The Critical List

by Wenke, John;

  Joey Merriweather, huffing his smoke, stands in wobbly space. The cops grab one foot each and rake Herbert through blankets and trash, over one comatose sleeper, and into the open corridor. One cop is on the walkie-talkie.

  Joey presses his fingers to his eyes and brings the big clock into focus. It’s 7:01 a.m. He’s late. By now, he’s usually heading east on Market, seven whole blocks, before turning south on his way to the river. There, six days a week, as dependable as the light, he takes up his broom and sweeps five loading docks, pushing into piles butts, cans, wrappers, newspapers, and spoiled produce—the cargo rotted mess of black lettuce, wormy grapes, smashed mangoes, and bruised bananas. Sometimes, from out of the stew, he’ll forage for roughage or assemble a fruit salad. From his sister’s husband, dock manager Carmine de Palma, he collects twenty dollars in cash. Enough for the day’s hooch and huff and enough to save for Sunday. Meals he takes mostly at the shelter—all slop and gop and whole grain crusts. When he’s open to prayer, he lights upon the Mission—all that fool’s gruel and knobby potatoes. The benighted converts always want to know, “Are you free in the Lord?”

  When Joey Merriweather bends to fold his blanket, he feels his brain spasm. Squat City fandangos around him, all splashing colors and wiggling walls. His head constricts, thick with glue. His tongue wads: the sawdust craw is desert dry. To steady his stomach, he sucks his smoke. Water—the problem with water. Too little and too much. All over thirst and bladder burst. He reaches for his jug. Yesterday’s gallon of Carlo is empty. He shakes a green jug. It sloshes. Water. He drinks enough to flatten the dust and then he wades down Condo Lane, careful to skirt the ghetto. When his legs buckle and brace, he pulls up short and takes a deeper huff. Inside, he rattles like a closet full of cracked and shattered glass.

  Goat and Bo-Bo greet him.

  “Hey, Huff, my man.”

  “How you be bein’, Huff?”

  Goat holds one of his large green plastic bags. He collects aluminum cans for a living. For laughs and maybe for nourishment, Goat occasionally pulls one out and snaps a wild-dog bite. He chomps and chews and makes like he swallows.

  “No trains this mornin’,” Bo-Bo tells Joey. “Gone be commuter hell. Upside must be a war zone.”

  The subway concourse is eerily empty. Only the bagel shop is open. The grates are pulled in front of the tobacco and newsstand. On a normal day, the commuters swell and clutter the concourse. It’s a walled-in mass of hustling peds. Now, a lone transit cop shuffles his feet and plays with his fingers. The world is quiet. It’s a remarkable thing—being able to hear.

  Joey nods and steps past Bo-Bo and Goat. He needs to get to the Portable John, the city’s chief concession to the ineluctable presence of Squat City. The John is tucked across the corridor, in a recessed alcove, straddled by curving iron supports that disappear into concrete slabs.

  “Weather?”

  Out of the highest necessity, Joey Merriweather has come to master the one-word sentence.

  “Don’t know the weather,” Goat replies, walking behind Joey. “Ain’t been Upside yet. But I’ll say this: the way things been, it ain’t no sunny and seventy.”

  The City of Brotherly Love has been compressed by a January freeze. Night temperatures sink below zero. For five days now, the high has yet to reach twenty.

  “Hey, Huff!” Bo-Bo calls. “Why don’t ya’ll bag work and kick back at my pad? Today, I be goin’ exactly nowhere. Just me and my sports talk radio.”

  “Work!” No work, no hooch.

  “One day ain’t gone break you. You must got some scratch hidin’ somewhere.”

  “Work!”

  Joey Merriweather waves them away, tugs open the John door and weaves up the step. The stench could kill a doornail.

  The city shivers under glass, a glittering sheen of pimpled ice. Overnight, a misty spew of freezing rain glazed buildings, signs, poles, lights, pavements, roofs, awnings, wires, cars, and streets. The treacherous ice rink world is seized by traffic rigor mortis. A bus sits sideways against People’s National Bank. In the intersection, fifteen cars nestle dent to dent. The drivers either sit surly or huddle in groups or grip handles in the slippery attempt to inspect damage. Two blocks down, stalled in gridlock, a city pick-up truck, yellow light flashing, shudders beneath a full load of rock salt.

