Blue World

by Robert R. McCammon

  “Get it yourself.”

  “I said…bring me a beer.” His head turned, and he stared at Sophia with eyes that threatened destruction.

  Sophia held his gaze. She was a small dark-haired woman with a lifeless face, but her mouth tightened and she didn’t move; she looked like a tough reed, arching itself against an oncoming storm.

  Salomon worked his big knuckles. “If I have to get out of this chair,” he said quietly, “you’re goin’ to be real sorry.”

  She’d been sorry before; once he’d slapped her across the face so hard her ears had rung like Santa Maria’s bells for three days. Another time, he’d thrown her against a wall and he might have broken her ribs had Bridger not threatened to go for the police. The worst time, though, was when he’d kicked Chico and left a bruise on the boy’s shoulder for a week. She had gotten them into this mess, not Chico, and anytime Chico was hurt, it carved her heart to pieces.

  Salomon placed his hands on the armrests, in preparation to hoist his body out of the chair.

  Sophia turned and walked the four steps into what served as a kitchen. She opened the stuttering refrigerator, which held a mixture of leftovers, things in sacks, and bottles of the cheapest beer Salomon could find. Salomon settled himself back in his chair, paying no attention to Chico crawling mindlessly back and forth across the floor. A big, useless roach, Salomon thought. Somebody ought to squash the little bastard. Put him out of his misery. Hell, wouldn’t that be better than bein’ deaf, dumb, and half-blind? Anyway, Salomon reasoned, the kid was empty in the head. Couldn’t even walk. Just crawled around, a moron on hands and knees. Now, if he could get out and hustle some money somewhere, it might be different, but as far as Salomon could see, all Chico did was take up room, shit, and eat. “You ain’t nothin’,” he said, and looked at the boy. Chico had found his customary corner, and was crouched there, grinning.

  “How come you think everythin’s so damned funny?” Salomon sneered. “You go to work on those loadin’ docks like I do every night and you won’t grin so damn much!”

  Sophia brought him his beer, and he jerked it out of her hand, unscrewed the cap, and spun it away. He swigged beer down his throat. “Tell him to stop it,” he told her.

  “Stop what?”

  “That grinnin’. Tell him to stop it, and to stop lookin’ at me.”

  “Chico’s not hurtin’ you.”

  “It hurts me to look at his damn ugly face!” Salomon shouted. He saw a dark flash: a roach running past Chico’s foot along the cracked baseboard. A drop of sweat dripped down Salomon’s nose, and he wiped it off before it reached the tip. “Burnin’ up,” he said. “I can’t take this heat. Makes my head ache.” Lately his head had been aching a lot. It was this place, he thought. It was these dirty walls and fire-escape window. It was Sophia’s long black hair, streaked with gray at age thirty-two, and Chico’s remote grin. He needed a change, something different to keep him from going crazy. Why the hell had he ever taken in this woman and her idiot child anyway? The answer was clear enough: to fetch him his beer, wash his clothes, and spread her legs when he wanted them spread. Nobody else would have her, and the welfare people were about a signature away from putting Chico in a home with other idiots like him. Salomon ran the chilly bottle over his forehead. When he glanced at Chico in the corner, he saw the boy still grinning. Chico could sit like that for hours. That grin; there was something about it that grated Salomon’s nerves. A big black roach suddenly ran up the wall behind Chico, and like a fuse it set off Salomon’s charge. “Damn it to Hell!” he shouted, and he flung the half-full bottle of beer.

  Sophia screamed. The bottle hit just below the roach, and about six or seven inches over Chico’s swollen skull. It didn’t break, but splattered beer everywhere. The bottle fell and rolled, and the roach darted up the wall and winnowed into a crack. Chico sat perfectly still, grinning.

  “You’re crazy!” Sophia shouted. “You’re crazy!” She knelt down, putting her arms around her son, and Chico’s skinny brown arms embraced her.

  “Make him stop lookin’ at me!” Salomon was on his feet, his belly and chins trembling with rage—toward Chico, toward the black, shiny roaches that it seemed he had to kill over and over again, toward the crack-crazed walls and the roar of noise on East River Drive. “I’ll bash his face in, I swear it!”

