Barking Man

by Madison Smartt Bell

  People back here had all been trying to peer over one another’s shoulders and they were still trying to see past one another now; they didn’t quite know he was what they were supposed to be looking at. The center of the ring had dissolved by this time, but Clay could see the two cops moving in the area right where it had been. He didn’t see those rubber sticks he’d been hearing about yet, but he still didn’t feel like he wanted to be spending much time with them. But for the moment he held his ground. Nowhere to run to anyway, and if he got lucky nobody would point him out. The cops were saying some kind of stuff, asking questions or giving orders, he couldn’t be sure. When the people around him began to move off, Clay turned and started to drift along with them. Right away he felt eyes drilling into the back of his head, but he wasn’t going to turn back to see if it was his imagination or not. Once he’d made it a few yards into the regular foot traffic, the feeling passed over and he thought he was cool, but it was right at that moment that something tripped him. His stomach seized up on him as he whirled around, but it was nothing but that same fat kid again: he’d got his foot hung up in the dog leash.

  “Little bastard,” Clay snapped at him, kicking free, and remembered he probably wouldn’t know what that meant. He threw a slap toward the kid’s head, but somehow he misjudged the distance, and by the time it got there the boy was long gone out of range.

  Martin had always liked to take his vacations on the beach, even though none of the conventional beach amusements attracted him all that much. He was not a great swimmer and had no interest in the other main water sports. As he liked to tell people, he was naturally tan and didn’t have to go fry on a field of hot sand to achieve it. If fishing was proposed to him, Martin’s line was: “Life is boring, fishing is worse.” What he did like was walking on the shore or near it, and sitting somewhere he could look at the water. Whenever Nadine had one of her sunburns he fell back hard on the second pastime.

  It was a really bad one this time around and it didn’t look like it would get much better before day three. On day two she didn’t wake up until midmorning, when Mindy had already gone to the beach, which was good luck for her, or so Martin thought. He gave her a fresh coat of cortisone cream, fed her her pills and brought her a tall glass of orange juice when she kept on saying she didn’t want to eat. A little later he left her lightly dozing and went out to see what was new on the balcony. The glass water pitcher still stood on the white table where he’d forgotten it the night before, and it seemed extraordinarily noticeable to Martin somehow, though at first he couldn’t have told why. The water had caught no particular ray but it was nonetheless so full of the sun that it glowed inwardly, swollen with light. He went into the kitchen and brought back a glass and poured it brim-full of the water. When he had sipped from it and set it back down, it became at once another such jewel, a crystal absorbed in a quiet inner radiance.

  On the other side of the highway there was still dense fog and where the mountains had been was now nothing but cloud. The fog smoked and moiled and formed itself into phantasmagoric shapes as it peeled away layer by slow layer and burned off into the upper air. Behind it, within it, the mountains took on line, then form, playing across a scale of color from the dimmest blue to a patchy gray and green. At last the fog had been all sucked away into a sky that was now an uncompromised ultramarine; in the small corner which Martin could see past the pine, the ocean had begun to reflect it. Down in the town, some reflecting surface had caught the sun and flung it back with nearly a laser’s concentration. Along the skyline ridges of the mountains, the conifers stuck up like little hairs. On the table before him, the pitcher and glass shone forth a brilliant diamond light.

  When he finally got up he felt he was starving and he went into the kitchen to cook some spaghetti. Mindy would be staying out for lunch or skipping it, probably—well, never mind. He carried a bowl into Nadine and found her sitting up crosslegged on the bed, flipping desultorily through a copy of Palm Beach. Trying to find a good part, she said. They ate together without saying much, and when they were done Martin greased her back again and went into the kitchen to clean up. Back on the balcony, the light had tilted, becoming a little less bright, more blue. He sat in a deck chair with a magazine opened across his knees, but his jet lag was still dragging at him and in a few minutes he dropped into an echoing sleep.

  He woke feeling calm and only slightly bemused. Once again Nadine had outslept him; she moved uneasily on the bed when he looked in on her, but did not quite wake up. Passing through the front room, he could see no sign that Mindy had been back through there yet. He took the bottle of Ricard out to the balcony and poured his first drink, ceremoniously slow. The water struck the liquor in a smoky explosion and Martin continued to look out and up.