  At the top of the subway steps, Joey Merriweather clutches the railing and tries to remember if he ever knew how to skate. In front of the shoe store, a man with a spade clangs ice into slivers. A few frightened peds feel their way along plate glass, doors, brownstone, and pointed brick. One man, dressed in a fancy black overcoat and a big Russian hat, glides along on penny loafers, pushing forward one foot at a time, skating down the pavement. A woman in a long skirt and pumps barges from an apartment house door, takes two slithering steps and skids toward the street. All flapping arms and twisting torso, she is fortunate to slam a lamppost. She hugs it, cheek to squeak, and twirls down to the ground, legs all loose and heels clicking. Just now, the morning sun sneaks through the clouds and splatters the scene with sparkles. Just as quickly, the clouds close.

  Joey has no idea what to do. He does not feel exactly light on his feet. The thought of slipping and falling along twelve blocks does little to quell his hammering head or untangle his twisted stomach. But the consequence is clear: no work, no hooch. Besides, it’s his job to work. His father always said, “Do your job!” Today there will even be more of a job. More work, more hooch. During other winter emergencies, during last month’s blizzard, in fact, Carmine let Joey fill in on union jobs. Every night, the produce comes in. Every day, it’s got to get out. For three hours, Carmine let Joey drive a front loader.

  He steps away from the railing. Surprisingly, he does not go flying, spinning, crashing. His floppy jogging shoes succeed in staying put. With his hands lightly pawing the air, he takes another step, sideways this time. It works and then it works again. He finds he can sidle without falling. Facing traffic, Joey Merriweather side-winds. Left foot out and down. Stop. Right foot catches up. Stop. The outer edge of his left shoe grabs and his right foot steadies his balance. In no time, he has gone one full block. Around him, peds skitter and gasp, oblivious it seems, to Joey’s discovery, this new law of Newtonian physics. Crossing the street, he steps between bumpers of stationary cars. Away from the buildings, the freezing mist settles on his baseball cap brim, which is crushed by a tied gray thermal hood. Beneath his brown, lived-in, once-upon-a-rich man Harris Tweed overcoat, two sweaters clasp his chest. Both pairs of pants straddle his hips and all three pairs of socks cling to his feet. Inside the layers, the great furnace hums. As he navigates, he feels his legs and feet go warm. His head-hurt eases; his stomach untangles. It’s like taking a morning jog. Intent on his two-step shuffle, he hurries south on Fourth Street and barely notices the water gurgling up from the sewer. They will have to airdrop the water company repair crew. Joey leaves the chaos behind. So awed is he by his artful locomotion that he ignores the gaggle of black school children, freed for the day, clustering to watch the street turn into a freezing lake. As he passes, they hoot, laugh, and holler.

  “The bum be ballroom dancin’.”

  One clapping, shimmying ten-year-old boy performs an impromptu rap.

  “The white man shake/he really bake/the street be ice/like his device/he go fast/like he be—”

  Through his layers, Joey barely feels the ice dart jab him in the back. He knows if he turns to hiss or snarl he will go down. The sidewalk strut requires concentration. If he can make it one more block, he will have won the day. He can then walk straight on through The Fields, an unimproved urban renewal parcel that has almost become a sports stadium, a city park, and a senior citizens center. Now, its sprawling surface is a tangled parcel of overgrown grass, burdock, pigweed, and jimson. Its edges are cluttered with mounds of clawed plastic bags, heaps of broken furniture, a display of abandoned appliances, a
nd a mass of tinseled brown Christmas trees. Cutting through The Fields will take him right to the edge of Delaware Avenue. From there he’ll have a short sidestep hop to the dock.

  Safe in The Fields, the ice rink behind him, Joey straightens out. With the wind at his back, he crunches through the frozen weeds, skirting the icy landfill heaps. He lifts his foot high and bangs it through stalagmite strips that rattle, click, slither, and then crash. Beyond the abandoned refrigerator, the landscape glitters like crystal. Joey plunges on. The sky humps into rolling hills of mottled gray splashed with dabs of white. At the end of the lot, the upper floors of the dock warehouse are lost behind the deserted I-95 Expressway.

