The Ballad of West Tenth Street

Home > Other > The Ballad of West Tenth Street > Page 18
The Ballad of West Tenth Street Page 18

by Marjorie Kernan


  “Now listen to me carefully,” she said, “you’re to take very good care of that girl, do you hear? I know her mother left her with you, but I’ll be keeping my eye on you.”

  “You’ll see—Deen loves me,” Kristen said. “I’m really good with kids, really nice to Deen.”

  “Yes, well, you just make sure you are, got that?” Mrs. D left, after fixing Kristen with a look, who affected a teary, mistreated expression that Mrs. D did not buy for an instant.

  Sleeping as innocently as a lamb,” Mrs. D reported to the colonel. “I couldn’t very well haul her out of there, it might’ve frightened her and after all, Sadie did sanction the deal. But I’d be far happier if she were out of there.”

  “The girl could stay here, and Ettie could look after her,” he said.

  “Hamish, any idea when your mother will return?”

  “Nope, she doesn’t tell me much about Brian, but I think it’s bad. I think she’s going to stay for a while. Like, a few weeks more at least I’d guess. Brian’s pretty fucked up, from what I read on the Internet. I think he’ll probably live but if he’s paralyzed, Munster might want to hang around and wait for a chance to smother him with a pillow.” He looked around at the faces of the grown-ups. “I mean, she’d have to, it’d be her mission. She wouldn’t leave him there all hooked up to tubes and stuff. She could never leave him like that.

  “Hey, if Deen moves in here, you think I could too? I know I said staying at the Fieldings’ is all right, but I’d much rather be here. Then I’d have all of you and Deen and Ettie, and I could learn cooking again.”

  Later, when Robert went to find a taxi for Mrs. D, he thought, She’s quite a woman. Really knows about people. And even though she pretends to be all hard-hearted and businesslike, she sure has a soft side. Why, she’d felt so bad for Ettie worrying about where the Cap’n had run off to this time she’d hired a detective agency to look for him. No doubt on the colonel’s dime, but that was his business. Yes, if anyone could rustle up that old bum for Ettie, it’d sure be Mrs. D. And it seemed private detectives didn’t belong to any union, so that was all right.

  24

  Brian was alive, though he gave no sign of being so. He lay very still on his white bed, in his beeping chamber, hooked up to all sorts of gadgets and living in a richly imagined world, dreaming round the clock on powerful narcotics. As he’d always enjoyed drugs, he was quite content, though he felt a bit as if he were tripping in some very remote place.

  Sadie, on the other hand, was not content. She was bored almost beyond endurance by the business of caring for someone in a coma. She spent her nights drinking herself into a sleep in which she tossed horribly, prickled by night sweats. She hated the swanky hotel the recording company had booked her into. It wasn’t anything like the London she’d known, a London of gravely paneled rooms and vintage seediness. This place was a modern high rise with exposed steel beams. Of course it was in Docklands, with a great honking lobby and views of the Thames, the rooms trying like hell to be TriBeCa lofts. A nasty steel coffee table, which she’d already tripped over twice, held a tall vase filled with what appeared to be flower stems—some indie florist’s wet dream, oi, why don’t we cut off the flowers, see? Just do stems, like? I say, that’s absolutely marvelous, so edgy.

  Each morning at ten thirty, rocker’s time, a car hired by RRC came to take her to St. Elfreda’s. She spent the mornings there with Brian, but couldn’t bear to be in the hospital at lunchtime, with its groaning of food trolleys, clatter of trays, and horrid smells. So she had the driver take her back to town, where she ate lunch in a café or a sandwich joint, then did some errands or visited her old friend the bog man at the British Museum. He at least was the same, had been the same for hundreds of years, pickled by the peat he’d been buried in, the garrote still around his neck.

  In the late afternoon she’d return to her faux loft and make calls home, then try to nap. In the evening, after the dinner trolleys had withdrawn, she’d call a minicab to take her back to St. Elfreda’s to spend another hour or two with Brian. He wasn’t allowed any other visitors, and had no living relatives, so it seemed a lonely time of day for an old rocker to lie in utter silence.

  She read him bits from music magazines, talked to him, and sometimes yelled at him. At other times she flung herself on the bed next to his and let out a long sigh, thinking that comatose people are not very good company.

