by Daniel Kraus
“Forgive me,” said I, “but aren’t you a touch old to make that your métier?”
“No. I’ve already filmed one picture.”
“Give me the title. I am well-versed.”
“Peeping-Tom Picnic. A fabulous lark.”
“If you tell me that this was a stag film,” said I, “my heart will fail.”
“Yes, it was. And no, your heart won’t do anything.”
I tripped and stumbled while the succubus snorted.
“Merle! Why would you subject yourself to such degradation?”
“It’s no different from what Bridey Valentine does. Show a little leg, a little tit, and like magic they give you money. I swear, Papa, you can be such a child.”
A delicatessen, packed with upright folk who did not strip in front of cameras, presented itself. On impulse, I ducked inside and pulled Merle along. Here we could sit in a booth, father and daughter, ordinary as you please.
“Your obvious intent is to ruin me,” muttered I. “But I won’t let that happen. Waitress?”
“Me? Ruin you? Oh, that’s right, I haven’t told you about my lovely abortion.”
A dozen people looked up from their soup and sandwiches. I wheeled about, steered Merle back outdoors, and quickened down a byway thick with men of nefarious leans. Evening had lowered; pink and yellow neon dissipated like dye into the sapphire sky. But darkness provided inadequate cover from Merle’s unblushing account of the cold table upon which she’d endured surgery. The abortionist had botched the job and she’d bled for a week, and when she’d finally scraped together the cash to see a qualified physician, she’d learned of the internal scarring that now rendered her infertile.
“Naturally, that’s when I started to actually want a baby. If only to stick you with a granddaughter. Seeing how much you enjoy taking care of me.”
“These are false fronts,” reasoned I. “You love me; I know you love me. You do not blame me for your barrenness.”
“Oh, but I do, Papa! I do! Had I had one single pocketful of your money, everything would’ve been different. There would have been better clothes, and therefore a better job, and therefore a husband, and therefore a child, and therefore no abortion, and therefore no stag picture, and therefore and therefore and therefore and therefore!”
Her yelps bothered the passing unbotherables. I corralled her against the brick wall of a pawn shop. We had progressed into a red-light district of peep-show cinemas and penny arcades boasting lewd photo reels entitled Hot-Cha!, Nude Kisses, and Girls of Spain. Scragged pitchmen jabbered their wares at pedestrians while street-corner twosomes swapped money for illegal goods. It was a Harlem drained of all joy, sapped of all class.
“Looks like my kind of place,” said she. “So be a peach? Give me the two grand and we’ll call it even.”
Merle might as well have carved out my dead heart. Unkind to her though the unknowns of life had been, she still preferred that risk, along with the gift of a couple thousand dollars, over accepting me for who I was—or the prospect of owing me a single damn thing.
“But the money.” I sounded feeble. “It was meant for your rescue.”
“You really want to rescue me? Then hand it over.”
“I don’t believe that wise, given the state of your . . .”
“Poverty? My state of poverty? The same sort of poverty as my mother?”
“I try and try to atone for how I treated her, but you refuse to let me.”
“This is how you atone. You give me the money.”
“I might be the child you say I am. But a stooge I am not. In one week you would spend every cent on morphine. I am not blind to those bruises on your arms. I have seen a hundred men, former soldiers most of them, marked by the same addiction.”
“I’m supposed to go cold turkey? Papa, that would kill me.”
Merle switched on a grin and dug into her skirt pocket.
“I have one left,” enthused she. “My last hit. I want you to have it. We don’t even need a needle. You can just swallow it or crush it—”
“Put that away.”
“Mother told me you drank, smoked, everything. Don’t you miss it? Here. Five minutes and you’ll feel it in your legs, the back of your neck, and then it’s like you’re in a secret, safe place where no one can hurt you. Morphine is for pain, Papa. Don’t you have any pain?”
Reader, what a question.
