All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  “Give us the whisky,” one of the cops said. Poodles handed him the bottle and Benny leapt out of his arms, yapping at the heels of the cops. One of them whirled Poodles around and up against a wall, kicking his legs apart.

  “For Christ sake, get your hands off me,” he cried

  “We got a touchy peeper.” The cop began to pat down his hips, getting up close to him. “And call off your dog,” the cop said and laughed.

  “Look, I got a business. I live just down the lane.”

  “Yeah, and what do you do?”

  “I’m an outfitter.”

  “A what?”

  “An outfitter.”

  “What’s that – a plumber?”

  “I make suits.”

  “You know what I can’t understand,” the other cop said, “is how come you guys fool around in back alleys when there’s all that naked snatch just waiting in the bars downtown?”

  “I was looking for someone,” he said. “There was someone waiting for me out there.” He scooped up the dog.

  The cop opened Poodles’ wallet and took out a card. “Ignatius John Tacoma. So, what is it you do, Tacoma?”

  “I own a clothing store. Where else do you think I’d get a good-looking suit like this.”

  “Stand straight and turn around,” one cop said.

  “Okay, so I’m straight.”

  “Maybe you’re queer?” the cop said

  “You don’t got no call to insult me,” Poodles said. “All I want is to be left alone. I got my privacy.”

  “How come,” the cop said, “if there’s nothing wrong you’re sweating so much?”

  “Who’s sweating?” Poodles said. “I’m easy.”

  “Yeah, how easy?”

  “How calm can I get?” he said, squinting into the flashlight. “I got nothing to worry about.”

  “We’ll see,” the cop said.

  Poodles put up his hand, shielding his face. “What’s to see?” he asked, but now that the glaring light was out of his eyes he saw that both cops were very young, almost baby-faced, and he was furious that he’d let himself be handled so easily. “Just like a fucking window blind,” he said.

  “What?” one cop said.

  “None of your damn business,” he cried. “If I wanta spend my whole goddamn life down a back alley it’s none of your business.”

  He was so angry with himself that there were tears in his eyes. “Lou’d just love to see me like this,” he said and turned to see if her face wasn’t there in the window.

  “Who’s Lou?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know,” Poodles said contemptuously.

  “Go on home,” the other cop said. “Get your act together,” and both cops stepped back into the dark.

  “You call this an act?” he yelled. “This is no goddamn act,” and he shook his fist at the shadows. The cops didn’t answer.

  “You’re crazy,” Poodles cried, cradling the dog. Benny was licking his hand. “You got your dumb flashlights but you got nothing on me.” One of the dog’s little woollen mittens was missing. He didn’t know how he could explain to the girls how he’d lost the mitten. “You don’t see nothing,” he cried, looking again for her face in the window. “An’ you can’t do nothing, ’cause I got collateral, man. I got collateral.”

  DARK LAUGHTER

  It was late afternoon and overcast. The light through the tinted ceiling glass of the art gallery made the large plaster maquettes by Henry Moore loom up like bones and socket holes hollowed by the wind. The security guard in the archway was watching two men who were walking arm in arm, taking their time. They looked like old friends, but they had met only that afternoon beside the reclining nude with the huge hips and pellet head. They walked at an even pace, silent for a long while, a little shy but in step. Every now and then they paused, looked at one of the huge white plaster casts, and once the older man said, “This is desert stuff. I’ve never seen the desert but the man who did this has got a desert wind inside his head.” He smiled, kneading the palm of his hand, as if the soreness of an old wound were there. He seemed a touch afraid of something, yet he was always smiling. “I’m dying,” he said. “Some go quick. Me, I’m going slowly. It’s the human situation, that’s all.”

  The younger man said, “You mean you’re really sick?” The older man, his breath somewhat sour, holding the young man close to him, said, “Do I look sick to you? All a man needs is a pinch on the cheeks for a little colour,” and he suddenly pinched the younger man playfully, laughing, saying, “My boy, my boy, what did you think when you saw me coming at you?”

  “Nothing,” he said warily, feeling uncertain of what to make of this man who had started talking to him so intimately, as if he believed they shared something.

  “Nothing? How can you think nothing when someone zeros in on you?”

  “I don’t know. I just thought, this guy’s coming at me and I don’t run from nothing. Never did, never will.”

