by Dale Peck
“Ma’am,” the head man wheezed, “if you don’t mind?”
But John was busy stroking the statue’s covered stomach and cooing something that sounded like, “There, there. There, there.”
“Ma’am? If…you…don’t…mind.”
I turned to the head man then.
“He’s with me,” I said, and my voice sounded hollow in my ears, “kind of.”
“And who the fuck are you?” the foot man said.
I turned back to him. Despite the cold, the sweat was running into his eyes, and he had to blink repeatedly in order to see me.
“I, um, I’m Ginny’s son.”
“No shit,” the head man said from the other end of the statue. I whipped my head around. “Well I’ll be goddamned. Hey, Frankie. That’s Ginny’s son.”
“That’s great,” Frankie panted from the statue’s feet. “Now we’re a foursome. Who’s got the fucking cards?”
I didn’t have to look at John to know he was looking at me: his breath was so foul it was almost blinding. But I looked anyway.
“Oh my poor baby,” he was saying through half his mouth, “whoever has done this to you?”
When he spoke I could see the gap of missing teeth on the left side of his mouth. The movers seemed to have taken stock of John’s wounds too, of his masculinity and the ill-fitting dress he wore, and they too fell silent. They swayed under their burden and I could feel the statue begin to vibrate as their strength failed.
“What happened to your face, John?”
“What happened? What happened? He’s fallen. Somebody has struck the hero down in his prime.” He inched his way toward the statue’s head. “Oh, you poor, poor man.”
“Goddamn it!” the foot man shouted. “If this bitch don’t back the fuck—”
“No!” John practically hissed at him. He felt around Claudia’s dress as if looking for one of the deep pockets Nellydean had sewn into his former habit, and even though I knew Claudia’s spiked heels were up in her apartment I still screamed,
“No, Justin, don’t! He’s a friend, he’s trying to help!”
It’s hard to say what might have happened had Nellydean not appeared. I heard her before I saw her: heard the bells of the shop ring behind me, heard the metal landing creak beneath the weight of a body, and without hurrying she moved around the statue and put her hands on John’s shoulders.
“Come on, honey. We got to set him down so we can tend to him.” She didn’t pull, just nudged him slightly, and, reluctant but docile, John stepped down to the street. The foot man heaved the statue off his leg with a crashing boom that made Nellydean’s earlier note sound like a tinkle from a tin drum, and I barely had time to stumble backwards before the head man dropped his end.
By the time the ambulance came the movers had abandoned us, leaving the statue in front of the door like a barricade. Nellydean had gone as well, leaving John stretched out beside the statue and cooing into its ear. He didn’t notice the cold, the siren that filled up Dutch Street like a flash flood of noise, just ran his hands over his fallen comrade’s lips and nose and cheeks. He started to rave when the paramedics took him by the arms and pulled him away. I went for his ankles then, but Sonny had beaten me there: John’s shoeless feet were as tiny and tender as the unbound feet of a Chinese princess.
At the hospital my pen scratched out a J, then wavered over the intake form. I settled on John finally, then paused again over the last name, finally wrote in Dionysus. Because, you know, that’s who the statue was. For an address I put down No. 1 and for next of kin I put down myself. Everything else on the form I left blank.
When I got home that night there was one more surprise waiting for me: not just my dinner, which sat on the floor in front of my apartment door, but a white envelope propped on top of the doorknob. When I picked it up I saw that it was addressed “To the Son of Ginny Ramsay.” As I walked down the hallway I dropped it in the dumbwaiter’s shaft, and a moment later I returned from my bedroom with John’s stuffed dress, threw it in after. I figured if there was anything important among all that paper it would find its way back to me eventually. It always did.
THE SLAM OF A CAR DOOR bouncing up Dutch Street woke me the next day. People were coming and going all the time now. In the quiet of the morning I could even hear the car drive away, but before it reached John I heard the squeal of wheels as another car entered Dutch from Fulton, and by the time it screeched to a stop below my windows I was leaning out, looking down. The first car was gone by then but the second was a cab, and who jumped out of it was Reggie, and what he screamed was:
“Goddammit, Claudia! Stop!”
