“I don’t get it,” I said.
“Get what?” said the Unicorn.
I dug my hands into my pockets. “Why do you have to be so maddening?”
“Maddening?” said the Unicorn.
“You’re never clear! You start to tell me something, then you tell me I already know it. Then you recite poetry. It’s driving me crazy!”
“Yikes,” said the Unicorn. “That’s all I need.”
“And,” I continued, my voice rising, “you act like your opinions are part of this huge science! But you know what? They’re not.” I leaned toward him agitatedly. “They’re just your opinions!”
“Wow, Leslita,” said the Unicorn. “You’re pretty huffy today.”
“Huffy? Huffy about what?”
“Are we having an argument?” asked the Unicorn.
He had me cornered. “I guess so.” I kicked at a clod of wet sand.
The Unicorn raised his eyebrows. He took a sweatshirt from the back of his chair and spread it on the sand. “Here,” he said. “Have a seat.”
I sat on the sweatshirt, crossing my legs. We watched the swelling of the ocean, shimmering like mylar under the sun. People passed now and then along the water’s edge, bright colors flashing as they moved. Pennies in a well, I thought. Each step along the shoreline was like a penny, or a part of a penny. You put in the steps and hoped that the payback would jell. Was that all? Steps and more steps? Or was there more? I was tired of friction, tired of the sudden walls. There was something missing, something I didn’t know.
A black shadow flitted in the brightness. We raised our faces to the cawing of a crow. More caws sounded from the boulders behind us. The Unicorn turned to look. Then he turned to me. “So what’s all this about my opinions?”
I traced a line in the sand with a piece of dried seaweed. “Nothing,” I said wearily. “I like your opinions. I just think you should peddle them as you, not some kind of science.”
He was quiet. I could feel him breathing next to me, watching the pattern I was making. I scored the pattern deeper. It was temporary, mine for the time I would sit at its side. Then the tide would spill over the sand—over and over—until every footprint, every disturbance was consumed, flattened into wetness, and the task of expunction was done. “I think you’re hiding,” I said.
Still he was quiet. The crow landed on a clump of seaweed and then rose with a flap into the air.
I looked up. “Well?” I said. “Are you?”
“Am I what?” He turned from the water to me.
“Hiding.”
He looked back at the water. “One is for bad news, two is for mirth. Three is a wedding, four is a birth. Five is for riches …” He paused.
“What are you talking about?” I demanded.
He gestured to the road behind us. “Six is a thief. Seven is a journey, eight is for grief.”
I stared at him, shaking my head. I turned to look above the boulders at the road. There was nothing to see.
“Nine is a secret, ten is for sorrow. Eleven is for love …” He grinned at my annoyed expression. “The crows,” he explained. “It’s a poem about crows.”
“What about them?”
He rubbed his palms along the faded denim of his jeans. “Did you notice how many there were?”
“No.”
He grinned.
“Was I supposed to?”
“The number you see corresponds with a line in the poem. One is for bad news, two is a birth. Three is a wedding, four is a birth. Get it?”
I nodded. “But what good is it if we don’t know how many there were?”
The Unicorn smiled and stretched, rubbing the muscles of his shoulders. Then he looked at me. “So it’s a secret.”
“What is?”
He grinned. “Nine. Like the poem says.”
“What’s the secret?” I demanded, irritated. I hated these riddles.
He stared at me for a second or two. “I don’t know,” he said. “Do you?”
I glared at him. He was arching his upper body forward, twisting slowly into the stretch. I closed my eyes for a moment, summoning patience. It was clear why he had to spend time in a chair by himself. He was a rambling madman. He would drive anyone insane. I opened my eyes. “How many birds were there?” I said sternly.
He stroked the scratch in the wood of the chair. “It’s a shame you didn’t count.” He watched me. Then he reached his arms in a V toward the water, raising first one and then the other. “The giant trick, Leslita. The hugest trick of all. First you get it, then you don’t.” His arms rose and fell in alternate turns. He turned to me, dropping his hands on the wood of the chair. “It’s all this great big balancing act.”
