Need

by Nik Cohn

  When he’d had a few beers taken, he’d hold up his right hand to the light, his bowling hand, and bite the fingertips, the way a gold-prospector might test a nugget. “191,598,” he’d say. The number of balls he’d sent down in his first-class career. “Thirty-three English summers, and not a single half-volley,” he’d say, and drink his own health. A maudlin old tosspot. She’d loved that man.

  In his back garden with the lobelias and foxgloves and sweet williams in their tidy beds, all those bland English blooms, he had taught her the in-swinger, the leg-break, the googly. Those were not skills you ever forgot. So instead of slashing her wrists in the Ansonia, she’d ridden the Broadway Local to the Bronx and watched the West Indians playing in Van Cortlandt Park.

  Ferdousine was sitting in the next deckchair. A dapper little party he looked, but hopelessly out of place and time even then, done up as an English gentleman on a country-house weekend, all tweeds and brogues and rough woollen socks, and talking down his nose in the accents of a prewar public schoolboy, vowels drawled, hard consonants spat out like grape pips.

  All of this sat oddly with his dark and sallow flesh, his yellowed eyes and hawk’s nose like the Mahdi in Gordon of Khartoum. The first remarks Kate dared risk, he responded curtly, as if she intruded. La-di-da, she thought, and she was just gathering up her things to move on when a soaring cover-drive came their way, a shot bound straight for the parking lot, except that she reached up her free hand, plucked it clean like a cherry.

  “Fred Root was my great-uncle,” she said.

  “A very great bowler,” Ferdousine replied. “A very great bowler indeed.”

  1931, when Fred Root was senior pro for Worcestershire, perhaps a little past his prime but still a force, Ferdousine’s father had been chargé d’affaires at the Persian Embassy, and Ferdousine himself a day boy, cricket-crazed, at Westminster. “Was it fun?” Kate asked.

  “Not precisely,” he said. But not so brusquely this time, merely answering the question. He told her about the Embassy, court ritual under the Shah, and how to tie a bow-tie. Fastidious, dry as dust, he was everything she’d been looking for.

  They’d sat like companions till close of play, and later on gone to an English tearoom in Greenwich Village, where they ate potted shrimps and fish-paste, rock buns, sherry trifle.

  It was the food of childhood. Kate’s mother had used to make English spreads each year for Charley Root’s birthday. She’d hated them then, and they tasted worse now, but she wolfed them down anyhow. An exorcism, it felt like. And Ferdousine gorged right along with her, mouthful for vile mouthful, while he told her tales of Westminster. “I was the tame wog in a nest of crypto-fascists,” he said. “Once they forced an entire suet pudding down my throat.”

  “Hot or cold?”

  “Tepid.”

  Kate could not picture this. What was more, she knew she never would. In Ferdousine, at last, she had met someone who cast no shadow.

  He seemed to have no needs. No desires beyond cream cakes and meringues. No begging puppydog eyes or hands clutching at her sleeve, imploring her for certainty. Humans in their hungers, they were the curse of the industry. The curse of existence, really. It got so she couldn’t stand to hear that word. I need, you need, they need—it made her want to scream. But she didn’t, of course. She wouldn’t get paid if she did.

  But what a relief its absence brought. With Ferdousine, she was absolved from strain; from having to see a damn thing. Maybe that was why she forgot herself. Or maybe she was simply drunk on tipsy-cake. Whichever, she lost all sense of self-censorship, she told him about Charley Root.

  Give him credit, the man never blinked. Never even broke the rhythm of his chewing. Only heard her out with his dark head cocked sideways, his yellow eyes like a curious bird, and the first time she stopped for breath, he asked her quietly, “Did you ever hear tell of one Katerina Rhute? By any manner of chance?”

  So that was that.

  He knew the entire saga, chapter and verse. Truth to tell, he was better informed than Kate herself. Making sense out of things that made no sense was his life’s work, he said, munching a sausage roll; he had created a whole library from his findings. Forty years’ accumulation of clippings and cuttings, bound up in red morocco. Spinning suns and burning moons, stigmatics, flying nuns. Rains of toads, and bleeding statues, exploding whales and poltergeists, the works. And Katerina Rhute, of course.

