Stuart said. “It was a personal visit kind of thing. What was this trench you were talking about?”

  “Out on one of them islands, I forget.” The kid’s tennis shoe, fat with thick lacing and white as new bones, beat back and forth on the hinge of his knee. “You know, when you die without no money, then they shove you in the trench.”

  “Oh,” Stuart said. “That trench. Do you get a box, at least?”

  “I don’t think so, bro,” the kid said. “Maybe you might get a bag.”

  Up at Millbrook, Stuart’s image of Natasha had been clear as a photograph tacked to the wall, but once he was back in the city it began to blur and fade and run together in a swamp of other faces: magazine covers, or actresses on posters outside the movies, and always and especially the dozens of near-misses that kept on slipping past him. Now her memory was less a face and figure than just a group of gestures, and these too began to dissipate and dissolve, until when he thought of Natasha he often thought of a painting he’d once seen by Manet: a full-length portrait of a woman in a gray dust coat down to her feet, one hand lightly extended toward … what? A bird cage? He couldn’t even remember the painting all that well. The woman in the portrait was nothing like Natasha; she had a totally different face, was taller, heavier, had red hair. Yet the cool repose of her expression also managed to suggest that she was poised at the edge of something. Stuart began to doubt if he would recognize Natasha when he found her, and what if he’d already passed her by? He recognized people that weren’t her frequently enough, that much was for sure.

  Stuart was trying to outlast a drunk with a three A.M. breakfast at the Golden Corner when a hooker slid into the booth across from him.

  “I been thinking about you, Mr. No-Money Man,” she said. “I been thinking, if you ate a little bit less breakfast, you might have a little bit more money.”

  When she laughed, her eyes half disappeared into warm crinkles at their corners. Stuart, saw she was a lot older than she wanted to appear, but not bad looking still, in a stringy kind of way. He sort of liked her face, under all the makeup. She was wearing white lipstick and white eye shadow on skin the shade of tan kid leather. The wig she had on was a color no hair had ever been. “I bet you got fifty cent right now,” she said. “Buy me a cup of coffee.”

  “Get the number ten breakfast if you want it,” Stuart said. “Or anything else they got.” He was in a slightly reckless condition and a lot of his concentration was being spent on keeping her from splitting into twos and fours.

  “Hell, yes,” she said, and shouted an order toward the counter. “I knew you had that money all along.”

  “Not that much,” Stuart said, laying down his fork.

  “Enough,” she said, aiming a long fingernail at his nose. “Your trouble is, you think you can’t find what you need. You know I seen you looking. Up and down and up and down—” She slapped the table. “You might not think it, but I can do it all myself, do it real well too.”

  “Breakfast only,” Stuart said, and as if those were the magic words, an oblong plate of hash and eggs came skidding into the space between her elbows.

  “I got it now,” she said, biting into a triangle of damp toast. “You not looking for something. You looking for somebody, right?”

  “Yeah,” Stuart said. “Right.”

  “Have to be a girlfriend.”

  “As a matter of fact, no,” Stuart said. “Just somebody I used to know.”

  “What for, then?”

  “I don’t know,” Stuart said. “I think I got survivor syndrome.”

  “Say what?”

  “I feel responsible,” Stuart said, heari
ng his words begin to slur. “For like … for everybody. Don’t ask me why, but I always felt like she’d be the only one I could do anything about.” He elbowed his plate out of the way and clasped his hands in front of him. “It’s got to be like a long chain of people, see? I take hold of her and she takes hold of somebody else and finally somebody takes hold of you, maybe, and then if everybody holds on tight, we all get out of here.”

  The hooker shoveled in a large amount of hash and eggs with a few rapid movements and then looked back up. “Out of where?”

  “Ah, I can’t explain it,” Stuart said, fumbling out a cigarette. “Whose idea was this, anyway?”

  The hooker stared at him, not smiling so much now. “You be knee-walking drunk once you stand up, won’t you?” she said after a while. “Man, where you coming from with this kind of talk?”

