“Good-bye,” he’d said sweetly, like he missed me already.
“Yeah,” I’d said, hating myself and what I was, which was something I didn’t feel very often. “Keep walking, go away.”
He went away.
I went to the sink now, splashed some water on my tongue. Evidence, shmevidence, the police wouldn’t find anything, even our fingerprints disappear. Still, I shouldn’t hang out too long.
I looked at the books and records formerly owned by Mr. Combs: science stuff, physics. Some of it in German. Yawnsville. This guy would have gotten along great with Cvetko. Novels, mostly arty-smarty: Günter Grass, Herman Hesse, The Little Prince. I liked The Little Prince. The music was better. Jazz, mostly—Miles Davis, Charlie Parker. I took the Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain, slipped it under my arm. It was a pretty cover.
Of course I went through his drawers and got some cash, a tie pin with a diamond, a silver ring with three pieces of onyx; he wasn’t going to need any of that.
I noticed his bed was made. He was a bed-maker. Made sense, the place was cluttered but clean. His mommy taught him right.
I was about to leave. I had fed the bird, filled my pockets, gotten a snootful of a dead man’s scent and now I had a bad case of the what’s-it-all-fors. My hand was on the knob.
“Want to groove on Miles?” the bird said. Then, more excitedly, “Miles Davis!” And it clicked and whistled its ass off.
* * *
One thing about carrying a birdcage on the subway, everybody looks at you. Saturday night, the 6 train. Everybody was on their way out to a movie or a late dinner or just to get good and schnockered at some Midtown watering hole. Too many people to charm more than mildly; hiding my fangs was as good as it was going to get.
“What kinda bird is that?” said a cowboy-looking guy, good and loud and twangy, doing that thing hicks from the sticks do when they want to show they’re more sociable than New Yorkers.
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
I shrugged, looking at him.
“Well, what’s his name?”
“Why, you want his phone number?”
“Nice kid,” he said to everybody and nobody, laughing like, See, I knew you were all a-holes here.
Maybe we are.
* * *
“Hello?” Mrs. Baker said from inside her apartment.
“It’s me,” I said, grinning a shit-eating grin at the little round peephole, holding the cage while Gonzalo said, “Are you cold? Do you want the heater? Are you cold?”
I laughed.
The bird laughed, too, but like somebody else, probably his master.
I heard her draw the chain out of the latch and open the door. I stepped in quick. Little Baker was at his post in the recliner, eating a bowl of ice cream with M&M’s on top, pouring Coke in. Well, he wasn’t keeping that ass on him with baby carrots.
“Who is it, Mom?” he said, sounding annoyed. “The commercial’s almost over.”
“Just me,” I said, and he looked up and started drooling.
“It’s an African gray parrot,” his mom said absently, also drooling a bit.
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, his name’s Gonzalo, and you’re all going to be very happy together. He eats this stuff.”
I handed over the bag of sunflower seeds plus a box of macaw feed. At the sound of the bag, the bird went back and forth on his bar.
“They like fresh fruit, too. And nuts,” she said.
Gonzalo clicked and bobbed his head.
“How do you know this stuff?”
“My sister’s ex-husband owned a pet store. He threw himself under a bus. Right in front of her. I didn’t care for him.”
“That’s nice. Where’s Pops?”
“Out.”
This was a problem. I’d have to charm him, too, or he might dump the bird.
“Out where?”
“Felix’s. On the corner. It’s the only bar on the block.”
Problem solved.
Back in television land, the commercial ended.
“MO-om!” little Baker said.
“MO-om!” the bird said, exactly imitating the kid’s bratty, entitled whine.
I laughed and Gonzalo said, “Live from New York, it’s Saaaaturday night!”
Damned if it wasn’t, too.
I loved that bird.
* * *
I walked into the corner bar, Felix the Cat’s, one of those old-guy places that smelled like weak beer and Kool cigarettes, a shitty television over the bar next to a little team of Clydesdales pulling their beer wagon around in circles under a glass dome. The only guy in the place with long hair was swearing at that stupid game where you slide the disc down the plank.
Mr. Baker was bellied up to the bar, watching himself get old in the long, dirty mirror. He said “Hi” mildly when I slid up next to him.
“Who’s the kid?” the bartender said.
“My son.”
“I thought I met your son.”
“My other son.”
Howard Cosell was talking away on the television. Someone threw a peanut at him, earning him a finger wag from the barman, but it was a good throw, would have hit Howard right in the eye, might have made him jerk his head and knock his lousy toupee crooked.
I told Mr. Baker that he and his family were the proud owners of a new bird. “What kind?” he drooled. I mopped his lip with a napkin before the barman saw.
“African. It’s gray.”
“A bird? A real, honest-to-goodness bird?”
“Well, yeah.”
“I always wanted a bird. I have to go meet him! Is it a him?”
“I didn’t look. But I think so.”
“Him,” he said. “I have to! I . . .”
“What?”
His eyes started to moisten. Then he grabbed my shoulder hard.
“Good-bye.”
He got up in a spasm.
