1987 - Swan Song v4

by Robert McCammon

  “I said get outta there!”

  Hands grabbed her ankles and hauled her roughly out of the box onto the pavement. As she came out she shouted in indignation and started kicking wildly. “You bastard sonofabitching bastard lemme alone you bastard!”

  “Shit, lookit that!” said one of the two figures standing above her, outlined in red neon from the sign of a Vietnamese takeout restaurant across West Thirty-sixth Street. “He’s a woman!”

  The other man, who’d grabbed her ankles above her dirty sneakers and hauled her out, growled in a darker, meaner voice, “Woman or not, I’m gonna stomp her ass.”

  She sat up, the canvas bag holding her worldly belongings clutched close to her chest. In the red wash of neon, her square-jawed, sturdy face was deeply lined and streaked with street grime. Her eyes, sunken in violet-tinged hollows, were a pale, watery blue and glinted with both fear and anger. On her head she wore a blue cap that she’d found the day before in a split-open garbage bag. Her outfit consisted of a dirty gray printed short-sleeved blouse and a baggy pair of brown men’s trousers with patched knees. She was a big-boned, fleshy woman, and her stomach and hips strained against the coarse material of her trousers; her clothes, as well as the canvas duffel bag she carried, had come from a kindly minister at the Salvation Army. Under the cap, her gray-streaked brown hair hung untidily around her shoulders, parts of it chopped off here and there where she’d taken scissors to it. Stuffed into her canvas bag was a mélange of objects: a roll of fishing line, a tattered bright orange sweater, a pair of cowboy boots with both heels broken off, a dented mess tray, paper cups and plastic eating utensils, a year-old copy of Cosmopolitan, a length of chain, several packages of Juicy Fruit chewing gum and other items buried in the bag that even she’d forgotten were there. As the two men stared at her—one with menacing intent—she clutched the bag tighter. Her left eye and cheekbone were bruised and swollen, and her ribs hurt where she’d been pushed down a flight of stairs by another indigent woman at the Christian Shelter three days before. She’d picked herself off the floor, stalked up the stairs and knocked two teeth out of the woman’s head with a roundhouse right.

  “You’re in my box,” the dark-voiced man said. He was tall and skinny, wearing only a pair of blue jeans, his chest shining with sweat. His face was bearded, his eyes filled with shadow. The second man, shorter and heavier, wore a sweaty T-shirt and green Army surplus pants pocked with cigarette burns. He had oily dark hair, and he kept scratching his crotch. The first man prodded her in the side with the toe of his boot, and she winced at the pain to her ribs. “You deaf, bitch? I said you’re in my fuckin’ box!”

  The cardboard box in which she’d been sleeping lay on its side amid a sea of oozing garbage bags, a symptom of the garbage strike that had clogged Manhattan’s streets and gutters for over two weeks. In the suffocating heat of one-hundred-degree days and ninety-degree nights, the bags had swollen and exploded. Rats were having festival days, and mountains of garbage lay uncollected, blocking off traffic on some streets.

  She looked dazedly up at the two men, the contents of a half bottle of Red Dagger percolating in her stomach. Her last meal had been the remnants of chicken bones and the scrapings from a discarded TV dinner. “Huh?”

  “My box!” the bearded man shouted in her face. “This is my place! You crazy or somethin’?”

  “She don’t have no sense,” the other one said. “She’s crazy as hell.”

  “Ugly as hell, too. Hey, whatcha got in that bag? Lemme see!” He grabbed at it and yanked, but the woman emitted a loud howl and refused to give it up, her eyes wide and terrified. “You got some money in there? Somethin’ to drink? Give it here, bitch!” The man almost tore it from her arms, but she whimpered and hung on. Red light sparked off an ornament around her neck—a small, cheap crucifix attached to a necklace made of linked gemclips.

  “Hey!” the second man said. “Looky there! I know who she is! I seen her panhandlin’ on Forty-second Street. She thinks she’s a damned saint, always preachin’ to people. They call her Sister Creep.”

  “Yeah? Well, maybe we can pawn us that trinket, then.” He reached to tear the crucifix off her neck, but she turned her head away. The man grabbed the back of her neck, snarled and balled up his other hand to strike her.