  Elbow-deep in Dundee cake, they didn’t stop stuffing until the tearoom shut; and the next Sunday they met again at Van Cortlandt Park. All summer they watched cricket, and bloated up on cream teas. When fall came, ending the season, it had seemed only natural for Kate to abandon the Ansonia, cross Broadway to the Zoo. She had no children, no true country. None of Ferdousine’s lodgers did. They were their own children, she supposed, and his house their nation.

  Nine years, eight months, fourteen days.

  How had they been? Come see, commissar, as Fred Root used to say. She could have done without the gas heaters and the fake rainforest. On the other hand, the routine kept her lulled. The twice-daily repetitions of feeding and cleaning, the chirpings and rustlings and hissings, the smells, the steam heat—top them off with Days of Our Lives, and she had her own brand of Prozac.

  No fuss, no fandango. She had grown slow and stout in this place; in this place, she’d learned not to see a thing. Every so often, somebody who remembered her from the Ansonia would track her down and try to pump her about their cheating lover, their dying mother, whatever. But she’d learned how to cope with those. Feed them a face like a boot, a smile like a ticket dispenser. Then back to the horn-billed conure, and the yellow-blotch salamander.

  Until this boy. In his silly red car.

  It was the blatancy that floored her. For a stranger to come to her home and expose himself like that, flash her in the open street—if this had been the New York Post or tabloid TV, she’d have said she felt violated.

  Violated and dirty. Just sickened. Every time she moved, took a turn around the jungle, the gas stabbed her again, jack-knifing her, and she had to go feed snakes to straighten up.

  Their cages sat in a bower of ferns and orchids. The scent of the orchids like embalming fluid, when combined with the brackish reek of snakeshit, never failed to soothe her. Sweat ran sluggish on her belly, her thighs, and she treated the California whipsnake, masticophis lateralis, to a bonus mouse.

  This was her favourite snake. A lot of reptiles she could take or leave, they were no more than furniture. But the whipsnake was a picture—black on top, with a cream-coloured belly and one orange stripe along each flank, a coral-pink underside to its tail, anal divided, smooth dorsal scales. Waiting on the mouse, he held his flat broad skull cocked sideways like Ferdousine, his yellow-rimmed eye glinting like a brass Woolworth’s ring.

  That oversized eye was the charm, the reason Kate had named him Whip. Other snakes had beady eyes, evil eyes, hungry eyes. Only his seemed ironic, removed. When all around him rattled and hissed, he would barely stir, just let his tongue flick out. Then his eye, though it had no lid, would seem to droop, grow heavy. A film like a translucent caul would blur its black pupil, and the yellow rings quivered, as if with private laughter.

  It was a lounge-lizard look. Glutted on mouse, Whip wore it now. A tango started playing in the room overhead, Hernando’s Hideaway, and there were sounds of shuffling, two sets of footsteps on a hardened floor, one shambling and uncertain, the other light and flitting. Anna Crow was giving Ferdousine his dancing lesson.

  At the tango’s lurch and judder, Kate’s stomach heaved, and all the prisoned gas burst from her at once. The eruption was so violent, she ducked her head in self-defence, slapped her hand palm-flat against her guts to bind them. “Regina Angelorum,” she said. Anna Crow’s boy was crossing Broadway with his hands in his pockets. Then he took out his right hand, held it up to the air, a gesture almost like a blessing.

  And Kate saw knives.

  Harvey McBurnettes, she’d
know them anywhere. They were the same blades that Charley Root had always used. Stainless steel bowie-knives, ten inches long, with elegant curved blades sharpened at both edges, a heavy brass cross-guard, a black leather grip. He used to call them his Susie Qs.

  In the years they’d spent touring, he kept them in his bedside table with his cuff links and his pomade. They lived inside their own teak box lined with crushed velvet, midnight blue, and when Charley Root let them out before the show, the tips of their blades were oily, malicious, like the eyes of a Sonoran Shovelnose, chionactis palarostris.

  By this time Charley Root no longer played the clubs and theatres, he travelled with a tent show, barnstorming through the Florida Panhandle. He drank too much Rebel Yell, and his hand had started to shake. It was so bad that his wife, Kate’s own mother, had lost her nerve. The moment she was strapped into place and saw the first knife flash in Charley’s gloved fist, she’d lose control of her bladder, it ruined the whole performance. So she’d had to leave the act, and Kate took her place.

