“Whatever you say,” said Little Red, and lifted the child in his arms and carried him to the bed. The boy seemed to weigh no more than a handful of kitchen matches. He leaned over the bed and nestled the child between a pile of balled socks and a heap of folded jazz festival T-shirts. “You can’t stay here, you know, little boy,” he said.
The child said, “I’m not going to stay here. This is just where I am.”
“You don’t have to be scared anymore.”
“I thought you were going to hurt me.” For a second his eyes narrowed, and his skin seemed to shrink over his skull. He was actually a very unattractive little boy, thought Little Red. The child looked devious and greedy, like an urchin who had lived too long by its wits. In some ways, he had the face of a sour, bad-tempered old man. Little Red felt as though he had surrendered his bed to a beast like a weasel, a coyote.
But he’s only a little boy, Little Red told Little Red, who did not believe him. This was not a child—this was something that had come in from the freezing night. “Do you think you can go to sleep now?”
But the child—the being—had slipped into unconsciousness before Little Red asked the question.
What to do with him? The ugly little thing asleep in the midst of Little Red’s laundry was never going to produce an address or a telephone number, that was certain. Probably it was telling the truth about not having a name.
But that was crazy—he had gone too long without sleep, and his mind could no longer work right. A wave of deep weariness rolled through him, bringing with it the recognition that his mind could no longer work at all, at least not rationally. If he did not lie down, he was going to fall asleep standing up. So Little Red got his knees up on the mattress, pushed aside some heaps of clothing, stretched out, and watched his eyes close by themselves.
Asleep, he inhaled the scent of clean laundry, which seemed the most beautiful odor in the world. Clean laundry smelled like sunshine, fresh air, and good health. This lovely smell contained a hint of the celestial, of the better world that heaven is said to be. It would be presumptuous to speak of angels, but if angels wore robes, those robes would smell like the clean, fluffy socks and underwear surrounding Little Red and his nameless guest. The guest’s own odor now and then came to Little Red. Mingled with the metallic odor of steam vented from underground regions, the sharp, gamy tang of fox sometimes cut through the fragrance of the laundry, for in his sleep Little Red had shifted nearer to the child.
To sleeping Little Red, the two scents twisted together and became a single thing, an odor of architectural complexity filled with wide plazas and long colonnades, also with certain cramped, secret dens and cells. And from the hidden dens and cells a creature came in pursuit of him, whether for good or ill he did not know. But in pursuit it came: Little Red felt the displacement of the air as it rushed down long corridors, and there were times when he spun around a corner an instant before his pursuer would have caught sight of him. And though he continued to run as if for his life, Little Red still did not know if the creature meant him well or meant to do him harm.
He twisted and squirmed in imitation of the motions of his dream-body, and it so fell out that eventually he had folded his body around that of his little guest, and the animal-smell became paramount.
During what happened next, Little Red could not make out whether he was asleep and dreaming of being half-awake, or half-awake and still dreaming of being asleep. He seemed to pass back and forth between two states of being with no registration of their boundaries. His hand had fallen on the child’s chest—he remembered that, for instantly he had thought to snatch it back from this accidental contact. Yet in pulling back his hand he had somehow succeeded in pulling the child with it, though his hand was empty and his fingers open. The child, the child-thing, floated up from the rumpled blanket and the disarranged piles of laundry, clinging to Little Red’s hand as metal clings to a magnet. That was how it seemed to Little Red: the boy adhered to his raised hand, the boy followed the hand to his side, and when the boy-thing came to rest beside him, the boy-thing smiled a wicked smile and bit him in the neck.
The gamy stink of fox streamed into his nostrils, and he cried out in pain and terror… and in a moment the child-thing was stroking his head and telling him he had nothing to fear, and the next moment he dropped through the floor of sleep into darkness and knew nothing.
