"I'm sorry, Anne," Barry said quietly, after they had driven a few more blocks.
"There's no need to apologize, Barry," Anne replied evenly. "I think we should just drop the subject of Bone, and leave it dropped. He's just a client, like any other. If you don't want to help me service him, that's all right; I'll handle it myself."
"He's more than just a client to you, Anne."
"Barry!"
On one of the malls, a woman—draped from head to toe in black and green plastic garbage bags, wearing torn, filthy bedroom slippers on her feet and a wool cap pulled down around her ears—slowly pirouetted, arms held out and face to the sky, like an aging, unwashed ballerina dancing to an invisible, celestial orchestra only she could hear.
"Anne," Barry said in the same low voice, "I'd like you to have dinner with me tonight. Will you?"
She turned toward the man behind the wheel, forced herself to smile. "Oh, Barry, that's sweet," she said, touching his heavily muscled forearm. "But I never go out with co-workers. It's kind of a private policy with me."
"You won't make an exception for me?"
"No, Barry. I'm sorry."
Two cabs had collided at the intersection of Broadway and Sixty-fifth, causing a massive tie-up. Ignoring the hand signals of a brown-uniformed traffic policeman, Barry yanked the wheel to the left, cutting into an inside lane where traffic seemed to be inching along. "Anne," he said tightly, "I think I'm in love with you. I know I'm in love with you."
"Barry, that's silly," Anne said lightly, trying to find the right tone of voice that would fend off the man without offending him. Most definitely, she thought, it was time for a new partner. "It's a lovely compliment, but—as a friend—let me tell you that I don't think you know what you're talking about. First of all, you're five years younger than I am, and—"
"Hear me out, Anne," Barry interrupted curtly. "Now that I've managed to get some of it out, let me get it all out."
"Barry, I really don't think it's a good idea—"
"I made a mistake in not telling you earlier—right after I started working with you, I knew I was in love with you. It's the first time. You probably think that I'm immature, but I'm not. When I was in the seminary, I remained chaste because that's what I thought God wanted. I didn't even think of women. But when I realized that God had other plans for my life, I opened myself up to love. And I found you. I think of you as a gift from God; I believe we're meant for each other."
"Barry, are you putting me on?"
He flushed. "I love you, Anne."
"Stop this."
"Let me finish. I didn't feel there was any hurry; I believed that everything was going according to God's plan, and that we would just naturally come together when the time was right. I believed that you would realize that I loved you, and that you would come to love me. It was natural. Then I saw the way you reacted to Bone, and . . . well, it just hurt me terribly. I saw the look on your face when you looked at him, and, finally, it made me very jealous. Well, it was my own fault for not speaking out sooner, for not announcing my feelings, for not fighting for you. All right, I was naive. But now you know how I feel, and I think if you look into your heart—if you'll let yourself—I believe that you'll find that God means for you to love me."
Again, Anne looked out the window. There was a momentary break in the traffic, and she caught a glimpse of a young Hispanic woman sitting on the sidewalk. The entire left side of the woman's face was covered with a dirty bandage that seemed ready to fall off; in the woman's arms was a small dirty child dressed in ragged clothes, holding a hot dog smeared with ketchup. Propped up next to them was a crudely lettered sign that read: Please pardon our appearance. Will you help?
"Anne . . . ?"
Anne cleared her throat, turned to him. "I don't share your feelings, Barry," she said, making no effort to soften the firmness or warm the chill in her voice. The time had come, she thought, to stop being polite. "Nor do I share your theology. I'm sorry this whole thing has come up. Under the circumstances, I think it might be better if we found new partners."
Barry paled. "What are you saying, Anne?"
"Oh, Jesus, Barry!" Anne said with frustration. They were standing still, and Anne yanked open the door of the van, stepped out into the street. "Why the hell do you have to be so difficult?"
"Anne, where are you going?"
"You go check out that guy in Sherman Square," Anne called over her shoulder as she angled through the stalled cars toward the woman and child on the sidewalk. "I'll take a cab back to the office."