I seized her arm and wrenched it. The beige tablet hit the sidewalk and bounced. Merle cried out and reached for it but I bounded in the direction of the Yankee Doodle, dragging my child behind. Did I know pain? Introducing Merle Watson to Bridey Valentine—now that would be painful! I could but pray that Bridey would, after stages of shock and disgust, sign a check that would pay for Merle’s medical impoundment. And if Bridey refused? Well, those medieval chastity belts and aboriginal pendants could be stolen and sold. Nothing, swore I, would thwart me from righting my wrongs toward Wilma Sue and Merle Ruby Watson.
Nothing, perhaps, except the most unexpected voice in the whole world.
We tumbled past a colorless, paint-chipped establishment beneath the eaves of which crackled a grandiloquent but impish sales pitch; ’twas the sort of voice that could flatten the back row of a crowd to its pew even as it fondled the fragile fancy of a worshipful front-row face. In the forty years since I’d last heard it, it had lost not a blurt of bombast, an edge of erudition, a whip of wickedness.
I turned about. Merle crashed into me and held on, sobbing.
Ashes to apocryphal ashes, dust to doleful dust.
The Barker.
XVIII.
THE OPPRESSIVE URBAN STENCH OF petrol and urine was overrun by the rural odor of dusty straw that had exemplified my tenure as the Highly Intelligent Monkey of Dr. Whistler’s Pageant of Health. My limbs went as lame as old Mr. Stick’s; my tongue, too, went as dumb.
“Out of your cage at last?” asked the demon. “Or finding your way back in?”
Given enough time, Dearest Reader, all chickens—even headless, spurting ones—come home to roost. The Barker stood at a shabby pulpit beneath a sign promising “GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS!,” eighty-five years old if a day, a wasted hobgoblin half as tall as the renegade knight who’d once commanded a whole battery of blackguards. His locks still reached his shoulders, though now they were white and the hairline began just north of his ears, leaving his scalp bare but for sunburn peels and purple lesions.
The cut of his jib, though, had suffered nothing. His shoulders, aslant now, were nonetheless thrust backward; his chest, concave now, continued to push forward; his mouth, toothless now, still lazed in grinning anticipation of his next whopper. This two-bit peep show upon this second-rate strand was but a different type of Gallery of Suffering erected upon a different Boardwalk of Chance. Despite having seen his own bleak end in la silenziosità, the Barker was still barking.
I could not speak, but given the politics of our relationship, that felt appropriate.
Merle whimpered. I was crushing her arm.
“Conversation was never Mr. Stick’s specialty,” mused the Barker. “Mayhap this will bring about a verbal reaction?”
He rolled up his right pant leg. The bottom half of the leg itself was missing. Strapped to the swollen knee by leather buckles was a piece of dark maple lathed into the shape of a lower leg but chipped white by years of wear. He’d long ago quit topping it off with a shoe, and the carved wooden toes had been gnawed away by city cement.
The Barker rapped the wooden leg with a knuckle.
“What you see before you with your own eyes, ladies and gentlemen, is a grave wound that Yours Most Meekly suffered in the Great War during the Battle of Cambrai! Alone, I addressed and defeated a German A7V tank, thereby saving the priceless lives of my entire cherished regiment!”
He let the pant leg, and his pretense, drop.
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br /> “It has been my delighted discovery that customers respond most generously to that tale. It makes the handing over of twenty cents feel right patriotic, turns the viewing of disrobing young women into moral obligation. Does it have the same effect on you, I wonder?”
You no doubt recall that the Barker had shot off part of his foot to avoid dueling me. Now I pictured the ugly reality: my old foe hobbled, gushing blood into the black Virginia mud, elbowing his way through the rain for help while his open wound was aggressed by an infection for which there were few remedies in 1902, aside from the crude correctives of a surgical saw and a belt to bite.
“You, here?” I had no control over what I said. “How?”
“Where else but Hollywood, Mr. Stick, would a cavalier of my character go? Fallen stars of the silver screen have become my twinkling tonic. And my audience? My audience has gone quite unchanged. Niggling ailments continue to bedevil Modern Man, and I, lowly servant, continue to anesthetize the sufferers.”
He severed eye contact to bray at two backslapping joes wandering by.
