Great Jones Street (Contemporary American Fiction) Page 13

  “Slobber, don’t you, when the piercing questions are asked. Cringe and snivel in the face of the heavy pressures. A dim thing, Blessy, that’s what you be. Slow. All too bloody slow.”

  “Prenatal malnutrition,” Blessington said.

  “You’ve long since tipped the balance the other way, haven’t you, piggeldy-wiggeldy?”

  “Don’t you go insulting me again.”

  “A right rosy piglet you are. Ready for the spit.”

  “Don’t you go saying that now. I’ll hold my breath I will. Then you’ll be sorry. Then you’ll see the error of your ways.”

  “Turning, turning, turning. Burning, burning, burning. Melting in the mouth like fresh farm butter.”

  “You’ll go too far one day. The way mum went too far with poor old dad every time dad sat himself in the sitting room to read the adverts. You’ll give me a stroke you will. How would you like it if I had a stroke that paralyzed one side of my body? Who would cook for you and see to your luggage and clean the house and offer unstinting companionship?”

  “The other side of your body,” Watney said.

  “Poo on you, mate.”

  “Back to the question at hand. Given the choice, Blessy, would you rather be an elderly, a malignant or a chronic? Into the microphone if you would.”

  “My solicitor instructs me to say nothing at this time.”

  “Crafty little brute. He’s a crafty little brute, this one is. We have our small entertainments, Bucky. You’re all done with traveling but we’re still inveterate travelers. We have to have our entertainments. We need something to while away the time, we inveterates of the travel game. Is the product in this room, Bucky? If not, why not?”

  “Which product is that?”

  “I’m here to make a serious bid,” Watney said. “We Anglo-Europeans are serious businessmen. We cling to the old methods, the old ways, the old traditions. None of your slick trading here. We make a solid offer and we stick to it. We are solid business people. We have various interests and a vast number of operations. We aren’t larky boys out for a bit of a punch-up. We’re after money, not thrills. Our operations are solid operations. We don’t use unorthodox methods and we don’t employ maniacs, sadists and addicts. This is our way. The orthodox way. The Anglo-European way.”

  “Tell him about the Malta deal,” Blessington said.

  17

  IN THE NIGHT I passed people trooping home with their newspapers, bearers of a weight that went beyond simple pounds and ounces. They headed up a street still blistered with neon and other watery sores, men and women almost single file, leaning into the wind, mountain guides trained against complaint, hired to carry home this swollen load and undress it section by section until the only thing left was the blur of faint print on their fingers. Against the moral obligations of their Saturday night, only yards from the newsstand, they had to walk around a man burning wooden crates, standing almost in the fire, looking at no one, a man dressed in a black coat with pockets torn away, leaving streaks of white lining at his hips. I held my hands for a moment over the flames. The man’s own hands were furled in each other, held high on his chest, fingernails of rust and chiseled silver, half-moon scar, shredded skin at the knuckles, luxuriant gash the length of one thumb. Easy to imagine a hundred miles of lines crosshatching his palms. Covering the man’s head was a football helmet, Miami Dolphins, complete with face mask.

  “Retractable ball points,” he said. “Thirty-five cents.”

  Down Second Avenue, darker here in its plodding Ukrainian sleep, I saw a small woman about to cross the street. She pointed at the opposite corner, holding her right arm perfectly straight, index finger extended. Then she lowered the arm and walked swiftly across the street in the direction she’d indicated. Here she made a sharp left turn, raised her arm, pointed over the speckled concrete to the end of the block and walked in that direction. Turn, point, march. I watched her stop at the far corner, turn to the right and point again. A Good Humor truck, stripped and gutted, sat in a lot near the Bowery. I walked slowly west. For a second nothing moved. There were no people in sight and traffic was nonexistent. I stopped on the corner and looked all around me. The wind took papers and boxes. Then, finally, about two blocks south, I saw men with rags go out into the middle of the street to await the next cycle of traffic, men with rags to clean the windshields, going out slowly from doorways and side streets, clean the windshields for a fee, men limping into the street, about a dozen of them, and then the first car came into view, moving north from one of the bridges or from Chinatown or Little Italy or the bank buildings, the first car followed by others, their lights rising over humps in the street, scores of cars coming up the Bowery toward the wild men with rags.