If she answered him—if she was even there—I didn’t hear, because I was at the bedroom door by then. When I came out of the stairwell downstairs I saw Nellydean and Claudia, and I ducked behind a shelf. Claudia was holding a golden bundle it took me a moment to recognize as Divine wrapped in the yellow blanket Nellydean had given her four days ago. Nellydean held her broom like a lance. Reggie was there too, and I advanced on the three of them stealthily, shelf to shelf, pile to pile.
Reggie rocked back and forth between Claudia and Nellydean. His face was streaming with sweat and his eyes were wide but not quite focused. When he got close to Claudia she turned her body away from him, curled it protectively around Divine, and when he got close to Nellydean she brandished her broom. He bounced back and forth between them half a dozen times then suddenly changed trajectory, bounced back and forth between two rows of shelves. Every time he got close to one or another shelf his hand swept out and sent something crashing to the floor until finally he tripped over the scattered spokes of a croquet set and crashed down on top of a pile of dented boxes. Then he was up again, a wooden mallet in either hand, but he just stood there, swaying between Claudia and Nellydean. I ducked down and crawled a few steps closer.
The outstretched mallets were only a foot or two away from Nellydean on one side, Claudia and Divine on the other, but I was still halfway across the shop. Still too far away to do any good when Reggie feinted toward Nellydean with his mallet. In the dusty light with his arms stretched out he looked like the skeleton of a giant bat, crudely animated, and when he feinted a second time Nellydean parried, her broomstick striking Reggie’s mallet with a crk! loud enough to produce a sound from the bundle in Claudia’s arms. Reggie’s head jerked around at the noise, then jerked back toward Nellydean. Toward Claudia and Divine. Toward Nellydean. He lunged then, at Nellydean, but even as her broomstick struck the mallet in his right hand he let go of both mallets and switched directions in midair, he threw himself at Claudia and Divine and I launched myself too and Claudia screamed, but whether she screamed at me or Reggie I couldn’t tell. I was on the opposite side of a long table from Reggie and even though I had a vision of myself leaping over it the truth is I more or less clambered over and fell against him. But I caught his knees in my arms and grabbed on tight, twisted his legs out from under him, heard a snp! as his head struck the floor. A golden cloud of dust flew up at the impact and I sneezed wildly but Reggie didn’t make any sound at all. When I could focus again I saw the long shaft of Nellydean’s broomstick. It pressed down on Reggie’s throat and he lay beneath it with his arms flung out to either side, his heaving chest bouncing my head up and down like a float attached to a trotline. I thought it was just exertion that made his chest strain like that, but then I realized he was, like his son, crying.
I inched my way off him. I moved warily, not wanting him to get up but not wanting to hurt him either, but beyond his inflating and deflating chest he didn’t move. Nellydean didn’t move either. I could hear her breath too, I realized, thinner than Reggie’s, more labored. I saw that she held the broomstick with both hands and that she wasn’t pressing it into Reggie’s neck as much as she was holding onto it to hold herself up. Claudia’s eyes were wide in an expression of horror. I started toward her, and she clutched Divine to her chest and backed away so rapidly she almost tripped over a box. I jump
ed forward to help her but she jumped back and that’s when I realized her expression of horror was directed at me, and I looked down at myself.
After seven months of daily wear, Johnson Montgomery Croft’s clothes were threadbare, practically see-through, and the body they barely contained—my body—was nearly as insubstantial, wraithlike with neglect. Then, when I looked up, I saw Claudia as clearly as I’d seen myself, saw what an effort it was for her just to hold herself up. I reached up to my neck and grabbed the key I’d taken from John. I snapped it from its chain and brandished it at Claudia.
“What does this open?”
Claudia blinked.
“That?” Her voice was dull, abstracted. “We’ve had that since chapter one, Jamie. You should know by now it’s not important.” She took a faltering step toward me, extracted one arm from the bundle of Divine and held her hand out to me, palm up. “Let it go, Jamie.”
