I almost apologised, but I stopped myself and just stood there while he clutched at his chest and got a hold of his breathing. Then I said gently, ‘Fix this for you, Rabbi?’
He squeezed out a little laugh and snatched the silver watch from my counter. ‘Maybe not today,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing personal, of course. I just left my wallet and my coins at home. I will come back another day.’
‘Yes of course,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ agreed the rabbi. And then he scrabbled for the door, his coat flapping behind him.
I knew he wouldn’t come back. And I know why. It’s the same reason my father doesn’t like to talk about the war; the same reason I don’t tell anyone I once ran errands for Barnum’s Museum, even though I saw all the wonders of our world up close. No one likes to be reminded of the evil in the world. No one likes to remember what they are.
When I was a boy I thought a creature like You-Go-Back didn’t belong, but my eyes were different then. Time was, I saw thin sunshine and thought of honey cakes, and heard bird songs even above the groan of wagon wheels up and down Broadway. I saw children in whale spouts and miracles in humbuggery and a penny in my pocket was the riches of a lost and dreaming kingdom. But now I see You-Go-Back and his brothers wherever I look, whether its the craven gaze of church leaders, the greedy grasp of politicians, or the despairing manoeuvres of the orphan gangs roaming like sad dogs through Five Points. I see You-Go-Back and I know he’s more real than any riches and any song.
I see now too that it couldn’t have been that hard for Barnum to capture him. Finding a devil is easy; devils is everywhere. Barnum’s mistake was thinking anyone would pay to look at one. For putting You-Go-Back in the Museum wouldn’t be no different than holding a mirror up to the world. Barnum wanted to show a capering curiosity, something along the lines of a pygmy child, or an orang-utan. But a demon is just the blackness of the human heart. And I suppose only animals and children don’t recognise that for their own when they see it.
There’s blackness in the alleyways, and blackness in the newspapers, and blackness in the rivers and blackness in the skies. I see blackness everywhere, even with the war long over. The devils are always with us. And You-Go-Back was right. Every day it just gets harder and harder for me not to burn the whole mess to the ground.
STRANGER MUST GO
Douglas Penick
All scattered
Ram rearing back
Leopard, the killer
A stranger must go
All scattered
Ram rearing back
(Igbo song from the Okoroshi Ojo)
ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS
Robert Sams was the second of six children. His mother, Amalie, was Jamaican and his father, Elford, was from Antigua. Robert was born in the United States, in New York City where his parents had come separately, each looking for work and a better life. Amalie had met her husband-to-be shortly after she arrived, when she went to a party given by her cousin. The small apartment was crowded. Everyone was laughing, drinking, smoking, dancing, showing off fine new clothes and gold bracelets, boasting about new cars and the fancy clubs where they went to hang out. Amalie was intimidated. She fell into conversation with the slim, intense Elford, a man her cousin knew from work at the supermarket in Manhattan. He, in turn, was attracted to this plump, quiet girl, the colour of café au lait, whose shyness didn’t hide the lively spunkiness underneath. The two fell to talking and sat side by side on the sofa. They talked about childhood, grandmothers, friends, the special qualities of the islands where each was born: the colours of the beach and sea, the storms, aromas, fruit trees, and the foods they missed. In this new strange and noisy world, they found between them a comforting happiness. Soon they were seeing each other frequently.
As she had done before in matters of less grave concern, Amalie went to consult Aunt Carlotta, not a relative but a woman versed in spells and spirit lore. While possessed by one of her familiars, this woman gave advice and prescribed charms. As Amalie sat silently, the spirits came to Aunt Carlotta. They were overjoyed that she was to marry Elford. She would have many children; one would be special.
Amalie and Elford Sams married. They found an apartment in Brooklyn in a neighbourhood with many other West Indians who were only the latest to find, in that battered, run-down locale, a toehold in the U.S. Things went along well enough. Years and children accumulated. Elford became depressed about his prospects either for improving his economic situation or for returning as a rich man to his birthplace. He began to drink and stay out all night. Finally he stopped coming home altogether. He disappeared from Amalie’s and the children’s life.