(ii)
His thoughts drifting easily in the semi-trance he entered between performances, oblivious to the crowds of pedestrians that eddied around him at the corner of Fifty-third Street and Fifth Avenue, Zulu stood very erect, his staff held close to his body, staring over the heads of the people. Without looking around, he knew there would be a large number of men and women—hot dogs, kebabs, sausages, falafels and cans of soda in their hands—gathering behind him on the broad steps of St. Thomas Episcopal Church to hear his next story. He was not ready; he had an inexhaustible wealth of stories to tell about the colossal, cruel, fantastic host-creature that was New York City, but the right words and rhythms in which to tell the next one had not come to him yet.
He was thinking, worrying, about the bone-man, who in the past had almost always come to hear his noontime performance.
It had been more than a week since Zulu had seen the blue Human Resources Administration van heading down rain-slick Fifth Avenue, with the social worker he knew as Barry driving, and the worker Anne in the back with the bone-man, who'd looked lost, forlorn and bewildered as he'd stared out the window. Zulu had raised his staff in greeting, but the bone-man had given no sign of recognition. And then the van had been gone. Zulu, who knew that the bone-man was much like himself, had not been able to understand what the other man was doing with the social workers.
And then he had read the newspaper stories the next day.
Zulu usually read at least five newspapers a day, pulling them out of the wire trash basket on the corner as soon as they were thrown away. He normally started the morning with The Wall Street Journal, discarded by well-dressed, fast-walking businessmen who had already read it over breakfast, or during their commute by train, subway, bus or taxi. But it had been the New York Post, not the Journal, which had given Zulu the most graphic description of what had happened to the strange, mute man he had come to think of as a friend.
The papers had said that although formal charges had not been filed, the bone-man was undoubtedly the killer who had been murdering homeless people and chopping off their heads.
He didn't believe it. Zulu was a writer—a sonic creator of short stories, essays and epic poems; he believed he could see into the hearts of men and women, sometimes with no more than a glance into the eyes of a pedestrian, or an exchange of looks with someone who had stopped to hear him, perhaps to drop money into the intricately carved and painted ceremonial wooden bowl at his feet. He had glimpsed petty thieves in three-piece suits, saints in leather and beads, closet alcoholics, embarrassed adulterers on their way to trysts in some mid-town hotel, homosexual priests, rapists, charitable people, writers like himself, insane people ready to explode at any moment. He had told stories about all of them, often feeling the inexorable surge of inspiration and beginning his recitation of the images in his mind even before the subjects had passed out of earshot.
But the person he had told the most stories about was the bone-man, and Zulu had never seen a killer in the bone-man's eyes or his strangely impassive face.
"Mister . . . ? Excuse me, mister?"
The papers said they had found him squatting in the mud in the rain; for two days he had been squatting in the mud, staring off into space.
That was not the bone-man he knew. The bone-man knew how to take care of his own needs as well as any man Zulu had ever known, even including himself.
Zulu didn't believe the bone-man had killed th
e old woman, Mary, or the old man on the steps of the Presbyterian church up the street. The bone-man was not a murderer, and Zulu didn't care what the "unspecified evidence" was that the police supposedly had. The one thing Zulu knew for certain was that something terrible had happened—
"Sir . . . ?"
—to the bone-man a year ago. Now something even more terrible might have happened to cause the bone-man to squat in the rain for two days. But, whatever had happened, Zulu was convinced the bone-man had not killed crazy old Mary, or anyone else—who had not deserved it.
"Sir, may I speak to you a moment?"
