Peaceable Kingdom

by Jack Ketchum

  They stopped in front of a boarded-up Chase Bank filthy with dust, the entire broad surface of its window covered with ID photos of cops and firemen dead, all those young faces staring out at them frozen in time forever. The thick brown-white dust lay everywhere. On the sidewalks, the streets, the surfaces of shops and highrises—canopies and even whole skyscrapers were being hosed down to try to get rid of it.

  It was a losing battle. The site was still burning.

  She stared at the faces moving past her. She guessed that not one in thirty was smiling.

  They passed police barricades strewn with flowers.

  Windows filled with appeals for information on the missing. The dead.

  Their photos.

  They passed children’s bright crayon drawings—hearts, firemen, cops, flowers, words of grief and thanks.

  It had been a while since either of them had said a thing. She’d always been perfectly comfortable with Barbara ever since their days bartending together at the Village Cafe but this was different. Each of them, she thought, was really alone here. Everybody was.

  The wind shifted. The stench died down. But her mouth still tasted like steel and dust and plastic. She was hungry. She hadn’t eaten. Yet it was impossible to think of eating here. She wondered how the sub shops and sidewalk stands stayed open. Even a Coke or a bottled water here would taste . . . wrong.

  They’d stop at each corner and gaze into the empty sky.

  Approaching Liberty Street the sidewalks became more crowded and then very crowded and before long they were trapped in the midst of a slow-moving mass of people that was almost frightening, what felt like hundreds of people, tourists and New Yorkers all crowding together at the barricades and straining for what was supposedly the best view of what was no longer there. And here you did see smiles and laughter, too damn much laughter for her liking. Almost a carnival atmosphere, fueled by morbid curiosity. And packed too tight together, far too tight, seven or eight deep—so that what if something happened? what if somebody panicked? You could be crushed, trampled. And when a father snapped a photo of his smiling little girl against the horizon and then a teenage boy with his girlfriend did the same she said, let’s get the hell out of here.

  “We can’t,” said Barbara.

  “I don’t like this.”

  “Neither do I.”

  She was shaking with a mix of fear and fury.

  “This way.”

  It was easier than she’d thought. As they stepped slowly through from the center to the rear of the crowd people were happy to take their place so they could get nearer to the site. Finally they stood at the edge of this crawling human tide, their back nearly scraping the filthy storefronts and climbing over steps leading into other storefronts and soon they found themselves on Park Row leading east so that it was silent again finally and they laughed and shook their heads almost dizzy with relief and that was when they heard it, a small soft mewling sound.

  “Is that. . . . ?”

  “Shhhh,” she said. “Yes.”

  She listened. In a moment she heard it again. There was a long green dumpster on blocks and packed with rubble, mostly chunks of cement, across the street to her left. The sound was coming from there. They walked over and peered beneath the dumpster, Claire working one way, Barbara the other.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Nothing here either.”

  She looked behind it. A dirty empty sidewalk and the wall of a building.

  “We didn’t imagine that,” Barbara said. “That was a kitten.”

  “I know. Hold on a minute.”

  She put her foot down on one of the blocks and hauled herself up to the lip of the dumpster and scanned the rubble. And there it was, far over to her right, a tiny tabby walking unsteadily across a narrow jagged cement-shard tightrope, back and forth, gazing down at something beyond her sightlines to the far side of the dumpster. They heard it cry again. She hopped down.

  “Over here,” she said.

  They walked over to where she judged the cat had been but there weren’t any blocks there, nothing for her to step up on. She looked around for a milk crate or a bucket or garbage can. Something.

  “Cradle your fingers.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Barbara did and her first try failed miserably and Claire fell back to the street again practically into her and they both started laughing and then she tried again.

  “Okay. I got it. Hold on.”

  She took most of her weight out of Barbara’s hands when her belly hit the lip of the dumpster and she folded at the waist and she spotted the cat and reached and the kitten turned to look at her, wide-eyed at this new disturbance and she thought it probably would have bolted had it not been perched there so precariously, but as it was, stayed put just long enough for her to put her right hand down and push further at the lip to get an extra foot of reach so that she caught it in her left hand and lifted it away.

  The kitten gave one long meeeeeoooowwwww in earnest now and glanced anxiously over its shoulder and she looked down to where the cat was looking and saw the much larger body whose markings so nearly matched its own. Its head lay hidden beneath a block of stone. She saw long-dried blood along its bib and shoulder.

  “Oh, you poor little thing,” she said.

  The kitten just looked at her, trembling.

  “I’ve got her,” she said. “I’m coming down.”

  “How did you know?” Barbara said.

  “How did I know what?”

  “That it was a she?”

  She laughed. “I did. I didn’t. I don’t know.”

