Under the name Phwombly, a variation on one of the aliases he had employed in the Thirties, he lived in one awful room in an apartment building on West 114th Street between Broadway and the Henry Hudson Parkway. About this building, the kindest description that could be summoned was, perhaps, that it had known less crummy days.
In the early Twenties it had been an elegant example of gracious Uptown West Side Manhattan living. Ten stories high, four huge apartments to a floor, with a common foyer decorated in the then-stylish manner of L’Exposition des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, it had been a residence of wealthy and graceful society mavens whose descendants had inevitably moved downtown to Gracie Mansion and other loci of power.
Now, as Bird approached the structure, it looked like nothing so much as the fever-dream of an architectural Quasimodo. It was dark and weathered, beaten down, street-level windows boarded and barred. What had once been a canopy was now a tattered battle flag of a war no one had even known was being waged. But the impecunious Columbia students, the penniless Puerto Rican immigrants, the frustrated blacks, and the gone-to-rot septuagenarians in what The Great Society called “their sunset years” had won that war. Uncle Kent’s building was a wreck. A shambles. A prison of dead dreams.
As Bird stepped into the dingy lobby through a leaded glass door hanging by one ornate hinge, he was assaulted by the piping shrieks of old women. A stridency of termagants, he thought. A daisy chain of shrews. A spike of shrikes.
The lobby was jammed with ancient, withered, tiny little women, all of them in bedroom slippers and faded wrappers. Their voices crackled and shattered against the marble walls of the lobby. They seemed to be knotted up around one man, a figure in blue, wearing a cap. It took a moment for Bird’s eyes to adjust to the dimness of the lobby–all light bulbs in the ceiling had been broken out eternities earlier–before he realized it was a postman.
He was in his middle twenties, a long-haired, bespectacled street type obviously working the Christmas overflow for a few dollars to supplement what he earned at some honest job downtown. And now he stood with his back to the wall, letter box receptacles behind him, a double-tiered unit set flush with the wall and referred to, in postal parlance, as a gang box unit. The old women had caught him as he’d begun to disperse the mail. His postal key on its long chain was still inserted in the lock of the master door of the upper tier. The master door had been pulled down but before he could begin to drop mail into the receptacles from above they had swamped him. Now he was pinned flat.
Bird edged around the mob, stood half-concealed by a marble pillar, and tried to decide whether to help the postal official or not. His mind cast back over all the do not roll, fold, crush, crease, or bend mail that he had received rolled, folded, crushed, creased, and bent. Also dropkicked. In the moment of hesitation, the postman screamed, “Ladies, ladies! I’m not going to deposit this mail till you all get the hell away from me! Please!”
There was panic in his face, and his voice labored to sound commanding, but there was a discernible crack in every syllable. The old women pressed closer for a moment, swaying in on him like telegraph vines aching for a message; spittle and madness were everywhere. Then, abruptly, there was a chilling sound that filled the lobby. It came from nowhere and everywhere, according to tradition. A voice as menacing, as sepulchral, as a cry for revenge from beyond the grave. It rose above the babble and its timbre held the vibrations of supernatural authority (though Bird detected a faint croaking far back in the glottis). WHO KNOWS WHAT EE-VIL LUUUURKS IN THE HEARTS OF GRUBBY, VENAL OLD WOMEN WHO WEAR SUPPORT HOSE? THE SHUH-ADOW KNOWS! And then there was a chilling laugh that rose and rose and spiraled and soared and twisted like smoke from a pillaged city; a laugh that penetrated marble and steel and human flesh and froze the thoughts in the brain. One of the lenses of the postman’s eyeglasses cracked.
Bird did not move. The old women, many of them clutching their cats, did not move. The postman did not move. Then, slowly, with fear, with the caution of a lemming herd brought to awareness at the final fatal moment that it was about to tumble over a cliff, the throng moved back gingerly. They cleared a space around the petrified postman.
