White Tiger on Snow Mountain

by David Gordon

  “Don’t worry. They’re not going to bite you.” He slips them back into place. “Come here, there’s something else I want you to see.”

  I lean forward, ready to run. The vampire pulls back his robe. There is a thick, lumpy scar running all across his frail chest.

  “A doctor did this to me.”

  I can’t take my eyes off it. It’s red against the milky skin, and I can see where the stitches had been.

  “What’s more, I paid him to do it,” he says. “I had this thing in me, see. A tumor. It was eating me up. They took it out. The damn thing had hair on it. And a couple of teeth too. Now that’s what I call a vampire.”

  He laughs again, quietly. “Now you go back to where you came from. And don’t tell no one you were here.”

  I open the window. Then I turn back.

  “Go on, I said. Scram.”

  I climb out the window and back down the fire escape. I get into bed and pull the covers over my head. I curl into a ball and shut my eyes tight.

  My mother and I watch the arrow above the elevator move from number to number. We’ve been shopping, and she holds a bag of groceries in each arm. The elevator door slides back.

  “Step aside please,” a large man in coveralls says, backing out. He’s holding one end of a gurney. A black cloth covers the shape of a body.

  “Oh, that poor old blind man from 6C,” my mother says as the wheels squeak by. “He’s finally passed on.”

  “Maybe he’s just sleeping,” I say. The sun isn’t down yet.

  “Yes, dear, it’s like he’s sleeping. Only he won’t wake up anymore.”

  I think about the time I woke up and found a long blond hair that wasn’t mine in my mouth and about the soreness in my chest sometimes that burns like a tooth when I breathe. I say the word to myself: “Tumor.”

  Matinee

  Philip’s family’s apartment is bigger than ours and better. His parents must be rich. There is a fireplace and a bar. My father has a dusty, unopened fifth of Scotch someone gave him last Christmas. Philip’s parents have rows of gleaming bottles filled with liquids the color of gold and autumn leaves and ice. There is a crystal decanter, an ice bucket, seltzer in a blue glass bottle with a siphon. There are three bedrooms. I’ve never seen an apartment with three bedrooms before. My sister and I share a room, but Philip has his own and shares the adjoining bathroom with his sister while his parents have one to themselves. A bathroom of one’s own! Somehow the idea entrances me more than even having my own room.

  But the most amazing thing is the state of Philip’s room. It is like a bomb crater or the inside of a dumpster, the most incredible room I’ve ever seen. There is a giant heap of dirty laundry sloping against one wall. The bed is a tangle of covers and stained sheets. A bird flies around, shits on the chair, and returns to its open cage, where a melted Spock doll sits beside an armless G.I. Joe. There is a scorched black spot on the floor where an experiment went wrong and a bare bulb dangling from the broken fixture. He has his own black-and-white TV, with paint spattered on the screen. A carving knife is stuck in the wall, a memento of an attempt on his life by his older sister. But he got vengeance, he confides, by secretly peeing on her bath towel and hanging it back up to dry, and also by sticking her toothbrush up his butt.

  This is an impossible life, utterly beyond my imagination. My dirty clothes must go directly into two separate hampers, a wicker one for shirts and pants and a plastic one with a lid for underclothes. My bed is always made. It is unthinkable that I could say, “Fuck you,” to my mom like Philip says he did to his. And though I fear my father worse than death, I can’t even imagine him striking me. Philip tells me how his father, when he heard Philip cursing his mom out, came flying from the bedroom in his boxers with a doubled belt and chased him, barefoot and half naked, down the stairs and out into the street, where he finally cornered him between two parked cars and whipped him in front of the neighbors. To me the Plotkins live like movie stars, like beasts, like mad kings and queens. They sleep and eat whenever they want. They have TVs in their bedrooms and hairballs under the beds. Dust rises in clouds when you sit down on their couch, and when you stand, pet hair coats your jeans.