  “Really, now. So what do you do?”

  “I own a wrecking lot.”

  “A what?”

  “Cars. Trucks. A regular wrecking lot, you know, where old cars go.”

  “A wrecking lot. And you come here?” The older man smiled.

  “Why not?” he said, a little wounded. “I feel at home. I like all the whiteness, like these things are the blown-up bones of birds.”

  “Birds? They look just like cow bones or horses’ bones to me.”

  “I only know about bird bones. I shoot birds.”

  The old man, rubbing the palm of his hand, stared at his open hand for a moment, and then pointed at a tall white totem sculpture. “It’s like it’s wearing a condom,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It’s like a plaster cast of a huge penis wearing a condom. By the way, where does a man like you shoot birds?”

  “On the lot. Where else? Except I don’t do it no more.”

  “Why not?”

  “They learned, I guess, or maybe all those tiny skeletons lying around scare them away now.”

  The guard stood with his eyes closed, half-asleep on his feet, and then, as if alert and on the watch, he opened his eyes and looked quickly around, sullen and unsmiling.

  “So why?” the older man asked.

  “Why what?”

  “Why shoot birds? Why would you want to shoot birds?”

  “I didn’t want to, I just did, that’s all. I sit out there in the sun and there’s nothing to do, except the sun’s so nice on the hubcaps and fenders and such like, and the silence, I like that. And them caw-cawing crows and starlings just come and shit all over everything so I just take my time and shoot ’em dead because what I like best is silence, and when there’s only the wind, and even better when there’s no wind, except then you can always hear a fly. Somewhere there’s always a buzzing fly.” He was talking at the top of his voice and the guard had taken three strides into the hall, hissing at them and flapping his arms. The older man, smiling, said, “What’s your name?”

  “Abel,” the younger man replied, putting out his hand.

  “Really? Abel?”

  “My father’s joke. My father’s a joker who never laughs. His name’s Adam, so he called me Abel.” The older man took his arm again and they began walking. The light had gone out of the skylight windows.

  “So who’s Cain?” the older man asked.

  “Cain? What do I know? The whole world. Anyway, I got no brother. What’s your name?”

  “Luther.”

  “Luther what?”

  “Luther Stahll.”

  “What do you do, Luther Stahll, when you’re not zeroing in on people in public galleries?”

  “I was a cop. A few years ago.”

  “A cop. You get busted?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that.”

  “You quit?”

  “No. I just decided I didn’t want to talk to anyone.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just about,” he said and
tucked his head into his shoulder, an almost coy gesture, as if he were about to acknowledge some shameful secret about himself. But he was still smiling. “I was a swimmer, see? I mean a real police-games champion kind of swimmer. I could go longer and farther underwater than anybody knew. I used to spend my lunch hours swimming underwater, sometimes floating with my eyes closed like I was drifting toward I don’t know what. I always had this sense that there was an unknown what out there in the silence, except it’s not really a silence, you know, it’s more like silent music would be if it could be silent. And one day I opened my eyes and I was staring into one of those big underwater round lights in the wall, a big eye of light swamping me, and I stared into it with my hands against the wall. I couldn’t see anything and I had nothing to say so later I just sat down in my life like it was a room and I was alone and said nothing.”

  “For how long?”

  “Nearly two years.”

  “My God. How could you stand it?”

  “You’re the one who’s supposed to be so crazy for silence,” Luther said.

  “Yeah, but I gotta at least hear my own voice. I mean, sometimes I get up in the morning and I say, ‘It’s a hell of a morning,’ and I feel good because I hear myself say it’s a hell of a morning.”

  “Well, it’s true. Sometimes I laughed.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, that’s something,” Abel said and stroked his long hair flat over his ears with the palms of his hands.

  “It’s everything,” Luther insisted. “When I was alone I’d sit out on the front porch and I’d listen to myself laugh.”

  “What were you laughing at?”

  “Not what. Who.”

  “Okay. Who?”

  “God,” he said, suddenly pinching Abel’s cheek again. “See, a little pinch, look how healthy you look.”

  “Come on, lay off,” Abel said, laughing shyly. “What the hell’s God got to do with this?”

  “Everything. I figure it’s the one thing I learned being a cop. Try laughing at a cop when he’s putting the arm on you and you know what he wants to do to you. He wants to kill you. But you laugh and there’s nothing he can do. There’s no law against laughter. It’s your only revenge.”

