Halfway Down the Stairs

by Gary A Braunbeck

  “Oh, no, please Mommy, d-d-don’t do that!”

  “Then be quiet. You’ve caused me enough trouble as it is.”

  Leah’s face twisted into a tight, hard, painful knot, and she couldn’t stop the tears from coming then. She thought that her mommy loved her and would never do something like that. But maybe—

  —you have about as much love in your heart for that child as I do for you—

  —Mommy only said that because she felt about bad the baby. Leah hoped so but she couldn’t ask her mother because Mommy would only get madder, so she decided to wait and tell Buddy about it tonight after Mommy did her needle-thing and rolled her eyes and shook and fell asleep sort-of. Buddy would say the right things to make her understand and make it all better.

  Leah was glad that Mommy didn’t know about Buddy and his secret Rusty Room underneath the warehouse basement.

  Buddy didn’t like her mother. Not one little bit.

  III

  and where do i live?

  in the alleys behind the

  cans

  abandonment my blanket

  no way to slough the fever

  and where do i live?

  in songs unheard

  in the flutter of bound wings that

  don’t know they’re bound

  where?

  somewhere else

  not here

  within the cell, life is long, life is hard,

  within the cell, life is hard

  who will take me?

  IV

  Leah smiled as Chief Wetbrain drew a chalk circle around him, scooted into its center (he had to scoot everywhere because he didn’t have any legs), and started playing his saxophone. Leah thought it was too bad that people called him Chief Wetbrain (she did it, too, and always felt bad afterward) because it was such an ugly name and they only used it because he got drunk a lot on account of the pain in his leg stumps. His real name was Jimmy NightEagle, and Leah wished he’d tell more people to call him that; it was the name of a king, and that’s what Jimmy was in her eyes.

  Mommy was down the street at Jewel’s apartment buying her needle-stuff and had said it was okay for Leah to go visit with her friends. Leah liked listening to Jimmy play his saxophone; his music made her feel less scared and sometimes, if she closed her eyes and listened real hard, the way Buddy had taught her, she could hear the unspoken words in Jimmy’s songs: Who will take me? I don’t belong here.

  (...someone come...)

  Listening the way Buddy had taught her, she heard Jimmy’s song cry out a tale composed of notes that became Kachinas and Crow Mothers and They Who Breathed The Land Into Being; she heard it turn round in the breeze and catch raindrops that held his memories of nights on the plains, soaring above the heads of the people as they passed, sprinkling them with hints of things he still knew and they had long ago forgotten, secrets of the Earth and Time hidden in the silences between the notes; a breath, a beat, songs of the Elders and their tales of the Fiery-Sky Ones, another breath, another beat, and the notes multiplied like the birds of the sky after solstice, power, strength, and courage in his grip as he pulled the sax closer to his ruined body, breathing his soul into the reeds like a fine medicine man should—and over there, a glint in a passing pair of eyes, yes, as the song banked on the winds and came back to him, more than it was before, making him feel that he was back among his people again, back where he should have been all along, grace covering him like tree-fallen leaves in autumn, so good, yes, I am ready: The time is upon me to fly.

  Jimmy stopped playing as a young man in a three-piece suit walked by and threw some change into a tin cup setting between his stumps. Jimmy smiled and lifted his hat to the young man in thanks, then looked into the cup. “Sokelas!” he said, taking out the three quarters and jingling them in his hand. “And my folks used to worry about me making a living as a jazz musician.” He looked at Leah, then gave her one of the coins. “That’s just for being a pretty sight to these tired eyes.”

  “How come you’re tired?”

  “How come I’m—? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap like that.”

  “...s’okay.”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Jimmy, taking hold of her hand. “I’m tired because I’ve been having too many bad dreams lately. I’m tired because I feel more and more like eceyanunia—a fool—every day. I’m tired because no one answers the music.” He pulled her a little closer, putting his arm around her waist. Leah liked it when Jimmy hugged her, it wasn’t at all like when Jewel touched her—moist and chilly and sick-making; Jimmy’s hugs were gentle and kind and made her feel loved.