“What is?” I demanded.
He shrugged. “Never mind.”
I sighed, getting to my feet. The riddle was meant to go on. A long thread of seaweed dangled from its coil around my finger. “You never answered my question,” I reminded him.
He turned to me. “What question?”
“The one I asked. Are you hiding?”
“Hiding?”
I nodded. His face twisted against itself into a grin. “You’re no dummy, Leslita. I’ll give you that much.”
“Thanks.” The seaweed crackled on my finger as I pinched it into dust.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The Bayonet
“I would like for you to give me a call,” said Cornelia after the beep on my machine. “There is something now happening with this penny royal.”
She picked up on the third ring. I had come home and walked right up the steps, ignoring the van outside Kevin’s house and the lamps and chairs on the sidewalk.
“What’s up?” I asked. “What’s going on with the pennyroyal?”
“I am having these weert pains, like cramps in your period.”
“How many days have you been taking it?”
“Three.” She pronounced it sree.
“And how long is it supposed to take to work?”
“One week.”
“So what do you do now?”
“I don’t know. I called the lady. She said to wait, and if I want I can take two glasses of water and penny royal instead of only one for the rest of the week.”
“And then you’re supposed to have a miscarriage.”
“Right.”
“Is this pain supposed to be part of it?”
“Ya. I guess.”
“How bad is the pain?”
“Pretty bad. Sometimes it’s pretty bad. Sometimes it’s not so bad. I am also feeling like throwing up.”
“Well, I think you should take it really easy for the next couple of days, don’t you? I mean, don’t go anywhere.”
Cornelia sighed. “I guess I will just stay here.”
I brought her a box of herbal tea and a Cheddar cheese sandwich. She was lying on the couch, an olive-green corduroy sleeper with a black-and-white Mexican blanket draped over it. She had a woolly blanket over her legs and stomach and was wearing her glasses and watching TV. She looked very different from the stilletto-jeans nymph I had erstwhile known her to be. She had left the front door unlocked and looked up when I entered the living room. I was happy to see her. She was getting to be like family.
“Here.” I put the Cheddar sandwich on the table next to her. “Do you want me to boil water for tea?”
“Ya, that would be great.” She leaned forward to tuck the blanket in around her feet.
I went into the kitchen. A faucet dripped noisily into the sink and the stove had black flecks and grease spatters on it. Cornelia liked the house with Erich and his other roommate, she had said, though she complained off and on about having to clean.
She had made room for me on the end of the couch. “Are you in pain right now?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I am not feeling great. I hope this happens quick.”
“Did you ever call the guy?”
She half shrugged again. “Ya. I don’t know if he even car
es so much. And this pregnancy is hard to believe.”
“Is he going to pay you?”
“Ya.” It was her little inhaled yup. “Only half.”
“When?”
“I don’t know.” Cornelia reached for her tea. “I don’t care. I know he will pay.” Hot as it was, she took a big gulp from the mug. “What is with you and Kevin?”
I shrugged and felt the stone in my stomach swell up and settle heavily. The stone had been a parasite for several days. “We had a weird argument. I guess you could call it an argument.”
“About what?”
I described what had happened. Cornelia listened, smoothing little fluff balls in the nap of blanket. I could almost see the wheels inside her click and turn and calculate, analyze, sort and file. The pink plastic rims of her glasses, not quite as clear as the lenses within them, made her look neutral and nonpartisan, like a professor or librarian.
“Ya,” she said flatly, plumping the cushion behind her as I finished. “So? Are you going to see him more?”
I shook my head reluctantly. What was the use? Kevin, too, was on the barge, poling down the river with the rest of the them, stopping at city after city like the Long Island garbage boat and finding nowhere to land.