  Philip’s mother is like no mother I’ve ever seen: She has a perm and smokes Eve cigarettes and never cooks us lunch, but Philip and I fix our Cheerios in lumpy bowls that he claims she made herself out of clay. His father wears a double-breasted suit with a bright tie and pocket hankie and works as an advertising executive in a skyscraper in the city. It is a mysterious and exotic profession, and even Philip can’t really explain what he does. My father works in the subway, selling tokens in a booth. He has been down there a long time and has seniority, but still works all kinds of shifts, holidays, weekends, graveyards. He needs the overtime, he says, and what’s the difference, it’s always night underground. Sometimes he goes down at dawn like a miner, when only a few working people and the bums are drifting through the station. Those who slept in the subway come creeping out, poking in the garbage, taking up their begging posts before the rush. Strangest of all the creatures my father describes are the Tokensuckers, a subspecies of drug addict who feed by stuffing bits of paper down the turnstiles’ token slots and lying in wait until a normal traveler’s token gets stuck. Depending on his mood, the passenger will either jump it or complain to my father, who buzzes him in the service gate. The Tokensucker then presses his lips to the metal slot like a woodpecker tapping for an insect and sucks the token up into his mouth. He’ll try to cash it in with my father, who, of course, refuses. The Tokensucker will sometimes become enraged and pound on the bulletproof glass. Then, as rush hour begins and a line forms at the booth, he’ll sell the tokens to other passengers at a cut rate.

  Every day, during the rush hour, my father sees humanity pass by. They line up and push through the turnstile like cattle and cram onto the train cars as if packing themselves off to the slaughterhouse. The trains scream and moan. The overhead speakers bark. It’s like a mass deportation. Quiet returns at nine, and it’s back to housewives and students and bums till evening. He sees the same people each time, coming and going, tired in the morning and tired at night, when they stagger up exhausted and angry, as if from hell, but none of them recognizes him. He’s invisible. After the evening rush come the night people, dressed up, going out, then later the drunks puking on the tracks. No one even knows he’s there. He’s seen people mugged and beaten right in front of him. He calls the transit police, who show up an hour later, after even the victims have gotten bored and left. One night, he spent a whole graveyard watching a Spanish kid spray-paint BOOTY BURGLER in giant letters over the wall.

  I keep asking my father why he doesn’t become a conductor, my own dream job, but he says he’s not interested. Finally, to stop me from pestering him, my mother tells me that he tried but was rejected because of his accent when pronouncing the street names. Of course, she says, that’s ridiculous since you can’t understand anything over those speakers anyway. It’s true; they sound like dying walruses or Mayday calls from foreign wars. The real reason, she says, is because he’s Jewish and the Irish have those cushy jobs locked up.

  Philip gets a box of Fudge Town cookies (a whole box, mind you, not a numbered handful negotiated with promises not to spoil dinner) and shows me where to squat and spy through the keyhole at his sister in the bathroom. She is sitting slope-shouldered on the toilet with a look of distraction on her face. At first the only skin visible is her knees and thighs where the jeans are pushed down and of course her bare arms in the T-shirt. As she slumps forward and stares blankly into space she might as well be sitting on a bus, except for the thrilling sense of violation I feel and the faint trickle of water in the bowl, like the tingling of a tiny golden bell. My heart pounds. I squat in a runner’s crouch, ready to flee even as my legs cramp into stone. I hear Philip crunching cookies over me. Fine crumbs skitter down the back of my neck. Then Philip’s sister reaches for the toilet paper and tears a few sheets
off the roll. Just two or three weightless squares, a crumpled flower, nothing like the massive wads of paper I use to bandage up my mitts. Instead, holding her dainty pink corsage, she dips into the shadow between her legs, arching her back to reveal a soft belly, white as the porcelain, smooth as the tile. Carelessly, she drops her damp tissue beneath her, like the princess in a story, leaving her perfumed hankie in a forest for her favorite courtier to retrieve. I’m no Galahad, but still I am kneeling, like any knight should before the Grail. Then she stands, jeans falling around her ankles, T-shirt riding up her ribs, and not three feet from my sweating eyeball, I behold, at last, the mystery that lies at the center of the world.

  Philip whispers wetly in my ear. “What’s she doing?”

  I shrug.

  “She’s got a nice little cunt, right?”

  I’m outraged, but I nod, thinking it the easiest response.

  “She’s fingering herself, isn’t she?” he asks.

  I hesitate, then nod again. He chuckles, and I can smell the chocolate on his breath.

