Come Sunday

by Bradford Morrow

  “Seedees?”

  “Hey, Lupi?”

  “Yes.”

  “Whatever happened to Topo Gigio?”

  “What?”

  “Topo Gigio, the adorable little mouse on Ed Sullivan, oohh Eddie! —you never heard of Sullivan probably.”

  Lupi pulled on his lower lip. “I don’t think so.”

  “Someday somebody’s going to be able to tell me … so a few years ago I’m so disgusted by all this phony baloney I say to myself Krieger my friend you’re looking unemployment benefits straight in the teeth unless you can turn this shit around and I have to admit I thought, Anything has got to be better than this. But I thought of half a dozen things all of them not suited to my delicate constitution, so I begin to look up old acquaintances, connections, etcetera etcetera, three of whom you find on your plate even as we speak.”

  As Krieger lit the cigarette he had been fidgeting with during the prior several minutes Lupi had enough time to arrive at the appalling conclusion that once one crossed Krieger’s path there was no way ultimately to untangle it from one’s own. “On my plate …”

  “Uhm,” he assented as he waved the match and inhaled vigorously at the cigarette, “yes, means to deal with what you’ve got before you, so I did some research did some contemplation on what I’d learned and voilà, here we are back in imports/exports.”

  The rooster had been anxious for some time to escape its basket and upon the boy’s having fallen asleep made its move, departing the bus by a window in a cloud of luminescent feathers, red and yellow. When the bus pulled to a stop in the middle of the road the soldier leapt down to chase it. Krieger followed this activity with amusement, crying out “cockadoodle-doo” and laughing with the musicians, one of whom had worked his way down the narrow aisle to the back. “Toma un poquito de eso, amigo,” the frail moustached man offered, but Krieger, broadly smiling, answered. “Gracias no.”

  When the soldier climbed aboard, the rooster dangled mortified upside down where it was held, clutched by its legs in one fist of its captor.

  “Aquí está,” and he gave it back to the boy.

  Krieger kept laughing, smoke bursting off his tongue, as if the laughter itself moderated his involvement with the others. “People, god. Certifiably crazy, just scratch your way a bit under the surface, and you don’t have to go far, believe me and—look at that character.”

  The soldier settled down in his seat, his chin on chest.

  “You shouldn’t talk so loud.”

  “Oh hell, I’ll shout it, you think any of these people understand a word of English, and even if they could who cares? Anyhow, where was I?”

  “Topo—”

  “—slightest fraction of an inch beneath the surface of their occupations or moods and what opens up almost without exception are vast wild alien worlds absolutely unexpected beyond anything you might have guessed at … it’s not necessarily intriguing, I mean not even guaranteed to be all that interesting, sometimes it’s just your favorite cousin turns out to be a squeeze artist or your girlfriend this sweet Marian-the-librarian type, you go out with the guys one night and you thought she was back home reading Trollope or something and you go into the club and you look up on stage and there she is, pasties flying, in this live sex revue … but more often than not I swear to god—wild vast alien crazy worlds out there, Lupi.”

  “Why do you say this?”

  “If you’ll just listen to me, I mean the two you’re about to meet and your friend there—”

  “He’s your friend not mine.”

  “Whatever, but here I do a little work little snooping and … Pandora’s box! pop the top and whadayaget? Worlds, worlds. Old Nicaragua’d come down some several notches since the polo-pony days private banquets at the lagoon Xiloa and some Argentine jockey has had more bubbly than he should’ve and here he is standing on the smorgasbord table, dainty as hell, trying to arrange a rendezvous with a huge dripping ice sculpture of Somoza’s wife the problem was his amorous attentions were pretty goddamned funny until some big guys in brown suits pulled him down into the fruit bowl.”

  “Hey hold on—”

  The rooster had again gotten free. Lupi grabbed it by a wing as it lurched off the back of the seat.