  “Please!” she begged, about to sob. “Please don’t hurt me! I got somethin’ for you!” She started rummaging through the bag.

  “Get it out, and hurry! I oughta bust your head for sleepin’ in my box.” He let her head go, but he kept his fist poised and ready.

  She made little weak whimpering noises as she searched. “Somewhere in here,” she muttered. “Got it somewhere.”

  “Put it right here!” He thrust his palm at her. “And maybe I won’t kick your ass.”

  Her hand closed around what she was looking for. “Found it,” she said. “Sure did.”

  “Well, put it here!”

  “Okay,” the woman replied; the whimpering was gone, and her voice was as tough as sunbaked leather. With one blurred, smooth motion she withdrew a straight razor, flicked it open with a snap of her wrist and slashed it hard across the bearded man’s open hand.

  Blood jetted from the gash. The man’s face went white. He gripped his wrist; his mouth contorted into an O, and then the scream came out like the sound of a strangling cat. At once the woman was on her stocky legs, holding the canvas bag in front of her like a shield and swiping again at the two men, who tumbled back into each other, slipped on the garbage-slimed pavement and went down. The bearded man, blood streaming down his hand, came up holding a piece of wood studded with rusty nails; his eyes gleamed with rage. “I’ll show you!” he screamed. “I’ll show you right now!”

  He swung at her, but she ducked under the blow and slashed at him with the razor. He staggered back again and stood looking dumbly at the line of blood that leaked from his chest.

  Sister Creep didn’t pause; she turned and ran—almost slipping in a pool of ooze, but regaining her balance—with the shouts of the two men ringing out behind her. “Gonna get you!” the bearded one warned. “I’ll find you, bitch! You just wait!”

  She didn’t. She kept going, her sneakers slapping the pavement, until she came to a barrier of a thousand split-open garbage bags. She crawled over it, taking the time to pick up a few interesting items, like a broken salt shaker and a soggy copy of National Geographic, and stuff them into her bag. Then she was over the barrier, and she kept walking, the breath still rasping in her lungs and her body trembling. That had been close, she thought. The demons almost got me! But glory be to Jesus, and when he arrives in his flying saucer from the planet Jupiter I’ll be there on the golden shore to kiss his hand!

  She stood on the corner of Thirty-eighth and Seventh Avenue, catching her breath and watching the traffic pass like a stampeding herd of cattle. The yellow haze of garbage fumes and automobile exhaust stirred like the stagnant matter atop a pond, and the wet heat pressed in on Sister Creep; beads of sweat broke and ran down her face. Her clothes were damp; she wished she had some deodorant, but the last of the Secret was gone. She looked around at the faces of strangers, daubed the color of wounds in the glare of pulsing neon. She didn’t know where she was going, and she hardly remembered where she’d been. But she knew she couldn’t stand on this corner all night; standing out in the open, she’d realized a long time ago, brought the demon X rays jabbing at your head, trying to scramble your brains. She began walking north, her head ducked and her shoulders hunched, in the direction of Central Park.

  Her nerves were jangling from her experience with the two heathen who’d tried to rob her. Sin was everywhere! she thought. In the ground, in the air, in the water—nothing but rank, black and evil sin! And it was in people’s faces, too, oh, yes! You could see the sin creeping over people’s faces, hooding their eyes and making their mouths go crooked. It was the world and the demons that were making innocent people crazy, she knew. Never before had the demons been so busy, or
so greedy for innocent souls.

  She thought of the magic place, way over on Fifth Avenue, and her hard, worried frown softened. She often went there to look at the beautiful things in the windows; the delicate objects displayed there had the power to soothe her soul, and even though the guard at the door wouldn’t let her pass she was content to just stand outside and stare. She recalled a glass angel in the window once—a powerful figure: the angel’s long hair was swept back like holy, glittering fire, and her wings were about to unfold from a strong, sleek body. And in that angel’s beautiful face the eyes shone with multicolored, wonderful lights. Sister Creep had journeyed to look at that angel every day for a month, until they replaced it with a glass whale leaping from a stormy blue-green glass sea. Of course, there were other places with treasures along Fifth Avenue, and Sister knew their names—Saks, Fortunoff’s, Cartier, Gucci, Tiffany—but she was drawn to the sculptures on display at the Steuben Glass shop, the magic place of soul-soothing dreams, where the silken sheen of polished glass under soft lights made her think how lovely Heaven was going to be.