  The trees had faded away from the ridgetops now, and the mountains were floating off down their deep well of blue. The swallows had just begun to come in, darting and flickering, then freezing to soar, their crossbow silhouettes slicing long strokes on the sky. When it was almost too dark to see them anymore, Martin noticed that a crescent moon had appeared, stained rose by the last falling light of the sun. Beside it was a jet trail, also red, raking its way across the purpling sky, progressing so slowly he had to strain to see it move. By the time the jet trail had dissolved into the dark, the moon had turned more crimson and was dropping speedily into a cleft of the ridge. When it had gone Martin could no longer distinguish the top line of the mountains, though a net of colored lights was creeping up the hollows toward the spot where it had disappeared. The air had grown cooler, almost cold, and Martin shivered with a pleasant tingle. It came to him that Mindy had been gone so long now that ordinarily he would have been crawling the walls, but here he felt so completely at ease that the worry was more a prick than a shock; he felt that it hardly could reach him at all.

  In the evening Ton-Ton Detroit encountered the Haitian in the Eden Bar. The Haitian had bought a handful of peanuts from a little machine that stood on the counter and was feeding them one by one to the parrot who lived behind the metal grille fixed in the wall to the left of the door. The parrot hung sideways with his wrinkled feet clamped to the wire mesh and accepted the peanuts singly into his sharp curved beak, turning his head one way and another to examine the Haitian out of each of his round eyes. The Haitian spoke to him in a guttural murmur and the parrot responded with sirenlike whistles. When Ton-Ton Detroit came in the Haitian offered him a peanut to feed to the bird. Ton-Ton Detroit separated the nut from the small foil packet that had come with it and proffered it to the parrot’s beak, holding it in such a way that the bird had next to no chance at his fingers. The parrot took the peanut delicately and after eating it let out such a piercing shrill that Ton-Ton Detroit started a couple of feet back. He shook hands with the Haitian in their usual way and then went down the hill to the breakwater.

  An unlucky wind had brought a quantity of trash to float sulkily in a foaming line along the lower edge of the rocks. Without trying he could find a light bulb, a juice carton, a wrinkled hot-pink condom, the front panel of a cheap note pad and a great many other things too rotten or broken for him to identify. The water seemed to be staining the rocks as it licked them and from below the post where he was sitting there rose a dense and fetid smell. He smoked assiduously to cut off the stench from his nostrils, but the hash seemed to darken his mind much more than it relieved it. This evening there were no fish to be seen. Just under the surface of the water a variform patch of seaweed several yards across expanded and contracted in a dull sickly movement like the hand of a drowned man opening and closing with the shifting of the tide. When Clay came popping through the door to the sea wall, Ton-Ton Detroit discovered that he was not at all surprised. He let the boy scramble up on the post beside him without doing anything either to help or prevent him. Clay walked to the edge of the post, scratched his head, turned around, snapped his fingers and finally sat down.

  “Listen, uncle,” he said. “I know you got to ha
ve something, man. I know you holding some kind of something because there wouldn’t be any reason for you to hang in a place like here if you weren’t.”

  Ton-Ton Detroit sat perfectly still, staring out at the place where the sky met the sea. It had cleared enough for him to see the horizon now, though it was no more than the palest blue line.

  “Come across for me, uncle, come on,” Clay said. “I’m telling you straight, my head needs some help.”

  Mutely, Ton-Ton Detroit unpalmed the tinfoil pipe and held it out. There wasn’t a lot left in there and it didn’t seem to have been doing him all that much good, either.

  “That’s a little more like it,” Clay said, stretching his hand out for the pipe. And while you’re at it—” He cut himself off.

  Ton-Ton Detroit already had the lone kitchen match sticking straight up under his nose. Clay scraped it into a little blue blaze on the stone and held it over the crumpled pipe bowl and sucked down hard for a very long time. Ton-Ton Detroit saw the line of his mouth tighten when the foil got hot but he did not stop drawing until the hash had burned down to a smear of greasy ash. After he had lowered the pipe from his lips he sat for some time more without breathing, and when he finally did exhale there was no sign of any smoke escaping.

