The Donzerly Light

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  “Come on. Just one picture? Human interest stuff. Trust me.”

  It was a photographer talking, and the subject he was imploring was Sign Guy. Trying to get the bum to pose with his sign for a ‘slice of life’ kind of picture for the paper. The Times, Jay could tell from the tag on the cameraman’s bag.

  “Come on,” the photog urged, but when Sign Guy still politely refused the shutterbug took another tack. “You know, I don’t have to get your permission. You’re on the street, fella. You’re news. I can snap your picture just like that.” He brought the camera up a bit, but not to his eye. Not yet. “I’m only saying it would look a whole lot better if you cooperate. Kind of get into it. You know?”

  Sign Guy turned his smiling face left and right, and saw that there were a good many people around. Jay and Jude and about a dozen others, some waiting for the light, some obviously tourists gawking upward at the church’s spire. Yes, and some were even watching the little vignette between the bum and the photog play out.

  Sign Guy seemed to consider all this, all these people that were witness to the interaction, and then he looked back to the man with camera, the man who was so subtly threatening him, and said, “All right, brother.”

  “Good,” the photog said, and started to bring his camera up. But Sign Guy’s hand came up first. He had something to say.

  “I’m sorry I was so reluctant, but I’m a bit shy. I’d like to tip the brim of my hat down, if you don’t mind.”

  The photographer shrugged. Whatever. The picture was a bum and his sign, not a bum and his face and his sign. “Go ahead.”

  And Sign Guy did tip his hat down a bit, covering most of his face, leaving just part of his smile visible, and that in severe shadow. The photog snapped a few shots, thanked his subject for the trouble, and was on his way.

  “The fat bastard can ruin us!” Jude said with unintended volume. It drew Jay from the scene that had captivated him, and even garnered attention from others who stood nearby. Stood or sat, Jay realized, because the bum was looking his way now, too. Looking hard. “Ruin us, Grady. He can do just that.”

  The light changed, and Jude and Jay stepped into the crosswalk, and when they reached the opposite side Jay glanced back and saw the bum flashing him the peace sign. And he was nodding.

  * * *

  Workmen buzzed about, though the noisiest parts of the remodeling work always took place after the market closed. Green Machine Partners was a business after all. For the moment it was still that, at least.

  “Maybe he’s bluffing,” Bunker suggested to the rest of them as they sat around the X desk a craftsman had built for them their second day in the new office. Nearby a secretary and an assistant were monitoring the phones, and beyond them a gang of computers was watching the market, ready to act on predetermined instructions without input from anyone. Which was a good thing right then, because the ‘anyones’ who mattered had been engaged in a back and forth on the survival of their business for the good part of the afternoon.

  “We’re threatening his pocketbook,” Jude replied. “Would you be bluffing?”

  Bunker shook his head, and then looked off toward the window.

  Jay saw defeat on his face, and anger on Jude’s, and on Steve’s there was some kind of resignation, as if he had just realized that, okay, it had been too good to be true after all.

  And Jay? He was none of those things. Maybe because he could be the only true believer among them, the only one who knew how deep this dream of his that they were now all part of ran. How basic it was. How indefatigable. No fat old man was going to stop them. No way. Success was their destiny, because it was Jay’s destiny. The riches were there for the taking. All would work out just fine. This little speed bump on the road to their dreams would pass and be forgotten in no time.

  And so he was not worried as the others were. What he was, though, was tired. Tired of the subject of their demise at the hands of an old gas bag who could hardly walk. “You know, what the hell can we do about it?”

  “What do you mean?” Bunker asked, surprised by Jay’s calm.

  “Have we been served with papers yet?”

  Bunker shook his head. “You know we haven’t.”

  “Then we can’t do anything,” Jay suggested. “Unless you want to go downstairs and drive a stake through his heart. So why are we sweating it?”

  “This could be a big deal, Jay,” Steve said. “It could keep people from bringing their money to us.”

