The Charlie Parker Collection 5-8: The Black Angel, The Unquiet, The Reapers, The Lovers

by John Connolly

  Our real life — anchored by those twin weights (and here they come again), our careworn friends duty and responsibility, their edges considerately curved, the better to fit upon our shoulders — permits us our small pleasures, for which we are inordinately grateful. Come, take a walk in the countryside, the earth spongy and warm beneath your feet, but be aware always of the ticking clock, summoning you back to the cares of the city. Look, your husband has made dinner for you, lighting the candle that his mother gave you for a Christmas gift, the one that now makes the dining room smell of mull and spices although it is already mid-July. See, your wife has been reading Cosmo again, and in an effort to add a little spice to your waning sex life has for once gone farther than JCPenney for her lingerie, and has learned a new trick from the pages of her magazine. She had to read it twice just to understand some of the terminology, and had to rely on ancient memory to summon up a picture of the sad, semitumescent organ that she now proposes to service in this manner, so long has it been since any such matters passed between the two of you without the cover of blankets and smothered lights, the easier to fantasize about J. Lo or Brad, perhaps the girl who takes your order at the sandwich bar, or Liza’s kid from two doors down, the one who is just back from college and is now transformed from a geeky little boy with railroad braces into a veritable Adonis with white, even teeth and tanned, muscular legs.

  And in the darkness, one upon the other, the real life blurs at its margins, and the secret life intrudes with a rush and a moan and the flicking tongue of desire.

  For in our secret life, we are truly ourselves. We look at the pretty woman in marketing, the new arrival, the one with the dress that falls open when she crosses her legs, revealing a pristine expanse of pale thigh, and in our secret life we do not see the veins about to break beneath her skin, or the birthmark shaped like an old bruise that muddies the beauty of her whiteness. She is flawless, unlike the one we have left behind that morning, thoughts of her new bedroom trick already forgotten for it will be put away as surely as will be the Christmas candle, and neither trick nor light will see use for many months to come. And so we take instead the hand of the new fantasy, unsullied by reality, and we lead her away, and she sees us as we truly are as she takes us inside her and, for an instant, we live and die within her, for she needs no magazine to teach her arcane things.

  In our secret life, we are brave and strong, and know no loneliness, for others take the place of once-loved (and once-desired) partners. In our secret life, we take the other path, the one that was offered to us once but from which we shied away. We live the existence we were meant to lead, the one denied us by husbands and wives, by the demands of children, by the requirements of petty office tyrants. We become all that we were meant to be.

  In our secret life, we dream of striking back. We point a gun and we pull the trigger, and it costs us nothing. There is no regret at the wound inflicted, the body slumping backward, already crumpling as the spirit leaves it. (And perhaps there is another waiting at that moment, the one who tempted us, the one who promised us that this is as it was meant to be, that this is our destiny, and he asks only this one small indulgence: that he may place his lips against those of the dying man, the fading woman, and taste the sweetness of what passes from them so that it flutters briefly like a butterfly in his mouth before he swallows, trapping it deep inside him. This is all that he asks, and who are we to deny him?)

  In our secret life our fists pummel, and the face that blurs with blood beneath them is the face of everyone who has ever crossed us, every individual who has prevented us from becoming all that we might have been. And he is beside us as we punish the flesh, his ugliness forgiven in return for the great gift that he has given us, the freedom that he has offered. He is so convincing, this blighted man with his distended neck, his great, sagging stomach, his too short legs and his too long arms, his delicate features almost lost in his pale, puckered skin, that to gaze on him from afar is like looking at a full, clear moon as a child and believing that one can almost see the face of the man who dwells within it.

  He is Brightwell, and with sugared words he has fed us the story of our past, of how he has wandered for so long, searching for those who were lost. We did not believe him at first, but he has a way of convincing us, oh yes. Those words dissolve inside us, their essence coursing through our system, their constituent elements in turn becoming part of us. We begin to remember. We look deep into those green eyes, and the truth is at last revealed.

  In our secret life, we once were angels. We adored, and we were adored. And when we fell, the last great punishment was to mark us forever with all that we had lost, and to torment us with the memory of all that once was ours. For we are not like the others. All has been revealed to us, and in that revelation lies freedom.