I climbed my front steps in the hazy blue of dusk. Kevin’s windows, stripped of their curtains, stared black and gaping, the shiny panes of glass wiped clean of life inside. I stood still for a minute. A tree frog chirped in the cooling air, hear me, hear me, glass beads of sound grinding into the night. Two cardboard cartons squatted on the front porch. I listened to the silence of the house, hollow and vacant, shrouded in its cloak of desertion. Hear me, hear me, trilled the tree frog. Slowly, as if from the wings of a twilight orchestration, I felt the shadows of the pine trees lengthen, stretching toward the unlit windows, cold black fingers meeting cold black holes. The tree frog sang to the hollowness, its coded tiding fracturing the air, and somewhere in Kevin’s former back yard the lid of a garbage can thudded as one of the stray cats landed on it.
I put my key in my front door.
There were no messages on the machine. The friendship demon had swooped out of the night, nipped at the end of the tape and carried the vinyl ribbon far out over the city. On and on it untwirled, floating lightly over the houses, unseen on puffs of wind in the dark. Leslie, Leslie, jabbered the messages etched upon the drifting tape, call us when you get in, call us when you get back. Leslie, Leslie. Leslie!
And now it was all quiet. Weert. No lights blinked.
I checked on the Unicorn during the week. I was worrying about him, like his mother, the way Paul used to worry about me. “You sure you’re going to be okay, Leslie?” he would ask me sternly. And now? Well, now was now, I said to myself. Funny how it had all come to pieces. I heated a tortilla in the toaster, gulping seltzer as it browned. Thanks to Steve, I again had hours off—time to run and walk and think. The hot tortilla sizzled in my teeth, burnt flakes falling to the ground as I pattered down the front steps, heading for the beach.
The Buick passed me on the cliff stretch of the highway. I felt it before I saw it, goose bumps prickling on my scalp and skin. He was glaring straight ahead, his face almost in the windshield, grim brow knotted as he leaned down on the wheel.
I slid behind a bush outside the meditation park. The Buick, shrinking to the size of a peanut, disappeared into the road. I counted seconds, waiting, thinking hard. Would he turn around and come back? Was he out to find me? Hey, there, Leslie! he would say, the finger pointing bigger than a barge pole. You! Still thinking about what you did? Betcha are. Betcher sorry.
I waited for a long time behind the bush. Cars passed up and down the highway. Joggers lumbered southward along my side of the road. Graffiti, wobbly on the molded metal, splayed its leering notice down the guardrail. Vinny has crabs Gus has h-roids. I waited longer, checking the traffic, checking my watch. Then I crossed the train tracks and walked along the service road.
The Unicorn was holding court with the world from his usual place. I spied his outline, leg extended, arm bent, something at his mouth. A toothpick? He was stationary, fixed in his contemplation, studying the sand. I wondered if he was happy. It might actually be all right to live in a van. No mailbox choked with bills, no calls, no toilets backing up. Only the smell of peeling vinyl, the clicking of the engine shutting down, and now and then a quake in the air from a passing car. Were we all meant to sleep in rooms? It was the inner world that counted; around that could be a room, a van, a palace or a cave. And all around him, the Unicorn had the sea. There was more life in the sea than on any kind of land.
He lifted his head as I approached. He was biting on the rosewood pipe. “Chiquita,” he grinned. “My buddy.” He winked slyly. “Is it all right now to call you that?”
“What? Buddy?”
“No. Chiquita. You yelled at me a couple of months ago.”
I smiled. “If you like.” I felt like throwing my arms around him, but I was held back. By what? Did anyone hold the Unicorn? How could you hug a Unicorn? The horn would get in the way, poking you in the face. Maybe that was it. The spear, the bayonet that kept the world at bay. Instead, I stood very close to his chair. “How’s the weather down there?” I asked.
“On my level,” said the Unicorn with pretend seriousness, “the weather is always beyond belief.”
“I wish everybody could think like that,” I said. “Where I work people are always complaining that it’s too hot, too cold, too foggy …” I let the list trail. There actually wasn’t a lot you could say to complain about the weather where we lived.