  Micklewhite’s door was open. The frame and edge of the door had been splintered. I looked into the room. She was sitting on a sofa watching television. I knocked on the door frame and she looked up.

  “I told them go scratch your ass with a broken bottle. Go scratch your heinie, I told them. I wasn’t afraid of them. Them or nobody else. Breaking in my door like that and coming in here to smack me around. I don’t take that. Don’t come in here and give me that. I ain’t afraid of you punks and bums. I told them, mister. I don’t take smacking around. You want to rob me, one thing. Smack me around, whole different thing. My husband was here, they’d see. He’d of cut them up good. I’m telling you, mister. Good thing for them he’s dead and buried.”

  “How many?” I said.

  “There was four come in here and some more out in the hall that never even made it in. Smash, they come right through the door. Then when they got out of here they went upstairs, the whole bunch. I heard them on three, making noise with the mister up on three. Breaking through the door, smash. Crazy people. Say nothing, do nothing, take nothing. Crumbums, I told them, go scratch your heinie.”

  “Did they hurt you?”

  “It was him that stopped them,” she said. “They seen him there and that stopped them cold. He was right there on the chair and when they seen that, they went charging upstairs, taking over the whole building. They came in here to smack me around. Then they seen him on the chair and they went flying out. Good thing for them I got no more husband. He was good and sneaky in a fight. He was just a skinny-melink but he made up for it with sneakiness. Little as he was he’d sneak-fight bigger men right into the crash ward. He’d jap them when they weren’t ready. He’d go for the family jewels. That was the only thing in the world he was good at. Japping bigger men. He put many a bigger man out of commission. Sneakiest s.o.b. you’d ever want to meet.”

  I stepped into the room. Her son was on a chair in the corner. His own special chair, it seemed. No upholstery. Wood frame, binding, springs, two bed pillows. He wasn’t sitting or reclining; he was stored there, his head slowly rolling side to side, arms and legs stunted. Because of his disfigurement, everything about him was pervasively real and I was struck by a panic that went far beyond what my eyes had registered. His face seemed to have the consistency of pounded mud. The head was full of bulges and incurvatures, scant of hair, a soft curious object that seemed to belong in a greenish jar. Useless pair of club-hands. Arms about three-quarters normal size. Legs perhaps less than that. The boy was unforgettable in the sheer organic power of his presence. Standing before him was like witnessing the progress of some impossible mutation, bird to brown worm, but of course he’d been merely deposited there, wet, white and unchanging, completely stagnant, and I began to feel that I myself was the other point of the progression. The sense of shock and panic hadn’t left me yet and I understood why the marauders were not eager to browse in this particular room. One felt nearly displaced by the hint of structural transposition; he was what we’d always feared, ourselves in radical divestment, scrawled across the dark. Instead of leaving I went closer, drawn into what I felt was his ascendancy, the helpless strength of his entrapment in tepid flesh, in the reductions of being. I lowered myself to one knee and sought to trace som
e sightline or bearing in his pale stare. With my left hand I raised his head, finding nothing in the eyes beyond a rhythmic blink. I must have seemed a shadow to him, thin liquid, incidental to the block of light he lived in. For the first time I began to note his embryonic beauty. The blank eyes ticked. The mouth opened slightly, closing on loomed mucus. I’d thought the fear of being peeled to this limp circumstance had caused my panic, the astonishment of blood pausing in the body. But maybe it was something else as well, the possibility that such a circumstance concludes in beauty. There was a lure to the boy, an unsettling lunar pull, and I moved my hand over the moist surface of his face. Beauty is dangerous in narrow times, a knife in the slender neck of the rational man, and only those who live between the layers of these strange days can know its name and shape. When I took my hand from his face, the head resumed its metronomic roll. I was still afraid of him, more than ever in fact, but willing now to breathe his air, to smell the bland gases coming off him, to work myself into his consciousness, whatever there was of that. It would have been better (and even cheering) to think of him as some kind of super-crustacean or diabolic boiled vegetable. But he was too human for that, adhering to me as though by suction or sticky filaments. Mouth opened and closed. Eyes blinked at precise intervals. Head moved from side to side. Micklewhite adjusted the sound on her TV set.