  “Goddamn it,” Krieger shouted, dropping his cigarette into his lap as he tried to wave off the mass of flapping feathers and sharp squabbling. The woman was screaming Thief! “Ay, Dios—ladrón!” and her baby began to wail. Lupi reverted to his first language as he tried to hold the angry bird away from his face, “Ma che cazzo da sei cosí stupido da far paura ma,” none of which meant much.

  Having come down the aisle, boots heavy on the loose boards of the bus’s floor, the soldier got the rooster away from Lupi, who sat there dazed spitting feathers as the wild aaacking ceased although its legs continued to prance, dry and rubbery. With eyes empty, the soldier presented the bird to the woman.

  Eat, he said, and shut up.

  The woman continued to shout, and didn’t hear him.

  Ignoring her, he returned to his seat.

  “Hurrá soldado,” said Krieger, cigarette back at the side of his mouth. He relit it, offered a cigarette to Lupi. “Viva López Reyes, now where the hell was I?”

  Lupi could not say. The flat green plains out the windows had begun to lose their definition in late-morning heat. Beyond, ranges of mountains rose away into pine green, shrouded by warm mist up into their valleys, mist that hugged fan-shaped anticlines and slid its ephemeral fingers through spiderwebs that spiraled up and fell like breath over the brown floor measured by its needles. Lupi thought of the fingers and how Nini might have liked to lie down there on a bed of boughs in her school uniform, and how after kissing her for a long time he might be allowed to roll her on her side and lift up her navy blue skirt, that scratchy …

  “You’re not listening, caro.” Krieger put his cigarette out on the side panel of the bus.

  “Yes I was, you were saying how that fat one moved his wife and seven? eight? children to a place a few kilometers inside Honduras near the village where I was.”

  Krieger said, “Okay. And so he’s very protective of his family, good Third World trait, anyway it wasn’t that difficult to locate him renew relations segue into what’s doing for work these days and I find out his brother Carlos—”

  “His brother?”

  “Of course. All these people are related. You’re a Catholic, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “But I mean, surely brought up Catholic.”

  “Yes.”

  “There we are. Well? the Eleventh Commandment? Thou shalt copulate like bunnies so to increase the papist warren. What the hell else is there to do in a natural state but hunt, eat, screw, sleep? Well anyhow these are all good Catholics down here, by-the-bookers even though they can’t sign their own name on a birth certificate.”

  “Bautista, is that his son, too?”

  Krieger’s eyes closed, the lashes fluttered, lids opened again. “Question’s rhetorical, right? right?”

  “Not meant to be.”

  “I mean, of course he is, Jorge, Juan, who can remember all the names?—the whole lot, outside me, you didn’t meet a soul back there that wasn’t family, etcetera. And so I have these connections and this one gentleman requires any artifacts, literature, materials that have to do with longevity, fountain of youth and his self-image is obviously that he is exacting and scientific in his acquisitive procedures, mostly limiting his purchases to obscure offprints and old bones, I thought I’d test the waters with something Carlos had shall we say confiscated from the Cristóbal village—it was a figurehead, the kind of carved statue, busty gals, they’d put on the bow at the stemhead, and it was truly old could really pass for sixteenth-century without anybody getting fucked up or embarrassed and so I offered it by prospectus to this Berkeley, saying it had provenance that goes back to Cuba and Tampa Bay before where it had been owned by descendants of Carib Indians who’d stripped it off one of
Ponce de León’s ships in Florida …”

  “And he bought it?” Lupi smiled despite himself, with a gesture that brought his hands forward, fingers drawn together at their tips, mildly flexed.

  Krieger rubbed his eyes. “Huh?”

  “This guy, he bought it?”

  He looked down at his lap, up at the rattling roof of the bus, and finally at Lupi—a casual sequence meant to impart not disdain but ennui. “That’s not all and he’s not all. It’s blossomed better than a hothouse orchid. Sure he bought it and I’ll tell you he paid for it, too, just like he is going to pay for this one, the real goods, he wants an old man? okay okay, you got it. Now, the oldest authenticated man alive is this nip Strigechiyo Izumi but he’s only a hundred and nineteen, and they talk about ones down in South America, you know a hundred forty a hundred fifty, no more than that, so I start thinking start thinking uhm, that malarky that Sardavaal was going on about and …”—Krieger thwacks Lupi’s nearer thigh, all energy once more, and winks—“yeah! right! fine, okay: Gentlemen? start your engines!”