  They were headed uptown and over to the subway and then home. Barbara carried her bag for her. She carried the kitten pressed against her breast and shoulder. The kitten was matted and caked with dust and God knows what else and smelled like the inside of a garbage can and she gripped Claire’s shoulder fiercely. Claire didn’t mind a bit.

  “How old, do you figure? Five, six weeks?”

  “God, I doubt that her eyes were even open a week ago. She’s young. Really young. I’ll get her to a vet this afternoon. Check her out and see if she’s okay. The vet’ll probably know.”

  They were going back roughly the way they came. Past the dusty shops and into the smell of burning and the strange sad New York silence.

  “You going to keep her?”

  She lifted the cat off her body and held her up over her head with both hands and the cat looked down and she smiled at the cat and smiled too out into the quiet street.

  “Forever.”

  November 10, 2001

  SEVEN

  When David finished work for the day—the acrylic for the YA bookcover was getting somewhere, finally—he did what he always did and cleaned his brushes; and covered his canvas and went to the bedroom and pressed MESSAGES on his answering machine and turned off the mute button and listened.

  Sandwiched between a recorded pitch from Mike Bloomberg asking for his support in the coming election and a call from his agent’s assistant asking him to phone when he got the chance, she had good news for him, was her voice saying it’s me, just wanted to see how you were doing, cut off abruptly.

  There had been whole days by now that he hadn’t even thought of her though they were still few and far between but this had been one of them, he’d been that absorbed in the work for a change, and then her voice, or the ghost of her voice—his machine was an old analog cassette recorder and had the annoying habit of allowing snippets of old buried messages to rise up from between the new ones like withered fingers from a grave—rushed at him with all its force and broke the dam inside him again.

  How am I doing?

  Some days fine, Claire. Most days, not well at all.

  He dialed her number. Something he hadn’t done in weeks now at her request.

  He got her machine.

  “It’s me,” he said. “Did you phone today? Or is my machine messing with my mind again? I figured I’d better check. Anyway, I’m
here, and I hope all’s well. See you.”

  He’d given her plenty of time to pick up. She hadn’t, so either she really wasn’t there and the call had come in earlier or her voice had been a mechanical glitch and she still wasn’t talking to him.

  Ready to talk to him was the way she put it.

  He’d wonded if she’d ever be ready.

  His agent was on speed-dial. She wasn’t. He’d taken her off almost a month ago. Too much temptation, far too easy. His agent said they had a terrific offer for him, cover art for the next six Anne Rice paperback reissues, his agent very enthusiastic about it, and went on to outline the deal. The deal was a good one and he sure as hell could use the money but he’d worked with Rice a few years back and knew she could be difficult, one of those writers who seemed to think they were painters too and let you know it each step of the way, detailing you to death, your art going back and forth for approval like a canvas ping-pong ball.

  “Tell them I’ll take it,” he said.

  He hung up and went to his computer and lit his twenty-first cigarette of the day. It was supposed to help him cut down if he counted them but so far it had only made him nervous to know he was smoking so damn much. He went into his e-mail. Half an hour later he hadn’t answered any of them. The words wouldn’t come.

  It was obsessive but all he could think of was her message on the machine. Just wanted to see how you were doing. Maybe she really did. Maybe she had just gone out for a while and she’d call back later.

  He doubted it.

  But he missed her enormously and whenever he allowed himself to realize that, whenever he truly let it through, he’d cling to even the most delicate thread of hope. She’d changed her mind, it didn’t matter that he couldn’t bring himself to leave, she missed him too much, all’s forgiven, let’s try again.

  He knew her far too well to think it was anything but fantasy but he clung to hope as though hope itself might make it so. It wasn’t just the sex he missed though God knows it had never been anything but fine between them but his heart had an entire Whole Earth catolog of what he missed about her and his mind kept flipping through the pages. Sometimes almost at random, something striking him hard for no reason. The gap between her two front teeth, the husky voice, the talk about mutual friends whose names he hadn’t heard for weeks now and incidents long past and people long gone in both their lives and art and books and feelings, the tall proud way she walked the street or the feel of her waist beneath his arm or her cheek beneath his hand or the two of them staring up at the darkening New York sky—it just went on and on. Countless images, moments observed and shared over the heady course of two long years. And the friendship which always lay beneath.

  He pushed back away from the computer and turned it off, watched the screen crackle down to neutral grey. The e-mail would have to wait. He wasn’t feeling up to the basically cheery voice it always seemed to require of him.

  A drink, he thought, that’s what was in order. You got a lot of work done today. You deserve it. Have a scotch and turn on the news for a while. Couldn’t hurt.

  Could it?

  He was drinking a fair amount these days.