When in a trance, Zulu could normally block out all sounds and movement around him. But today he was distracted by thoughts of the bone-man, and the right words for his stories were not coming to him; consequently, he became aware that someone was persistently trying to get his attention. He looked down from his seven-foot height at the middle-aged, bespectacled woman with gray hair who was standing very close to him, almost touching his staff, craning her neck to look up into his face. There was kindness in the face, Zulu thought, compassion in the gray eyes magnified by her thick eyeglass lenses. And curiosity. Hers was a face being gently eroded by open countryside, displaying none of the sharp, tense lines sometimes etched into even young faces by the city. He had seen the woman before; each day for the last three days, after eleven but before the crush of the noonday crowds, she had come to sit on the steps of St. Thomas and listen to his stories, and she had always dropped at least a dollar into his wooden bowl.
"How can I help you, ma'am?" he asked in his resounding, mellifluous bass.
The woman smiled warmly. "I just want you to know how much I enjoy your stories, sir. They're like poetry, and when you speak it's almost like you're singing. My husband and I are here on vacation—we're from Indiana. This is my first trip to New York, and it's all too much, but I must say that I enjoy listening to you as much as anything else I've seen or heard. I think you're a remarkable man."
"Well, I certainly thank you for saying that, ma'am. I'm glad you enjoy my work."
"Are they true?"
"My stories? Oh, yes, ma'am."
"You tell them so well. Are they things you've memorized?"
"No, ma'am. I tell them as they come to me."
"But you said the stories are true."
"To describe something which has happened is not the same thing as telling a story, ma'am. A good storyteller must use just the right words if he is to accurately re-create the events in the listener's imagination." He was glad he had broken from the trance; the right words for another story were beginning to form in his mind.
"You mean you tell those stories right off the top of your head, here on the spot?"
"On the spot, yes, ma'am; not off the top of my head. The words come from somewhere deeper than that."
"Oh," the woman said quietly, somewhat surprised and obviously disappointed. "I was hoping . . . I very much wanted to buy some of your work."
"My work is not for sale, ma'am; it's given away. If people enjoy what I do, then they are free to give me what they want. You have given me donations, and I appreciate your generosity;"
"I was hoping to take a book, or something else of yours, home with me."
"If you remember me, if my stories linger in your mind, then you've taken me home with you."
The woman smiled wistfully. "We don't get many street poets in Indiana."
"In New York you expect to find such people, and so you do; you don't expect to find such people in Indiana, and so they would be easy to miss. Is it possible you weren't listening with the same ears and seeing with the same eyes when you were in Indiana?"
The woman stared up into his face for some time before finally nodding. "Yes. I think you may be right. I'll bear that in mind when I go home. I just wish, sir, that I had something of yours which you could autograph."
"The memory of me and my work is my autograph, ma'am. It would please me if I thought that my autograph would be easy for you to find, and to share with your friends."
"But you haven't published anything, sir?"
"My name is Zulu, ma'am. I publish here; every day."
"May I take your picture, Zulu?"
Zulu blinked slowly, then averted his gaze, hoping to mask his disapproval and disappointment so as not to hurt the gray-haired woman with so much kindness and curiosity in her eyes. He said softly, "If it is a photograph of me that you want, ma'am, go right ahead."
The woman removed a small Kodak Instamatic from her purse, waited for a break in the pedestrian traffic, then backed away to the curb and raised the camera to eye level. Zulu gazed stonily over her head, across the street, and saw the four youths in gray leather jackets, gray denims and black boots coming from the direction of Central Park, moving with the crowds. They abruptly stopped by the entrance to Fortunoff's, then moved back behind the flowing wall of people, disappearing from sight—but not before Zulu had seen the tall albino leader of the Wolfpack nod in his direction. They were in the next block, on Fifty-fourth Street.
The attack would come from his left.
He looked back at the woman, and knew that she had not released the shutter on the camera, which she was now putting back into her purse. She had a puzzled expression on her face as she walked back toward him.
"I don't know why," the woman said distantly, "but I don't think I want to take your picture. It's like it would take something away from that autograph you mentioned."
"You must go now, ma'am," Zulu said in a low voice.
"Oh," the woman said in a small voice that clearly reflected distress. "I hope I haven't offended you."
"No, ma'am."
"I still have an hour before I have to meet John, and I was so hoping to hear another of your stories. Isn't there any—?"