  Somebody jostled her back to reality. She blinked in the hot shout of neon. Nearby a sign announced Girls! Live Girls!—would men want dead ones? she wondered—and a movie marquee advertised Born Erect. The signs pulsed from every niche and doorway: Sex Books! Sex Aids! Boom Boxes! Martial Arts Weapons! A thunder of bass-heavy music came from a bar’s doorway, and other pounding, discordant rhythms strutted from speakers set up over a strip of bookstores, bars, strip shows and porno theaters. At almost eleven-thirty, Forty-second Street near the rim of Times Square was a parade of humanity. A young Hispanic boy near Sister Creep held up his hands and shouted, “Coke! Poppers! Crack! Right here!” Not far away, a rival drug seller opened his coat to show the plastic bags he was carrying; he yelled, “Getcha high, you’re gonna fly! Do it deep, cheap cheap cheap!”

  Other sellers shouted at the cars that slowly drove along Forty-second. Girls in halter tops, jeans, hot pants or leather slacks hung around the doors of the bookstores and theaters or motioned for the drivers to pull over; some did, and Sister Creep watched the young girls being swept away into the night by strangers. The noise was almost deafening, and across the street in front of a peep show two young black men were grappling on the sidewalk, surrounded by a ring of others who laughed and urged them on to a higher level of violence. The burning hemp aroma of pot floated through the air, the incense of escape. “Switchblades!” another vendor yelled. “Blades right here!”

  Sister Creep moved on, her gaze warily ticking back and forth. She knew this street, this den of demons; she had come to preach here many times. But the preaching never did any good, and her voice was drowned out in the thunder of music and the shouting of people with something to sell. She stumbled across the body of a black man sprawled across the pavement; his eyes were open, and blood had pooled from his nostrils. She kept going, bumping into people, being shoved and cursed at, and the neon glare all but blinded her. Her mouth opened, and she shouted, “Save your souls! The end is near! God have mercy on your souls!”

  But no one even looked at her. Sister Creep plunged into the swirl of bodies, and suddenly an old, gnarled man with vomit on the front of his shirt was in her face; he cursed at her and grabbed for her bag, yanking several items out of it arid running before she could get a good swing at him. “You’re goin’ to Hell, you sonofabitch!” she shrieked—and then a wave of freezing cold gnawed at her bones and she flinched. The image of an onrushing freight train bearing down on her streaked through her mind.

  She did not see who hit her, she simply sensed that she was about to be hit. A hard, bony shoulder thrust her aside as easily as if her body had turned to straw, and in the second of contact an indelible picture was seared into her brain: a mountain of broken, charred dolls—no, not dolls, she realized as she was flung toward the street; dolls had no insides to burst through their rib cages, no brains to ooze from their ears, no teeth to grimace in the frozen rictus of the dead. She hit the curb and a cab swerved to avoid her, the driver shouting and leaning on his horn. She was all right, just the wind knocked out of her and her hurt side throbbing, and she struggled to her feet to see who’d hit her such a blow, but no one was paying her any attention. Still, Sister Creep’s teeth chattered from the cold that clung to her, there on the hottest night of midsummer, and she felt her arm for what she knew would be a black bruise where that bastard had collided with her. “You heathen shitass!” she yelled at nobody in particular, but the vision of a mountain of smoldering corpses lingered behind her eyes and a claw of fear clutched at her stomach. Who had that been, passing on the sidewalk, she wondered. What kind of monster dressed in human skin? She saw the marquee of a theater before her, advertising a double feature of The Face of Death, Part Four and Mondo Bizarro. Walking closer, she saw that the poster for Face of Death, Part Four promised Scenes From The Autopsy Table! Car Wreck Victims! Death By Fire! Uncut And Uncensored!

  A chill lingered in the air around the closed door of the theater. Come In! a sign said on the door. We’re Air Conditioned! But it was more than the air conditioner, she decided. This was a dank, sinister chill: the chill of shadows where poison toadstools grow, their ruddy colors beckoning a child to come, come take a taste of candy.