  “Straight out of hell,” Stuart said, trying to get his cigarette together with his match. “You familiar with the place?”

  Over the winter he started going to the kung fu movies along Forty-second Street and around Times Square. It was a better time killer than drinking for him now; he’d tried getting drunk a few more times but he didn’t much like where it took him. He went to the movies at night or sometimes in the afternoons, wearing a knit cap pulled down to his eye sockets so others couldn’t tell much about him in the dark. It would take him a while, sometimes, to find a seat. Often whole sections had been ripped out, and also he liked to get one that put his back to a post or some other barrier. In the half light reflected back from the screen, the rest of the audience milled through clouds of dope smoke, dealing for sinsé or street ludes or dust, each cluster playing a different boom box, usually louder than the soundtrack. They only turned to the screen when there was fighting, but the fight scenes always got their whole attention, bringing screams of approval from every cranny of the huge decaying theaters.

  Stuart, on the other hand, always watched all the way through, even the tedious love scenes. He was not very discriminating, could watch the same picture again and again, often staying so long he would have forgotten whether it was day or night by the time he returned to the street. The movies were all so similar that there was not much to choose between them, if you were going to bother to watch them at all. He observed that the theme of return was prevalent. What the returning person usually did was kill people, keeping it up until there was no one left or he was killed himself.

  Twisted among the lumps and rickets of his moldy ricket of a bed, Stuart falls into a dream so deep and profoundly revealing that at every juncture of it he posts his waking self a message: you must remember this. The dream is room within room within room, each suppressing its breathless secret, and on every threshold, Stuart swears he will remember. Each revelation has sufficient power to make him almost weep. When he sits up suddenly awake, the message is still thinly wrapped around him, bound up in a single word, a name.

  Clifton. Stuart stared at a gleaming crack in the gritty window pane, an arm’s reach across the space between the bedstead and the wall. Clifton, that was nothing but nothing, and the dream was entirely gone. He flopped back over onto his side, eyes falling back shut, fingers begin to twitch and a shard of the dream returns to him. The self of his dream comes hurrying from a building and in passing glances at a peddler on the sidewalk, a concrete-colored man propping up a dismal scrap of a tree. Its branches are hung with little figurines carved in wood and stone, and Stuart, hastening on his way, takes in as a matter of course that each of them astonishingly lives, is animate, moving toward the others or away. In the dream he rushes past as though it were completely ordinary, but now he is transfixed by the gemlike movement of the tree, this nonsense miracle, a mere wonder outside the context of the dream, and uninterpretable. Stuart sat back up in the knot of his grimy blanket, muttering, Clifton. Surely, somewhere in all of this there must be something to extract.

  Back in Brooklyn, Stuart checked in Henry’s old bar to see if anyone knew where Clifton was living now and found that no one did. He tried the old place up on Broadway and the super sent him back around the corner to a half-renovated building between two shells on South Eighth Street. It was a sunny day, though cold, and even the well to the basement door was full of light. Stuart rolled his newspaper tighter in his right hand and rapped on the door with his left. It took five or ten minutes of off-and-on knocking before the door pulled back on the chain, then reclosed and opened all the way.

  “You been a long time coming,” Clifton said. Inside, the light that leaked down from the street level was thin and watery. Clifton shimmered vaguely as he yawned and stretched; it looked like he’d been caught asleep, though it was well past noon. There was something that smelled to Stuart a little like old blood. He followed Clifton into the room and kicked the door shut behind him with his heel.

  “The worried man,” Clifton said, bending away from Stuart to get a T-shirt from the bed. “Well, babe, you ready for me to make your troubles go away?”

  “Can you?” Stuart said. “Clifton?”

  When Clifton began to turn toward him, Stuart lashed at him with the rolled newspaper, and the heavy elbow of pipe he’d furled inside it knocked Clifton all the way over and sent him sliding into the rear wall.

  “What in hell is the matter with you?” Clifton said. He sat up against the wall and stroked at the side of his mouth, his finger coming away red from a little cut. “Have you gone crazy or what?”

