For all its age and wear, it was an elegant coat. A subtle blending of black and gray weaves, with here and there a touch of white. The seams and shoulders had maintained their positions well. The buttons were large, black, and old-fashioned; they appeared to be wooden, and each bore an ornate cross, like something from a crusader’s armor, the crosses highlighted in silver in the dim morning light that spilled over the high walls of the alley. The lapels were wide, as were the shoulders; the coat would have come down to about mid-thigh if I had tried it on. All in all, it was the kind of garment I could really become attached to.
Actually, I had once had a coat very much like it, passed down to me from my father, who had worn it almost every day for the last years of his life. Even during the summers, much to my mother’s annoyance.
But now I couldn’t bring myself to touch it.
I never saw my father touch my mother. I never heard him say more than commonplaces to her. But he loved that coat. It kept him warm, however shabby he and it might have become together.
“A good coat is all a man needs, really,” he’d say. “Hell, get a big coat, I always say, big a one as you can find. Your grandaddy had one that’d sleep a family of four pretty comfortable.” Then he’d horse-laugh. It was my father’s favorite joke, and he repeated it often.
“A man’s inners get soft and raw as he gets older.” That was another of my father’s theories. “A good coat protects ’em, keeps your guts from sloshing around, hanging all out if you know what I mean.”
I didn’t, but it would have been foolish to say so. I used to wonder how my father came to be convinced of such craziness. That particular theory gave me nightmares. I’d dream of my father standing in the doorway all bundled up in his old coat. Then he opened it. Each time in the dream I’d want to believe he had brought home something from the butcher’s—they just hadn’t bothered to wrap it. But then the raw red and gray lumps started to fall, and my father was screaming soundlessly, like a fish. There were bleeding horrors beneath that old coat.
My father died of consumption, but by that time he was eaten up by cancer and other nameless ills. Too much drinking, smoking and carousing, the doctor said. That and passing out in the street and having to sleep there all night. No help for someone like that, the doctor said. Just another drunk. Just another bum. No help for those kind. Nothing you could ever do for them would save them. Everything you did for them became a dangerous drain on your own life. They were determined to crap out on you.
I never got to say goodbye to my father. But I got his coat “for my protection.” Just like it had protected my father. My mother said it was the only thing he ever wrote down by way of a will.
When I put that big old coat on I’d find myself unbuttoning it every few minutes to see what I looked like under it. Or I’d run a finger under the front of it, and then check my finger for blood. I had my father’s coat for a year before I met the tramp in the diner. He wore a baseball cap and a light-weight summer shirt, even though it was late fall. The cheap radio he carried—held closely to the ear because, he said, he’d lost the earphones, or they’d been stolen but he didn’t want to accuse anyone—had British flag decals pasted all over it. “The British Invasion!” “The British Are Coming!” He was probably fifty years old, maybe fifty-five. His hair was extremely short and missing in spots, as if he’d had scabies that had had to be cut out.
He sat down across from me, our knees touching under the cracked Formica table. “Nice coat,” he said.
“Thank you.” I felt incongruously formal. I noticed the liver spots like birthmarks on his hands.
“The British are coming,” he said, pointing to his radio with a knowing look.
“I see.” I smiled, feeling ridiculous.
“My name’s Frank,” he said. And smiled back.
“Steve,” I said. And smiled again. But then his liver-spotted hand reached out and touched me under the table.
I reached down and removed his hand then, just as I had scolded my own father many times during his last years, when he’d been childish or mean with my mother. I held the tramp in my eyes. “You shouldn’t do things like that, Frank. Someone else might have really hurt you bad for doing a thing like that.”
Frank looked down, ashamed. “I’m sorry. I’m bad sometimes.”
Again surprising myself, I reached over and touched his sleeve. “It’s all right, Frank. Just be careful about that sort of thing.”
He looked up at me, and then I knew he thought of himself as the consummate con-artist. And maybe some days he actually was. “I’m awfully cold. No place to go. Could I have that coat?” Part con-artist and part child.