  Tegucigalpa’s lights and Krieger’s voice were left below at the end of the day in the valley bowl as the airplane climbed sharply, precipitously, up in the drafty air, wings flapping birdlike but stiffly to Mexico City, where while they waited for their connection he stared at the photographs of the armillary sphere, then boarded a jet. When the airplane landed in Houston, it was the middle of the night. Lupi peered out the window at this country he knew only from photographs, television, newspapers, dubbed westerns with cowboys in chaps, spurred boots, leather vests, and sometimes black ten-gallon hats—these stuck up bank tellers and made demands of barmaids in Sicilian accents. But he couldn’t see much, and the terminal (good word for it, he thought)—with its Muzak, its stale fuel smells, its pastel modular furniture and art panels, its taverns sunk in black niches and filled with damp smoke, and above all its faces, the faces and faces and faces canceled by harsh forms—had been just like any old terminal.

  He sat down, twiddled his thumbs, closed his eyes. A brief rest. Bring something up to see.

  Framed in the soft square what were those? smokestacks? the rim of a tide pool littered with molted claws of crabs? shorebirds slathered in spilled oil? No, he saw that they were hors d’oeuvres. Cut away to a colloquy between beefy faces obscured by Stetsons and double old-fashioned glasses of scotch. It wasn’t long before he recognized the faces, for the show had been syndicated in Italy. Signor Bobbi restopped the cut-crystal decanter and handed with a look of oily empathy spread in his face the glass to sad signora Elli—beneath Signora’s brow welled tears and as she contemplated this glass her eyes dissolved to clams on the half shell. He knew the episode. He was bored by Elli’s troubles with her boys and husband lost in the jungles of South America and he was tired of her pissing and moaning.

  There was a tug at his sleeve. Lupi opened his eyes. Poor old man wanted water. Lupi had to show him how a water fountain worked. You turn this metal stick here and the water comes up and you put your head down like this and suck it in.

  When the airplane took off from Houston for New York, he peered out the window onto the receding runways and houses and streets below, all laundered by the vivid moon. Although he had flown before, any number of times, never had the earth seemed so far away, as the jet banked.

  He was looking straight down at the ground. It was all pattern and points of star-white in the blanket of black. The snaking highways strung with headlamps; suburbs laid out in crisscross, their windows burning, their trees blots. The jet righted itself and the wing swung up again to block the view. He listened to the whistling, propulsive roar as he was carried toward an address written out in a childish script on a folded and refolded slip of paper in his pocket. The pill kept the viejo quiet.

  6.

  HANNAH CAME BACK in through the side door, switched off the set, didn’t say anything. There was a rustling of paper and the front door opened onto fine drizzle. Only then did Lupi see her clearly. Slight and strong as any cowgirl Lupi had ever seen in films, she walked out onto the roof. Even under the overcast her profile became visible for the short time it took her to turn and kick a rubber stop under the metal door. Her hair caught and gathered and reflected back shades from auburn to copper to brown and even to a dark coral color; it was dry now, and she had brushed its waves so that it fanned heavily around her shoulders, and came forward in bangs that curled over a broad forehead to rest along her thin eyebrows. Her lips were determined, cinnamon, the lower lip full, the upper a fine trace. What he noticed more than anything were her hands, as she reached to right the doorstop: long, elegant, spontaneous, grease-stained, swollen delicately at the knuckles—they were the hands of a laborer, an artist, a farmer, someone who knew how a cow was covered, a horse shoed, a stable mucked out.