Amalie returned to Aunt Carlotta. On this occasion, the spirits required Amalie to wear white clothes and recite prayers to St Michael. She had to perform ritual ablutions, to wash herself and the children in perfume, clean the apartment, light candles and incense. These practices met with no success. Elford had vanished. Amalie resolved that, with or without help from husband, spirits or god, she would raise her family decently. In this she was successful. She saw that the four girls and two boys were clean, well mannered, and well dressed. She made sure they stayed in school and stayed off drugs. Though it was too soon yet to know how the youngest ones would turn out, she was proud of them all.
In her heart of hearts, the second one, Robert, disturbed and puzzled her. She was afraid this was the child the spirits called ‘special’. The teachers at school were pleased with his undemonstrative, obedient manner, but his mother was bothered by his moody silences which often lasted days on end. She couldn’t help feeling that perhaps her apprehensions stemmed from Robert’s physical resemblance to his father. Both were slight, very dark, and shared a peculiarly intense way of staring at people that sometimes made them uncomfortable. Mrs Sams struggled to overcome her prejudice by ignoring it. She staunchly thought of Robert as a good, quiet boy with no harm in him. She felt vindicated when at last he got a job.
Amalie Sams had supported her family, sometimes with help from welfare it is true, and she had always worked. She started out cleaning houses, then moved on to supermarkets and other kinds of stores. She had at last managed to become a receptionist in the Department of Public Transportation. Her existence had often been one of lonely struggle against long odds, so it was perhaps not surprising that she had become an ardent member of the congregation of the neighbourhood Baptist church. This would not have pleased her former spiritual advisor nor, for that matter, her grandmother, who had practiced similar arts. But in the church she found fellowship. She also found solace in an intimate relationship with the church’s leader, a white man, Reverend Grove. Robert was unhappy with the new arrangement. As Amalie and the pastor became ever closer, her son Robert moved out of the apartment and moved in with some friends of his in the neighbourhood.
This, as it turned out, was not a happy choice After living there six months, Robert came home one day to find his clothes and his radio gone. He suspected his roommates had stolen them so he left. No one saw him for about a year, and even his mother had no idea what had become of him.
When he reappeared, he was very much changed. He was now a homeless person, a bum. He showed up as if he had sprung from the earth, living in an improvised hovel in a vacant lot three blocks from his mother’s apartment. He lived there, washing in an open hydrant and begging for food from local stores and restaurants. His mother and sisters were mortified, but after a time they were able to accept it.
They notified the welfare agency. The girl sent by the agency was fresh out of school and still full of zeal for her calling. She took an interest in Robert and tried to draw him out. She tried to get him to go back to school. Secretly, she dreamed she might save a good man who would have gone to waste had she not come along. She was only moderately discouraged by his lack of interest and attributed it to his socio-economic background. She tried to get him into a job training programs. When she sprung this on him, he became abusive. She contented herself f
inally by giving him papers so he could get into a city shelter. He refused, politely enough, but firmly. She continued to look in on him for a while, but soon lost interest, finding, no doubt, that there were more promising candidates for her dwindling mercies.
PLACEMENT
In school, Robert had been neither unruly nor diligent. He had taken pains to stay on the sidelines and not stand out. His schoolteachers looked on such behaviour favourably since it did not call for them to be on their guard, but they would have been hard pressed to remember him amongst the mob they faced daily. The other children in whose orbit he lingered would, years later, recall him little better. He waited on the fringes for the promptings of others.
Maybe he had had dreams of being a soccer star, a fireman, a scientist, things of that sort. Later, as an adolescent, when the pressure to have some goal in life became more distinct, he probably thought of being a pop star, someone like Bob Marley or Jimmy Cliff. But he could not take such dreams seriously enough to pursue them.