  “There was a time, Leah, before I left to be educated in the White schools, when I would play my music at night under the stars and know that it would be heard by Matotipila, would linger in the heart of Wanagitacanku, answered by Tayamni, but not here, not in the city. There’s too much noise, too much anger and violence, and the buildings block out the heavens. Sometimes I find myself wondering if the heavens are still really there.” He shook his head. “Does any of this make sense to you?”

  “Uh-huh, some.”

  “I like you very much, Leah. You’re a good friend and I will miss you when I’m gone.”

  “You’re not leaving, are you?”

  “Oh, not right now, probably not for a while, but I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. Especially since the dreams started.”

  “What kind of dreams? What happens in them?”

  Jimmy laughed but there was no humor in it. “You see, that’s the thing, I can’t really say what happens because I don’t know, exactly. It’s not so much what happens in them, anyway, as it is...the impression they leave when I wake up. I feel like I don’t belong here, but I can’t go back home because I don’t belong there anymore, either. Not that they’d have me, and if they wouldn’t, then...who will take me?” He reached out and massaged one of his stumps. “Get drunk and pass out under one trailer, have it back over you and crush your legs—do this once, and people think you’re incompetent.”

  Leah giggled.

  “Ah, good girl,” said Jimmy. “There was a time when you wouldn’t’ve realized I was making a joke.”

  “But it was only a half-joke. It was still funny, though.”

  “I’m glad you liked it. I like hearing you laugh; it’s a lovely sound. I wish you made it more often.”

  “I know. Buddy says that I—” She gasped, then covered her mouth with her hands, eyes wide. Oh, God! She’d never mentioned Buddy to anyone before and now—

  “Buddy,” whispered Jimmy. “So that’s his name? In my dream he was called Peye’wik: It-Is-Approaching.”

  Slowly, Leah pulled her hands away from her mouth. “You know about Buddy?”

  Jimmy reached into one of his pockets and took out a folded piece of paper that he handed to Leah. “There was one image from the dreams that I remembered early on, and I drew it on that paper. Take a look and tell me if those’re—tell me if it looks familiar to you.”

  Leah unfolded the piece of paper; most of it was blank, except for two large, dark, slanted, opposing almond-shapes in the middle. “Buddy’s eyes,” she said.

  “‘Someone come,’” said Jimmy.

  “W-what?”

  “‘Someone come.’ Buddy wrote those words on a wall somewhere, didn’t he?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He’s very lonely, isn’t he, your Buddy?”

  “I guess. But with him it’s like...it’s like with Denise, that girl who lives with Jewel?”

  Jimmy closed his eyes and nodded his head. “A Hollow House. More pain than person. Goddamn that little pervert.”

  “With Buddy, it’s like he’s so lonely he don’t even know it.”

  “Oh, I doubt that,” said Jimmy. “I think he knows exactly how lonely he is. He’s just like us, Leah; he should be somewhere else.”

  Just then Merc came around the corner pulling something behind him that made a funny thunka-thunka-shisk! thunka-t
hunka-shisk! noise: An orange crate nailed to a set of planks that were supported by roller-skate wheels.

  “Oh, man,” said Merc, coming to a stop next to them. “I read this article in the science section of the paper yesterday about that damn Wooly Mammoth they found upstate a couple weeks ago—you know, the one that was almost completely preserved? Anyway, these science dudes, they were makin’ all this brouhaha over the buttercups that were in the thing’s mouth. Seems these buttercups were as totally preserved as the mammoth, right? But what makes everything so righteously fucked—oops, sorry, Leah, gotta learn to watch my mouth—what makes it all really weird, right, is that buttercups evidently release some kind of chemical into your system when you eat them that acts like a natural anti-freeze, y’dig? The mammoth had itself a bellyful of buttercups, so they’re saying that’s why it was so well-preserved, but—whoa, almost lost track of where I’s going with this—but the thing is, buttercups can only grow in a moist, warm climate, like around seventy-eight degrees or so, and these buttercups in the mammoth’s belly, they weren’t dehydrated, and neither was the mammoth. You know what that means? That means in order for the mammoth to’ve been preserved so well and without dehydration, the temperature had to’ve dropped from around eighty degrees to something like three-hundred below zero in a matter of seconds! And these science wizards, they got no idea what happened, let alone how it could’ve happened, and if they can’t speculate on what happened, then they got no way of being able to predict if or when it might happen again. Man, I tell you, that messed up my breakfast big time! Knowing that at any given second we could all be slammed into the fuc—uh, friggin’ deep freeze and there’s nothing we can do about it. It could all be over”—he snapped his fingers—”like that, and I spent ten minutes trying to decide what to wear today. Not that I got what you’d call an ex-ten-sive wardrobe. That game on your head, or what?”