  By now, Joey Merriweather feels awake and ready to work. The head-hammer is gone; his stomach merely bunches into a compliant fist of pain. He will earn an appetite for brunch. With added cash, he figures on skipping the shelter and splurging on potted meat. At the convenience store at Front and Locust, he can get some Spam, fresh Italian rolls, a box of Juicy Fruit, a bag of Doritos, and two bottles of the Bird. In the warmth of Squat City, reposing on his pad, he will make his own Thanksgiving feast.

  Tangled with anticipation, Joey trips over a log and tumbles. Ice blades scrape his chilled face. He lands belly-square on a sharp rock that penetrates his take-a-moon-walk layers and punches his solar plexus. His breath leaves with a gush. He snaps his body switchblade shut, his knees cuddling his guts, his gloved hands patting his face. As he sits up, a frozen stick slices his forehead. Angry, he hoists himself to all fours, his breath still gone, and his body shaking in the hyper-wrench of asphyxiation. Gasping, he crunches backwards until his ass finds the log. He leans forward and wheezes. His pain is doing what only pain can sometimes do; it pries open the locked and rusted vault of memory. A young boy runs from his pursuers. With the end zone looming, a hand grips his ankle. Struggling, the boy falls flat and smashes on the point of the football. That whoosh of air and then the pain. They turn him over. Hey, Joey, his father calls, lifting the front of the boy’s padded pants. You’ll be okay. You just got the wind knocked out of you.

  Hunching atop the log, Joey Merriweather still has the wind knocked out of him. He rocks back and forth, fighting nausea, trying to suck the air. Losing his breath was like tasting death. Gradually, after lung-burst spasms, he unfolds himself and looks at the ground. He scowls; the rock he hit is not a rock but a toaster oven without a door. He shakes his head and breathes some more. The mule-kicked feeling subsides, and the stabbing forehead grinds down and dulls. He takes off a glove and dabs the wound. Flecks of blood blot his fingers. From the ground, he grabs a shredded crystal and crushes it. He brings the bits to his forehead. As the ice leeches water, he rubs in the dripping shells. The pain slinks back to its cave. Wet flecks of ice drip away. After wiping his hand on his coat, he rubs his forehead dry. He inspects his fingers. No blood. He pulls his cap to cover the scratch and is pleased to find that he has been breathing all that time.

  Relieved, he lets his hand fall lightly to his side, where it barely settles on the cold log. The icy casing startles him; a log should have bark. This one has feathers. His hand travels and his fingers flutter along a knotted lump. Slowly, he tilts his head left, lowers his chin, and sees the open eyes of a man with wavy black hair. Rimmed with red, a purple hole the size of a dime dots his left temple. Like the weeds, toaster oven, streets, sidewalks, buildings, and cars, like all exposed surfaces, the man in the black tuxedo and ruffled shirt is sheathed with pimpled ice.

  Retracting his hand, Joey jumps out of his skin. Crab-walk wild, he thrashes away. Around him, weeds jangle like gnomic laughter. He stares right and left to see if he is about to be arrested, finger-printed, charged, tried, and executed. He looks straight up, all ready to tell the police helicopter he didn’t do it. But no one can see into this tangled bower. From where he sits, there is no warehouse, no expressway, no abandoned refrigerators, no rowhouses, no skyscrapers. It’s just Joey, the ghost, and the dead man’s body. There is also a weed-crushed space to his right, like some elephant rolled over on it. A trail winds off.

  The dead man got dumped out in the cold. Welcome to the Upside life. He didn’t even get a shuddering grate, some smelly Mission sheets or a patch of ghetto linoleum. All dressed up and no—Joey stifles the joke. He realizes the ghost can hear his thoughts, and without question the ghost hovers nearby, guarding the finished flesh like a zebra mother over her dead colt. It would not do for Joey to mock the dead. It is his belief that the dead are not taken away. They are not buried in the big underground. Instead, they crowd close, huddling at elbows. Joey will never say so, but every night he sleeps with his mother and father, both dead nearly forty years, taken abruptly in the car crash when he was only twelve. Even as he limped away from the wreck, he felt them clinging. He clung back. They have never gone away. They live with him in the Condominium section of Squat City.