  “Careful, he bites,” she said.

  I went upstairs to see Fenig. The door was almost off, leaning from the lower hinge. He was seated at his typewriter, looking into the keys. Bandages, tape and gauze were all over the floor. He tapped out a few characters, then turned toward the door and gave me a small wave. His face was full of bruises. There were bloodstains all over his clothes. Both brows were puffed up, his lower lip cut open, thick with dried blood. He hadn’t applied bandages or gauze to his wounds, at least not in exposed areas. I stood there watching him type a line or two, very slowly, his fingers merely pecking at the keys prior to each actual assault, the moment in which the words moved through his hands and found the page. He looked my way a second time.

  “Magazines keep folding. It’s not so good. I’ve spent a lot of time lately worrying about whether or not I’ve lost the essential spark. It’s not me I should have been concerned about. It’s the market. The market is getting smaller every day. The bright lights are dimming. The sounds and echoes are fading. The great elliptical arc is spinning ever slower.”

  “Did they take anything?” I said.

  “They just cuffed me around and stomped me a little bit. I was lucky. They were in the room probably only sixty seconds. They made a lot of noise coming up the stairs and a lot of noise going back down the stairs. I think that was the biggest part of their operation. The idea of taking over a building. The idea of breaking and entering. The idea of domination. It could have been a whole lot worse. I was lucky. I can’t get over how lucky I was. I know people who’d give almost anything to be as lucky as I was.”

  “Do you want me to help you clean up this mess?”

  “You mean the bandages and stuff. I’m the one who flung the bandages and stuff. They didn’t do that. I’m the one who did that. After they left I got all this stuff out of my medicine chest. The Band-Aid plastic strips. The safety gauze. The nonstick sterile pads. The first-aid tape. The absorbent cotton. I got it all out. I laid it out on the table and looked at it. I looked especially hard at the tan bandages with the clever little air vents. Then I swept the whole thing right off the table. What good’s gauze and cotton against the idea of domination? What good’s a sterile compress against the idea of domination? So I’ll bleed. So I’ll experience discomfort for a few days. I don’t think about that because right now, as I sit in this chair talking to you, I’m in the midst of work on a whole new genre. Fi-nance. Financial writing. Books and articles for millionaires and potential millionaires. The floodgates are opened and the words are pouring out. Financial literature. Handled right it’s a goddamn gold mine, relatively speaking.”

  My own door had not been touched. I went inside and turned on the radio. It was cold in the room. There was an airline bag near the door, accidentally left behind by Watney’s manservant. The phone rang. It was Azarian in Los Angeles, saying his people were very anxious to bid. I hung up. On the radio several men were conversing in an unfamiliar language. I looked in the trunk for an extra blanket. The package containing the mountain tapes was gone. I had to work my way up and down several mental steps before I arrived at this conclusion. I knew at once that something was missing from the trunk. I realized it was the brown package. I thought the package contained the drug. Then I remembered Hanes had the package with the drug. The second package contained the tapes. The second package was gone. I stood in a corner of the room, near the window, crossing and uncrossing my arms, finally wedging my hands in my armpits for warmth. I knew I’d never be able to reproduce the complex emotional content of those tapes, or remember a single lyric.

  After a while I went over to the door, picked up Watney’s airline bag and unzippered it. Inside were several hundred bubble gum cards. Watney’s picture was on each one of them. A funny enough sight. But not what I needed at the moment.

  There was no extra blanket. I put Opel’s coat over my shoulders, placed the one available blanket over the coat and then settled into a chair and waited for the first line of light to appear across the window, bringing sleep with no dreams.