I’ve never quite understood my actions that night. I gave him my father’s coat. Maybe it would protect him, keep his raw “inners” safe. It was much too big for him. Walking away, he looked like a clown. He stuck the radio inside, and said out loud that it tickled, singing into his chest. I was cold walking home.
This coat propped up in the alley was very like that one. But I couldn’t touch it, couldn’t try it on.
The next day the coat was still there. The garbage around it had a slightly different arrangement, and for some reason that bothered me. Partially opened cans lay around the coat, but they certainly hadn’t been touched by your standard electric can opener. They were bent lopsided, the tops twisted as if they’d been punched, crushed, chewed, the contents sucked out. I picked up a can; blood spotted the bent lid.
I stared at the coat. Blood dotted the cuff of the right sleeve. At least I was pretty sure it was blood. I was also pretty sure that it hadn’t been there yesterday. In all my admiration for that overcoat, I would have noticed.
I looked at the bulges in the cloth about where a stomach and chest would be. They weren’t very large, and about what you’d expect in a coat left bent that way, stiffened with age or filth, and beginning to lose some of its shape. There was a mild breeze in the alley, no doubt concentrated because of the high walls and the ever-so-slight slope of the building that dead-ended the alley. That, I was sure, was what made the bulges seem to stir, to breathe as I stared at them.
Even so, I turned to leave. I was feeling sad, and frightened, and something else not quite explainable.
Nor can I explain what I did next. I reached into my jacket pocket—I’d bought it at Sears, a short corduroy jacket with what I hoped was a reassuringly dull history—and pulled out the chocolate bar I was carrying there. I dropped it behind me, by the overcoat. Then I walked out of the alley without looking back. Perhaps I do too many things I can’t explain.
I lived then in a poor, run-down section of the city, the kind of neighborhood I’d always gravitated to. Old tenements with architectural character crumbling to plaster dust in the corners, peeling off the walls. Plumbing and electricity working haphazardly in buildings not originally designed for them. Cheap, roomy apartments, and frequently someone passed out on the steps in front of the building, or on the hall steps inside. You stepped over them, or picked them up and carried them if you knew them a bit and they lived there. Dogs and derelicts would come in to relieve themselves, sometimes together. It made my few friends crazy, but none of it ever bothered me.
There was something about those people. Their needs were naked; there was little point hiding them. It made me wonder whether I would become that way if I lost the little I had. A child again, with no need to pretend, asking without hesitation. Whether deserved or not, those people let you love them. They couldn’t help letting you love them. In that regard they were quite different from my father. Maybe I could do something, and maybe my effort wasn’t wasted. I wasn’t a saint, but I carried them to their rooms. I wasn’t even a very nice person at that time—I was much too full of myself—and yet I bought them meals, gave them rides in my car. I had no illusions—they didn’t give a damn about me—but they let me love them.
The ones who actually lived in the streets, who had no homes or even an occasional rented room, were nea
rly invisible most of the time. When the weather got cold—when you began seeing the large boxes erected over gratings, the sections of plywood and sheet metal and plastic dragged into dark back alleys, the spaces under the overpasses turned into rough-made caves—you realized how many of them there were. A city within the city seeking its own kind of shelter. It made you wonder where they had all come from, and I was convinced I didn’t see most of them during the course of a normal day, even if we lived on the same block. I began to wonder if there might be some you never saw at all, who didn’t want to be seen, ever, except by their own kind.
I wasn’t a saint. And I wasn’t their own kind, although sometimes I dreamed I was.
In ancient times, the unwanted were cast out to die from exposure, without the modern miracle of the cardboard box or the plastic grocery bag.
Each day I left a few more groceries in the alley, an offering to the overcoat. Which altered itself slightly each day, lost more of its shape, as if it were shrinking from within. Starving itself no matter how much I fed it. Its lack of progress frustrated me. Malnutrition is a terrible thing; the coat’s persistent ill health enraged me. I wasn’t their kind, never would be. Each day the food I had left the day before had been ripped from its packages and devoured.