  Stuart looked down at him, trying to feel something, anything, but could not. He thought for no reason of the trench, bags jumbled into it, barely covered with a damp film of dirt.

  “Just curious,” he said haltingly.

  “Yeah, well, are you satisfied now?”

  “Not really,” Stuart said. The newspaper hung at the full length of his arm, pointed at the floor. “I was thinking I might beat your face out the back of your head, but I don’t really feel like it now.”

  “That’s real good, Stuart,” Clifton said. “I’m glad you don’t feel like it now. You don’t maybe want to tell me why you felt like it a minute ago?”

  “I don’t know why,” Stuart said. “What happened to Natasha?”

  “Man, are you kidding me, man?” Clifton said. “I’m going to tell you the truth now, okay, I don’t freaking know.”

  Stuart took a step forward, hefting the newspaper. Clifton raised one hand more or less in front of his face and pushed up into a crouch with the other.

  “Hey, I would tell you now if I knew, man,” he said. “You got the edge on me, okay? Besides, what would I want to hide it for? I don’t know any more than you do, man.”

  “Okay,” Stuart said, and let the newspaper fall back to rest against his thigh. Clifton reached into the side of his mouth and took something out and looked at it.

  “This is my tooth I got here, man,” he said. “I cannot believe you did this over that dumb freaking chick.”

  “I had a dream,” Stuart said, “but maybe this wasn’t what it was supposed to be about.”

  Clifton pushed himself up off the floor and stood, pressing the T-shirt over the bleeding edge of his mouth. “Yeah, well, thanks for stopping by,” he said, words a little slurred by the cloth. “Next time I see you I’m going to kill you, you do know that, I hope.”

  “No, you won’t,” Stuart said.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Clifton said. “Don’t turn your back.”

  Almost every day he bought a paper and almost every day he didn’t read much of it. Sometimes he’d take a look at the want ads, but with barely focused attention, though the savings he’d been living on were about to empty out. Not long before he’d be Mr. No-Money Man for real, but mostly he’d just flip through the paper quickly and then roll it and carry it all day, till the front pages began to curl and tatter and the ink started to bleed off on his fingers. After a while the feel of the rolled newspapers stopped reminding him directly of Clifton and only made him uncomfortable in a dull way he couldn’t identify.

&n
bsp; There was always too much news about missing people, and too many of the ones that weren’t missing were dead. Every time he heard about someone else missing he wondered how many just vanished without being missed. Every third person he passed on the street was probably missing from somewhere.

  “Missing” was no more than a whitewash; a better word would be “gone.” Gone people. Whenever Stuart looked at the faces on the milk cartons, he had a deep feeling the children were dead. He didn’t own a picture of Natasha, but all the same he was convinced that if she’d died he would have known that too.

  When it got warm enough to sit outside again Stuart sat in Tompkins Square with one more unread newspaper flattened on the bench beside him and watched Tombo coming across from the east side. He would have let him go on by, but Tombo saw him before he could get the paper up, came over and sat down.

  “Long time,” Tombo said. “I wasn’t even sure you were still around.”

  “I’m here,” Stuart said.

  Tombo leaned back on the bench, shooting his long legs out before him. He had on a nice pair of gray pleated pants, expensive looking. None of it ever seemed to age or even touch him. He still had his dark and vaguely foreign prettiness, perfect skin, red pouty mouth, long eyelashes like a girl’s. Stuart watched him blink his eyes and sniffle.

  “Hey, you know Clifton’s been talking you down a lot,” Tombo said, shifting around in Stuart’s direction. “He keeps on telling everybody he’s gonna fix your business.”

  “Good,” Stuart said. “If he’s talking about it, then he won’t do anything.”

  “You think?”

  “Clifton’s got a temper,” Stuart said. “But he’ll never let it take him all the way to jail.”

  “Maybe not,” Tombo said. He snorted, pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose. “Allergies, man,” he said. “It always gets to me around this time of year.”