  Sophia grasped Chico’s chin. His head was heavy, resisting her. But then she got his face turned away from Salomon, and Chico rested his head against her shoulder and gave a soft, strengthless sigh.

  “I’m goin’ to take a leak,” Salomon announced. He was ashamed; not of throwing the bottle at Chico, but of wasting beer. He left the room, went out the door and toward the community bathroom at the end of the hall.

  Sophia rocked her son. “Shut up that screamin’!” Somebody shouted from along the corridor. A radio blasted rap music between the walls. A bittersweet smell drifted to her: someone free-basing in one of the abandoned apartments that now served the addicts and dealers. The noise of a distant siren caused a panicked scuttling beyond the door across the hall, but the siren faded and the scuttling ceased. How she’d come to this, she didn’t know. No, no; that wasn’t right, she decided. She knew very well. It was a story of poverty and abuse from her father—or, at least, the man her mother had said was her father. The story included turning tricks at age fourteen in Spanish Harlem, needles and cocaine and picking the pockets of tourists on 42nd Street. It was a story that, once spun out, could not be reeled back in. There had been corners of decision, and Sophia had always taken the dark street. She had been young then, and drawn to a thrill. Who Chico’s father was, she didn’t really know; maybe the salesman who said he was from Albany and whose wife had gone cold; maybe the hustler on 38th Street who wore pins through his nose; maybe any one of a number of faceless Johns who passed like shadows through her semiconsciousness. But she knew it was her sin that had swollen the infant’s head in her womb and turned him into a silent sufferer. That, and the time she’d been kicked down a flight of stairs with the baby in her arms. Such was life. She feared Salomon, but she feared losing Chico too. He was all she had, and all she’d ever have. Salomon might be cruel and brutal, but he wouldn’t throw them out into the street, nor would he beat them too badly; he enjoyed her welfare check too much, with the allowance she got for having a retarded child. She loved Chico; he needed her, and she would not turn him over to the cold hands of an institution.

  Sophia leaned her head against Chico’s and closed her eyes. She had dreamed of having a child, when she was a very young girl. And in those dreams that child was a perfect, happy, healthy boy, and he was full of love and goodness and…yes…and miracles. She smoothed Chico’s hair, and she felt his fingers on her cheek. Sophia opened her eyes and looked at him, at his single dark eye and the dead white one. His fingers floated across her face, and she grasped his hand and gently held it. He had long, slim fingers. The hands of a doctor, she thought. A healer. If only…if only…

  Sophia looked through the window. In the sultry gray clouds over the East River there was a splinter of blue. “Goin’ to be a change,” she whispered in Chico’s ear. “Won’t always be like this. Goin’ to be a change, when Jesus comes. It’ll happen in an instant, when you least expect it. Oh, he’ll come in white robes and he’ll put his hands on you, Chico. He’ll put his hands on both of us, and oh we’re goin’ to fly so high up over this world. Do you believe that?”

  Chico stared at her with his good eye, and his grin flickered off and on.

  “It’s promised,” she whispered. “All things made new. All bodies whole, and everybody set free. You and me, Chico. You and me.”

  The door opened and thudded shut. Salomon said, “What’re you whisperin’ about? Me?”

  “No,” she said. “Not you.”

  “Better not be. I might have to whip some ass.” It was a hollow threat, and they both knew it. Salomon belched like a bass drumbeat. As he walked across the floor, another roach skittere
d past in front of him. “Damn it! Where are all these bastards comin’ from?” He knew the walls must be full of the things, but no matter how many he killed, they were all over the place. A second roach, larger than the first, shot from under Salomon’s chair. Salomon bellowed, stepped forward, and stomped down. The roach, its back broken, spun in circles. Salomon’s shoe came down again, and when it lifted, the roach lay in an oozing yellow mass. “Things are drivin’ me crazy!” he said. “Everywhere I look, there’s another one!”

  “It’s the heat,” Sophia told him. “They always come out in the heat.”

  “Yeah.” He wiped sweat off his neck and glanced at Chico. There was that grin again. “What’s so funny? Come on, moron! What’s so damned funny?”