  Anyone who lives in a high place knows the happiness of dropping things. You feel sorry for deprived city children who’ve never seen a cow or picked an apple? Big deal. I pity those who’ve never lived more than two stories off the ground.

  Philip and I have it down to a science. We know just how long it takes for a wad of wet toilet paper or a tomato to fall six floors. We know where, allowing for variable wind conditions, an egg will land if you hold your arm straight out from the sill and let it go. As a target comes down the block, we gauge its speed, and just as it is two or three paces from the kill zone, we let a payload fly. A mailman saunters along unawares as an egg spirals toward his head and explodes down his shoulders. A fat lady shrieks as wet toilet paper splatters over her housedress from out of nowhere.

  Then Philip has a stroke of genius. He rushes into his parents’ bedroom and returns with a blue box of tampons. Cackling to himself, he disappears into the kitchen. I follow curiously and find him in front of the open fridge. He has unwrapped several tampons and, holding them by the string, is stuffing each one down the throat of a ketchup bottle. The effect is strikingly realistic. Gleefully, he dashes to the window and leans far out while I watch from an adjacent sill.

  At first there is nothing promising in sight. A few kids squat in the dying sun, trying to set a newspaper on fire with a magnifying lens, but they are out of our range. Cars go by, but this is too good to waste on a car. Then a big blue Cadillac pulls into a space directly below our post. A balding man in a suit gets out with a briefcase and an overcoat over his arm and locks his car. As the man steps onto the sidewalk, Philip lifts a tampon by the string and flings it straight at him. There is a queasy moment as I hold my breath, watching, and then she lands true, sticking to the man’s right shoulder. Startled, he stops and picks off the object, a look of pure horror overtaking him as he realizes what it is. Moaning like a shot animal, he drops the foul thing, and tossing his coat and case aside, he tears off his suit coat, throwing it to the ground. He scans the heavens in anger, and we duck out of sight behind the sill, shaking with fear and excitement. Cautiously, like a trench fighter, I peek over to see the man shaking out his coat. Philip drops another bomb. It streaks through the air and slides like a snail down our enemy’s back, leaving a red trail on his white shirt. He jumps and starts running, leaving his belongings behind. As he sprints down the block, he pulls off his shirt and throws it away, fleeing for his life.

  How can I describe the laughter? It’s like being tickled by an angel’s wings. It’s like farting on a cloud in heaven. It’s like having your heart go mad with delight and take off running for the hills. We laugh till our guts hurt and we cry. We bend over double like God-stricken men. We crawl howling on the floor and roll in the dust like drunks, and the dog licks the tears from our faces. We laugh till we’re miserable, until there’s no happiness left in us at all but an empty, delirious ache. Those who say that throwing dog crap at a bus isn’t funny are mere Philistines and will never know true joy.

  At breakfast my mother asks if I want to invite a friend to go to the movies and dinner for my birthday. I ask to bring Philip. My father snorts over his cereal.

  “He’s a loser, that kid.”

  “Well, Philip is a bit wild,” my mother says.

  “He’s soft,” my father says. “He couldn’t make it two days without his refrigerator and TV.”

  “Don’t you have any nicer friends?” my mother asks.

  I blurt out the awful truth. “I don’t have any friends.”

  My mother waves it away. “Of course you do. You’re just shy. And you can’t play sports because of your health. And they’re jealous because you’re smarter. “

  “I had a friend once,” my father breaks in. “They shot him and left him lying in a ditch. No one could go to him because the guards were looking out. So late at night, I crawled out to him. I tried to help him, but he was dying and he knew it. All he wanted was for me to knock him out so that he wouldn’t feel so bad the pain. So I hit him as hard as I could. But he was tough and I was weak from cold and no sleep and to eat only one rotten potato a day. I tried and tried, beating him until my hand ached, but it was no good. Then I took up a rock and hit him on the head, but he was still too tough. He bled, but he stayed awake. So finally I smothered him, with my hand like so.”

  My father pinches off my nostrils with his left hand and covers my mouth with his right. “It wasn’t hard because he didn’t struggle. Just squeezed my wrist until it was bruised.” With that he turns back to his bran.

