by Alan Trotter
The desk crashed backwards with us.
There was a squeal in the room. It was Holcomb somewhere, begging me to help him, as if it was him that was being squeezed all out of life. I shook myself and this bald demon hung on and hung on but then hung on less and I got my breath back enough and knocked an elbow into his chest and then punched down onto his head, driving it into the edge of the desk. ‘That little son of a bitch,’ the crying demon said from the floor.
On the desk was the copper ball and I reached out for it and I picked it up. It fitted in a single hand and I lifted it and as he raised up I crashed the ball into the side of his head, which crumpled with a sound like dropped fruit. He tried to wobble himself up and I hit him in the same spot. His ear caved in towards the strike like a car crashed off the road. I hit him again with the ball and left it in its fresh crater.
The man didn’t move any more. The ball rolled out of the side of his head and under the couch, past Holcomb’s feet.
Holcomb patted me on the back.
Interlude
Hector smiles at Charles, at the sourness of his expression. They have returned to their own compartment in the train. They are sitting. ‘You’re wanting to feel bad,’ Hector says. ‘You always want to feel bad.’
Charles has his feet raised on one of the padded benches. He has previously snarled at Hector and slapped him about the face and spat across his feet a bolt of saliva for saying things like this, but now he yawns.
‘You’re a dope,’ says Hector, ‘because you imagine you should feel bad, and you don’t and it sours you. But why should you?’
‘The buttons would make me feel bad for helping a man from the rear of a train,’ says Charles.
‘Sure, the buttons would like to make you feel bad,’ says Hector. Hector presents Charles a cigarette without taking one for himself. Charles takes from his pocket an unremarkable matchbook and lights it. ‘We understand how the police work,’ Hector says. ‘A dead body washes up at their desk. They say who did this? And they say why did they do this? And answers to questions like that are always easy. Every button you’ll ever meet thinks he’s got a great mind.’ Charles gives a snort at this, it pushes two smoke plumes from his nostrils. Hector says, ‘And the reason is they’ve never asked themselves a difficult question. You don’t need a great mind to know that if you go in the rain without a hat your hair’s going to get wet, and you don’t need a great mind to know that if the wife’s dead the husband killed her. The average button, if you were ever to give them a difficult question, they’d forget which way their knees bend.’
‘So?’ says Charles. ‘Why did we throw him from the train?’
‘Exactly what I mean,’ says Hector. ‘We could stay here and talk until you’d smoked me out of cigarettes and we’d still not have half an answer. There’s no money to connect us to the man, and no grudge. The buttons can come and piece him together and ask the easy questions and they’re not going to get an answer, and then they won’t know what to do with themselves. Or else they’ll go and find out that there’s a wife, and she’s wrapped around a boyfriend, and the whole thing looks good to them for an easy answer. However it happens, no police are ever going to knock on our door.’
‘You’re right,’ says Charles. ‘Society would disapprove of what we’ve done, but it’s obvious why: for reasons of self-defence. If they don’t know why violence has been visited on this person rather than that person, then they have to worry are their own necks safe.’
‘Are their necks safe. Unreason and unpredictability are their own kinds of attack on society, which can only organise itself in response to the predictable. Without predictability, the best it can do is act randomly, and random actions are not a society at all. So in the face of aggression and unpredictability, in self-preservation, it would have to condemn us. However, it’s absolutely clear that it will never have the opportunity: we will never be held to any account for what we have done.’
‘Our own self-interest is not threatened,’ says Charles, ‘so the impulse that demands that society disapprove of our action doesn’t lash at us. If we punish ourselves, then we are holding ourselves to a higher standard than that to which society holds itself.’
‘And why,’ says Hector, ‘would it be reasonable to expect us to do that?’
*
‘There’s no question of feeling bad,’ says Hector. ‘And yet.’
‘And yet,’ says Charles.
‘I’m unsure of how I do feel.’
‘The experience is already being lost to a kind of vagueness.’
‘I can remember the colour of his hair, something of his bearing,’ says Hector.
‘He didn’t stand straight,’ provides Charles, ‘so although I had noticed he was tall, it was only as we grabbed him that I realised in fact quite how tall.’
‘He lacked confidence and wanted to be left alone. He was annoyed when we interrupted his solitude, but he caught the expression of his annoyance quickly and made himself give a friendly smile.’
‘His face was well creased from smiling. He had dark hair, beginning to fall to grey at the temples. He was dressed well but not expensively.’
‘And I remember something of the cry he gave as he fell.’
‘Yes, but that’s all. Height, the colour of his hair, a kind of outline of a person, something of the cry,’ says Charles. They sit in silence for some time. Hector has lighted a cigarette of his own and he looks down at its burning tip as though there is something to find there, or as if he might press it into his eye.
‘Suppose,’ says Hector, ‘with the next one we go and sit with him. Perhaps they are in the dining car, and we strike up a conversation. We familiarise ourselves first. We get to know who he is, what he has by way of family, what sort of—’
‘—God he believes in,’ offers Charles. ‘What sort of love he practises, what he thinks of—’
‘—cities and cisterns. We take the time,’ says Hector. ‘We have the time. Then the whole experience might be more vivid, might endure more, sure, couldn’t it? It’ll last better when we throw him from the rear of the train or slit his throat or bash his head in.’