Robert was like a traveller who had fallen asleep on an aeroplane and, on arrival, had no idea where he was, no memory of how or why he was there. He didn’t know if he was still asleep and dreaming on the aeroplane or awake in some alien land. Since the situation was inescapable, the best course seemed to follow those passengers who seemed to know what they were doing, where they were going, who their friends and family were. He followed, waiting for a sign or gesture or event to clarify his predicament, to show him how to keep going or escape.
The only person he met who also seemed to live in this kind of suspense was Aunt Carlotta, his mother’s spiritual advisor until she took up with the Baptist minister. Robert had no doubts about Aunt Carlotta’s authenticity, but he wasn’t particularly taken with the trappings of her trade: the trances, ululations, summoning and possessions, her vatic pronouncements and the weird voices in which she issued them. All this struck him as a bit of play-acting she found necessary to make a living. But it was a relief to him that she didn’t take this world at face value and he liked to sit beside her as she drank iced tea and fanned herself in between clients. In those moments he could see she too had no expectations whatsoever. She was simply waiting for the next thing to put in an appearance. ‘Ooooh, chile’,’ she’d say, as she waved her big bronze bony hand back and forth. ‘People say, “Do you have problems?” And I say, “No, I do not have problems. I have bills.” And I makes the bills and I pays the bills.’
So Robert went along. He drifted through school, then on to the job and the apartment shared with some schoolmates who needed a third roommate. Their need for him coincided with the time when Robert was anxious to move out of his home because of the presence of the Reverend Grove. Robert perceived that the reverend was another one who was just wandering around, but unlike Aunt Carlotta, he made himself feel in control by getting others to follow. Not that Robert disliked the man on that account, nor did he resent his mother’s involvement. He was just tired of the Reverend’s badgering him to come to his church. Robert didn’t want to cause a fight. He was working full time at a record store. It was easy to say ‘yes’ when the two classmates asked him if he wanted to move in with them.
This, in turn, provoked his first awakening.
When Robert came in the door that Friday six months later, he saw that his records and record player were not where he kept them. He looked through the apartment, and saw that his best shirts and slacks and jackets were missing. He flopped down in an old over-stuffed chair that they had scrounged from the street. He waited for his roommates to return, jumping up from time to time to search in vain through the place. He concluded finally the roommates had borrowed his things for some reason or other. When they returned, he could see they were stoned. They feigned surprise at his predicament. They acted like they were sharing a joke at his expense. They rushed off to some engagement, so they said, airily, and they flitted off, shouting back to him, ‘Catch you later, man,’ giggling as they stumbled down the stairs.
‘No,’ he thought. ‘You will not catch me later. You will not catch me at all.’
Robert fell prey to overwhelming fatigue and could not move. All the effort and time he had expended obtaining his few possessions went out of him completely. A profound sense of futility chained him to the chair until nightfall, and the orange glow from the streetlights turned the room into an oven. He roused from his stupor to the sounds of empty glass bottles hurled down and smashing on the street outside.
He left, taking nothing with him and abandoning as vain the desire for a home. He walked through the streets all night, watched lovers clutch at each other as they laughed and hurried to their beds; he saw children hold to their mothers, and men standing together outside stores, drinking beer out of cans in paper bags and talking to each other. He saw old people walking laboriously home on canes, a shopping bag in one hand, others looking out of windows, their heavy arms resting on pillows on the windowsills, looking at the people passing by, looking back at him. He smelled sweet rotting garbage, and the oily scents of fried onions and he heard the noise of jukeboxes and ghetto-blasters as their owners walked by, till finally the city, even if it did not entirely fall asleep, at least paused.
Early next morning it began to rain lightly, and there was a strong wind. He spent some of his money on a haircut and he felt stripped and clean.