A pack of dogs could have done such a thing, but they would have disturbed the coat as well. And although the coat was collapsing a bit, it still retained its luster, and any movement of the overcoat was no more than that a body might make after being forced to sit in one place for too long a time.
People screamed, hit each other, and abused each other all the time. Sometimes in the streets, to a stranger, but most of the time it would be a couple, or someone and their kid, screaming and pounding and snapping and slapping right on the other side of that rotting panel of plaster, only a few feet from your nose. It was always a question of when to call the cops. Most of the time you didn’t, else you’d be calling them ten times a night. Usually if there was a gun shot, or if the context of the screams indicated there might be a knife or club involved, then you called. Lots of people got badly hurt, but what were you supposed to do? Even the cops couldn’t tell you when you should call. You shut your door and turned up the TV. Pretty soon it was just white noise. I wasn’t a saint.
An old man sprawled on the sidewalk near the opening of the alley, sobbing and spitting up into a metal can, a crumpled bit of paper in his hand. He said somebody went and tore up his million dollar lottery ticket, now how was he going to get right?
The coat was quite sunken now, but still splendid, a beautiful piece of goods. I still secretly wanted to slip it under my arm, take it home and maybe even wear it, protect myself from the cold for a change. The jacket from Sears always seemed too thin for the city winds; the high buildings and narrow street-canyons produced a “wind tunnel” effect. I really needed a heavier, old-fashioned coat. But I was still afraid, wondering if the wrong person might see me, and if there was a wrong person to see me.
Some of the groceries from last time were untouched, unopened. I gazed at the coat, now looking slumped in defeat. It seemed much thinner than I remembered, more like an autumn jacket, as if some of the lining had been eaten out. What had I been thinking of? There was nothing here but an old coat, and groceries a fool had left for the dogs and cats and rats to rummage through. I kicked at one of the unmolested cans.
It thumped and clacked against pavement, a harsh metallic sound, coming to rest against one sleeve of the coat.
A long, wormlike finger, followed by something like an eye, webbed skin shrouding something unrecognizable, darted out and snagged the can. Sucked it back so quickly the sleeve looked empty again, like after an amputation.
The coat began to dance, a waltz and then a jitterbug.
There was the sound of metal warping, then a moist sound.
I don’t understand why I didn’t run then. But I’m not the only one who’s ever missed a chance to escape.
More pale worm-ends shot out of sleeves, collar, and open waist, and unrecognizable pink and gray flesh. In the flurry the can was ejected, empty.
And in the flurry I saw my father open his old, bloody coat, and his pink and gray entrails falling loose. Disease-ridden, worthless, and all because he was careless, irresponsible, depending on an old coat to protect him from everything. Dying and leaving us alone. Didn’t even get to say goodbye. And then he leaves me that goddamned coat. As if that’s what’s going to protect me, keep me safe and sane as I grow older.
And now here’s this thing, itself so much like a mass of diseased entrails, some new mutated breed of homeless derelict in the city. But it’s no better than any of the rest of them. It pretends to be helpless, and then it rips cans apart. It lets me give it food, but gives me nothing in return, not even its improved health. There’s no helping them. They’ll drain you if you let them, and then they won’t even let you say goodbye. They’ll leave you a filthy old coat, good for nothing but to hide the disease, letting it eat you to raw hamburger if you don’t open it and look in time.
I turned and left there. But slowly.
Somehow my neighbors knew a truce had been broken. Somehow they knew I was on to their manipulations.
During the next two weeks someone stole two books of checks out of my apartment. The police found the kids who did it; their father, a fellow tenant, had ordered them to climb over the transom. The police stopped me for urinating in public. I hadn’t done it—a man was sick and I had turned my back on the street and gone over to the corner to see if I could help. He ran away. The police let me go with a warning. Someone drew a nail down the length of my car; someone else—or maybe it was the same person—slashed the left front tire. The hotel where I lived was noisy all the time; there were parties, fights, and party/fights late every night.