  Jay shifted his feet from the top of the desk to the floor. “Jesus, it ain’t even happened yet and already we’re letting Old Man Mitchell dictate what we do—worry. Shit bricks. Just like we used to when we worked for him.” And to his feet Jay now rose. “Well, not me.”

  He snatched his jacket from the back of his chair and slung it over his shoulder.

  “You’re going?” Bunker asked.

  “If we get served tomorrow, or the next day, or the next, we can deal with it then. I’m not putting life on hold. There’s too much out there waiting.”

  And with that he left, striding past the workman and their power tools that would soon whine to life, out the door and to the elevators.

  Jude followed and caught him just shy of their shiny steel doors. “Hey, what’s up?”

  “Don’t start on that again, Jude,” Jay implored him, then stabbed the DOWN button and waited for the numbers above the door to tick up to fifteen.

  “Oh, excuse me, there’s nothing on your mind?”

  “If there is, it’s my mind. Okay?”

  Jude nodded, figuring he was right on the money now. “It is the dairy queen, isn’t i—”

  “We’re through,” Jay said suddenly, and turned toward his friend. “Carrie left last night. She went back to Wisconsin.” The cab had picked her up, and that was that. “At least I think that’s where she went.”

  The elevator arrived with the customary DING, its doors sliding open. Jay stepped on and turned to look back out at Jude.

  “Jay, buddy,” Jude began, keeping a hand on the door so it would not shut. “I know I was riding you hard about her, but...”

  Jay shook off the almost apology. “Don’t sweat it. All her leaving does is open up the possibilities.”

  Jude nodded and withdrew his hand. He watched the door close, and looked up at the numbers quite out of habit, and saw them count from fifteen down to eleven and stop right there.

  Sixteen

  Horace J. Mitchell...Doer

  Horace J. Mitchell woke just after midnight, his eyes snapping open in revelation. There was something to do.

  He had gone to bed at ten, as usual, and had gotten up some twenty minutes after that to bark at Alonzo that he was hungry and that he wanted the leftover linguine with marinara that he hadn’t finished at dinner. Alonzo, who some fifteen years earlier had been hired to drive Mitchell from home to work and wherever else he desired to go, had seen his job description change over time. He chauffeured the old man still, and acted as his bodyguard (an insistence that Alonzo Vallente had never quite understood—wondering just what the old man needed to be guarded against—but had nonetheless accepted, along with the fifty bucks more a week that came with the title), and had in recent years become something of a manservant, cooking the old man’s meals (Alonzo’s linguine with marinara and clams was Mitchell’s favorite, and Alonzo found himself cooking three pounds of pasta and a full two pounds of scrubbed littlenecks at least three times a week—not to mention baking the loaf of garlic bread and fixing the antipasto salad that simply had to accompany the main dish, and of course seeing that there was at least a half gallon of mint hyacinth iced tea to wash down the meal) and, pretty much all the time now, living in the back bedroom of Mitchell’s expansive and expensive thirty-third floor condo on the Upper West Side. So, when Mitchell had beckoned near ten thirty for a somewhat early midnight snack, Alonzo had dutifully warmed up the leftover pasta (which was enough for a regular meal for a normal person—maybe two) and had set it
before the old man at the long dining room table, along with another full pitcher of the sickly green beverage his employer insisted upon with every meal. Mitchell had eaten, and Alonzo had cleaned up, retiring to the kitchen to read the paper once Horace J. Mitchell was back in his bed.

  And now he was awake again, and a toss of his arm swept the covers aside. There was something to do. Yes, something to do.

  Often he would bellow out to Alonzo to come help him from bed, and his trusty manservant would come, and would take hold of his elderly employer by the ample flab of his biceps, and would lean back and pull with all his own aging might until the old man was to a sitting position, and then with both hands Alonzo would tug until Mitchell was upright, wide and tall and ungrateful as always. Yes, often this would be the routine. But not this night. This night Horace J. Mitchell had something to do, and this night he would need no help. The covers off, his body revealed in its stinging white nightshirt, he swung his trunk-like legs over the edge of the bed and sat himself up with an ease he had not known for thirty years. And once sitting he leaned forward and put his meaty hands on the wide platform of his knees and pushed, and then he was standing. Standing in the near dark of his bedroom with something to do.