"There's going to be trouble, ma'am. If you stay here, you could be hurt."
The woman looked around her in alarm. "Trouble?"
"Yes, ma'am. Please go now—or at least move up on the church steps with the other people."
The woman blinked. "I'll get the police."
"That won't do any good, ma'am. If you bring the police here, it will only postpone the trouble. Please go. Hurry, now."
The woman, clearly frightened, clutched her purse to her chest. She once more looked around her, then back at Zulu; but Zulu was in another kind of trance now, one which sharpened his senses and heightened his awareness as he waited for what he knew was coming. The woman started to say something to him, then abruptly turned and hurried away, moving with a knot of pedestrians across Fifty-third Street.
The attack came five minutes later. The Wolf—this one a pimply-faced white youth of fourteen or fifteen—came at him on the run from behind a tightly packed knot of pedestrians. To his left, out of the corner of his eye, Zulu caught a flash of gray moving at right angles to the pedestrian traffic. Then the youth cut sharply and came at him at full speed, at the last moment reaching down to grab the money-filled bowl at Zulu's feet.
With what appeared to be a minimum of effort, without even glancing down, Zulu reached across his body with his left hand to grasp his staff in its middle, then used both hands to bring the heavy wooden rod smashing back into the youth's face and chest. The impact of the staff stopped the running youth in his tracks, straightened him up. His hands shot to his nose and mouth, which were gushing blood over his clothes and onto the sidewalk. He uttered a low, mewling cry, spat blood and teeth, then toppled backward. There were startled gasps from the people on the sidewalk and on the church steps behind Zulu. Somebody screamed, but a few seconds later there was a spontaneous burst of applause. More people started to clap as the youth, retching and spitting blood, crawled across the sidewalk, collapsed at the curb and rolled into the gutter.
Suddenly there was the howl and whoop of a police siren close by, and then a squad car came squealing around the corner of Fifty-third Street and braked to a halt at the curb—missing the fallen Wolf's outstretched hand
by only two or three inches. The policeman driving the car, a slender man with strands of fiery red hair visible from beneath the edge of his cap, took in the scene at a glance; he casually glanced down at the bloodied youth lying in the gutter before getting out of the car and stepping over the Wolf, spitting as he did so.
"Wolfpack," the policeman said to Zulu in a thick Irish brogue as he perfunctorily jerked his thumb back in the direction of the street. "I'm sorry I didn't run the fucker over. You all right, man?"
"Yes, Jim," Zulu replied evenly. Once again he was standing very erect, his staff planted firmly on the sidewalk in front of him. "Thank you. I believe, though, that the young man in the street has some trouble; he's missing teeth, his nose is definitely broken and his jaw may be as well."
The red-haired policeman grinned wryly. "Shit. Was he trying to rob you, Zulu?"
"He gave that indication, Jim," Zulu replied in the same even tone. "He seemed to be reaching down for my bowl as he sprinted along the sidewalk, and I'm afraid he miscalculated and ran right into my staff."
From somewhere in the crowd on the church steps, an angry woman shouted: "That's right, Officer! The kid was trying to rob the man! It was self-defense!"
There was a chorus of assenting, angry shouts which turned to jeers as the youth, still holding both hands to his face, struggled to his feet and staggered across Fifth Avenue against the light, causing a cacophony of blaring horns, screeching brakes and shouted obscenities from drivers.
"You want to press charges, Zulu?" the red-haired policeman asked as he casually watched the gray-jacketed Wolf stumble over the curb on the opposite side of the street. "If you want, I'll go get him."
"Don't bother yourself, Jim. I don't think he'll be back."
"Others will. The Wolfpack gang is getting to be a real pain in the ass. Juvenile Division's been trying to handle the Wolfpack, but I think they've underestimated the problem. When those kids start doing numbers like this in broad daylight, on Fifth Avenue, it's time to kick some ass."
"They've been watching me for a week, and I knew they'd be coming at me sooner or later."
Bone Page 9