“What the hell kind of a nuthouse is this?” he mumbled, lens shards tumbling down one cheek. There was no answer. So he began to tremble. GET ON WITH IT, NITWIT, the voice said, and it was a command not to be ignored. The postman pulled loose the key from the master door, inserted it in the lower tier door, opened the metal plate, and began very quickly depositing Social Security checks in their proper receptacles. Bird watched; not the postman, or the old women huddling together, but the darker corners of the lobby. He thought he detected movement, a swirl of smoke, a whisper of dark cloth, an eddy of wind, a substanceless substance coming in his direction.
Finally, the postman finished his chores, locked the tier doors, and bolted through the mob and out the open front door, into the winter chill, even as the old women surged forward. Bird thought of the scene in Zorba the Greek where the old ladies wait for Bouboulina to die so they can confiscate her possessions: black-clad creatures crouched in bright-eyed mercilessness. They rushed the gang boxes and opened them hurriedly, withdrawing the checks that would permit them to have one meal of hamburger and onions tonight instead of canned pet food. One by one, then in clots, then in large groups, then again one by one, they rushed away from the mailboxes, clutching their cats, bedroom slippers making whispering sounds against the marble floor. Doors slammed and the sounds of skeletal shufflers climbing the stairs were all that remained…save for one old woman.
She stood in front of her open mailbox, her stick-thin hand inside the aperture, feeling, feeling. Her hand came up empty. Her check was not there. The beneficent government had fucked up. Tears stood in her tired eyes. Her body slumped into an exhausted S. Her shoulders trembled. She dropped her cat. It slipped around her feet and looked up at her. Bird felt helpless; he clenched his teeth; an auto graveyard junk compacter squeezed his insides. Who had brought this old woman to this place, this condition? It wasn’t just age and being useless and unwanted, it was some entropic force, some nameless conspiracy of inarticulate inhumanity that reduced people to being open bird mouths, raw nerve ends, naked animals, husks deprived of visions, flesh waiting to rot. It wasn’t just that some bureaucratic fiefdom had slipped a cog. That could happen. No system is perfect. It was that this lined and discarded creature had been brought to a final state of subsistence where one day’s delay of her check could render her helpless and terrified.
At that moment, Cordwainer Bird swore that if he could purge his soul of the hatred for the particular group that had crushed his soul so effectively, if he could bring them to their knees, he would devote the rest of his life to wrecking these other conspiracies of corporate and governmental complexity whose only purposes in life were to preserve and maintain power at the level they’d attained and to beat down human beings to the service of the systems.
He remembered a quote from Brendan Behan. “I respect kindness to human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don’t respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and old men and women warmer in the winter, and happier in the summer.” It was a flawed philosophy, and there were parts of it Bird did not subscribe to–there were too many roads already, and not enough land unflawed by concrete–but the tone was there; the tenor was right; the message was clear. Yes, from this moment on he would be considerably more than a writer, or a Fury bent on reclaiming his soul for personal reasons. From this moment on he would take up the mantle of Uncle Kent and Uncle Bruce Hagin, who had gone under the name G-8 when he had fought with his Battle Aces; and to some extent–though with greater sanity–Uncle Richard Wentworth, The Spider.
From this moment on the Bird would fly against the new forces of evil in the world.
His reverie was shattered by the shouting of the toothless old woman. Fr
ustrated beyond endurance, she shrieked her hatred of the impossibly gigantic forces that had brought her low. As she scuffled back toward the door to the corridor down which her bleak room lay, she cursed them, without knowing who they were. She gummed her words. “God damn the Post Office! God damn the Social Security Administration!” She reached the door to the corridor and kicked it open with strength Bird could not have suspected lay in such a fragile body. The door banged against the inner wall of the corridor and hung there on its pneumatic door-closer. She staggered down the corridor toward her room, the cat padding at her heels. “God damn you Government! God damn you Herbert Hoover! God damn you Franklin Delano Roosevelt! God damn you Harry S. Truman! God damn you Dwight D. Eisenhower! God damn you John F. Kennedy, may you rest in peace! God damn you Lyndon Baines Johnson! God damn you, God damn you, God damn you Richard Shit Nixon! God damn you Gerry Ford! God damn you Jimmy Carter.” Bird’s view of the old woman was steadily being narrowed as the door closed with a sigh, but in the final instant before it closed completely he saw her shove open the door to her room, the cat got underfoot, she kicked it viciously, sending it out of sight through the inner doorway, and the last thing he heard, in an anguished howl, was, “God damn you…God!”