  His cane was right there, just next to his leg, leaning against the nightstand with its hounds head handle waiting to be smothered in a fleshy fist. But he did not take hold of it. He moved without it. Walked without it. For the first time in oh so long he walked without it, and wasn’t it a wonderful thing that he was walking without it, on his own, step, step, step, walking toward his bedroom door, walking on his own two fat feet because there was something to do, oh yes something so very urgent to do.

  Out of the bedroom and into the hall, not a hand on the wall for support, not a hesitation in his slow but steady pace. Down the hall, past the bathroom, past his study. Past the room in which Alonzo slept, walking on his own, turning on his own, turning into the dining room where he’d had a very nice meal just hours ago, and a particularly satisfying snack a bit after that, skirting the long table that had but a single, wide chair at one end, then out of that room and passing the brightly lit kitchen, quietly alive with the sounds of a radio playing salsa very low and a newspaper rustling and a chair squeaking and footsteps, and then Alonzo in the doorway saying something to his back. Something that did not matter as Mitchell walked away from the kitchen and into the living room, night streaming in from the windows that let onto the balcony.

  Yes, yes, he thought as the darkness beckoned, something to do. There was something to do.

  He moved through the furniture with surprising grace, not a bump nor a nudge along the path he took across the room, every stately chair and every exquisite side table in place after he had passed, every lamp erect and dimmed for the night. Still Alonzo was chattering on behind, but behind did not matter. Behind was not where there was something to do. Ahead was where he needed to be. Ahead. Out there. On the balcony with the night and his task.

  He reached the long tall glass door and slid it aside, making the way open. Chill air spilled over him, the breeze that brought it tossing the hem of his nightshirt in great billows that approximated the sound of sailcloth tickled by light and fickle winds. His garment trailed him, flapping easily as he stepped onto the balcony, Alonzo calling to him now with some sense of confusion, maybe concern, but his own ears ignorant of such and his eyes wide and joyous and plying the night sky. On he walked, step, and step, and step, and weren’t there oh so many stars out this night, and step, and the solid, waist high rail that walled the balcony was just ahead, and step, step, and another step, and the cool air sizzled on his skin in ways that should have stung but did not, and toward the railing the enormous old man walked in the shuffling way that was, to him, as free as flight would seem to another, and nearing the railing his gaze came down from the black heavens above and set upon the knee-high concrete planter that Alonzo grew herbs in during the warm months. Basil and oregano and dill and rosemary would be scenting the crisp night air soon enough, and that would be a wonderful thing the old man thought, and with that thought so pleasant and new in his head he reached the planter and brought one thick leg up and placed his big foot upon it.

  The rock solid container hissed and crackled as all of Horace J. Mitchell’s weight went to that one foot and the rest of what was him rose up upon the planter. Rose as if the hand of God himself had given him a boost. Rose as if the near five hundred pounds that was him was nothing more than the sum of his breath and his thoughts. As if lunar gravity had been installed on the balcony of his thirty third floor condo. With such ease did he lift himself that all that had come before—the rising from bed, the walking—paled when recalled and compared. Inside, near the kitchen, Alonzo gasped, and then came running toward his employer, and to Horace J. Mitchell these things did not matter because he was oblivious to all but that which must be done.

  And a doer he was, yes. A doer he was.

  Standing fully on the planter now, he lifted his foot again and set it firmly on the cap of the wide railing wall and stepped up until it was there that he stood, his nightshirt flapping with vigor now, high above the city with the dark and infinite universe above and something to do. Yes, something to do.

  His gaze shifted once more, not skyward this time. Down. Far down. He spread his fat arms like wings, and the sleeves of his nightshirt wagged from them like the sickly shroud of some grotesque angel. But an angel he was not, because it was known to all that angels could fly, and when Horace J. Mitchell tilted forward in concert with a close and blood curdling scream from his manservant Alonzo, he fell toward the street far below like a quarter ton of old and flabby flesh would.