I looked down at the toothy shard, looked back up at Claudia.
“Jamie, please. It’s time to let it go.”
My eyes darted desperately around the shop, but there was nothing left to open. Everything was empty. Nothing would hold back the truth any longer.
“Jamie.”
Claudia took another step toward me, and all at once I dragged the pointed tip of the key through a whisper of fabric and an echo of skin. What I did made no more sense than what I’d done with K., but I’d run out of options. I drew the key the length of my forearm because if it opened nothing else it would open me, seam of seams, split skin and spilt blood flooding the room. I waved my arm at Claudia like a gun.
“Keep away from me. I have AIDS.”
And Claudia laughed.
“Oh, Jamie.” Her voice was tired, defeated, honest, relieved. “You do not.”
She took the wet red key from my hand, dropped it in her pocket, sagged against the corner of the table I’d climbed over to get to Reggie. And then, finally, she came clean.
“I do.”
IT TOOK THIRTY-FOUR STITCHES to close the wound in my arm. It took six hours for my test results to come back, and wouldn’t you know it: Claudia was right. They kept me in for three days though: suicide watch, and because I was suffering—surprise, surprise—from malnutrition. I waited for someone to say it, but no one did, so I said it myself: “Like the deer.”
The first day I was in the hospital, Claudia came to my room. In the harsh fluorescent glare her body seemed to have become evanescent, less ill than transparent: I could see right through her. “When I told you I hid that heroin from Reggie, I didn’t tell you the whole truth.” As she spoke she pushed her sleeve up until it bunched around the soft flesh of her upper arm, and there, dotting the hollow of her elbow like a woodpecker’s bug-hungry beak marks, were a half dozen prickled dots. When she rolled down her sleeve one reddish brown spot in the elbow crease matched up with the track mark underneath, a single umber fleck amid the yellow spots from Divine’s nursery, scattered like buttercups across the white field of her shirt.
THE SECOND DAY i was in the hospital Nellydean came to my room. She carried Divine and a tiny metal apparatus, but only the latter was for me. “She told me I ought-a show this to you.” I’d’ve never recognized it if it hadn’t been for the key sticking out of the variegated slot on one side. “It was the original lock on your momma’s desk. I switched em when I found out you was coming, left the key in the desk for you to find. It was supposed to be the first clue. For the treasure. I had no idea it was gonna lead you here.” I picked up the lock. It felt impossibly light, even as the key felt preposterously heavy. Suddenly I remembered. “You left No. 1? To give me this?” Nellydean’s eyes dropped to Divine’s face on her lap. “I left No. 1 to tell you I’m sorry, else I’d’ve just waited till you got home.” She looked up, blinked repeatedly in the light of the fluorescents. “Some things can’t wait.”
ON THE THIRD DAY, on my way out, I went looking for John. This was easier than you might think: the ambulance had taken me to the same hospital I’d taken him. When he saw me he smiled a gap-toothed smile. “It’s not so bad,” he said, touching his cheek. “Not half as bad as what I did to him.” Then he saw the bandage wrapping my arm. He frowned. “She said you’d come by but I didn’t realize this was what she meant.” “Who?” I said, and in answer he opened the drawer of his bedside table and pulled out two tattered maps and…and those shoes. “Hey, I get out of here in a few days. Can I borrow a pair?” I pointed to Divine’s rubbers with one hand, with the other indicated Johnson Montgomery Croft’s sandals on my feet. “This is all I have left.” John pointed at the sandals. “Not those.” He frowned. “One other thing.” He was still holding something. An envelope. “To the Son of Ginny Ramsay.” For the first time I lifted the flap, and the edge of a computer disk appeared along with a sheaf of papers. “For Jamie” was what was written on the disk’s label. I almost ran from the room, but John said, “She said to tell you not to hurry. She said by the time you got it it would be too late.”
six
DEAR JAMES,
I’ve been working on this for a long time. In some ways, longer than I’ve known you. I figured you deserved more than “the explanation.” You already got that anyway, at the hospital. So for the past six months I’ve been sneaking into your office when you were out. Luckily for me, you fuck around more than anyone I’ve ever met, and on a regular schedule too.