“Platitudes,” said the Unicorn, watching a pelican soar over a fish. “It’s a way of getting to talk. You can’t jump on someone and say ‘Well, has your brother died yet?’ So they start with the weather. But a lot of them, as you know, never go any further.”
The pelican dove like a meteor and was back in the air. “Animals are made for efficiency,” observed the Unicorn. “They’re running machines, eating machines, diving machines. People are … thinking machines. Worrying machines. Sense-sealed I have wrought, without a guess that I evolved a Consciousness to ask for reasons why.” He turned to me. “God talking in a Thomas Hardy poem. On New Year’s Eve.”
“What does it mean?”
“Well,” said the Unicorn, considering. He rolled his fingers down the stem of the pipe. “God says he didn’t think about why he gave us the power to question. Why he made us thinking machines.”
“Why did he?” I asked.
The Unicorn shot me a look of surprise. “You think I know?”
“Well, I thought the poem might say so.”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t. I guess it’s meant to keep us wondering. Clever, huh?”
I grunted. “It’s your approximation theme. None of us will never know. We can only approximate.” I watched him for approval.
His face lit up. “Very good, Leslita. I supppose if there’s a sale on these chairs, we ought to get you one, too.”
I shook my head and made a ring in the sand with my toe. “You are the only one who should sit in that chair,” I said.
He patted the wood. “It’s my other half.”
“I can’t believe you haven’t fallen out of it.” I pointed with my toe to the rip in the canvas.
“Leslita, this chair has had that tear ever since I got it. And I’m still here, safe and sound. You know what?” His brown eye gleamed. “The day I fold it up is the day I move on.”
“On? You mean to another place?”
He shook his head, settling back to look out at the sea. “Change things, Leslie, change things.”
I studied him, legs extended, hands on the armrests, ponderous and calm. His eyes had narrowed. He looked a little like an Indian. Massasoit, the Wampanoag chief who taught the white man to survive. What did he mean by change things? He sat quietly, communing with the ocean, his instrument for meaning, consciousness and peace. I would not interrupt. He smiled, very lo
vingly, at the sea.
“What’s the matter, Leslita? Afraid?”
I felt myself start. He was right. I was afraid. I said nothing, trying to trace the circle in the sand.
“You’re going to be fine,” he said gently, his eyes still on the sea.
I sighed. I couldn’t push it away. The sadness swelled around me like a cocoon. He wouldn’t look at me. The telescope to the ocean was his bayonet, keeping me to the side, nudging me out of the way.
“I’m going to keep walking,” I said to the side of his face.
I had climbed into bed with my tea that night when I heard the ringing of the phone. It was Cornelia. She sounded tired, and I guessed that I did, too. “What’s going on?” I asked.
She let out a frustrated sigh. “This penny royal is not working. I have done it eight days now and nothing is happening except this sick feeling all the time and this pain and I feel like any minute I am getting my period.”
“Did you call the lady again?”
“Ya, this morning. She said that if it is not working after one week then it is not going to work and I should stop and get the abortion. So I will call tomorrow morning and try to get it as soon as they can make it.”
“Well, I suppose that’s your best bet.”
“I guess so.” She was brief, matter-of-fact, and very exhausted.
The line held our silence.
“Cornelia,” I said, “It’ll be over very soon.”
They gave her an eight-a.m. appointment the following week, but told her to be there at seven. I set my alarm for six and picked her up at six-thirty. She came running out of the house, her hair flying in its usual slightly messy ponytail, and flopped into the front seat of the car.
“Hi,” I said. “How do you feel?”
“Terrible!” She reached down to push her bag under the dashboard. “I feel fat and sick and ugly and I want this to be just over. I cannot understand why everyone is saying it’s so great to be pregnant. For the last three days I ate toast—just toast. And a little rice. And yesterday some broccoli. But it took hours to eat this broccoli. I just don’t understand how all these women are doing it.”
The Shadow Man Page 27