  Joey Merriweather reaches out and touches the pale bluish face. It is sleek with ice, not a face so much as a shield, covered on the outside and frozen within, in a state of arrest but already breaking down, already having begun to disappear. His knuckles trail over eyebrow ridges and plunk the peak of his nose. He paddles the cheek and pats the hair. Ice crumbles and flakes. Disintegration. To please the ghost, Joey offers a prayer directly to the crowded silence.

  “May you find,” he thinks, “the easeful repose of life eternal. Mom and Dad, please help steady this newborn ghost.”

  “Who?” Joey blurts, scattering the silence. As much as he’d like to, he cannot bring himself to speak whole gobs to the dead man’s body. The ghost already knows his thoughts, hears the whole question, but the murdered man’s body cannot hear.

  “Search.”

  Joey fans his hands across the chest and finds a bulge above the heart. He lifts the lapels and breaks the ice. He slithers his hand inside, afraid of touching the feathers. He feels the lump and takes it out. The wallet has credit cards and pictures and a driver’s license behind a plastic sheath. Joey turns it to the side and squints.

  James P. Pierce. 1868 Woodrow Lane, Radnor, PA.

  Jimmy Pierce. Downside, he would need a handle. Jimmy is for Pierce and P. is for Pistol.

  “Hey, Huff!” Goat calls. “Who you got there?”

  “Pistol.”

  “He be stiff and straight all right, a real son of a gun.”

  Joey removes a bunch of green from the wallet and fans it.

  By now, the ground chill has seeped through the layers and shivers his bones. With a creaky push, he gets to all fours and stands up. He slips the wallet into his pocket, puts his glove back on and looks up.

  Without speaking, he informs the ghost, “Don’t worry. I’ll take good care of the Pistol.” And then, with a wild thrilling defiance of the consequences, he looks down, draws a breath, and lets his voice go. His voice is cracked and hoarse, but his words are refined, precise.

  “Mr. Pierce, you are in quite a predicament, almost past help. But I’ll help. I’ll see to it that your day improves.”

  It’s been more than a decade since Joey Merriweather has spoken on the telephone. It’s not a matter of hating speech—he loved and loves words. Rather, he fears the dissipation of his soul. Years ago, at the college where he taught, he ripped away the veils and achieved synthesis: Spirit is the Creator and contains life within itself. The soul is breath—Atman—and breath effuses from the omphalos, the deep center, the eternal circle. If the Word became Flesh, then Spirit is coextensive with words. Talk is so much dissipation. He understood why the church mystics breathed with God and ghosts in silence. Professor Merriweather’s brilliance was in his peculiar method of atonement: to smoke a cigarette was—is—to relinquish the self in a burnt offering, exhaled breath could carry unspoken words back to Spirit. The University Administration did not see the poignancy of his one-word lectures and his hour-long smoking at the podium. His wife refused to stay married to silence a
nd smoke. He opted out, gratefully. But now is a problem; here is a telephone, and back there wait the ghost and Pistol.

  Joey lifts the receiver and smacks the ice from the keyboard. He pauses. He promised the ghost and owes Pistol. He squints and pushes 9-1-1.

  “City emergency,” a woman says. “Speak clearly, please.”

  He freezes to the sound. Has his ex-wife become an operator?

  “Is anybody there?”

  No. There are other women in the world. “Dead!” Joey mumbles.

  “Pardon me? I can’t help you if you don’t speak up. Did you say someone is dead?”

  “Fields.”

  Inside the furnace, pressure builds. Joey sweats. He wants to give it up and scurry Downside.

  “Who is Fields? Is Fields dead? Please, sir, speak up! Otherwise, I will have to cut you off.”

  “Anima mundi,” he sputters. It’s as close as he gets to an explanation. He’s trying to say he doesn’t want to lose his soul. He breathes hard.

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  The wind shakes the open booth. The chill pierces his core. It’s the ghost. The ghost followed him to see how he would do and now the ghost is jabbing him. Pierce is Pistol and Pistol is Pierce.

  “All right, then, I’ll do it,” he shouts. Fighting tears, he surrenders. “There’s a dead man left like a decomposing log in the middle of The Fields.”

  “What fields, sir?”