  “You’re not laughing,” Abel said. “I don’t hear you laughing.”

  “It’s hard to laugh alone,” Luther said and stood for a moment alongside a sculpture that was so polished it was almost glazed and there were cords of white string bound around the white body. “You know what I think when I look at this, and this’ll make you laugh? It reminds me of a plaster cast like you’d put on a broken arm, all wrapped like a butcher does in a meat market. I figure there’s a big side of red, living, healing meat in there and someday they’ll take the cast off.”

  “That doesn’t make me laugh.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “No.”

  Luther linked arms again and drew Abel in close. “Listen,” he said. “One day I went walking for the first time in two years, and standing on the curb I got so fascinated by the cars I stepped out and got sideswiped, knocked down like I was dead. A priest from some church, he heard the noise and he came running.” Luther had hold of Abel by the arm and said, “I’m lying there like I’m underwater, that’s how I felt, half-hearing everything, except somehow I knew I was okay, and I opened my eyes and this priest is over me saying, ‘Do you believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost?’ I knew right there, absolutely, that he wouldn’t laugh when I said to him, ‘I’m dying and you ask me riddles.’”

  Abel broke into a sputtering, coughing laughter and Luther, as if he were relieved, as if a view he had of things had been confirmed, smacked his hands together, the smack echoing in the empty hall, and they were laughing together as he said, “I eye-balled that old priest and he had the strangest look in his eye, like some men do, you know, when they’re down at the heels, half-broke and come from families that used to have money. He had that bewildered, regretful look, and I thought, My God, man, you’re more alone than I ever was, and I just walked away, laughing real hard as hell.”

  The security guard, hissing for silence, strode up to them and yelled, “Quiet. No disturbance is allowed.”

  “We’re only laughing,” Luther said.

  “Then laugh quietly. This is a public place,” the guard said sternly.

  “I’m sick, my life’s slipping away, and you talk like that to me,” Luther snorted, smiling as he led Abel by the elbow toward the archway. “Come on, Abel, it’s closing time anyway. We’ll talk a little in the dark. It’s dark out, you know. The sun’s gone down.”

  They walked out laughing quietly to themselves, side by side, as if they were old friends.

  A TERRIBLE DISCONTENT

  When Collette came home after being away for a long time, the first thing she did was run her hands through old lacy underclothes in the bureau and put bobby pins into the little porcelain blue bowl she had won at school for elocution, and then she got up on the bed and looked at her legs in the dresser mirror. Men had always said she had good legs, and she smiled, but later standing alone in the street in front of a shop window she saw only her pale face in the glass, and the only life on Dupont Street was a preacher down on his hands and knees scratching scripture on the sidewalk with a stub of chalk. She thought how deeply she had missed men, except now they all seemed to be like her brother – lanky, sallow, twenty years old, and ill at ease in his grey serge postman’s suit with the red seam-stripe up the leg.

  She was most at ease with herself walking alone on the streets that seemed surprisingly idle and wide, and then down the lanes between houses and back gardens. It had been a dry August and all the yard tomatoes were small, a pink plum size, and the ruts in the lane were filled with white dust, the sun strong on the dead twigs and vines. Someone was burning trash and a crow flew out of the cloud of smoke, settling behind her in the high branches of a silver birch tree. She took a flat stone and threw it at the crow, the stone slashing through the dry leaves. The bird cawed like raw laughter but she didn’t mind the bird’s cry: it was people laughing, the chuckling sound they made behind your back that she disliked. She shook her hair, long and loose, and laughed too, surprised at how loud she laughed, and the bird flew away and she thought, There goes the last laugh, those black wings.

