Need

by Nik Cohn

  In the end the Pirates ran out of patience and pillows. When they caught him sawing logs in the manager’s office, right in the middle of the seventh-inning stretch, they kicked his butt in the street. So Bombo went on a six-day drunk. He rambled halfway across Jersey and back, Trenton to Asbury Park, Teaneck to East Orange, and then he showed up at Willie’s house with his raggedy ass hanging out of his pants, a breath like kerosene. Mumbling how he had to have a dream, he’d never make it otherwise. And Willie’s mother, like an idiot, fell for it. Dreams? We got a million of ’em, she said. Come in and rest your bones.

  Bombo, of course, was not the man that needed to be asked twice. Before Willie’s mother could get the door half-open, he was up the stairs and into bed, knocking out the Zs in triplicate.

  Willie’s bedroom was right next door, there was only a plywood wall no thicker than a screen or a membrane almost between them, and he was trying to get some sleep. With so much pressure on him, between Prof. De Herbert and his relations waiting on him for numbers, he could never get his proper rest, he could not sleep for dreaming. A few minutes’ doze, then he’d cough up his dream like some Speak Your Weight machine, and the rest of the night he’d spend staring at the walls, with an endless tickertape, ASPARAGUS, DIPHTHERIA, LOBSTERS, ROOSTER, TURPENTINE, VOMIT, ZIGZAG, spooling through his sleep-starved brain.

  So anyhow, cut to the chase. He couldn’t swear to what happened next, not in so many words, he had to take Tia Guadalupe’s word. But it seemed like he was trying to sleep on one side of the screen, and Bombo Garcia was trying to have a dream on the other, and somehow screwy they must have got confused, half-unconscious as they were, curled back to back like Siamese twins. By some freak their spirit-spines must have fused and their chemistries swapped places. At any rate, when Willie woke again it was the day after tomorrow, he’d slept for thirty-two hours. And afterwards, he never could remember another dream, not to save his life. While Bombo, he had all the dreams he could handle. But they didn’t concern the Yankees or the Orioles, they only showed him a dry cleaner’s in Canarsie with a crack house in the basement.

  Or that was the tale handed down. The gospel according to Tia Guadalupe. Which explained why Willie now, stretched on his bed in Brighton Beach, had a dream he couldn’t remember, and then he was between sleeping and waking, dying on Kate Root’s leg.

  When the next train plundered through and set the bed’s brass frame to shuddering, he sat up straight and dreamless to find himself surrounded by the forty-nine duck hunters with their walrus moustaches and green eye-patches, their forty-nine guns that didn’t shoot, and one sentence stood plain as a thought-bubble in his mind: I am not my self.

  Course he wasn’t.

  His true self would not put up with this. Would never have stood still to be used and abused, thrown away like a broken toy. Not unless the fix was in.

  Take a look at the story straight on, as if this had all happened to a stranger, some other body entirely, and see how it printed out. A man of power at his age, a blowfish at Kate Root’s—the only way the set-up made sense, there had to be another force at work. Why else would he be brought to his knees? Howling at the moon for three red hairs?

  Possession was an ugly word.

  But sexy, just the same. The moment it spelled itself, he felt renewed. Blotting out the duck hunters, he put on a pair of dove-grey flannels, an absinthe cambric shirt. He brushed and creamed and oiled the armadillos, then he brushed and creamed and oiled them some more.

  Tia Guadalupe lived in Morrisania, five floors up in the last tenement still occupied on a block of gutted shells. The walls were so rotted you could look clear through, there were holes like open wounds, but Guadalupe’s own apartment was kept immaculate, a Santeria shrine.

  Though she wasn’t connected to Willie by blood, she had been madrina to his mother and his aunts, she seemed like family. An outsized woman of maybe seventy, painted bright as a Dutch doll, in a plain white dress that flowed like robes. When she saw him at the door, her first glance was at his feet, coated in dust and nameless crud from his subway ride, and her second glance scoured the street below. “What happened to the Spyder?” she asked.