  “Do you ever just say ‘hello’?” asked Jimmy.

  “Uh, yeah, right. Forgettin’ my manners left and right today. Hello.”

  “What’cha got there?” said Leah, pointing at the orange crate.

  “Huh? Oh, this?” He stood back and gestured with his arms like a model at an automobile show. “This here’s the new Chiefmobile, first one off the line.”

  Jimmy stared. “You...you made this for me?”

  “I get kinda tired of watching you do the Stumpy Dance when you walk. Them little short steps give me a pain. Takes forever to get anywhere with you. I figure this way, you hop in the Chiefmobile and we’ll be burnin’ up pavement. Do wonders for clearing up my schedule. So, you like it?”

  Jimmy shrugged (but gave Leah a quick wink), and said, “It’s all right, if you like that sort of thing.”

  “That sort of thing? I been digging through dumpsters for the last two weeks trying to find four sets of wheels that’re all the same size and all you got to say is, ‘If you like that sort of thing’? Talk about your ingrates. Here we got you trans-por-tation, Chief. You hear what I’m saying? Take your act on the road. Make ‘em Big Wampum, go truckin’ on down that Happy Trail in style.”

  “It is perhaps one of the ten most wondrous sights I have ever beheld in all my life. Why, in all the history of history itself, there has never been a more resplendent orange-crate chariot. I think I’m safe in saying that, yes.”

  Merc cocked his head to one side as if trying to decide if Jimmy was yanking his chain or not, then gave a quick nod. “Well, that’s more like it. Man needs to know his labors’re appreciated.”

  “Very much,” said Jimmy, reaching out and patting the side of Merc’s leg. “Very much. Thank you.”

  Merc knelt down and clapped Jimmy on the shoulder. “No hombre of mine’s gonna be stumpin’ round and giving himself more pain.”

  The two of them looked at one another for a moment.

  In the silence, Leah heard the song of two hearts: Friendship.

  She ran over and gave Merc a big hug and kiss; she couldn’t help it.

  “What’s that for?” asked Merc.

  “‘Cause you’re a sweetie.”

  “Uh-oh, this’s starting to get too warm and fuzzy for me—but thanks for the hug and smoochie, darlin’. Nice to know the Merc’s still got it for the ladies—speaking of: You seen Randi around here today, Chief?”

  “No, but I heard she’s selling—uh, I heard she’s singing at some club in the East End.”

  “Singing?” Merc looked from Jimmy to Leah, then back to Jimmy again. “Oh, yeah, right! I forgot about her, uh, singing engagement.”

  “I know what a hooker is,” said Leah. “You don’t have to talk around me like I’m stupid or something.”

  Jimmy and Merc burst out laughing.

  “Here I thought we were being so co-vert,” said Merc.

  “It’s okay,” said Leah. “I tell everybody that Randi’s a singer so they won’t know.”

  “Well, that’s darned thoughtful of you.” Merc touched the side of her face. “Where’s your mom today?—no, wait, don’t tell me.” He looked at Jimmy. “Jewel’s place?”

  Jimmy nodded.

  “Jeez-Louise.” He looked back at Leah. “You two still squattin’ in that warehouse down on 11th?”

  “Uh-huh. It’s not too bad there.”

  “She’s got no business keeping you in a place like that and usin’ her money to buy—”

  “Merc,” said Jimmy; a warning.