Little Red awakened in late afternoon of the following day. He felt wonderfully rested and restored. A decade might have been subtracted from his age, and he became a lad of forty once again. Two separate mental events took place at virtually the same moment, which came as he sat up and stretched out his arms in a tremendous yawn. He remembered the weeping child he had placed in this bed; and he noticed that one of his arms was spattered with drying blood.
He gasped and looked down at his chest, his waist, his legs. Bloodstains covered his clothes like thrown paint. The blanket and the folded clothing littered across the bed were drenched in blood. There were feathery splashes of blood on the dusty floor. Spattered bloodstains mounted the colorless wall.
For a moment, Little Red’s heart stopped moving. His breathing was harsh and shallow. Gingerly, he swung his legs to the floor and got out of bed. First he looked at the blanket, which would have to be thrown out, then, still in shock, down at his own body. Red blotches bloomed on his shirt. The bottom of his shirt and the top of his jeans were sodden, too soaked in blood to have dried.
Little Red peeled the shirt off over his head and dropped it to the floor. His chest was irregularly stained with blood but otherwise undamaged. He saw no wounds on his arms. His fingers unbuckled his belt and undid his zipper, and he pushed his jeans down to his ankles. The Chinese slippers fell off his feet when he stepped out of the wet jeans. From mid-thigh to feet, he was unmarked; from navel to mid-thigh he was solid red.
Yet he felt no pain. The blood could not be his. Had something terrible happened to the child? Moaning, Little Red scattered the clothing across the bed, looked in the corners of the room, and went as far as the entrance to the sitting room, but saw no trace of his guest. Neither did he see further bloodstains. The child, the thing, had disappeared.
When Little Red stood before his bathroom mirror, he remembered the dream, if it had been a dream, and leaned forward to inspect the side of his neck. The skin was pale and unbroken. So it had been a dream, all of it.
Then he remembered the sounds of weeping that had awakened him at his command post, and ih ih ih, and he remembered the weight of the child in his arms and his foxy smell. Little Red turned on his shower and stepped into the stall. Blood sluiced down his body, his groin, his legs to the drain. He remembered the blissful fragrance of his clean laundry. That magnificent odor, containing room upon room. Thinking to aid a distressed woman, he had discovered a terrified child, or something that looked like a child, and had given it a night’s shelter and a bed of socks and underwear. Standing in the warm spray of the shower, Little Red said, “In faith, a miracle.”
3. The Miracle of C---- M---- and Vic Dickenson
Late one summer afternoon, C---- M----, a young trombonist of growing reputation, sat in Little Red’s guest chair listening to Very Saxy and bemoaning the state of his talent.
“I feel stuck,” he said. “I’m playing pretty well….”
“You’re playing great,” said Little Red.
“Thanks, but I feel like there’s some direction I ought to go, but I can’t figure out what it is. I keep doing the same things over and over. It’s like, I don’t know, like I have to wash my ears before I’ll be able to make any progress.”
“Ah,” said Little Red. “Let me play something for you.” He rose from his chair.
“What?”
“Just listen.”
“I don’t need this jive bullshit, Little Red.”
“I said, just listen.”
“Okay, but if you were a musician, you’d know this isn’t how it works.”
“Fine,
” said Little Red, and placed on the turntable a record by the Vic Dickenson Trio—trombone, bass, and guitar—made in 1949. “I’m going to my bedroom for a few minutes,” he said. “Something screwy happened to my laundry a while ago, and I have to throw about half of it away.”
C---- M---- leaned forward to rest his forearms on his knees, the posture in which he listened most carefully.
Little Red disappeared through the door to the toilet and went to his bedroom. Whatever he did there occupied him for approximately twenty minutes, after which he returned to the sitting room.
His face wet with tears, C---- M---- was leaning far back in his chair, looking as though he had just been dropped from a considerable height. “God bless you,” he said. “God bless you, Little Red!”