Someone groped me in the hall. Someone spat on me. Someone whispered endearments I couldn’t begin to understand. Before, they had always let me love them.
When I went back to the overcoat the material was nearly flat. Just in case, I had brought a loaf of bread and a can of peas. I scattered the slices of bread all around. Like leaves over a drunkard sleeping under a tree. There was no response. I threw the can into the middle of the black and gray folds. Nothing. I kicked at the beautiful overcoat.
The coat turned on its side. Something long, pink and gray drifted out of one sleeve. It stirred ever so slightly.
I picked up a brick at the side of the alley and dropped it on the pink and gray thing. The coat spasmed, but only minutely. I picked up more bricks and dropped them over various parts of the coat. I emptied a barrel of trash and rolled the barrel up and down the length of the coat, pressing it flat. I did a silly dance on it. If I’d had a match I would have set the whole thing on fire, like a schoolboy tormenting a stray cat.
I turned and left the alley. Again, I did not run.
I gave away all the things I didn’t need. The other tenants were overly thankful. I gave away my food, too, and some of my clothes, to the mission down the street. But no jackets, no coats.
When I moved back into my mother’s house for the first time since my father had died, she was very happy to see me, but also very surprised.
My friends were pleased that I lived at last in a respectable place, but I think their sudden victory caught them unaware, and they didn’t enjoy it as much for that.
Some people said I was a really good person to have helped the poor the way I did. I cut those people off rudely, sometimes saying the worst things I could think of to get them to leave me alone. “I was never one of them,” I’d say sometimes. “Do I look like one of them? You can’t do anything for people like that. I didn’t even say goodbye.”
And even more than before, I dream about an overcoat, opening slowly, like bat wings, showing off the bloody mysteries inside.
BUZZ
He felt a trembling in his ears, like the passage of warm breath, and a buzzing high inside his brain, as if a tiny, persistent voice were
trapped there.
“Paul, please.”
“I’m up, dammit.” After a few more minutes he kicked off the covers and rolled out of bed.
“The kids want you there when they open presents.”
Paul had heard Alice cajole and threaten the three children all morning about how they had to wait, but he said nothing.
Annie got the usual assortment of dolls, with the celebrity addition this year of a Barbie. Richard got a train set, Lincoln Logs, and assorted military toys and other vicious personae. Their oldest, Willy, got cash and a motorbike, something else Paul had disapproved of but had been skillfully pressured into accepting.
The kids’ gifts were a bit stereotyped: he and his wife had finally given up on arranging for Santa to deliver “cross-gender” presents. This was the stuff they really wanted. But Paul found himself unable, as yet, to stop hoping their tastes in heroes and role-models would change. For now, any crudely-drawn animated figure, with a good merchandising arrangement, dazzled them.
The expensive motorized Erector set he’d bought Willy, on his own initiative, lay forgotten in its box, shrouded in white tissue.
“Kids have changed, Paul,” Alice whispered behind him. “They don’t always go for the toys their parents treasured as children.”
He turned around. His wife wore her Didn’t I tell you? look.
Paul shrugged. “I just wanted to please him … and please myself, too, I guess.”
Annie was completely enthralled with her Barbie doll.
“Now, sit here, Barbie. I don’t want you fallin’ off the table and getting’ hurted.” Propped up on the table, the doll looked dim-witted. The expression on its face made Paul think of experimental brain surgery. “Oh, I know,” Annie said suddenly, “you want to go for a walk by the railroad tracks.” Annie hopped the doll over the wooden floor, slamming its feet down so hard the legs made a noise like chicken bones breaking. Richard aimed his toy rocket launcher their way and made popping noises, much to Annie’s dismay. “Leave my baby alone!” She let the doll fall over onto the tracks. “Oh, my baby,” she cried theatrically. “She’s caught on the railroad thing!”
City Fishing Page 5