Laundry day.
When I started writing this I wasn’t sure what I was doing, really, or on what occasion I’d give it you. My primary motivation was guilt. I knew I was misleading you, that I was in your house under false pretenses—and it is yours, Jamie, no matter what Endean tells you, or Sonny. But, as is often the case with these things, I thought I was fooling you, but I was really fooling myself. I thought I didn’t really like you, and I was only too happy to play you for Endean’s sake, keep you sniffing after your mother’s buried treasure until…until Endean died, I guess, or at least till the baby came and I could decide what to do about that.
But I did like you, Jamie. I do. You’re one cracked cookie but you’re a good kid. You’ve got a little catching up to do in some areas, a little back-tracking in others, but you’ve got a good heart. You feel things. Maybe you feel things a little too much, but better too much than too little. Here’s a bit of Endean wisdom, for what it’s worth: you can’t build a road in front of you. You can only build it behind you, and if you want to walk on it you have to go all the way back to where you started.
I couldn’t tell you how far back I’d have to go to find a time in my life when I wasn’t playing people, but it would be a long time before Parker and Ellis. I didn’t play people because I didn’t care about them, but because I couldn’t bear to get too close to them. You remember that day in the car Upstate, you asked me what it had been like to lose my mother and I smacked you? I smacked you because that’s what it felt like and because you were out of your head a little, but also because you reminded me for the first time in years of everything I’d lost. I lost my mother, Jamie, both of my brothers, and in many ways my father. And I lost Reggie too—lost him, even though I can’t get quit of him.
Like a lot of women, I found out I was positive when I found out I was pregnant. This doesn’t mean it happened at the same time—I’ve been pregnant before, I just never got tested—but they were still all wrapped up together in my head. Until I got pregnant with Divine I never thought I wanted a kid. Let me rephrase that: I always thought the last thing in the world I wanted was a kid. I’ve had four abortions, Jamie. Four, and I never lost a night of sleep over any of them. If you’d asked me in the stirrups what I thought about the life that was being vacuumed out of me, I’d have told you it was better off where it was going. At least this way it wouldn’t lose its mother, its entire family, its future.
I don’t know why this time was different. Maybe it was because the woman at the clinic told me that if I was worried about the baby she could arrange to have that taken care of. Do you
know they don’t even have a special form for abortions, Jamie? There’s just a line on a generic questionnaire marked “type of operation.” Hernia repair, liposuction, gall bladder removal, it’s all the same. The whole thing was like, you obviously can’t take care of yourself, what makes you think you can take care of a baby? And the truth is, I probably would have had another abortion if you hadn’t shown up. But I mean, the cover of New York magazine? “The man who saves people”? I’m the least superstitious girl I know, but even I took that as a sign. And of course it turned out to be a lie. Oh, irony! Actually the ironic thing is that it’s me who’s trying to save you—or maybe it’s just the stupid thing, the reductio ad absurdum of this whole sad affair.
Maybe I wouldn’t be writing this if I’d gone to the doctor like I was supposed to, but there we go: we had any number of outs along the way, both of us, you and I, you and me, whatever, but the truth is most people are ignorant because they want to be, and I guess we’re no exceptions. With a single question to any obstetrician in this city I could have learned that fewer than two percent of babies born to HIV-positive women are themselves infected, which when you get right down to it is about the closest thing to a proof of a benevolent God I’ve ever heard of. If I’d known that, maybe I’d have done a little more research, I’d have joined some kind of support group for HIV-positive single black women—I’m sure there is one, if not a dozen, in this city. I’d have been told I wasn’t alone, I’d have been told that my job was going to be hard but not impossible. I’d have been told to stick with it and we’d have joined hands and prayed and sang—because if there’s black ladies involved you know there’s gonna be prayin’ and sangin’ and a whole lotta carryin’ on—and afterward we’d have gone out for coffee and pie and bitched about the men and/or needles that got us into this mess.