4. The Miracle of the Blind Beggar-Man
He had been seeing the man for the better part of the year, seated on a wooden box next to the flowers outside the Korean deli on the corner of 55th Street and 8th Avenue, shaking a white paper cup salted with coins. Tall, heavy, dressed always in a double-breasted dark blue pinstriped suit of wondrous age, his skin a rich chocolate brown, the man was at his post four days every week from about nine in the morning to well past midnight. Whatever the weather, he covered his head with an ancient brown fedora, and he always wore dark glasses with lenses the size of quarters.
He was present on days when it rained and days when it snowed. On sweltering days, he never removed his hat to wipe his forehead, and on days when the temperature dropped into the teens he wore neither gloves nor overcoat. Once he had registered the man’s presence, Little Red soon observed that he took in much more money than the other panhandlers who worked Hell’s Kitchen. The reason for his success, Little Red surmised, was that his demeanor was as unvarying as his wardrobe.
He was a beggar who did not beg. Instead, he allowed you to give him money. Enthroned on his box, elbows planted on his knees, cup upright in his hand, he offered a steady stream of greetings, compliments, and benedictions to those who walked by.
You’re sure looking fine today, Miss… God bless you, son… You make sure to have a good day today, sir… God bless you, ma’m… Honey, you make me happy every time you come by… God bless you… God bless…. God bless….
And so it happened that one day Little Red dropped a dollar bill into the waiting cup.
“God bless,” the man said.
On the following day, Little Red gave him another dollar.
“Thank you and God bless you, son,” the man said.
The next day, Little Red put two dollars in the cup.
“Thank you, Little Red, God bless you,” said the man.
“How did you learn my name?” asked Little Red. “And how did you know it was me?”
“I hear they come to you, the peoples,” the man said. “Night and day, they come. Ain’t that the righteous truth? Night and day.”
“They come, each in his own way,” said Little Red. “But how do you know my name?”
“I always knew who you were,” said the man. “And now I know what you are.”
Little Red placed another dollar in his cup.
“Maybe I come see you myself, one day.”
“Maybe you will,” said Little Red.
5. The Miracle of the Greedy Demon (from Book I, Little Red, His Trials)
The greedy demons were everywhere. He saw them in the patrons’ eyes—the demons, glaring out, saying more, more. While Little Red dressed to go to work, while he laced up his sturdy shoes, while taking the cross-town bus, as he opened the door to the bar and the headwaiter’s desk, his stomach tightened at the thought of the waiting demons. Where demons reign, all joy is hollow, all happiness is pain in disguise, all pleasure merely the product of gratified envy. Daily, as he padded to the back of the restaurant to don his bow tie and white jacket, he feared he would be driven away by the flat, toxic stench of evil.
This occurred in the waning days of Little Red’s youth, when he had not as yet entered fully into his adult estate.
The demons gathered here because they enjoyed each other’s company. Demons can always recognize other demons, but the human beings they inhabit are ignorant of their possession and don’t have a clue what is going on. They suppose they simply enjoy going to certain restaurants, or, say, a particular restaurant, because the food is decent and the atmosphere pleasant. The human beings possessed by demons fail to notice that while the prices have gone up a bit, the food has slipped and the atmosphere grown leaden, sour, stale. The headwaiter notices only that a strange languor has taken hold of the service staff, but he feels too languid himself to get excited about it. Ninety-nine per cent of the waiters fail to notice that they seldom wish to look their patrons in the eye and record only that the place seems rather dimmer than it once was. Only Little Red sees the frantic demons jigging in the eyes of the torpid diners; only Little Red understands, and what he understands sickens him.
There came a day when a once-handsome gentleman in a blue blazer as taut as a sausage casing waved Little Red to his table and ordered a second 16-oz. rib eye steak, rare, and a second order of onion rings, and oh yeah, might as well throw in a second bottle of that Napa Valley cabernet.
“I won’t do that,” said Little Red.
“Kid, you gotta be shitting me,” said the patron. His face shone a hectic pink. “I ordered another rib eye, more onion rings, and a fresh bottle of wine.”