  Was it for pleasure the way it used to be? Or just to throw a cozy blanket over pain?

  He knew Sara worried about it. Sometimes so did he.

  He seemed to have to bludgeon himself to sleep these days.

  He got up and poured one anyway. His two tabby cats yawned awake on the counter when he cracked the plastic tray of ice. He scratched them both behind the ears. They fell asleep again. Sara wouldn’t be home from work for two hours yet and the cats wouldn’t be fed until she did. They knew that as well as they knew every flat surface in the apartment and the exact extent to which it was good for sleeping on. Until that time rolled around, dozing was an appropriate response to life.

  He wished he were as sensible and poured himself a stiff one.

  He was waiting for a phone call.

  It might be a long night.

  It was.

  Seven hours, five drinks and a leftover chicken dinner later she hadn’t called. So it had been a glitch, as suspected. Tomorrow he was getting a new machine, dammit. He didn’t need the torment.

  And it was a torment. He wasn’t overstating. He felt like a caged animal in his own apartment. Sara was in the bedroom watching TV and doing paperwork, some homework from the bank but he couldn’t join her the way he usually did, not tonight. He couldn’t turn it off. It was as though being in the same room with her right now would constitute betrayal—of Sara, of Claire, of all three of them.

  He tried to read but that didn’t work either. He never painted or even sketched when he’d been drinking and he wasn’t about to start now. So that left the computer. He answered his e-mail as best he could and then surfed the net, looking for images, not sure what he was looking for but something to startle him or comfort him. Something. He felt hot-wired to her voice on the phone. Finally he left-clicked on the WRITE MAIL icon and began this long, feverish, idiotic letter to her. A plea for some kind of communication, any kind would do but mostly he wanted to see her and probably he wanted that for the very same reason she did not want to see him. It might start it up all over again, which he was selfish enough to want even knowing it could not be good for her and was honest enough about to make him feel guilty as sin.

  He didn’t know if the booze was helping or hindering in the sense-making department but the letter poured out of him and when it was finished he began to hit the SEND button but then stopped to read it again. He didn’t know if it spoke to his feelings or didn’t. If it was self-pitying drivel or not. Fuck it, he thought. Fuck it fuck it fuck it. He saved it into the MAIL WAITING TO BE SENT file. Maybe he’d send it off tomorrow when he was more sober and maybe he wouldn’t.

  Meantime he was not going to sit here staring at a computer screen all night.

  He knew where she worked these days.

  They still had a few friends in common who hadn’t deserted him completely and he’d pursuaded Barbara to give up the address. Hell, she was right here in the neighborhood. Only ten blocks away.

  He turned off the computer and got up and walked into the bedroom. Sara looked up at him from the bed. Piles of papers fanned out in front of her in an orderly fashion. She was doing something to them with a red felt tip pen.

  “I’m going out,” he said. “Feeling restless.”

  “Okay. Where to?”

  “Take a walk, have a drink. We’ll see.”

  “You going to see Claire?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I guess I’ll figure that one out once I’m out there. She still doesn’t want to see me.”

  She put down the pen.

  “David, are we in trouble? Do we need to talk?”

  “No, we’re not in trouble. At least not now. I don’t know about the long run. I don’t know where we’re going. But we don’t need to talk, not now.”

  “I worry.”

  “Don’t. It’s okay. I just might need to see her. I don’t know.”

  She looked at him and nodded. “All right. Be careful,” she said.

  She meant it. All that careful entailed.

  “I will. I love you.”

  She went back to her papers. He thought how strange this would look to some outsider. As though she really didn’t care. But he knew she did care and how much. They had thirty years together and the ties were strong even if sometimes invisible to most people, stretched thin these days because he had fallen in love and she of course knew as she knew everything important in his life—and maybe it was that knowing, as much as the cats they shared or the apartment they shared or the fact that she was his first best critic or even the years themselves of order and easy companionship which was why he stayed and couldn’t seem to leave.

  Sarah was family by now. He had no other.

  He put on his jacket and stepped into the hall and locked the door behind him.

  EIGHT

  Half-past midni
ght and Claire was finally getting to eat—the ceasar salad with grilled chicken she’d asked the cook to leave for her in the microwave. They’d been slammed all night long for a change but now there was only old Willie in his usual corner, arms folded in front of him and half asleep over his beer. When she finished she’d roust him. Willie weighed in at a good two hundred pounds and he’d already fallen off his barstool once since she’d started working here only a few weeks ago. He was going to crack his head open one of these days. She didn’t want it to be on her watch.

  Sandi dumped the last of the candles out of its holder into the black plastic trash bag down at the end of the bar, sighed and smiled and untied her waitress’ apron and slid it off over her head.