  “That’s fine, uncle. Thanks a whole lot.”

  Clay snapped the matchstick in two and let the pieces fall over the edge of the post into the rest of the litter floating dully below. Ton-Ton Detroit peered down after it; he kept thinking he saw that purse drifting with the rest of the trash, though so far he’d been wrong.

  “One more thing I hate about this place,” Clay said. “Not even a pack of matches is free. Hey, you not carrying any more of that, are you?”

  “No,” Ton-Ton Detroit said.

  “Oh,” Clay said.

  For several minutes he stared out at a point on the horizon beside the one that Ton-Ton Detroit was staring at. Then he balled up his fist and smashed the stone surface of the post three or four times with the meaty side of it. On the last smash the fist bounced back at a funny angle and Clay uncurled his hand and looked at the raw edge of it.

  “Now I skinned my hand on top of everything else,” he said.

  “Yes,” Ton-Ton Detroit said.

  Clay’s face crinkled up as though he might start to cry and Ton-Ton Detroit shifted to another angle so he wouldn’t have to watch it if he did. But after a couple of seconds Clay just began to curse. He seemed to know a lot of words but he was jumbling them all together in a nonsense sort of way. The one that seemed to please him most was “bastard.”

  “That little bastard,” Clay said, and paused for breath. “He got away with all my money, man, I didn’t even get a chance to see how much it was.”

  “Yes,” Ton-Ton Detroit said.

  Clay raised his head and stared at him hungrily. “You know him, uncle, is that right? Then why didn’t you ever let me know about him?”

  “I try to let you know about a number of things,” Ton-Ton Detroit said.

  “Well there’s just one thing I need to know now. Where’s he live at? What’s his name?”

  “He don’t really have a name in particular,” Ton-Ton Detroit said. “The people just mostly know him by that little dog of his.”

  “Yeah, that sweet little son-of-a-bitching dog,” Clay muttered. “He talk to it like it was a baby or something … Man, but all of my money is gone.”

  “I understood it you didn’t have any money,” Ton-Ton Detroit said.

  Clay did not appear to have heard him. “Uncle, I swear you the best friend I got,” he said. “Don’t you have some kind of a thought about what I could do?”

  Ton-Ton Detroit lit himself a cigarette and smoked a fair portion of it down. He waited for Clay to ask for one too, but the boy just gazed at him out of sad baggy eyes.

  “Come through for me, uncle,” Clay said. “I need somebody to tell me my fortune.”

  Ton-Ton Detroit licked his fingertip and dampened his cigarette where it had begun to run down one side.

  “I think you be better off leaving this place,” he said.

  Clay snorted, then rocked back and moaned. “Now just what you think I been trying to do? The one thing I want now is get back to New York. But I can’t even raise the fare for a bus across town.”

  “I don’t see why you don’t go to Italy,” Ton-Ton Detroit said. He twisted the top of his body to point farther down the coast where Italy began. “You can just walk over the border. It’s not more than about a mile.”

  “Yeah, but you know, I don’t speak Italian,” Clay said with a frown.

  “You don’t speak French either,” said Ton-Ton Detroit.

  “But I hate to leave here where I got my good friends,” Clay said.

  “If you turned yourself in, they might just deport you,” Ton-Ton Detroit said. “Of course, on the other hand, they might not.”

  “If that’s the best you can come up with, don’t bother trying anymore,” Clay said. He made a move to pound the stone again, but changed his mind and only smacked his thigh. “Man, if it wasn’t for that little bastard. That oily little bastard, I’d swear he even had greasy eyes. Man, when I once catch that little bastard I’ll rip him into little pieces and feed him straight to his own damn dog.”

  Ton-Ton Detroit reached up to his ear and turned on France Culture as loud as it would go. It was time for the music now, and he’d struck it lucky, they were playing Ornette.

  “You go ahead and do that,” he yelled at Clay over the mad squall in his ears. “Then just work in a rape and you’ll have done everything.”