  At times Dr. Mendelsen, or rather, Mr., for he was a surgeon, would breeze in, his tie tucked into the lapel of his white coat like certain cinema heroes of WWII propaganda films. He’d talk to Brian and then try to cheer Sadie up, being very British and kindly toward Yanks, especially Yank widows with lean thighs. Sadie’s plan to charm the surgeon had gone rather too well, though it had achieved her desired result, in that he checked on Brian often. The downside was that he’d developed a certain heavy-handed charm toward Sadie, while giving her sidelong wolf looks.

  Mendel-bendel, as Sadie had dubbed him, of course never discussed Brian’s condition with her in any scientific or substantive way. She was not an initiate into the Mysteries, and so must be treated as barely able to make out “the cat sat on the mat.” But through charm and an intelligent question snuck in here and there, she gradually was able to cobble together a picture of Brian’s medical condition.

  It seemed the injuries to his spine were of a type that might mend, or might not. That they had set the other breaks, immobilized his neck, and drugged him into a very dark, quiet place, where they could study his injuries and possibly allow them to heal on their own. As far as she could tell, there really wasn’t any surgery that could be performed to aid him. That admission had been won with no little effort and cunning on her part. Mendel-bendel talked of surgery that might return the use of his upper body, but it was obvious that what he meant was that they’d do it if the larger battle was deemed already lost. As far as the skin grafts went, they’d done a rough job when he was in the operating theater and left them.

  One thing bothered Sadie a great deal. This was that Mendel-bendel had spent hours observing Brian as Sadie talked to him. It was clear that he was looking for some sign of response. And there had been none. He’d been unable to disguise his puzzlement, and Sadie unable to hide her disappointment. In fact, she was getting bloody annoyed with Brian.

  So there was talk of lowering Brian’s intake of drugs, bringing him a bit closer to consciousness. “Oi! Who stole my stash?” Sadie imagined him shouting, in his enforced sleep, how it came out as a mumble, oi, oo to my tash? A frown creases his brow for a flicker, and his fingers tremble fretfully. Meanwhile, inside his head he’s leaping into the air, hurling whatever object to hand at the wall and going over to repeat the question, glaring right into the asshole’s eyes: “I said, who stole my stash?”

  Ah, bitter days when the last living member of a throw-it-all-away-for-the-moment rock band is neither living nor dead. Bitter days for his will, reduced to a flicker at the far end of a dark cavern, the red and glistening corpus Homo sapiens. Sadie sat in her gloomy hotel chamber, her feet up, the lights out, drinking vodka and staring out at the lights reflected on the surface of the oily Thames. It occurred to her that if Brian had been in the same accident back when the band was young, well, no it was too complicated a conjecture. And she was too drunk, had passed the point of composed, linear thinking.

  Instead she poured herself another drink.

  25

  A great cloud mass, stretching from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts, moved over the metropolitan area before sunset, bringing a sudden twilight, then darkness. As it met the warmer air from the Atlantic it stopped, piling up on itself. The weight of water inside it began to fall to earth, freezing as it did.

  The first flakes of snow fell on Manhattan with a glide, then melted. As they came down faster they began to cool the tepid streets, starting to accumulate. The denizens of Gotham hurried their steps. A bitter wind came up, hurling the new snow into eddies.

  By m
idnight the streets were white with the first snow of winter. The noises of the city were muffled by it and the streetlights shone in haloes of driven flakes. Taxis shushed by now and then, but traffic was at a minimum.

  Cap’n Meat clapped his hands together to warm them and kept on walking. He’d never been sorrier to see the sun set than he had that day, the last of the daylight subsuming in indigo clouds over the tops of the buildings. He felt the wind reaching to find his flesh, and noted how it had changed and was now coming from the north. He noted also that something had broken in him. That the week in the Hollanders’ house had set him irrevocably apart from the desire to wander forever. And that he had nowhere else to go but one place.