  18

  I PICKED UP the telephone and listened to the dial tone, music of a dead universe. The sound fascinated me. Ever since the phone had been put back in working order, I had fallen into the habit of lifting the receiver from time to time and simply listening. Source of pleasure and fear never before explored. It was always the same, silence endowed with acoustical properties.

  I dialed the numbers of Globke’s office, his home, his car. Nobody knew where he was. His wife spoke to me about the stillness at the center of a thing in motion. In the background, as she talked, I heard my own voice, revolving at thirty-three and a third, second cut on side one of third album.

  A man wearing a gendarme’s cape appeared at the door. He was small and pallid, almost lost in the cape and long boots, and in his eyes was a frenzy he seemed to be trying to pass off as alertness. He gestured toward the bathroom.

  “What’s in there?”

  “Everything that’s not in here.”

  “My name isn’t important. Menefee. It happens to be Menefee but that’s not important. What’s important is the person I’m clearing for. I’m here to clear. I’m here to make the area secure before you and the person in question conduct your undisclosed business. We have procedures we’ve developed over a long period of time. Can I use your phone?”

  As he dialed he stood between me and the telephone. Talking to the person at the other end he buried his head in the cape. Merely listening he turned slightly and glanced my way every few seconds, as if verifying a description.

  “Change of plan,” he said. “We don’t go there. He comes here.”

  “Who comes here?” I said.

  “Dr. Pepper.”

  “He’s going to be disappointed.”

  “Don’t tell me anything,” Menefee said. “I’m only here to clear. I make things secure. I work with details, not sum totals. I don’t want to be made a party to any information that has sum totals involved in it. This job is tough enough. Handling details for a man like Dr. Pepper is like the ultimate in nerve-rackingness. We run up and down the country, in and out of hotels, motels, airplanes, taxi-cabs. Seeing people, fleeing people. Making deals, turning wheels. Dr. Pepper is a master of many things. People think he restricts his genius to dope and matters related to dope. Dope-related matters. Not so. The man shows his genius in an unspecified number of ways, each and every day, north and south, in lake country or mountain terrain, talking to the makers and shakers or just ambling along a country road laying a gentle rap on some backpacker who’s into penance and mortification. But the man’s a stickler for detail and this makes
my work tough as can be. Soon’s we get something all set up he contacts me in some devious way and changes eight details out of a possible eleven. You could say the man’s hyper-secretive. You could use adjectives like eerie and uncanny and you’d be right on the mark. He’s got disguises, he’s got surprises. He doesn’t trust a soul, least of all me. He’s all the time devising tests to determine my loyalty. The man’s a master of regional accents, a master of total recall, a master of surreptitiousness. Every time I meet some stranger somewhere I automatically assume it’s Dr. Pepper in disguise probing at my loyalty. But the man’s an aw-thentic genius. I’m grateful to him. I had two years of crisis sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara in Santa Barbara, California. Ruined my head just about. Dr. Pepper took me out of the world of terminology and numbers and classifications and provided access to new kinds of awareness. Centrifugalism and overloads. Brain-patching. Electrode play areas.”

  He stopped talking abruptly and I became aware of a jackhammer beating into the street about half a block to the west. I sat at the small table near the sink. Menefee remained by the door, his body yielding to an occasional mild twitch, his face reflecting a mental cc icentration so intense I thought his eyeballs might suddenly click backward in their sockets in order to peer into the depths of his mind, leaving curdled sludge and pink drippings for my own eyes to gaze upon. Slowly he moved across the door, opened it an inch and looked into the hall. Then he billowed back toward the middle of the room, followed by the man himself, Dr. Pepper, a figure of ordinary size, wearing ordinary and somewhat out-of-date clothing, all in all no less common than a clam on a paper plate. Menefee made clearing motions with his hands and after the door was locked, the shade drawn and the introductions made, we crowded around the table, Pepper and I seated on identical straight-backed chairs and facing each other, Menefee between us in the low-slung canvas chair, leaning forward, his face at table level.