‘It might,’ says Charles. ‘You’re right about this one, after all. The yell still rings a bit in the mind, but faintly, and everything else has left.’
*
They move to the smoking car, and are aggrieved to find themselves its only inhabitants. To spend time, Charles asks Hector for the letter that has taken them on to the train journey, and rereads it. When he is done, Hector also rereads the letter, then returns it to his pocket. ‘How do you know this woman?’ asks Charles. ‘Tell me as if I don’t know.’
‘I used to know her husband, the dead man,’ says Hector. ‘I went to his wedding, so I guess I met her there, but I don’t remember her.’
The train pulls into a stop. Shortly after, a man joins them in the car, and Hector moves to sit beside Charles, so that together the two of them are opposite the new arrival. Hector lights the man’s cigarette for him and they speak to him for some time. They learn a lot about his habits, and a lot of the details of his past, and commit a lot of his features to memory, but his yell as they throw him from the train still fails to compel itself on their minds.
PART 3
I took care of the demon’s body while Holcomb hovered queasily, then I waited until dark and in two trips disposed of it.
*
I walked all the way back to _____’s. When I reached the apartment, there was a thought that I’d sooner see Lydia than _____, so I walked past our door and upstairs to hers.
There was still no apartment manager—she had taken over his work, collecting rent and complaints as needed, but she trailed around in it like a red-eyed ghost, and the smoke that drifted from her black cigarettes looked more substantial than she did.
She opened the door to me in her nightgown, and said, ‘Hi, Box,’ then fell back into her own bed in a way that suggested she would rather have been going out a
window, or felt as if she was. I said hello back.
She looked smaller in her sadness, the way some animals lose size when they get wet. Still as death, eyes open, she lay shrunken in her sheets.
I took a seat on the ground by her bed. I thought to tell her that her husband would be back, and also wondered whether that would be a kindness, given it seemed unlikely that he would. I didn’t say anything.
After a time, she patted me on the head, and said, ‘Night, Box’ and when I woke up I was still beside her bed.
*
I found _____ pulling on a tie. He said Jarecki had told him he didn’t have to go back to the new quarter. He’d told him that we’d done good work.
I asked what we were going to do. _____ said we were going to go ask Jarecki for work. And if he didn’t have any for us we were going to go knock over a bank, or ask Danskin if he had any, or play cards.
*
The club was open but it was early and the only business in the main room was a private bridge game in the corner. Through the office door I could hear _____’s raised voice.
A waitress took two brandies into the room on a tray. As she opened the door, more of _____’s shouting escaped like an angry wind let into a cold house. When she returned her tray was wet and held just one of the glasses, only now it was half the height and topped with a mountain range of glass. Her face didn’t say much. I carried on waiting.
Bernard came up to me, his nose now entirely without bandages. He tapped it with a finger and winked at me. He was in a good mood—his face looked like a plate of meat in an advertisement painting, a hearty breakfast lit by a big orange sun. He explained that the lookout had told him we were around, and offered me a cigarette. I took it and we smoked silently.
Bernard asked if we were looking for work. I told him we were. He said that since Gabriel—who we’d spent those happy days bouncing off walls—had died, Fylan didn’t have much choice but to keep some distance for a while, which was why there hadn’t been anything for us.
My face must have asked a question, because he set to explaining.
Not long after we had returned Gabriel to Danskin he had puffed up with blood and died in a hospital bed. We were meant to deliver a beating, but a murder risked unbalancing things between Jarecki and Danskin.
No one blamed us for not knowing the boy was infirm, Bernard said, but in the spirit of caution, Fylan was keeping a space between Jarecki and the kid’s death, and so also: us.
We finished our cigarettes. I got Bernard to tell me it again, just so I was clear with myself: we hadn’t had any work from Fylan since we returned Gabriel.
He told me that’s how it was, and how it would be, for a while longer, at least.
We’d been passed the envelope of cash, to keep us from wanting. Which meant the trips to the new quarter had been nothing, just _____’s invention. A play he’d put on so we’d have something to do.
*
The boy who’d come to our apartment with Bernard that first time—who’d stood flipping his knife open and shut—appeared. He whispered something to Bernard. Bernard told him, ‘This is Box’ and the boy nodded at me, and I nodded back. Bernard said they had to leave, but then he waved away the boy. He rubbed at the back of his neck with a hand. ‘Look,’ he said, quiet, ‘I don’t want you to feel sore I asked, but if you need to borrow some jack, until there’s work again …’ I thanked him, but told him I didn’t. He nodded, patted me on the shoulder. ‘As long as you don’t feel sore I asked,’ he said, and faded.