  Now we live our secret life.

  I awoke to find myself alone in our bed. Sam’s cradle was empty and silent, and the mattress was cold to the touch, as though no child had ever been laid upon it. I walked to the door and heard noises coming from the kitchen below. I pulled on a pair of sweatpants and went downstairs.

  There were shadows moving in the kitchen, visible through the half-open door, and I could hear closets being opened and closed. A woman’s voice spoke. Rachel, I thought: she has taken Sam downstairs to feed her, and she is talking to her as she always talks to her, sharing her thoughts and hopes with her as she does whatever she must do. I saw my hand stretch out and push the door, and the kitchen was revealed to me.

  A little girl sat at the top of the kitchen table, her head slightly bowed and her long blond hair brushing the wood and the empty plate that sat before her, its blue pattern now slightly chipped. She was not moving. Something dripped from her face and fell to the plate, expanding redly upon it.

  Who are you looking for?

  The voice did not emerge from the girl. It seemed to be coming to me both from some distant, shadowy place and also from close by, whispering coldly in my ear.

  They are back. I want them to go. I want them to let me be.

  Answer me.

  Not you. I loved you, and I will always love you, but you are gone.

  No. We are here. Wherever you are, so will we be too.

  Please, I need to put you to rest at last. Everything is coming to pieces. You are tearing me apart.

  She will not stay. She will leave you.

  I love her. I love her as I once loved you.

  No! Don’t say that. Soon she will be gone, and when she leaves we will still be here. We will stay with you, and we will lie by you in the darkness.

  A crack appeared in the wall to my right, and a fissure opened in the floor. The window shattered and fragments of glass exploded inward, each shard reflecting trees and stars and moonlight, as though the whole world were disintegrating around me.

  I heard my daughter upstairs, and I ran, taking the stairs two at a time. I opened the bedroom door and Rachel was standing by the crib, Sam in her arms.

  “Where were you?” I asked. “I woke up and you weren’t there.”

  She looked at me. She was tired, and there were stains on her nightshirt.

  “I had to change her. I took her into the bathroom so she wouldn’t wake you.”

  Rachel laid Sam in her cot. Once she was happy that our daughter was comfortable and settled, she prepared to return to bed. I stood over Sam, then leaned down and kissed her lightly on the forehead.

  A small drop of blood fell upon her face. I dabbed it away with my thumb, then walked to the mirror in the corner. There was a small cut below my left eye. When I touched it, it stung me sharply. I stretched the abrasion with my fingers, and explored it until I had removed the tiny fragment of glass from within. A single tear of blood wept down my cheek.

  “Are you okay?” asked Rachel.

  “I cut myself.”

  “Is it bad?”

  I wiped my arm across my face, smearing the blood.

  “No,” I lied. “No, it’s not bad at all.
”

  I left for New York early the next morning. Rachel was sitting at the kitchen table, in the seat where the night before a young girl had sat, blood slowly pooling on the plate before her. Sam had been awake for two hours, and was now crying furiously. Usually, once she was awake and fed, she was content to simply watch the world go by. Walter was a source of particular fascination for her, his presence causing Sam’s face to light up whenever he appeared. In his turn, the dog always remained close to the child. I knew that dogs sometimes became disconcerted by the arrival of a new child in a house, confused by how this might affect the pecking order. Some became actively hostile as a result, but not Walter. Although he was a young dog, he seemed to recognize some duty of protection toward the little being that had entered his territory. Even the day before, during the fuss following the christening, it had taken him time to separate himself from Sam. It was only when he was assured of the presence of Rachel’s mother close by that he appeared to relax and attached himself instead to Angel and Louis.

  Rachel’s mother was not yet awake. While Frank had returned to work that morning, managing to avoid me entirely before leaving, Joan had offered to stay with Rachel while I was gone. Rachel had accepted the offer without question, and I was grateful to her for that. The house was well protected: prompted by events in the recent past, we had installed a system of motion sensors that alerted us to the presence of anything larger than a fox on our property, and cameras kept vigil both on the main gate and the yard, and on the marshland behind, feeding images to twin monitors in my office. The investment was considerable, but it was worth it for peace of mind.

  I kissed Rachel goodbye.

  “It’s just for a couple of days,” I said.