  “I can’t help it,” shouted Merc, rising to his feet. “Shit, when I was workin’ over in Panama a couple years ago, we’d been hired to blow a worthless fuck like Jewel right out of his socks. Him, and about forty of his boys. I enjoyed it a little too much, y’know? Won’t do for a merc to start takin’ sides. That’s how come I got out.”

  “I know,” said Jimmy.

  Merc smiled—and it wasn’t a nice smile. “Still got me a little firepower.” He looked around, nervous, then pulled open one side of his jacket to reveal a large silver 9mm semiautomatic tucked into the waist of his pants.

  “Oh, great,” said Jimmy, “look at this: Son of The Equalizer—close your coat, for chrissakes. People will think you’re flashing us.”

  “Hey, if I decided to whip out the man-meat,” said Merc, closing his coat, “you’d know you been flashed. Didn’t mean to shock you, Leah.”

  “You didn’t.”

  Jimmy laughed.

  Merc pulled himself up straight. “Gettin’ off the point here a bit, ain’t we? I’d just love to dust our little Jewel. ‘Bout the only way we’d ever get Denise away from him. And you know, don’t you, Chief, that it’s gotta be us. Nobody else give’s a rat’s ass. We’re just partial people to all of them, and you don’t pay no attention to a partial person.”

  “My father had a term for us,” said Jimmy. “He called people like us ‘Hollow Houses’; the Unbelonging: Vessels with homeless spirits.”

  “We don’t belong here,” said Merc.

  “We should be somewhere else,” whispered Jimmy.

  And Leah thought: Someone come.

  “Well, Darlin’,” said Merc, laying a hand on top of Leah’s head, “I imagine your mom’s gonna be havin’ herself a private little party tonight. Maybe Jimmy and me—bet’cha didn’t think I knew your real name, did’ya, Jimmy?—maybe the two of us’ll cruise on by in the Chiefmobile later and see how you’re doing. Can’t never tell how a person’s gonna act after they shoot that shit into their veins.” He saw something behind them, then rolled his eyes. “Speaking of shit...”

  “Watch it, Merc,” said Jimmy. “I’m serious.”

  “Leah!” shouted Mommy, trying to sound nice and almost making it. “C’mon, hon. Time to get something to eat.”

  “Bitch’s gonna buy her daughter some real food?” whispered Merc to Jimmy. “Sorry state, when junkies start thinking of others. Almost enough to make you believe there’s a God.”

  “Put a sock in it, will you?” said Jimmy.

  Mommy came up behind Leah and grabbed her arm. �
�Say good-bye to your friends, hon. You can maybe come back tomorrow.”

  “How’s Jewel doing?” said Merc.

  “Fine,” snapped Mommy. “He said to send his regards.”

  “I’ll bet,” muttered Jimmy.

  “You see Denise?” asked Leah.

  “Oh, she, uh...she wasn’t feeling too well today, hon. Jewel was making her stay in bed.”

  Jimmy snorted a nasty laugh. “What a tactful way to put it.”

  Mommy pushed Leah behind her. “All right, assholes, you’ve had your fun. I don’t need this shit from the likes of you. Nice crate, by the way.”

  “That’s the Chiefmobile, Mommy!”

  “It’s a goddamned orange crate, for hauling garbage.” And she turned around and pulled Leah along.

  Leah managed to turn around and wave at Jimmy and Merc. They waved back, but didn’t look very happy.

  As they got to the corner, Leah looked over at Jewel’s building and saw Denise standing at her window. She looked pale and empty and sad. The lower half of the window was foggy with steam, and Denise was drawing patterns in the condensation with her finger. When she finished her drawing, she knelt down and looked out through the two opposing almond-shapes.

  Below the almonds, she’d written: Someone come.

  Leah wanted to touch her, to tell Denise that she’d be her friend.

  Buddy would like Denise; Merc and Jimmy, too.

  Partial people; Hollow Houses.

  “Who will take me?” Leah whispered.

  “What?” snapped Mommy.

  “Nothin’.”

  “Christ Almighty. Fuckin’ starchild. Airhead’s more like it.”