  She leaned on the old slat gate that hung by one hinge from the garden fence, and Simon was there in the shade of the weeping willow tree their father had planted the year Simon was born. Their father had spent weeks under that tree one summer when she was still a high-school girl, whittling and carving flutes. He had said, There’s no point, at least not the point most people think is the point. Soon after, some papers arrived in a brown envelope and, a little later, a lean man who was wearing flight glasses shook his hand by the old slat gate, laughing slyly, saying, The beautiful thing is you old soldiers never die, no matter how old you get. The last she had heard, he was somewhere near the equator, probably dead because she got a yellow card postmarked Libreville saying he was Missing in Action, which was a funny way of putting it, she thought, for a man lying absolutely still somewhere. It struck her as she stared at Simon that he had their father’s lidded eyes and flat sloping cheekbones, always licking his thin lips, with a smile that might have been shyness but actually was secretive, cunning, which she liked in him, the way he went hunching along the street, shuffling heavy-footed, so big-boned and young. He surprised her by putting his hand on her shoulder and said that the old woman was in a rage about her not coming back to fix lunch on time and said she was a shirker always trailing trouble like a tin can, and when Collette said she’d hop to it, yes sir, and made a mocking little motion, waddling like a wind-up doll, he said the old woman had hollered and pounded her cane because Collette was off mooning up the road, which she was, she said, but not mooning, only wondering why she had once thought that her star had fallen out of the sky, and she laughed.

  The old woman, though she was blind, had always dealt
from a Braille deck when they played cards at night at the kitchen table, saying since Collette had been a little girl, Grandma’s got a right, and don’t forget that. When they were children, though Collette did not know how, the old woman had always snapped a black queen on her as if she meant it as a mark, and now she was harping and pouting again, insisting that they play as if it were the old days, and when Collette said, No, the old woman stomped her feet, tall and stone-blind, eighty-two, and leaned on her blackthorn cane, glaring wide-eyed, her eyes the colour of spit or fish eggs.

  Collette hated the old woman’s bird that had been with her for years, a guinea cock she kept on a string leash, the nickel-grey feathers shining and the red comb jiggling when it high-stepped in front of the old woman, who threw a fistful of corn and called out to Collette, You’re no good for anyone around here, and clomped up the porch steps, her guinea cock alongside her as she eased into the pine rocking chair. Collette stood out in the flower garden of foxgloves, poppies, and lilies, looking at the little bits of candy wrapper and an old nylon stocking that were blown up against the wire fence. She wondered how a woman could lose one stocking down a lane, particularly now when women were wearing pantyhose. Maybe it was a woman with a wooden leg, she thought, and laughed. And wouldn’t that be a sight, she said out loud so that the old woman sat upright, erect and listening, but Collette said nothing more, enjoying the silence, the sudden expectancy of the old woman. She looked up and Simon was there with his nose to the back window, watching, and Collette wasn’t at all certain why she had come home to the old iron-haired woman who had always been sour because Collette’s mother had died delivering her into the old woman’s hands on the kitchen table.

  The old woman called out, Get lunch, will you, if you haven’t forgotten how, and Collette took a swipe at the poppies with her foot, scattering the petals. Up in the window Simon was smiling, and under him on the porch the old woman caressed the neck of her cock. Collette fed the old woman buttered white bread, yellow pea soup, and poached eggs. The sun shone all day. There had been no rain. That night she lay on her bed, hands linked behind her head, a breeze bellying the window curtains, and the cool night air left her calm, at ease for the first time in a long while, except with the house being so quiet she could hear the old woman’s rattling snore, and she even found herself listening to the creaking beams. The curtains rose and fell like some frail body barely alive and sighing. She felt a yearning, and not just for a man, because a man could have held her but the way she felt it would have been too hard and unknowing, and how could a man know since she could hardly say herself how she wanted to feel a rush through her loins but no ache, to be touched lightly and lifted like those curtains, bellied up in the air as if they held some living thing. She wondered whether she wanted a child or maybe childhood again, except that she never wanted to be a girl again. There had been so little that was childlike in her life, with the bony hand of the old woman always on her, as if by being born she had murdered her mother. As for her father, until he went away he had acted as if any kindness were a dull brown penny like the coppers she had flattened when she put them on the railroad tracks, the tracks two blocks away, unused now, the ties overgrown with scrub and weeds. As a girl she had put her ear to the rails listening to what was far away, and on the day she was told that her father had gone she went along to the old tracks and lay down and cried and listened as if she might hear him somewhere. The old woman hardly seemed to know he was gone, hard and locked inside herself, the way she had always had hard fingernails, poking into the bedclothes when Collette was a baby, nails the colour of the underside of a turtle she had once seen over in a pond in the Allan Gardens hothouse, which she thought was the loveliest place to be alone in the city, far from the old woman’s cold and dry fingers.