“Twenty cents, good sirs, to see Garter Girl Gabrielle Dumont, the Pacific Siren! Exposed in person! Extra late shows! Free parking! Viva Les Femmes!”
The men dithered, lazy trout distracted by colorful tackle, and the Barker reeled them in with a more flattering pitch about the artistic obligation we as Americans had to appreciate the female nude in all of her transcendent splendor—such had been the healthy habit of giants of men like Michelangelo and Cézanne!
He’d sold two tickets before I could begin to piece together my sick, exploded wits. I yanked at Merle’s arm but, for some infernal reason, the malcontent had wedged her foot against the podium. The Barker took notice of our feeble struggle and whimsically peaked his bushy white brows.
“Your choice of companions, at least, has improved beyond mischievous midgets.”
The gut-burn of Johnny’s golden aggie might be the beacon able to guide Merle and me from this overcast imbroglio. I focused upon it too late—the Barker was suddenly holding Merle’s slender hand inside his wrinkled paw. I grimaced, expecting Merle to bite, but she showed no reaction, not even to his loose, toothless lips upon her knuckles.
“Gentle contessa,” bade the Barker. “Let us forgive your escort’s rudeness. I am Dr. Whistler, A.M., M.D., former lecturer on nervous diseases and neurasthenia at the University of the City of New York, fellow of the Boston Academy of Medicine, author of Every Man Is a Physician, author of A History of Groin Injuries, Medicinal Therapist to the Massachusetts State Women’s Hospital, and eternally yours. Would you pay me the indescribable honor of an introduction?”
“Merle.” Her voice was flat. “He’s my father.”
“Oh, truly?” The Barker radiated. “You don’t say.”
I snapped the bridge of their joined arms with a slap of my hand.
“I care not that you are old and withered,” said I. “Touch her again, I will kill you with your peg leg.”
The Barker, wizard of provocation, continued to court Merle with lewd looks.
“Merle, from the French merle, via the Latin merula, meaning ‘blackbird.’ But which blackbird? I wonder. Are you the opportunistic crow? Or the raven of myth and legend?”
“Raven,” she whispered.
“Then, Raven, might you do an old, old man an easy favor and turn your head slightly—ever so slightly!—so that I might enjoy your profile?”
To my sputtering shock, Merle did as he asked, the first time, to my knowledge, that she had ever fulfilled another human being’s request. She even blushed. The Barker hummed an appraisal.
“Life has yanked a few of your feathers, hasn’t it, Raven? Yet I think you could build a nest here among our flock—given the proper billing, so to speak. One cozy spot might be between the hours of three and six in the morning. Here, I can see the marquee! ‘The Ripe Raven of the Sunset Strip.’ ”
“Daughter,” begged I. “This is abject vituperation. Believe not one word. I know this evildoer and he wishes only to infuriate me, which he has done, and degrade you, which he is doing. You are nothing like the noxious tramps he peddles.”
“Forever flows the gumption from our intrepid Mr. Stick! You may have known something of my business at one point, but look, old friend, at my face. See the number of years that have passed since then? I can assure you that a woman of, shall we say, maturity can generate a faithful crowd of admirers, provided that she is willing to venture a bit further than her pubescent colleagues. Our Raven is the sort of product of which I’ve always been most fond: bitter to the taste, tinctured with time, and of dubious veracity, yet salvageable, soluble, and, with a fresh label and a bit of watering down, sellable.”
I took Merle by her puny elbow and bared my teeth at the Barker.
“You are abhorrent. I take extreme satisfaction in your looming death.”
I bolted down the sidewalk but managed only two steps before Merle’s arm ripped from my grip. I swiveled upon my heel, arms spread so as to squash the Barker’s brittle old-man skull between my palms, only to find that he was not the culprit behind my daughter’s dislodgment. Merle stood at his side by choice, her back straightened for the first time that day, or, for all I knew, since 1913 when we’d slunk from Boston.
She placed a hand upon the rat’s shoulder but her eyes kept aim at me.
“I’d love to be one of your girls,” said she. “I think you and me could go places.”
The Barker’s grin revealed brown gums.