  It was fading now, dissipating in the sultry heat. Sister Creep stood in front of that door, and though she knew that sweet Jesus was her mission and sweet Jesus would protect her, she knew also that she wouldn’t set foot inside that theater for a full bottle of Red Dagger—not even two full bottles!

  She backed away from the door, bumped into somebody who cursed and shoved her aside, and then she started walking again—where, she didn’t know, nor did she care. Her cheeks burned with shame. She had been afraid, she told herself, even though sweet holy Jesus stood at her side. She had been afraid to look evil in the face, and she had sinned yet again.

  Two blocks past the forbidding theater, she saw a black kid toss a beer bottle into the midst of some overflowing garbage cans set back in the doorway of a crumbling building. She pretended to be searching for something in her bag until he’d passed, and then she stepped into that doorway and started looking for the bottle, her throat parched for a sip, a drop, of liquid.

  Rats squealed and scurried away over her hands, but she didn’t mind them; she saw rats every day, and much bigger ones than these. One of them perched on the edge of a can and squealed at her with furious indignation. She tossed a cast-off tennis shoe at it, and the thing fled.

  The smell of the garbage was putrid, the smell of meat that had long since gone bad. She found the beer bottle, and in the murky light she rejoiced to see that a few drops remained. She quickly tilted it to her lips, her tongue struggling into the bottle for the tang of beer. Heedless of the chattering rats, she sat down with her back to the rough brick wall. As she put her hand to the ground to steady herself she touched something damp and soft. She looked to her side; but when she realized what it was, she put her hand to her mouth to stifle a scream.

  It had been wrapped up in a few pages of newspaper, but the rats had chewed that away. Then they had gone to work on the flesh. Sister Creep couldn’t tell how old it was, or whether it was a boy or a girl, but its eyes were half open in the tiny face, as if the infant lay on the edge of sweet slumber. It was nude; someone had tossed it into the heap of garbage cans and bags and sweltering filth as if it were a broken toy.

  “Oh,” she whispered, and she thought of a rainswept highway and a spinning blue light. She heard a man’s voice saying, “Let me have her now, lady. You’ve got to let me have her.”

  Sister Creep picked up the dead infant and began to rock it in her arms. From the distance came the pounding of mindless music and the calls of the vendors on Forty-second Street, and Sister Creep crooned in a strangled voice, “Hushabye, hushabye, little baby don’t you cry…” She couldn’t remember the rest of it.

  The blue light spinning, and the man’s voice floating thr
ough time and distance: “Give her to me, lady. The ambulance is coming.”

  “No,” Sister Creep whispered. Her eyes were wide and staring, and a tear trickled down her cheek. “No, I won’t… let… her go…”

  She pressed the infant against her shoulder, and the tiny head lolled. The body was cold. Around Sister Creep, the rats chattered and squealed with frustration.

  “Oh God,” she heard herself say. And then she lifted her head toward a slice of sky and felt her face contort, and the anger flooded out of her as she screamed, “Where are you?” Her voice echoed off along the street and was drowned by the merry commerce a couple of blocks away. Sweet Jesus is late, she thought. He’s late, late, late for a very important date, date, date! She began to giggle hysterically and cry at the same time, until what came from her throat sounded like the moaning of a wounded animal.

  It was a long time before she realized that she had to move on, and she could not take the infant with her. She wrapped it carefully in the bright orange sweater from her bag, and then she lowered it into one of the garbage cans and piled as much as she could on top of it. A large gray rat came close to her, baring its teeth, and she hit it square with the empty beer bottle.

  She couldn’t find the strength to stand, and she crawled out of the doorway with her head bowed and the hot tears of shame, disgust and rage coursing down her face. I can’t go on, she told herself. I can’t live in this dark world anymore! Dear sweet Jesus, come down in your flying saucer and take me with you! She leaned her forehead against the sidewalk, and she wanted to be dead and in Heaven where all the sin was blotted clean.

  Something clinked to the sidewalk, ringing like notes of music. She looked up; her eyes were blurred and swollen from crying, but she saw someone walking away from her. The figure turned the corner and was gone.

  Sister Creep saw that several coins lay on the pavement a few feet away—three quarters, two dunes and a nickel. Somebody had thought she was panhandling, she realized. Her arm darted out, and she scooped up the coins before anybody else could get them.