  “Don’t talk to him like that! He can understand your voice!”

  “The hell he can!” Salomon grunted. “He got a big hole where his brain ought to be!”

  Sophia stood up. Her stomach was clenching, but there was life in her face now, and her eyes glittered. Being so near Chico—touching him—always made her feel so strong, so…hopeful. “Chico’s my son,” she said with quiet strength. “If you want us to leave, we will. Just say the word and we’ll get out.”

  “Right. Tell me another one!”

  “We’ve lived on the streets before.” Her heart pounded, but the words were seething out of her. “We can do it again.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet the welfare people would love that!”

  “Everything’s going to work out,” Sophia said, and her heart kicked; for the first time in a long, long while, she actually believed it. “You’ll see. Everything’s going to work out.”

  “Uh-huh. Show me another miracle, and I’ll make you a saint.” He laughed hollowly, but his laughter was forced. Sophia wasn’t backing down from him this time. She was standing with her chin lifted and her backbone straight. Sometimes she got like this, but it didn’t last for long. Another roach ran across the floor, almost under Salomon’s feet, and he stomped for it but it was a fast one.

  “I mean it,” Sophia said. “My son is a human being. I want you to start treatin’ him like one.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He waved her off. He didn’t like talking to her when she sounded strong; it made him feel weak. Anyway, it was too hot to fight. “I’ve gotta get ready for work,” he said, and he began pulling off his wet T-shirt as he walked into the hallway. His mind was already turning toward endless rows of crates coming off a conveyor belt, and trucks rumbling up to take them away. It was work, he knew, that he would do for the rest of his days. Everythin’ is shit, he told himself. Even life itself.

  Sophia stood in the room, with Chico crouched in his corner. Her heart was still beating hard. She had expected a blow, and been prepared to take it. Perhaps it would fall later…or perhaps not. She looked down at Chico; his face was peaceful, his head tilted far to one side, as if he heard music she could never hear. She looked out the window, at the clouds over the river. Not much blue in that sky. But maybe tomorrow. Salomon was going to work. He would need his dinner. Sophia went into the kitchen to make him a sandwich from the leftovers in the refrigerator.

  Chico remained in his corner for a while longer. Then he stared at something on the floor, and he crawled to it. His head lolled, and he had a moment of difficulty when its weight threatened to capsize him.

  “You want mustard?” Sophia called.

  Chico picked up the dead roach that Salomon had just crushed. He held it in his palm, looked at it closely with his good eye. Then he closed his palm and grinned.

  “What?” Salomon asked.

  Chico’s hand trembled just a little bit.

  He opened his palm, and the roach skittered over his fingers, dropped to the floor, and darted into a baseboard fissure.

  “Mustard!” Sophia said. “On your sandwich!”

  Chico crawled to the next dead roach. He picked it up, closed his palm around it. He grinned, his eye glittering. The roach squeezed between his fingers, darted away. Gone, back into the wall.

  “Yeah,” Salomon decided. He sighed, heavy-laden. “Whatever.”

  The relentless roar of traffic on East River Drive came through the fire-escape window. A boom box blared at its highest volume. Pipes chugged and moaned, fans chattered uselessly against the heat, and roaches returned to the cracks.

  Night Calls the Green Falcon

  1

  Never Say Die

  HE WAS IN THE airplane again, falling toward the lights of Hollywood.

  Seconds ago the craft had been a sleek silver beauty with two green-painted propellers, and now it was coming apart at the seams like wet cardboard. The controls went crazy, he couldn’t hold the stick level, and as the airplane fell he clinched his parachute pack tighter around his chest and reached up to pop the canopy out. But the canopy was jammed shut, its hinges red with clots of rust. The propellers had seized up, and black smoke whirled from the engines. The plane nosed toward the squat, ugly buildings that lined Hollywood Boulevard, a scream of wind passing over the fuselage.