  “I know. I understand.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  “Okay.”

  She was holding Sam against her shoulder, trying to comfort her, but she would not be comforted. I kissed Sam too, and I felt Rachel’s warmth, her breast pressed against my arm. I recalled that we had not made love since Sam was born, and the distance between us seemed even greater as a result.

  Then I left them, and drove to the airport in silence.

  The pimp named G-Mack sat in the darkened apartment on Coney Island Avenue that he shared with some of his women. He had a place in the Bronx, closer to the Point, but he had been using it less and less frequently of late, ever since the men came looking for his two whores. The arrival of the old black woman had spooked him even more, and so he had retreated to his private crib, venturing out to the Point only at night, and keeping a distance from the main streets whenever possible.

  G-Mack wasn’t too sure about the wisdom of living on Coney Island Avenue. It was once a dangerous stretch of road, even back in the nineteenth century, when gang members preyed on the tourists returning from the beaches. In the 1980s, hookers and pushers colonized the area around Foster Avenue, their presence made clearer by the bright lights of the nearby gas station. Now there were still whores and dealers, but they were a little less obvious, and they fought for sidewalk space alongside Jews and Pakistanis and Russians and people from countries of which G-Mack had never even heard. The Pakistanis had been having a hard time of it in the aftermath of 9/11, and G-Mack had heard that a lot of them were arrested by the Feds, while others had left for Canada or gone back home entirely. Some of them had even changed their names, so it sometimes seemed like there had been a sudden influx of Pakistanis named Eddie and Steve into G-Mack’s world, like the plumber he’d been forced to call a week or two back after one of the bitches managed to clog up the bowl by flushing something down there about which G-Mack didn’t even want to know. The plumber used to be called Amir. That was what it said on his old card, the one G-Mack had pinned to the refrigerator door with a Sinbad magnet, but on his new card he was now Frank. Frank Shah, like that was going to fool anyone. Even the three numerals, the 786 that Amir once told him stood for “In the name of Allah,” were now gone from beside his address. G-Mack didn’t much care either way. Amir was a good plumber, as far as he could tell, and he wasn’t about to hold a grudge against a man who could do his job, especially since he might need his services again sometime. But G-Mack didn’t like the smell of the Pakistani stores, or the food that they sold in their restaurants, or the way that they dressed, either too neat or too casual. He distrusted their ambition, and their manic insistence that their kids better themselves. G-Mack suspected that good old Frank-Who-Was-Really-Amir bored the ass off his kids with his sermons on the American dream, maybe pointing to black people like G-Mack as a negative example, even if G-Mack was a better businessman than Amir would ever be and even if G-Mack’s people weren’t the ones who steered two jets into New York’s tallest buildings. G-Mack had no personal beef with the Pakistanis who lived around him, food and clothing aside, but shit like 9/11 was everybody’s business, and Frankie-Amir and his people needed to make it clear just whose side they were on.

  G-Mack’s place was on the top floor of a three-story brownstone with brightly painted cornices, between Avenues R and S, close to the Thayba Islamic Center. The Thayba was separated from the Keshet Jewish day care center by a kids’ play group, which some people might have called progress but which bothered the hell out of G-Mack, these two opposing sides being so close to each other, although maybe not as much as the fucking Hasidim further down the avenue in their threadbare black coats, their kids all pale with their fag curls. It didn’t surprise G-Mack that they always hung around in groups, because there wasn’t one of them strange Jews could handle himself if it came to a fight.

  He listened to two of his whores babbling in the bathroom. There were nine in his stable now, and three of them slept here in cots that he rented to them as part of their “arrangement.” A couple of the others still lived with their mommas, because they had children and needed someone to take care of the kids while they were on the streets, and he had rented floor space to the rest in the place over by the Point.

  G-Mack rolled a joint and watched as the youngest of the three women, the little white bitch who called herself Ellen, strolled through the kitchen in her bare feet, eating toast with peanut butter smeared untidily across it. Said she was nineteen, but he didn’t believe that. Didn’t care none, either. There were a lot of men liked them younger, and she was taking top dollar on the streets. G-Mack had even considered setting her up somewhere private, maybe placing an ad in the Voice or the Press and charging four or five hundred an hour for her. He’d been about to do it, too, when all the shit had broken around him and he’d been forced to watch his back. Still, he liked to take a little of her honey for himself sometimes, so it was good to have her near.