  He thought he knew what that place was, but needed time to approach it. Perhaps he should go into a church to pray. No, he thought, if reason is my messenger, and self-knowledge my goal, then a will-o’-the-wisp, a phantom that some men call their father will not do. I had a father, a real man of stringy flesh and blood that had gushed from a wound. The blood had pooled on the dusty soil where I laid him down beside the harvester then tied his kerchief tight above the vein. He looked near to dying so I ran to fetch Ma. He screamed after me as I ran, Tell her there isn’t any fucking God, not when you’ve got to slave every live long day on acreage like this, where insects and crop diseases are more plentiful than harvests, tell her to sell up and get out.

  He’d never gone inside a church again. Ma thought it was badness coming to the surface in him, but it wasn’t—he’d blasphemed the Lord, so he could no longer be a guest in His house.

  Instead he read the scriptures each Sunday, alone in the parlor. Ma begged and argued with him, but he wouldn’t budge, so she’d jam her hat on and leave, tugging us boys to follow her.

  The city had grown so still and silent the Cap’n had an odd feeling that he was the only person left alive there. The depopulated streets were eerie, as if the worst thing man could imagine had come to pass, and he was living in a postapocalyptic world.

  He’d read somewhere, long ago, of the last woolly mammoth, which was found wandering, somewhere in northern Europe, around the end of the seventeenth century. The men who’d spotted it ran back to the village to raise the alarm, then the villagers had gathered to kill it.

  Extinction, by its very process, means that there is eventually one sole survivor of its species. One last of its kind to roam and search for others, crying out for them. But their calls will never be returned. No brother, no parent, no ladylove, will ever make their sound.

  They forage and fend and wander, looking for another. Then walking monkeys, with their lightning sticks and yells and cutting things, beset them, and beat sounds of pleasure up into the sky to hear the last sounds of the last of one creature, as they trample its blood into the earth.

  Going up Minetta Alley, the Cap’n saw a pigeon lying on the sidewalk, one wing nearly torn off. Drops of blood sat like scarlet beads on its breast. A slithering blur ran from it, a rat. The bird beat its good wing uselessly, trying to get away. The rat had bitten off its feet. It let out a cheep of fear.

  The Cap’n knelt, the snow wetting his knees. He wrapped a handkerchief around the pigeon’s head, then wrung its neck. It was less frightening to them if they didn’t see. He buried it in a mound of snow once it had stopped twitching.

  It was a night for dying, he thought, trudging up Fifth Avenue. He touched Titus’s pocket to feel the cat’s solid warmth. Up ahead, in front of the Forbes building, he saw a fire in a trash can, a bum’s fire, and felt warmer just looking at it. Maybe there would be a few good fellows there, comparing exaggerated figures of other snowstorms.

  As quickly as he’d felt hope, his hopes were taken away and replaced by fear. It was the Angry One. His voice beat out like metal fists crashing on a shield, in the abandoned city canyon. The Cap’n dodged behind a scaffolding, hiding from those demented eyes.

  “I know you’re in there, motherfucker!” The Angry One was screaming. He was looking up at the Forbes building, and gesturing. “Come on out, Stevie-boy! I got a date with your ass. You and me gonna fuck like queens, do all that shit. Shotgun joints, have us a party, a real fine time, laugh and fall in goddamn, motherfucking love! Yeah, you and me, Stevie-boy, I’ll make you my bitch yet. You’re gonna want a tattoo with my name on it, right on your shiny white ass, when I’m done with you, man.

  “These people down here, they don’t understand the capitalist system. Not like you and I do, hey my main man? Come on, come on down—I wanna play!”

  No towheaded boy in spectacles came out of the towering bronze doors. The Angry One held his arms out, keening, but no playmate appeared.

  “Ah, he’s hidin’ up there. He just does not know what he’s missin’. Well, if that wonderbitch won’t play, maybe I’ll find my pleasure elsewhere. Where’s that fat bum and his cat? I thought maybe I’d kill the old man first, then that goddamn cat, but I can’t make up my mind, maybe it should be the other way around. Either way, when I’m done with that I don’t think you’ll mean so much to me anymore, Stevie-boy. Maybe I been fooling you all along, maybe I don’t love you at all.”

  The Angry One’s voice fell silent at last. The Cap’n was blocks away before he realized that he knew now who had been rousting and menacing him.

  He wondered why. Why did this man have an ache in him to kill him? What limpet attached that man’s rage to his life?