I didn’t feel sore. I didn’t feel too much about it at all, but the little I felt was like he had offered me a glass of water while I was being slowly buried: it was white of him but didn’t enter into the problem. There was no work for us. We were going to be throwing cards, or sitting in empty buildings watching the sky. We weren’t going to be able to take another breath, maybe not for weeks, and I needed air. I could imagine how the days would feel and it was like hanging on a clothesline, and my body ached with it already. But none of this was Bernard’s fault.
I declined his offer decently enough I think.
When _____ came out it was in a cloud of anger. It drifted towards the exit and I followed after, but on the street I reached into it and pulled him out by the collar.
I had _____ off his feet and I shook him. I shook him for killing the boy and for leaving us with no work and for walking us into the new quarter to sit in dirt. I shook him but I didn’t have any words for him, I just crackled nonsense and spat empty breath at him and he didn’t kick, or shout or bite so nothing took, nothing started.
I set him back down. He said we’d go around the city, and we’d visit every person we’d ever done a favour for, and that’s what we did.
*
No one had any work for us now. Not the pool hall prop, not the pawnshop owner, not the louse snow-peddler.
This was friendship in the city, this was fellow feeling. There was no one you could rely on when you needed a way to fill the days.
We took to throwing cards from a deck across the room and into _____’s hat, and we were at it still when the weekend came, and when it went.
*
The days were long. I slept as much as I could to shorten them. It was as far from enough as sleep is from death.
_____ shook me by the shoulder. I pretended to sleep through it. _____ left the apartment. I wanted to be asleep so badly but wanting it wasn’t enough, it would have taken some improvement in me. Sleep was a capacity that other, better people had but I lacked. I went and cleaned myself. I threw water over my face and rubbed it dry with a towel, pressed more water into my eyes. I opened all the windows, standing by one to feel the chill, letting the rain come in and wet my bare feet.
Then I lay back down on the mattress and watched the ceiling. It had a couple of dark stains. Enough wrong with it to look a little interesting—malevolent, maybe—but it could only bear so much attention. I felt half bugs, like if I stayed there I would have taken to chewing on the mattress, so I took a shower. Water hitting skin again, only now it made me itch. I sat in the kitchen, waiting for _____ to return. I had the feeling that I’d got sometimes when we had returned Gabriel and the work first dried up, the feeling that I was outside of the room looking in, and the room was empty. I looked at my arms on the table. They were folded and I had my hat in my hands.
I couldn’t think of anything to do with my arms to make them appear more lifelike so I pushed my chair back and looked down at my shoes. I moved them to show there were feet inside and that the feet were mine, but I still felt like so much furniture. I decided that when _____ returned I would try and persuade him that we should fill our pockets with rocks and walk into the river. I doubted I would do it alone, but when we were together things got done.
For what felt like skin-crawling days I waited for _____.
When I woke up _____ was at the table with me and setting up for a poker game.
*
There were four players and two conversations, and I was sitting in the middle as if I was between two running streams. Holcomb had arrived—he kept his eyes away from me when he first came in—and now he sat talking to a salesman, someone I recognised from _____’s games without knowing his name. Meanwhile _____ was speaking intently to a man with one arm—the other, his right, just an empty sleeve pinned up beneath the shoulder—and one leg, the left, ending just below the knee and continuing in an aluminium pole. No one paid any attention to the cards or the small piles of chips on the table.
I couldn’t make out either conversation over the noise of the other. It was _____ who was doing the talking on that side, all of it, while Holcomb was so tickled by whatever the salesman was telling him that he pulled his black notebook from his pocket and was asking questions, scribbling things down as he did.
The man _____ was talking at shuffled the deck. He was neat at it for having one arm. He dealt, and even though I’d been sitting it out, I took a card when he offered it, for something to d
o, and a while later, for more or less the same reason, when Holcomb poured me a drink from a bottle of gin I took that too.
After a while I’d begun to feel part of the game—the two conversations had turned into a communal, easy joking around, and I was up a few dollars. The only one of us down was the salesman, and Holcomb and _____ were riding him for it, and he was taking it with a sheepish good charm. The man with the one arm was called Childs. It was Holcomb that used the name: I still hadn’t heard Childs himself say anything. I was thinking of asking him whether he was dumb as well as cripple. Either way I liked him for his quiet and I liked Holcomb’s gin.
There was a big pot that ended with Holcomb and the salesman heads up, and the salesman lost again. After that he stood and said that, well, he’d had a good time, and he thanked us all for it, but the bank was going to have to close before it went out of business altogether.
He’d reached for his coat when Childs spoke. He said: ‘Stay a while longer. I’ll see you the cash.’ The salesman looked surprised. I might have too if anyone was watching. Still, he gave his reason again, and added a couple more: he had to go and take a shower, he had an early train to catch.
He went for his coat again, and Childs stood, his chair scraping back from the table. Both the salesman and _____ reacted to the menace that had arrived to the cripple along with a voice. The salesman looked puzzled. Excitement swam and rippled in _____.
I couldn’t guess if _____ had expected the scene to buckle, if there had been an agreement between him and Childs that it would, and I couldn’t guess if he knew why it was important to Childs for the game to continue. More likely _____ was just a dog at the sight of a dinner bowl.