  In her wake, obliquely, a wisp of dawn penetrated the room, which Lupi could see was cavernous. A tint, the color of water strained through a used teabag, made its way into the interior. Ash, soot, bits of paper, leaves, plastic sandwich bags, other anonymous fragments of the city hesitated where Hannah had walked out across the tarred rooftop. These fragments Lupi watched as they floated clockwise, twirled, banked, collided, slithered; they raced out in her wake. Their movements were contradictory, even contentious. It was as if—having risen seven stories from the street only to be forced by their own weight to be carried back down, to be transformed again beneath a shoe or a tire—they could be consciously intrigued by the room’s contents but chose not to be locked inside.

  The bunkhouse (as Lupi would later learn this structure was called) stood at the southwestern corner of the roof. A rectangular construction measuring roughly thirty feet across its front on a north-south orientation, and perhaps a hundred and fifty feet long, east to west. Its door faced directly into the morning sun not quite two stories above the roof of the building, and its own flat roof was tarred and covered in gravel. During rainy springs, the drainage being feeble, pools of stagnant water would collect on this roof and serve as spawning grounds for the larvae of mosquitoes. Hannah never considered having this repaired, or altered. She liked the faint rotten scent of algae. Hardy mosquitoes, which carved lazy arcs around the floodlamps over the door in the summer night, she fancied, too. Hammond, Henry, Madeleine, the other three who lived with her here, all complained. But Hannah would slap away mosquitoes and sip at gin and revel—“Why in the hell not?”

  Fashioned of corrugated tin and painted battleship gray, the Sixth Avenue gable, which faced Chelsea and the Hudson, Jersey City and Hoboken, had an enormous index finger painted on its surface, pointing skyward. The rest of the hand must once have covered upper stories of the warehouse building but was long since covered over by another sign advertising a car rental agency. No one had bothered to eradicate the finger. None of the oldest of the twine-and-paper men, the wholesale florists, the countermen who had worked in the district all their lives knew the index finger’s origin. The nail was sharp with once-red polish, long, and hinted of having served a religious purpose as the finger, topped by an oval flame, pointed skyward.

  The roof of the building was piggybacked by three other structures: a wooden water tank, an elevator house and a flight of architectural fancy they called the silo. This superstructure was built as a massive belltower. It had never been fitted out with bells but a tall, narrow, wooden cistern was housed within its walls. Its neo-Gothic body was decorated with oversized male heads which had curly (lumpy) beards, bulgy noses and recessed eyes. The effect (especially when viewed from the roof: telling from proportions meant to be viewed from a distance) was that they resembled comical Neptunes. Four of them, fabricated from the same mold, dressed the corners of the tower. A crumbling concrete stairway inside, trafficked by large and gentle rats, led to the highest point on the building where, from the archivolted clerestory over a tousled concrete coif, it was possible to see, on a sunny smogless day, the Statue of Liberty with Staten Island beyond.

  Hannah crossed
the flat expanse. At her back, the West Side Highway hummed where the rotten docks were abandoned to collapse erratic into the tidal river and an ocean liner moaned. Tankers, tugs, garbage and gravel barges, plied fore and aft its funnels. How was it possible, she wondered, that she had never been on a ship before?

  She reached an oil drum which she used from time to time as an incinerator. She tucked the cassette bundled in newspaper under her arm, pulled a book of matches from her vest pocket, struck a match, touched the tiny flame to one ruckled-up edge of the newsprint. Once the bundle caught fire, she tossed it into the drum and watched the flames go from yellow and blue to green and red as they crackled, chawed through to the plastic. With a broom handle she flipped over the small burning mass, to feed the bottom fresh air; soon it was converted into a bubble of char. She looked out across the rooftops of the city and a shiver passed down through her.

  Lights came on, dozens of them, to shine in this room so cluttered with paraphernalia that it took Lupi a few moments to pick Hannah out of the mosaic, a vision like the jigsaw puzzle of an alchemist’s lab flung in a thousand bits, curved and irregular, overhead.

  “How long has it been since the old man ate?” Hannah asked.

  Lupi gaped. Objects of all varieties dangled from the ceiling, hung on the walls, stood in vast cabinets along the edges of the multistoried room.