  His feet were frozen. It didn’t matter. Ill luck had plagued him all his days and here was just another outbreaking of the clouds that thundered down arrows at his head. The logical thing was to suppose that a life so cursed would end badly. No great surprise there. His feet bore him toward the river. The Hudson would take him, end all this claptrap.

  Realizing that he was truly ready to choose death, he thought suddenly of Titus. He took off his left glove and stroked the cat’s head. No, he couldn’t plunge in and listen to the cat’s screams, feel it fighting for life in his pocket. So he’d have to kill his friend first, then himself. But Titus had not decided to die. What should he do? There was little time left. It was far easier, he realized, to kill oneself than to leave another who needed you behind. Quick, think harder. He looked up and saw that he was on West Tenth Street, only a couple of blocks from the Hollanders. They would care for Titus.

  He’d leave the cat tied to their doorstep, with a note around his neck. And Titus would yowl at being tied up, then see him leave. And he’d hear his yowls and feel his friend’s eyes on his back. Why are you leaving me?

  Because I must. Or, he could wrap his wool scarf around his hand, break the window into the basement kitchen of the Hollanders’ house, shove Titus inside, and then seal it up somehow. Scribble a note. No, damn the soft explanations of a suicide note. All right, but he’d be obliged to say something to explain why Titus was there…. Look, the very thing, a square of plywood, pick it up. There, the plan was set. He wouldn’t stop to say good-bye to his friend, it would be too hard.

  Looking up at the brick house that had sheltered him, a house where he’d known kindness and safety, he saluted it. He knew that what he was doing was right, and that this house would care for Titus.

  Is you?”

  The Cap’n started. He looked over his shoulder and saw a small woman wrapped in a check coat. “Oh, meester Cap’n, it’s Ettie. I been looking out for you for so long. Waking, always waking, so many nights, looking for you.”

  She shone the flashlight in her hand onto her own face, to show him. Feeling suddenly so very tired he could barely move, he took a few steps toward her.

  “It’s in here,” she whispered, shining her flashlight on the garden gate. “Look, here, I open with key. It’s back there. A place for you. See?”

  The Cap’n followed her into the garden and over the bluestone paving. Shrubs made dark shapes around him. He was sure he was in the clutches of the river, and that contrary to common belief, a drowning man does not see the past, but this, a neatly made cottage, with a porch and la
mplight soft within.

  “That’s your house. The colonel made it. I go now, you and your cat sleep. I lock the garden gate. Talk in the morning. Then I’ll cry, so happy you came back, all right?”

  He nodded and she disappeared with a shush of cloth and the snap of a lock clicking home.

  The Cap’n stood, looking at the tiny cottage. He saw that lamplight fell from windows at its sides. That it had a door. A door it seemed he was invited to go in. He thought of running, there must be some way to climb over that garden gate. But a deep ache, running through the axis of his being, held him still.

  Slowly he mounted the steps to the porch, then opened the door. He poked his head around it, looking in. Two lanterns burned in brackets on the wall, another on a small table. To the left a bed folded out from the wall on ropes. It was made up with white sheets, a pillow, a wool blanket, and a quilt. He really couldn’t see the rest, the bed swam in his mind so large.

  He stepped fully into the cabin, closing the door behind him. No alarms went off, and no one leaped out to challenge him. He didn’t know how quite to describe it but the place seemed new, unoccupied. That either it was really for him, or he was sinking down inside the cold waters of the river, his hair floating and swaying, his mind at last free. Gingerly, he touched the bed.

  He drew Titus from his pocket and set him on the quilt. Titus wouldn’t take that, had to march around in ever decreasing circles, then sank onto the quilt, curled into a loose ball, and kneaded his claws into it. He let out a purr.

  Very carefully, the Cap’n took off his coat and boots, then raised the chimneys of the lanterns and blew them out. He felt his way over to the bed and snuck between the sheets. He never remembered putting his head down on the pillow, because he was asleep as he did.

  26

  The storm blew out to sea before dawn, leaving the sidewalks and trees covered in a hard, white snow. As the first light showed through the windows the Cap’n opened his eyes. He was warm under the quilt, though he could see his breath in the air.

 

‹ Prev