“You don’t want any more food,” said Little Red. He bent down and gazed into the man’s eyes. “Something inside you wants it, but you don’t.”
The man gripped his wrist and moved his huge head alongside Little Red’s. “You act that way with me, kid, and one cold night you could wake up and find me in your room, wearing nothing but a T-shirt.”
“Then let it be so,” said Little Red.
6. The Miracle of the Murdered Cat
Years after he had come into his adult estate, Little Red one day left his apartment to replenish his stock of Beck’s beer. It was just before 6:00 am on a Saturday morning in early June. Two trumpet players and a petty thief who had dropped in late Thursday night were scattered around the sitting room, basically doing nothing but waiting for him to come back with their breakfasts.
The Koreans who owned the deli on the corner of 55th and 8th lately had been communicating some kind of weirdness, so he turned the corner, intending to walk past the front of their shop and continue north to the deli on the corner of 56th Street, where the Koreans were still sane. The blind beggar startled him by stepping out of the entrance and saying, “My man, Little Red Man! Good morning to you, son. Seems to me you ought to be thinkin’ about getting more sleep one of these days.”
“Morning to you, too,” said Little Red. “Early for you to be getting to work, isn’t it?”
“Somethin’ big’s gonna happen today,” said the beggar-man. “Wanted to make sure I didn’t miss out.” He set down his box, placed himself on it, and opened the 12-oz. bottle of Dr. Pepper he had just purchased.
Only a few taxicabs moved up wide 8th Avenue, and no one else was on the sidewalk on either side. Iron shutters protected the windows of most of the shops.
As he moved up the block, Little Red looked across the street and saw a small shape leave the shelter of a rank of garbage cans and dart into the Avenue. It was a little orange cat, bony with starvation.
The cat had raced to within fifteen feet of the western curb when a taxi rocketing north toward Columbus Circle swerved toward it. The cat froze, eyed the taxi, then gathered itself into a ball and streaked forward.
Little Red stood open-mouthed on the sidewalk. “You worthless little son of a bitch,” he said. “Get moving!”
As the cat came nearly within leaping distance of the curb, the cab picked up speed and struck it. Little Red heard a muffled sound, then saw the cat roll across the surface of the road and come to rest in the gutter.
“Damn,” he said, and glanced back at the beggar-man. He sat on his box, gr
ipping his bottle of Dr. Pepper and staring straight ahead at nothing. Little Red came up to the lifeless cat and lowered himself to the sidewalk. “You just get on now,” he said. “Get going, little cat.”
The lump of fur in the gutter twitched, twitched again, and struggled to its feet. It turned its head to Little Red and regarded him with opaque, suspicious eyes.
“Git,” said Little Red.
The cat wobbled up onto the sidewalk, sat to drag its tongue over an oily patch of fur, and limped off into the shelter of a doorway.
Little Red stood up and glanced back down the street. The blind man cupped his hands around his mouth and called out something. Little Red could not quite make out his words, but they sounded approving.
7. The Miracle of the Kitchen Mouse
On a warm night last year, Little Red awakened in his command center to a silent apartment. His television set was turned off, and a single red light burned in the control panel of his CD player, which, having come to the end of The Count on the Coast, Vol. II, awaited further instructions.
Little Red rubbed his hands over his face and sat up, trying to decide whether or not to put on a new CD before falling back asleep. Before he could make up his mind, a small grey mouse slipped from between two six-packs of Beck’s empties and hesitated at the edge of the sitting room. The mouse appeared to be looking at him.
“You go your way, and I’ll go mine,” said Little Red.
“God bless you, Little Red,” said the mouse. Its voice was surprisingly deep.
“Thank you,” said Little Red, and lapsed back into easy-breathing slumber.
The Beatitudes of Little Red, II
Over the long run, staying on good terms with your dentist really pays off.
Bargain up, not down.
Mister October - Volume Two Page 5