  Fell, yes, but not without aplomb, or whatever bit of that a four hundred and eighty three pound man could in the situation. He arms remained outstretched, stubby wings that would never lift, and his nightshirt trailed behind him like some ornamental white streamer meant to mark the spot of a very important descent. And that it did, a blinding flutter of snowy satin that flapped and snapped all the way down and away from the luxurious hundred year old building in which he lived, its sound a sharp and unnatural racket that drew the attention of a young couple out for a midnight stroll. A couple who looked up just as the smiling fat man slammed into West 89th Street some twenty feet from them.

  It all happened in a flash of white, and red, and colors and textures and smells and sounds that split the night like a show of dim and sickly fireworks, pieces of the massive humanity that Horace J. Mitchell had been arcing away like so many dead sparks from the depression his bulk had pounded into the street. His body was literally unzipped in a thousand places at once, all that it was, and all that was in it, exploding outward and through the instantly tattered fabric of his nightshirt in a spray of flesh and blood and bone.

  And food, it should be said, his dinner that night and the snack that had followed flung away from the point of impact in chunks and glops of foul smelling yellow-green bile, striking the walls of the graceful old building in which Mitchell had lived, leaving tangled knots of partly digested linguini, and clams, and the marinara sauce that hued them the deep red of rich blood all upon the fine masonry facade, each speck and dollop of the mess dragging a mucousy streak toward the ground as gravity pulled it down.

  Cars parked nearby were speckled instantly by a wide jet of sticky white fat, and the red of the man’s misted blood was stippled upon windshield and chrome and finish, the conglomeration looking like some horrid high school prank gone way out of hand.

  But it was the young couple so near the disintegration of the enormous old man who knew the most of what gore this sight could be. The loudest, wettest POP either had ever heard scorched their eardrums and caused them to flinch, which was fortunate, just as the hurricane wind of human debris washed over them. Strips of the aged muscle from the old man’s legs whirled like bolas and snapped the young man about the face, one length of the bloody sinew actually wrapping itself around his neck
. A chunk of Mitchell’s splintered fourth rib rocketed outward from what could easily be called ‘the blast’ and grazed the young lady’s left leg, gouging a half inch length of flesh from beneath her nylons before flailing past and shattering against a concrete planter outside the building’s service entrance. Both were bathed in a rain of pulverized viscera, pieces of liver and kidney and pancreas striking them about the face like soft, pulpy hailstones. A flap of skin, cast off the devastated body in a form resembling the shape of the state of Michigan (less the upper peninsula), slapped the young man on the lower half of his leg, adhering itself there as though it had found a new host and oh wouldn’t he please let it stay?

  So fast it all happened that by the time the young woman’s inevitable scream leapt from her throat, more of the old man’s final repast had struck out and meshed itself brutally with her hair, leaving her looking like a cheap and bloodied medusa of the most vile kind. Her male friend, too, was not spared this last assault, a spray of masticated clams and doughy concretions of garlic bread peppering him from head to toe, stinging a thousand times at once and sending him reeling and retching to the fouled sidewalk where he’d stood. The young lady, though, did not lose the tasty pastry she and her boyfriend had so recently enjoyed. No, as he lay vomiting on the now slick and slimy pavement, she clutched her hands to her mouth, fingers folded down, and screamed at the wide puddle in the middle of the street that was all that remained of Horace J. Mitchell, the doer of doers.

  Seventeen

  Different Angels

  He had come twice, and she three times. At least he believed so, but then who knew when it came to chicks? A moan, a groan, some shaking, and in her case a good dose of nails digging into the back of his head as though she feared both he and his tongue would up and run away before she reached her ‘moment of splendor’. But he hadn’t, and she had (or so it seemed), and now some minutes after their last go ‘round they lay in Jay’s bed, a sheen of sweat drying on their naked bodies and Christine Mellinger tracing little shapes on his bare stomach with her finger.