He was so enthusiastic about his new bird that he stuffed his pockets with peanuts and left immediately, forgetting to pay. The bartender called after him; he held up the I’ll-be-back-in-a-minute index finger and kept going, but he wasn’t going to be back in a minute. I paid for his three Budweisers. I had already said my good-byes to Gonzalo, but they were really so-longs. I had to find Cvetko and tell him what I saw, but first I had to make sure I got to see that bird again. It was a really cool goddamn bird.
LUCKY LUCKY
“And they just let you go?” Cvetko said. The old woman walked up to me with a tea tray for the third time in ten minutes.
“He does not care for tea,” Cvetko said again, but he wasn’t particularly good at charming. I was.
“No tea,” I said. “Now knit or something.” But I shouldn’t have said “now” because she dropped the whole tea set with a crash-bang and went hobbling off for her needles and yarn. The whole rest of the talk with Cvetko she just sat there, bleeding and knitting; she must have been on some anticoagulant. Cvetko wiped at her neck with a cloth so she didn’t mess up her nightgown. Kind of a saucy nightgown for an old bird, like satin or something; she must have really been looking forward to her visit.
“Of course they let me go, they’re just little kids.”
“I should loan you a book about ‘just little kids’ on a desert island.”
“Is it like Gilligan’s Island?” I said, fucking with him.
He sighed.
A little white paw flicked out under the bathroom door. The light was on in there.
I asked Cvetko, “Why do all old ladies have cats?”
“I enjoy cats,” the old lady said. “They sit on your lap and purr when it’s cold. It’s a great relief to loneliness. Do you have any idea what it’s like to know that
you are unlikely to live more than a decade? To have survived all those who were familiar to you so that everyone is a stranger? To feel that you’re tedious to these strangers? But really, it’s the nearness of death, especially for a secular person. Cats help with that.” She went on smiling, knitting, drooling, bleeding. Cvetko dabbed at her. She mouthed a silent Thank you.
“Are you done here?” I said. “Can we go talk somewhere? Maybe Old City Hall?”
In the same way that I had Chloë to go to when I wanted some peace, Cvetko had the Old City Hall station. I’m the one who showed it to him. The first time he saw it I thought he was going to cry at its vaulted ceilings and chandeliers, the beautiful brickwork. He even loved the blacked-out windows on the roof that used to be stained glass, used to let filtered sunlight in. It was magnificent. This was the place they had built to knock the socks off anybody who visited America back in the day, like “we’re so rich this is the stuff we stick underground.” Only problem was it was too small for how long the new trains were, just like 18th Street, only worse because this was a loop, not a straight line, so it would be impossible to fix. There was no way to let passengers on and off all the cars; some would still be in the tunnel. So this big, beautiful station got closed in ’45 and empty trains go through without stopping. Mostly empty. Citizens who want to peek at Old City Hall can still ride the 6 to the end of the line and just not get off before it starts up again. They’re not supposed to. But most people do what they’re not supposed to, as long as it’s fun, and sometimes even if it isn’t.
“This is a good place for conversation,” Cvetko said. “The temperature is agreeable and there are no unwanted listeners. Mrs. Dunwitty is an expert at keeping secrets. Do you know, she used to work in a speakeasy frequented by underworld figures. She was in charge of the coat room, and also the firearms of guests.”
“I fellated Lucky Luciano!” she said.
“Yeah, she’s buttoned up as tight as Fort Knox.”
“She won’t remember our visit.”
“Of course I won’t. Are you a vampire like Mr. Štukelj?”
“Yes.”
“That’s fine. Are you a Jew?”
“Shut up and knit.”
“That’s fine, too.”
She went back to her needles. The cat yowled. Another joined it. She had at least two of them in there.
“So you believe them to be feral?”
“What?”
“Your little associates in the park.”
“Oh. Yeah. Wild, untrained.”
“Did you ascertain how many there are?”
He said the word ascertain like he was smearing butter on fresh bread. He gave it like a gift.
“I saw six. I asked if there were more. They said no.”
Cvetko nodded.
“What do you think Margaret’s going to do if we tell her?” I said.
“You have known her for longer than I. I turn the question around on you. And please stop agitating your knees in that fashion; it is obvious that you are stimulating yourself.”
I hadn’t realized I was doing it. I got up, paced around, looking at the pictures on the walls. Guy smiling in a U.S. Army Air Corps cap, black and white and dead, nice chin on him, though. Really old people in sixties shots, young people in really old photos, one of them water-stained, showing a pretty couple, big mustache on him, hats like the Gay Nineties. Three babies, all in dresses, even the boy. Bet one of the girls was her.
Hey, Dad! She’s going to blow a gangster! Marry a pilot! End up as a midnight snack for a dead guy from, what, hungry-Austria!
“Joey.”
“Huh?”
“Stay with me, please. This is important.”
“Oh, Margaret. I don’t know.”
“Most important is the question of who turned them and then let them go with no knowledge of what they are or how to survive in the world as it is now. This individual is dangerous.”
I considered a fern hanging in macramé from a hook on the ceiling. I pushed it, set it swinging. I set another one swinging, too.