  She was eleven going on twelve, born in the East Texas pinewoods, schooled in Arkansas and Louisiana, presently residing in Fruitville, a few miles out of Sarasota, where Charley Root had rented a ranch-style bungalow. When they weren’t touring, Kate had not a thing to do after dark but sit on the porch swing, counting fireflies. A big-boned girl even then, strapping was the kindly word. A hundred and fifty pounds, rock-solid and full of sap, too full for her own good. She didn’t fear a living thing, or dead. Certainly not a fistful of oiled knives.

  She was a Bird of Paradise, after all.

  On stage, she performed dressed up in feathers, every colour of the rainbow, and when the band played Cherokee, and the knives started flying, those feathers were cut away in sections, limb by limb, till she stood revealed. In the flesh. Well, not quite the flesh. A bodystocking, or a flesh-tinted leotard. But the glare of the spotlight was so fierce, nobody in the audience could tell for sure. What was really her, and what was lies.

  The Bird of Paradise wasn’t the only gimmick that Charley Root used. Not only did he throw at feathers, he threw masked. Not only was he masked, his target was pinned to a rotating backboard. And not only did this board rotate, it varied speeds, quickening as each knife hit home, till it wound up spinning like a top, seemed hardly more than a blur.

  All those back roads, all the jerkwater towns. Dade City and Destin, Trilby, Yalaha, Frostproof, through Manatee County, Polk County and Hardee too, clear out to Winter Haven. Mulberry that night when a man in plaids jumped up on stage, ripping out Kate’s feathers in great handfuls, till Charley Root with his last knife pinned his hand against the spinning backboard, neat as a mounted butterfly. Or Boca Grande when the act was over, and she stepped away from the board to take her bow, only to hear laughter instead of wolf whistles, wheeling to see that the knives, instead of voluptuous beauty, had traced the outline of a hunchback dwarf.

  Or Tarpon Springs.

  Half a mile outside city limits, there was a patch of scrub field out back of Little Ollie’s O-Boy Eats, with a dye-works across the highway, and a wallow of pigs rooting in the trough of a creek. The cracks in the walls of the trailer sucked in mixed smells of coal tar, burning grease and pigswill, and Charley Root’s corset sat out on his dressing table.

  He was a pendulous man with bleeding gums and piles, loose flesh hanging over his jewelled belt, but at night he mutated himself, turned into a masked avenger, the second coming of Lash Larue. The spurred black thighboots and the black cowboy shirt with the pearl buttons, the black pants too tight in the crotch, and the rhinestones on the cat burglar’s black mask. The pomade and powder, the Limes de Buras cologne. The black gloves like a second skin. Last of all, the teeth.

  This was a sacred rite, each step performed just so, and always in the exact same order. Except in Tarpon Springs, a town full of Greeks, where the ritual went crashing.

  Everything was copasetic till Charley came to the teeth. But the moment he reached for his upper plate, the pigs began to racket, and the sudden uproar caused his hand to jerk. The plate was knocked flying to the floor, and its bonding broke. Molars and bicuspids scattered every which way, and Charley had to get down on his hands and knees, scrabbling under the vanity with his rump thrust high. Sausage-skinned in black leather, it looked overripe, fit to burst; and Kate began to laugh. Sprawled across her bed, half in and half out of her feathers, she caught the giggles and couldn’t stop.

  Charley Root turned to curse her. But his back was stiff, or his corset caught him wrong. Whichever, he got stuck halfway. And there he remained, frozen in her memory, looking back across one shoulder like a coquette surprised at her bath, some old tart run to flab, with his fallen cheeks all pancake and rouge, his lips painted cherry pink.

  He’d wanted to hurt her then; she knew that. He could have killed her, but there was no time. The Susie Qs were glinting sly and greasy in their crushed-velvet beds, pigs kept blundering against the trailer walls, and Goodbye Cruel World was playing inside the tent. It was showtime.

  Pitched in Ollie O’Boy’s parking lot, the tent was barely quarter full. When the curtain was pulled back and the Bird of Paradise revealed, all gold and crimson and midnight-blue, Kate didn’t hear one hand clapping.

  Most nights, once the board had begun to rotate, she saw nothing more. Only felt the blades kissing cool and sleek, the jolt as they bit home. The first two or three always made her feel sexy. After that she mostly drifted. Thought of Elvis, or silk stockings, or getting her hair permed. But this night felt odd, she couldn’t let go. Even when she was spun at speed, her vision refused to blur. Through the hot pink nimbus of the arc lights she saw the knives fanned in Charley Root’s gloved left hand, then plucked one by one with his right. Each blade as it was raised above his shoulder, when his arm reared back before the throw, appeared to her frozen in close-up. She could see the long sweeping curve below, the clipped top, and each of the embossed waves, or were they ferns? They flew towards her lazily, showing off. Made sucking sounds as they slipped by. Each blade slower, more ostentatious than the one before.