  In the beach pajamas and her red espadrilles, Mindy felt a little bit more on the beat, swinging back into La Régence like an old habitué and whistling up her long-drink from the bartender, who served it this time with a little bit more of a smile than a sneer. She took a good long slug from the glass on the way out to the same table she’d sat at last night. Outside, the place was busy again, and she thought maybe she recognized a few of the same people she’d seen before, though actually they were all beginning to run together just a little. She was a touch woozy from all the sun she’d had today, and the warm rasp of the loose fabric over her skin was letting her know she’d stayed out in it right up to her absolute limit. From the looks of her arms she thought she could tell her tan was getting really deeper, though of course it would show up the best against white. She crossed her legs and rocked her free foot, admiring how brown her ankle had turned. A young guy coming in from the street shot her some question or sudden remark and paused to see what she would answer, but Mindy was so startled she just drew a blank. The guy flicked her away with one hand and went on inside the bar, leaving her sitting there with her lips still slightly parted.

  Man oh man, one lost opportunity. She dipped into the beach bag and put on her sunglasses; next time it happened, at least no one would be able to tell if her eyes started to bug out or anything like that. If they’d talk right to her, she thought she’d understand all right, that’s if they gave her a few seconds’ warning before they were planning to start. With luck she’d get better in a couple more days, because she wasn’t too socially brilliant like this. There were gangs of kids at two tables near her, and she tried to tune in but she couldn’t quite concentrate. It all could just as well have been bird sounds to her right now. She hit the bottom of her long-drink and closed her eyes behind her glasses, feeling her mind beginning to coast. She hadn’t eaten much all day, not that she felt hungry now; it was just a sort of buoyancy, a dizziness too slight to be unpleasant. When she got up she could tell the booze was getting through to her fairly quick too, but still she felt like she was definitely good for at least one more.

  Back inside the bar, she crossed over to the tobacco counter. Normally she didn’t smoke, but she didn’t mind one with a couple of drinks. A bullet-headed guy behind the counter gazed blankly through her as she scanned the shelves behind him for anything menthol, but there was nothing in sight and s
he didn’t really feel up to phrasing a question, so she settled for a square blue pack of Gauloise, then cruised by the bar for another long-drink. When she got back to her table she did a slow careful job of tamping the pack—no use getting tobacco flecks on her teeth. The cigarette was almost as fat as her finger, and it smelled more like a cigar when she passed it underneath her nose. She stuck it in her mouth and riffled through her bag, but of course she’d forgotten to get any matches.

  That left the oldest ploy since the invention of smoking … The table with the two guys and one girl looked the best. Now just be careful you don’t ask for a light bulb or a forest fire or something. What was the word for matches again? She stepped over and nudged one of the guys on the shoulder.

  “Avez-vous une allumette?”

  The guy looked up at her, slightly surprised. His eyes were the light blue of a thin pane of colored glass. After a second he flicked his Bic and Mindy dipped her cigarette down to the flame.

  “Merci,” she said, and straightened back up. The guy nodded to her and turned back to his table.

  Oh well. Maybe it wasn’t the most hip way to say it. Anyway, she’d got the concept across. She shrugged and turned to sit back down again. This cigarette was a fairly primitive item, all right, but it tasted okay once you got used to it, and it was giving her that slight cigarette buzz to go along with her drink. She rested the back of her head on the show window and let her eyes begin to glaze over. On either side of her the conversations seemed to swell. Gabble, gabble, gabble, she better start understanding all this real quick. But right now she was too drowsy and comfortable to worry much about it … She sat back up straight when she saw that same guy coming back, the one that had given her the long look-over yesterday, the guy that looked a little like Prince. Her smile was all polished and ready for him, but he didn’t even glance her way this time, just tramped right past her through the door. Mindy felt her head screwing around to follow his path like it was being pulled along on a string. Well, what the hell. She’d be getting old soon if she let this go on. Time to show a little initiative, let her luck have a little more help. She got up and crushed out her butt in the ashtray, then picked up her drink and went into the bar. There was no sign of the guy anywhere at first, but then she spotted him coming back from the bathrooms, heading for the restaurant section. Mindy followed as far as the newsstand and stood idly turning one of the book racks, watching to see where he was going to sit down. For a minute he stood in front of the menu, looking down at it in a sort of wandering way, like maybe it confused him somehow. He was still real good looking when you got closer up. Also Mindy was getting a real strong suspicion that he was a foreigner around here himself.