“I really don’t know what she’s liable to do, Cvets.”
KILLING MARGARET
Let’s go back to 1933.
All those years ago.
Margaret wheeling me through the streets of Manhattan in the Beth Israel wheelchair, my belly full of nurse’s blood, the darkness of the morgue drawer still sitting at the center of my mind like a base a runner can’t quite steal away from, always back to it and back, I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead.
I remember the slow parade of streetlamps over me, the tide of car headlights in the street, brighter now than they had seemed before, the only suns I would ever know.
“I would have left you there,” she said. “I wanted to, believe me.”
“Why didn’t you?” I said.
“I’m responsible for you now. At least until you learn.”
“Learn want?”
“Learn how. The how of it. He’ll show you.”
I started to ask another question and she cuffed my ear, hard.
“Shut up now. I don’t like your questions, and neither will he.”
“Hey,” a woman with a grocery bag said to Margaret. “What kind of nurse are you, smacking that kid like that?”
Margaret ignored her, but the woman trotted up next to her.
“I mean it, what’s wrong with you? You don’t smack a sick kid.”
Never slowing down, Margaret turned her head, looked her in the eye, and the woman stopped and tilted her grocery bag so an apple fell out and rolled, just stood in the sidewalk with her mouth open, making a sound I’ll never forget. Almost a cow sound, full of despair, the sound of a woman who hadn’t realized that behind every face was a skull and behind every skull, worse than the skull, was nothing. Just nothing. Margaret could show you that in a second.
* * *
One thing I need to say about Margaret’s family situation is that when she worked for us, I pictured the Irish stereotype, house full of kids, drunk husband, you know. Turns out I didn’t know a thing. When she left my house that day, the day of the gorgon, she had gone to her wretched Brooklyn tenement building with few windows and coal soot on the burlap walls, and she had passed the night staring at her son, a pale, freckled boy of six named Liam who had fallen from a snowy rooftop and lost the use of an arm. Worse, Liam was simple now. No school, no work, no wife for him. Ever. She had driven her violent husband off the year before and had leveraged herself as far into debt as she could go before finding the job at my family’s house. Things had started to get better. Just the week before the incident, she had paid one dollar fifty cents on the sixteen dollars she owed the grocer, given her sister a dollar against the ten she owed her and gotten her ice skates out of hock. Turns out Margaret in her daylight life wasn’t a half-bad skater.
And then?
“I tried being a whore,” she told me once. “I went with a fella, but ended up changing my mind about it halfway into the thing. He punched me good a few times and tried to take what he wanted, but I waited until he had his pants down and cut his mickey with a razor in my shoe. Not off. Just nicked it, but you know how they bleed, or maybe you don’t, but I do, and he wasn’t for fighting anymore after, and wasn’t worried about getting his money back neither. Just ran out into the street howling, holding a towel bunched up on it. Still, my eyes swelled up near shut and I knew I wasn’t no good for whoring. I didn’t know what I was good for.”
The food had run out and eviction was looming. They were living on soup kitchen and breadline charity. Margaret’s sister, who had five kids of her own, wouldn’t take the boy permanently, and neither would the home for boys. Not while Margaret was alive.
“So I did it.”
* * *
Picture this. You’re a vampire. You’ve bought a tenement building in Brook
lyn, some leaning-over piece of shit waiting to collapse or burn to the ground. You’ve got some schmuck who collects rents and manages things so nobody has to meet you. You live on the top floor with the windows boarded up and a pipe leading down to the ground and into the sewers, and that’s how you get out unseen. You make a point not to hunt in your own building, but there’s a wrinkle. There’s this woman. Irish, like half your tenants, but she doesn’t walk around beat-up looking and sad with a scarf around her hair waiting for her teeth to fall out. She’s got spirit. Like some old Irish clan chieftess or queen or something, she could walk down the sidewalk naked and never drop her chin. She had a piece-of-shit man who tried working her over with his belt one time too many, meaning once, and he ended up pushed down the stairs with a meat fork in his belly, went septic, almost killed him but he got better. Somebody said he went to Ohio because Pennsylvania was still too close to her. Only she’s got a sick kid and a perpetual case of bad luck.
You look in her window sometimes, watch her comb out her reddish-brown hair, you notice that her big blue eyes never look far-off or dreamy but like there’s work to be done and she’s going to do it. When she goes to bed she doesn’t read or pray—just washes up, combs her hair, lies back straight as a board in the middle of the bed (now that she can) and off goes the lightbulb behind its ratty shade. Only you can still see because you’re a vampire, and you just watch her in the dark, watch her close her eyes like a dead soldier, watch her chest rise and fall and think about how clean her neck is, how hot her blood is, how good it would be. She’s a beautiful woman, but not in the way the girls in the magazines or paintings are. She’s beautiful like a horse is beautiful, in her veins and the shape of her head, and her eyes. Especially her eyes. You want her in all the ways you can want a living woman. Only you never do it, any of it. Not here. Not where you live.
The Lesser Dead Page 12