  The last knife came slowest of all, seemed almost to stop in mid-flight. As if it was caught in two minds, couldn’t quite decide whether to stick her or pass her by.

  It was an awkward situation. Spreadeagled, she felt the spinning board pocked and scratchy against her back, the iron bands that strapped down her arms and legs, and saw Charley Root poised to take his bow. Masked but toothless, with his shirt-buttons straining and white coins of corset peeking through, he started to strip off his black gloves. Still Cherokee played on, and the knife’s point, dangling, turned hazy-blue like smoke.

  The taste in her mouth then was acrid, she felt as if she’d hit an air pocket and was falling weightless. She clamped her teeth against a rush of nausea, shut her eyes, and as she did so she caught a glimpse, somewhere out beyond the knife’s edge, of a city street in daylight.

  She saw a line of low wooden buildings in the rain, a bar, a hardware store, and some kind of medical shop, a plate-glass window filled with crutches and neck-braces, surgical trusses, all manner of miracle cures.

  It was like looking into a diorama: a girl stood leaning against the glass, eating french fries out of a paper bag in a plastic raincoat with no stockings and no hat against the wet, just the morning paper on her head, held open at the Classifieds. She kept glancing at her watch, waiting on a bus, but she didn’t seem impatient, merely curious. When the bus arrived, she placed one foot in a white orthopaedic shoe on the bottom step, then she must have sensed she was being watched, somehow spied on, because she looked back across her turned shoulder, the same coy pose that Charley Root had struck when he was scrabbling for his teeth under the vanity, only the girl’s face beneath the evening paper was not rouged or raddled, it was suffused with light.

  In that instant, the shock of recognition had whipped at Kate’s eyes like a lash; she’d shouted out. But her cry made no sound. The only noise was the
fat thwack of the Susie Q on the board behind her left ear, and a drizzle of applause, as she fell out of consciousness.

  How could that be? To be strapped to a board in Tarpon Springs, yet watching a girl in an open street, both at the same moment? Long afterwards, Kate had tried to describe it to Fred Root. Don’t be so bloody silly, he’d said, and she had tried not to be, but there were moments like now when she couldn’t help herself. Bloody silliness was her nature, the fashion she had been created.

  So she got gas. So sharp and evil, it almost knocked her to her knees. By the time she settled, it was almost time for Days of Our Lives.

  In yesterday’s episode, Stefano had learned from Celeste that Tony was pretending to be blind in order to trap John and Kristen, and Sami and Lucas joined forces to break up Austin and Carrie. Bo, meanwhile, refused to believe Billie’s claim that Gina was being brainwashed. So Billie, crushed, had returned Bo’s ring.

  But Kate could not concentrate. When Bo stole a kiss from Gina, the dirty dog, she felt no sense of betrayal. No sense of anything, in fact. All she could think of was a small boy on a blue tricycle, velvet drapes and Persian cats, and Tarpon Springs, and the teeth, the pigs, the knives, the girl waiting at the bus stop, and when the girl had turned her head. And Kate couldn’t cope. Too much had come at her too fast, too fierce. Panic swept across her, she felt sickened. Stumbling through the jungle to Pearl’s cage, she opened its gate wide. Opened the door to the Zoo as well, and gestured for her to fly away. But the fool bird refused to oblige. Instead of grabbing its freedom, all it did was flutter feebly in circles, bang its head on the walls and the ceiling, singe its wings on one of the gas heaters, and wind up tangled in a Virginia creeper, head-down and thrashing.

  This was no kind of life.

  No kind of life at all. Kate couldn’t stay here and watch, not one moment more. So she left the bird to live or die, it could suit itself. She didn’t even stop to lock the door, just walked out on Broadway in her housecoat and fluffy mules, and started swimming upstream. Past the OTB and La Perla botanica, past the Nu-U juice bar, Regan’s funeral parlour, and Blanco y Negro, and the Chemical Bank where the clock now read 101°, until she found herself almost at Sweeney’s, where she paused to catch her breath, she took a look around.