  My mother waves him off. “Don’t listen to your father,” she tells me. “You’ll make plenty of friends next year. Why don’t you try joining the math club?”

  I brighten as an idea comes to me. “Can I take karate lessons? Or join the scouts with Philip? They go camping in the country.”

  “Come on now, honey,” my mother says. “You know you’re allergic. The woods are full of airborne mold and pollen.”

  “Please?”

  “Ask your father.”

  To my father, “Please? I promise I won’t touch any plants.”

  My father points his spoon at me. Milk runs down his wrist. “Forget plants. There’s a lot worse things than pollen out in the woods.”

  “You mean bears?” I ask.

  “He means rednecks,” my mother explains. “And hicks.”

  My father shrugs noncommittally and opens the newspaper. “So go if you’re so smart. You’ll find out.”

  “Over my dead body,” my mother says. I finish eating as fast as I can and race out to meet Philip.

  We decide to cut school, but it is raining out, so we go to the Earl with Philip’s sister, who threatens to tell on us if we don’t let her come and buy her ticket. The ticket booth at the Earl Theater is freestanding, like a subway token booth, with bulletproof glass, a steel grille to talk through, and a curved wooden threshold worn smooth with hands pushing money, but it also has carved columns and a scalloped roof, and it stands beneath a huge marquee, with stone floors under the grime, and ornate moldings under the paint, and burned-out tulip bulbs around the empty glass boxes where the movie posters used to go. The fat lady in the booth never questions your age. She doesn’t even speak English, except to say “three dollar.” Sometimes she falls asleep in the booth, her breath fogging the glass, and you have to tap on the glass and show her your three dollars. You give your ticket to the old man in the threadbare jacket with epaulets, and he grants you entrance to an unearthed tomb. With each step, dust rises from the pattern of the ancient carpet, and in the dim light you can still make out a water-stained, speckled mural depicting Greek ruins on a hill above an olive grove. Silver ashtrays the size of funeral urns stand guard outside the gentlemen’s lounge.

  Entering the great cave of the theater, with its balding plush seats and the shifting curtain marked with the masks of joy and pain, the gaze lifts to the limitless roof, rising away on buttresses an
d columns, thick with soot but still painted, here and there, with stars. Glimpsed through the cracks and plastered fissures, mottled with mold, this night sky no longer matches the one outside. It has deteriorated, regressing to an older, unfinished sky, mapped with different constellations: the Key, the Snake, the Handgun, the Pizza Man, the Three-legged Dog. Drops of rainwater seep along the cracks and fall, one at a time, across the huge vault, to clang in the buckets placed in the aisles. No one ever sweeps up in the Earl. When the lights go down, you want to keep your feet up on the seat in front of you. Rats scratch in the candy boxes, stale popcorn in their mouths. Bottles roll. Don’t go to the bathroom either. The toilets are always backed up, and there’s usually blood or vomit in the sinks. Often the floor is flooded, with toilet paper sailing around. There are no doors on the scribbled marble stalls, and one time I saw a man stripped to his waist and soaping his armpits at the sink. Another time there were two men in a stall together, one on his knees before the other.

  Still, the Earl is the best place in the world to see a movie. It draws a great crowd. The dozen or so patrons spread out and relax. Some sleep, although the usher with the baseball bat will poke you if you snore or wave your hand in front of the projector. Otherwise, he doesn’t mind; you can smoke or drink from a bottle in a bag. You can throw candy and yell at the screen. In fact, the old dark-skinned men at the Earl appreciate everything that your parents would yell at you for doing in a theater or even in front of the TV. If you burp or make a fart noise, they laugh. They will discuss with interest the birth of Godzilla or debate who would win in a fight between Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson. If you shout, “It’s ass-kicking time,” when Bruce Lee takes off his shirt, they cheer, and yelling “Yo’ mama” at the bad guy is always appreciated as a classic riposte.

  It’s warm inside the theater today, as the three of us find our favorite seats in the middle of the middle row. Raindrops ping in the buckets. The lights ease down. There is a double feature, Blood of Vengeance, starring Bruce Klee (Bruce Lee’s cousin, someone explains), and a picture about knights, The Curse of Doom.