Bird stood trembling uncontrollably.
Then he heard a faint cackling beside him.
He was alone in the lobby.
“Uncle Kent?” he asked the emptiness, looking around.
“Huh? Who’s that?” The voice came out of nowhere.
“It’s me, Uncle Kent. Cordwainer.”
“Who? What? Are you The Black Master? Zemba? The Cobra? Who sent you? I have weapons, I still have weapons!”
“It’s me, Uncle Kent…your nephew, Cordwainer Bird.”
“You mean: it’s I, not me. Oh, you. What the hell’re you doing skulking around here? You out of a job again? I always told your momma you’d amount to nothing.”
“Uh, listen, Uncle Kent, I need your help.”
“Just what I thought, you little turd. Tryin’ to make another touch, eh? Well, forget it. I snitched my Social Security check before those damned old biddies could get at him. Heh heh, filched it right out of that damned hippie’s mailbag. Didn’t even see me workin’, did you? Heh, did you?”
“No, Uncle Kent, you were very subtle. I never saw a thing.”
“Damned right you didn’t. I’m as good as I ever was. I can still cloud men’s minds so they cannot see me! Wish it worked as well on those be-damned cats. One of the little monsters pissed up my pant leg.”
Bird could hear the sound of fabric rustling, as of someone shaking a leg. Still he could see no one.
“How’s chances we go upstairs to your room and talk, Uncle Kent?” Bird suggested. “I don’t need any money; I’m working on a case and I need some advice.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so; you take the elevator. I’ll just fiy up.”
“You can’t fly, Uncle Kent.”
“Oh. Yeah, yeah, right, I forgot. Okay, we’ll both take the elevator.”
“Uh, Uncle Kent?”
“What now? Boy, you have become one be-damned nuisance, always asking stupid questions, why is the grass green, how many grains of sand in the Gobi, how high’s the moon.”
“You once told me how many grains of sand there were in the Gobi.”
“I did? Hmmm. Well, what is it this time? Can’t it wait till we take the elevator upstairs and get settled?”
“Uncle Kent, this building doesn’t have an elevator.”
“It doesn’t, that’s peculiar. I could have sworn it had an elevator. What floor do I live on?”
“The tenth.”
“Well, you take the elevator, and I’ll just fly up.”
“I knew this Bird fellow had been a tv writer who punched a lot of producers because they allegedly altered his work, but as far as I knew for certain, he was just another of those hack sci-fi writers. We were doing a book of his called Where Do You Hide the Elephant in a Spaceship? It was a paperback original, a bunch of his stories. George, his editor, was off to the National Book Awards in Washington, D.C. and I got a call from this Bird nut, and he wanted to see the galleys of his book before it was printed. Well, for God’s sake, I’m an executive editor, not some lackey; so I told him I couldn’t be bothered sending out galleys to just any one who called up and demanded them. Then he started screaming that he was the author and he used the vilest language I’ve ever heard. Why, I didn’t even know such things could be done with a vacuum cleaner. So I just hung up on the little twerp; I mean, I had a handball court reserved at the Club, I couldn’t be hanging around the office all day listening to that kind of abuse! After all, I’m an executive editor! How did I know the copyediting had been farmed out to one of our 100 Neediest Cases at the Menninger Foundation? It wasn’t my fault the book was set in Urdu.”
Excerpt from diary notes of the late Skippy Wing walker, former Executive Editor, Avon Books, New York; used as source material in the New York magazine article, “Portrait of a Publishing Punk: The Four-Storey Swandive of Li’l Skippy; Did He Jump or Was He Eased Out of the Industry?” by Aaron Latham; 16 February 1976
Kent Allard’s room was bare. Spartan. The walls had been painted dead white. So had the ceiling and floor. Also the inside of the door to the corridor and the inside of the empty clothes closet. Also the windows. Light from the bitter winter’s day outside barely filtered through the paint.