  He didn’t give up. That wasn’t his way. He kept pressing against the canopy, trying to force the hinges, but they were locked tight. The buildings were coming up fast, and there was no way to turn the airplane because the rudder and ailerons were gone too. He was sweating under his green suit, his heart beating so hard he couldn’t hear himself think. There had to be a way out of this; he was a never-say-die type of guy. His eyes in the slits of the green cowl ticked to the control panel, the jammed hinges, the dead stick, the smoking engines, back to the control panel in a frantic geometry.

  The plane trembled; the port-side engine was ripping away from the wing. His green boots kicked at the dead rudder pedals. Another mighty heave at the canopy, another jerk of the limp control stick—and then he knew his luck had, at long last, run out. It was all over.

  Going down fast now, the wings starting to tear away. Klieg lights swung back and forth over the boulevard, advertising somebody else’s premiere. He marked where the plane was going to hit: a mustard-yellow five-floored brick building about eight blocks east of the Chinese Theater. He was going to hit the top floor, go right into somebody’s apartment. His hands in their green gloves clenched the armrests. No way out…no way out…

  He didn’t mourn for himself so much, but someone innocent was about to die, and that he couldn’t bear. Maybe there was a child in that apartment, and he could do nothing but sit in his trap of straps and glass and watch the scene unfold. No, he decided as the sweat ran down his face. No, I can’t kill a child. Not another one. I won’t. This script has to be rewritten. It wasn’t fair, that no one had told him how this scene would end. Surely the director was still in control. Wasn’t he? “Cut!” he called out as the mustard-yellow building filled up his horizon. “Cut!” he said again, louder—then screamed it: “Cut!”

  The airplane crashed into the building’s fifth floor, and he was engulfed by a wall of fire and agony.

  2

  An Old Relic

  HE AWOKE, HIS FLESH wet with nightmare sweat and his stomach burning with the last flames of an enchilada TV dinner.

  He lay in the darkness, the springs of his mattress biting into his back, and watched the lights from the boulevard—reflections of light—move across the cracked ceiling. A fan stuttered atop his chest of drawers, and from down the hall he could hear the LaPrestas hollering at each other again. He lifted his head from the sodden pillow and looked at his alarm clock on the table beside his bed: twenty-six minutes past twelve, and the night had already gone on forever.

  His bladder throbbed. Right now it was working, but sometimes it went haywire and he peed in his sheets. The laundromat on the corner of Cosmo Street was not a good place to spend a Saturday night. He roused himself out of bed, his joints clicking back into their sockets and the memory of the nightmare scorched in his mind. It was from Chapter One of Night Calls the Green Falcon, RKO Studios, 1949. He remembered how he’d panicked when he couldn’t ge
t the plane’s canopy up, because he didn’t like close places. The director had said, “Cut!” and the canopy’s hinges had been oiled and the sequence had gone like clockwork the second time around.

  The nightmare would be back, and so would the rest of them—a reel of car crashes, falls from buildings, gunshots, explosions, even a lion’s attack. He had survived all of them, but they kept trying to kill him again and again. Mr. Thatcher at the Burger King said he ought to have his head looked at, and maybe that was true. But Mr. Thatcher was only a kid, and the Green Falcon had died before Mr. Thatcher was born.

  He stood up. Slid his feet into slippers. Picked his robe off a chair and shrugged into it, covering his pajamas. His eyes found the faded poster taped to the wall: NIGHT CALLS THE GREEN FALCON, it said, and showed an assemblage of fistfights, car crashes, and various other action scenes. IN TEN EXCITING CHAPTERS! the poster promised, STARRING CREIGHTON FLINT, THE GREEN FALCON.

  “The Green Falcon has to piss now,” he said, and he unlocked the door and went out into the hallway.

  The bathroom was on the other side of the building. He trudged past the elevator and the door where the LaPrestas were yelling. Somebody else shouted for them to shut up, but when they got going there was no stopping them. Seymour, the super’s cat, slinked past, hunting rats, and the old man knocked politely at the bathroom’s door before he entered. He clicked on the light, relieved himself at the urinal, and looked away from the hypodermic needles that were lying around the toilet. When he was finished, he picked up the needles and put them in the trashcan, then washed his hands in the rust-stained sink and walked back along the corridor to his apartment.