“Most certainly,” cheered he. “You are packed, I say, with promise!”
Hours ago I’d murdered for Merle and she’d repaid that debt by loving me; I’d heard it, Dearest Readers, with my own dead ears! It was a sentiment she hid too well during waking hours. But suppose I were more softhearted? Suppose I were more supplicating, more submissive? Might it not bring my daughter’s latent love for me back to the fore?
Mary Leather, a wise woman, had foretold it:
Every time you have a child, Mr. Finch, you lose a piece of your soul.
I offered Merle a hand from which, to my disrepute, the scuff of Johnny’s ring had been taxidermied.
“Please,” said I softly. “You do not know this man.”
She shrugged. More than anything else, she looked tired.
“There’s no other way. Unless you give me that money.”
“What I give you is better: a solution. Together we shall wean you from your ills.”
“Wean me?” Her shoulders fell. “I am what I am, Papa. Can’t you accept it?”
That Merle chose to align her life with that of the man who’d worked to ruin mine was its own brand of satiric justice, the beginning eating the end, Ouroboros the self-devouring snake. My life had begun, truly begun, in a brothel bedroom alongside Wilma Sue, and now it was ending, truly ending, outside a brothel with her daughter. I’d lost both of them, and didn’t that mean I’d lost myself? If my resurrection had a purpose, it was to fix things in life I’d broken, but look! I’d but broken them further.
Out jutted Merle’s fierce underbite. How I adored it.
How I’d miss it.
The Subject, that innominate empty vessel, the same one who’d withstood so many of Dr. Whistler’s needles, takes over now so that he might fend off unendurable pain. The Subject turns away, and walks, and does not look back. The Subject bears the holly-jolly music and blinking lights of a new age coming at him like a kettle of hawks. Go ahead, beak from him his family; talon away his friends; leave him a dry pile of carrion. He will put up no defense; that is the Subject’s style.
The Subject slides into a leather seat. The Subject cannot think of Merle. The Subject will not think of Merle. The Subject regards the shiny red machine. It belongs to a woman. The Subject pictures her, a series of silvered daguerreotypes. Was this woman as alone as he? Not quite, thinks the
Subject; she has a daughter, Gopher. No, Margeaux. The Subject recalls a dour face, extra pounds, forearm scars. There, now, was a girl who understood loneliness. There was a girl who was herself a sort of Subject.
The Subject is pierced by a new pin, one of curiosity. It is to be expected: any monster is intrigued upon learning of a second of its kind. The Subject engages the ignition as imprecise recollections knock about his blank brain.
Z will take you.
He’ll go with you, I promise.
He’ll meet you at your place at seven.
A facial pinch—has another needle fastened together the Subject’s lips? The Subject checks the rearview mirror and finds contrary evidence. What pesters the Subject’s face is a smile. The Subject’s mission, after all, is to ensure that Zebulon Finch feels nothing. To the Subject, there is no daughter, no pitchman, no dreams. There is only the road ahead, the good-bye waves of palm trees, and the endless black pavement, the vanishing point into which all must vanish.
XIX.
MOTHER PHONED TO SAY SHE’D lost track of you. I assumed you weren’t coming. Sorry, but it’s nine o’clock, this isn’t going to work.”
Margeaux’s excuse was redundant given that she wore not a gown but a shapeless black tent of velvet pajamas. Even so, her appearance jolted me. My mind had crystallized her as a short, portly, bespectacled, and brace-faced twelve-year-old housebreaker, but this young woman had caught up to me in both age and height. While she was hardly ravishing, her glasses were stowed, her teeth were straight, and her size was at least ambiguous beneath that tarpaulin.
But the second she’d opened the door, I’d felt that shared sense of desolation that had united us upon first meeting. We snapped together now like magnets. Was it any surprise? All night I’d been attuned to a frequency of sadness and here in Santa Barbara was the signal the strongest.
None of that meant I had the courage to be anything but brusque. I’d not driven all the way here, circumventing major thoroughfares in case the police were patrolling for a red Coachcraft Roadster connected to a multiple-fatality shootout, only to be dismissed at a dorm-room door.