The Shadow had once told his nephew he liked it that way. “Spend so damned much time in the dark, hanging out in alleys and doorways, always sitting shivering on fire escapes, jumping out be-damned windows, never really had a chance to get to use a door in my adult life, I want it white in here. White!” His nephew understood the urgencies of Uncle Kent’s declining years. He never thought it odd.
Now they sat on the floor, facing each other, cross-legged. Bird had a vagrant wish that Uncle Kent would put at least a stool or campaign chair in the room, but the old man had acquired his abilities in the Orient, and he practiced self-denial, even at the age of eighty-one. Bird put the wish out of his mind; it was the least he could suffer, to get some help from this once-great champion of Good and Truth and Decency.
“You still ticked-off at me for not showing you how to cloud men’s minds?” The Shadow asked.
“No, Uncle Kent. I understand.”
“Heh. Sure you do! Sure you do! Every time I showed someone I trusted how to do it, he turned into a creep. That be-damned Oral Roberts, for instance, and his buddy, what’s his name, Willy Graham…Billy Graham! That’s it, Billy Graham! Pukers, both of ’em. But they sure can cloud men’s minds. Don’t do too bad with women’s minds, neither. And what about those Watergate tapes. Mind-clouding if I ever saw it! If I was fifty again, hell, if I was sixty again, even seventy, by damn! I’d have had them Ehrlichburger and Haldeburger by the heels.” He paused in his ranting and looked at his nephew. “Cordwainer? What the hell are you doing here? Did you learn to cloud men’s minds? I never saw you come in.”
“We came in together, Uncle Kent. I need your help.” He hurriedly added, to forestall a familiar conversation, “I don’t need any money. I need some advice and some good solid Shadow-style deductive thinking about a clue.”
“A clue! By God and Street and Smith, a clue! Feed it to me, boy! Just drop it on me! Let me have it! A clue, by damn, a clue! I love clues.” And he began coughing.
Bird slid across the floor and clapped the old man on the back. After a few minutes the coughing subsided, Kent Allard wiped the tears out of his eyes, pushed his tongue back into his mouth, and whispered, “I’m fine. Just fine. What’s this clue you’ve got?”
Quickly going over the events of earlier that day, the insidious placement of his latest book in Brentano’s cryptlike basement, the attack by Mrs. Jararacussu and her thugs, the revelation of the clue to their whereabouts, the seek-&-destroy team that had butchered the unfortunate pawn Jararacussu, the escape…Bird capped the recapitul
ation with a repeat of the whispered words that had been the last gesture of their mind-slave, Mrs. Jararacussu. “She said: ‘You’ll find them under the lady–’ and she was cut off in mid-sentence. There was more. What does it mean to you, Uncle Kent? You know New York better than anyone.”
“Well, Billy Batson knows the subway system better’n me, but I know everything else, that’s for certain.”
“So what does it mean to you?”
“Pornography, that’s what it means to me, boy! Under the lady, indeed. That’s what’s wrong with the world today, too damned much smut. Why, when I was your age, Margo Lane and I had a nice, clean, decent relationship. I’d take her out to Steeplechase Park every once in a while and we’d go in the tunnel of love, and that was as close as we ever got to all this jiggery-pokery.”
“Whatever happened to Margo Lane, Uncle Kent?”
He looked bitter. “She ran off with Bernard Geis.”
He would talk no more about it, so Bird let it drop.
“I don’t think it was a smutty reference, Uncle Kent. I think she was talking about a location. What does ‘under the lady’ bring to mind besides pornography?”
The old man thought for a moment. His tongue slipped out of his mouth.
Suddenly, his face lit up. His weary old eyes sparkled. “By damn!”
Cordwainer sat forward. “What’ve you got?”
“It wasn’t Bernard Geis, it was one of his Associates.”
Cordwainer slumped back. It was no use. The old man simply couldn’t keep his thoughts together. He started to get up. “Well, thanks, anyway, Uncle Kent.”
The Shadow stared up at him. “Where the hell you think you’re going, boy? I haven’t told you the location yet!”
Strange Wine Page 19