He saw a middle-aged black derelict standing on the street, holding a battered discarded umbrella over his head. On one side of him, his possessions were stored in a shopping cart, on the other he had a half a dozen more umbrellas stacked neatly on the sidewalk. A sudden gust of wind tore the umbrella from the man’s hand and sent it flying off down the street and upwards into the sky. As it sailed along, it almost beaned another man. The bum watched with utter indifference and, reaching down slowly, he picked up the next umbrella. In some inexplicable way, the detachment of this gesture impressed Robert deeply. He went by subway to the bus terminal and got on a bus bound for Baltimore because he liked the sound of the name.
So began a year of wandering up and down the East Coast. He ventured as far south as Florida and as far north as Massachusetts. Sometimes he worked and had money, sometimes not. He found that his needs could easily be met by using things that others threw away, and thus, slowly, he acquired the habits and demeanour of a homeless person. His movements in that time were dictated largely by whim and chance. He worked in Baltimore as a dishwasher on the nightshift, so that he could spend his days near the docks, watching the boats come and go, and the seagulls wheel through the air. The cook began to annoy him with his constant shouting, so one day, in a cigarette break, he simply walked out and got on a bus to Washington. There, in the bus station, a young man told him about his home, Richmond, and so he went there. Sometimes he worked as a migrant field hand, sometimes he just stayed in a flophouse and walked around until his money ran out. People were always on the move, it seemed. Unencumbered, it was easy for him to enter into this stream of constant motion. Living this way, like a bubble in a stream, brought him a certain feeling of calm self-sufficiency.
Robert’s return to New York was also a kind of accident. He came north on a night train, intending to stop off in Philadelphia but he slept through the stop and woke at the ungentle prodding of a tired and disdainful porter to find himself in the bowels of Pennsylvania Station. From there, it was easy to take the subway back to his old neighbourhood. He had entertained no notion of staying there until he saw the vacant lot. It was between two buildings, one abandoned and boarded up and the other half empty. The lot was mostly filled with rubble, broken glass, trashed-out refrigerators, and boxes and crates of all kinds. In the middle there was a small grove of ailanthus trees, and in the middle of that grove lay an old ripped-up mattress, surrounded by empty liquor bottles and cigarette butts. On seeing this almost lush if otherwise unpromising locale, the words, ‘a place to stay’ popped into his head. And so a decision was made for him. A piebald pigeon, black and white, rattled to a landin
g on a branch above him to his left, and this was all the confirmation he needed. He lay down on the mattress then, and there he stayed.
He lay in his grove in the sticky summer evening and watched the apricot light darken in the sky. The lights in the buildings to one side and behind came on, and he heard the sounds of TVs being turned on, record players being turned on, the clatter of pots on the stoves and dishes on the tables, the yells of children for their mothers, husbands for their wives. He felt all at once more desolate than he had felt at any time in the previous year. Where formerly he had felt himself to be swimming anonymously among a large and shifting shoal of fish, now it was as if he was buried in an anthill. His solitude was intense. Even as noise and light abated late in the night, he could feel the few visible stars twinkling slowly through the thick air and the trees and pricking his skin.
He stayed unmoving on that mattress for three days, once frightening a young couple who sneaked through the glade towards the mattress but who ran off, thinking he was a corpse. Although he was both hungry and very thirsty, he continued to wait.
Around three o’clock on the third morning, he suddenly jerked awake. He had not been aware he had fallen asleep. All the stars had disappeared from the sky, and all the lights in the buildings and on the street had been turned off. A huge wind began to blow, and the earth began to shake all around him. He gripped one of the slender tree trunks as if it could save him. Then, where the two buildings opened onto the street, he saw two enormous dogs, one black and one white, glowing in the dark and fighting each other violently. They fought, ripping at each other with their teeth. Suddenly they were copulating. Then, just as suddenly, it seemed to Robert, the dogs turned into two huge serpents, as tall as the two buildings beside them. They coiled and uncoiled, together and apart, crashing on the ground and making it shake and hissing at each other, loud as the wind.
Strange Tales V Page 12