  G-Mack was twenty-three, younger than most of his own women. He had started out selling weed to school kids, but he was ambitious and saw himself expanding his business to take in stockbrokers and lawyers and the hungry young white guys who frequented the bars and clubs on weekends, looking for something to give them a kick for the long nights to come. G-Mack saw himself in slick threads, driving a hooked-up car. For a long time he dreamed of owning a ’71 Cutlass Supreme, with cream leather interior and chrome spokes, although the Cutlass carried bullshit eighteen-inch wheels as standard and G-Mack knew that a ride was nothing unless it was sitting on twenty-twos at the least, Lexani alloys, maybe even Jordans if he wanted to rub the other brothers’ noses in it. But a man who was planning on driving a ’71 Cutlass Supreme with twenty-two-inch wheels was going to have to do more than push weed on pimple-faced fifteen-year-olds. So G-Mack invested in some E, along with a little coke, and slowly the dough started coming in swift and sweet.

  The problem for G-Mack was that he didn’t have the backbone to enter the big time. G-Mack didn’t want to go back to jail. He had served six months in Otisville on an assault beef when he was barely nineteen, and he still woke up at night screaming at the memory. G-Mack was a good-looking young brother, and they’d had a time with him those first days until he tied himself up
with the Nation of Islam, who had some big motherfuckers on their side and who didn’t take kindly to those who would try to punk out one of their potential converts. G-Mack spent the rest of his six clinging to the Nation like it was driftwood after a shipwreck, but when he left he dropped that shit like it was damaged goods. They came looking for him, asking him questions and shit, but G-Mack was all done with them. Sure, there were threats, but G-Mack was braver on the outside, and eventually the Nation cut him loose as a bad deal. He still occasionally paid lip service to the Nation if the need arose and he was around folks who didn’t know no better, but mostly he just liked the fact that Minister Farrakhan didn’t take shit from whites, and that the presence of his followers in their sharp suits and shades scared the hell out of all those middle-class doughboys.

  But if G-Mack was to raise the money to finance the lifestyle he wanted so badly, then it meant trying to score big, and he didn’t like the idea of holding that much supply. If he was caught in possession he was looking at a class A felony, and that was fifteen to life right there. Even if he got lucky, and the prosecutor wasn’t having troubles at home or suffering from prostate problems, and allowed him to plead down to a class B, then G-Mack would spend the rest of his twenties behind bars, and fuck anyone who said that you were still a young man when you got out, because six months inside had aged G-Mack more than he liked to think about, and he didn’t believe that he could survive five to ten years inside, didn’t matter whether it was no class B, class C, or even class fucking Z.

  What finally confirmed him in the belief that the pusher’s life was not for him was a raid on his crib by a couple of real bad-ass narcs. Seemed like they’d turned someone who was even more scared of prison than G-Mack, and G-Mack’s name had come up in the course of the conversation. The cops hadn’t found nothing, though. G-Mack always took the same shortcut onto the streets, slipping through the burned-out shell of another three-story behind his own that in turn backed onto a vacant lot. There was an old fireplace in there, and G-Mack hid his stash inside it, behind a loose brick. The cops took him in, even though they’d got fresh air in return for their warrant. G-Mack knew they didn’t have nothing on him, so he kept quiet and waited for them to let him walk. It took him three days to work up the courage to go back to his stash, and he offloaded it five minutes later for half of what it was worth on the street. Since then, he’d kept his distance from drugs, and instead found another potential source of income, because if G-Mack didn’t know shit about the drug trade, he did know about pussy. He’d had his share and he’d never paid for it, at least not up front and in cash, but he knew there were men out there who would. Hell, he even knew a couple of bitches who were selling it already, but they didn’t have nobody to look out for them and women like that were in a vulnerable position. They needed a man to take care of them, and it didn’t take long for G-Mack to convince them that he was just the man to do it. He only had to hit one every so often, and even then he didn’t have to hit her hard, and the others just fell in line behind her. Then that old pimp Free Billy had died, and some of his women had come G-Mack’s way, expanding his stable still further.