  “Possession is an ugly word.”

  “Repossession’s uglier.” Still she let him inside her hallway, where candles burned and one cabinet was filled with her Warriors and Eleggua, another with the otanes of Babalu-Aye, and she brought him a glass of dusty water, she placed her hot fingers on his wrist. “A full sack of woe,” she said, and lit a cigar, a White Owl. “What is it you want?”

  “A hair.”

  Next to Willie’s foot was a drum draped with necklaces of corn that spilled loosely across an altar made from a pair of baby shoes, a model car, a set of maracas, and a cluster of wooden axes, red and white in honour of Chango, god of lightning. “Male, female or other?” Tia Guadalupe asked.

  “A lady of a certain age.”

  “Head, pubic, underarm or excess?”

  “A leg.”

  “Money, sickness or love?”

  “523,” said Willie D. “A hunger.”

  He told her everything then, the Zoo, the knives, the birds and snakes, the black-and-white Zenith, the three reddish hairs, and Tia Guadalupe heard him without comment, only moved when he was done. Puffing at her cigar, she dipped inside a wooden chest and brought forth a miniature bottle of rum, a brown-paper sack filled with smoked fish, dried possum and popcorn. “Where’s the problem?” she asked.

  “Left shin. Two inches above the ankle, maybe two and a half,” Willie said, and Tia Guadalupe lifted the hem of her white dress. Raised it coyly like the flap of a tent to reveal monumental legs swathed in black hairs as thick as a pelt, and she snipped off three with the kitchen scissors, she dropped them in a plastic bag. “You should never have let the Spyder go,” she said, puffing deep. “How do you travel without it?”

  “Flat feet.”

  “982,” said Tia Guadalupe, and she pushed him out on the stairway, she started to close the door. “A sign of cowardice.”

  Penetrating the Zoo was easy. Anna Crow in a moment of false hope had given him a key. All he had to do was wait till Kate Root’s reading light went out upstairs, and prowl.

  Stealing by flashlight from the hallway through the barbershop and the crushed-velvet curtain into the menagerie, his only enemies were the smell and the graveyard silence. Instead of creeping he’d have liked to kick out, raise an uproar. Anything to break the stillness.

  His torch tracked the rows of masked cages, the climbing jungles, the aisles crawling with unnameable growths. At any moment an anaconda might uncoil from the darkness with flashing tongue, or some man-eating plant clutch at his throat. Well, they might do. But the only creature awake seemed to be one snake, and that was safely caged.

  California Whipsnake, its label said. A glitzy-looking character, black with flashes of pink and orange, and a yellow-rimmed eye that measured Willie calmly, seemed to find him somehow amusing.

  Kate Root had looked at him the same way. Contemplating the whipsnake, Willie saw the woman—her gapped front teeth and her freckles, her wide flat forehead that carried no lines, her green eyes with their steady gaze as if she was studying fate or flying fish behind your back, as if she held some secret she wasn’t telling, no money or angle would tempt her.

  A conspirator’s look.

  That was it. The look of privileged data. What was it the FBI agents always said in movies? Classified information, We are not at liberty to divulge. And her snake was down with the same jive. Its blinkless gaze withered him and ranked him, sucked out what was left of his resolve.

  Still, he couldn’t run. Having broken and entered, he had no choice but to see the job through. Groping and fumbling among the roots of a ficus tree, he found soft soil that parted at his touch and he buried the bottle of rum, the sack of popcorn, possum and fish. “An offering to Osain,” Tia Guadalupe had called them. If they didn’t fix Kate Root, at least they would give her pause
for thought. An awkward hour or two, and maybe a migraine headache. Vomiting and evil cramps at her monthlies, too, or was she past those? Hard to tell. Crouching, he spat on Osain’s feast in its shallow grave for luck, and began to cover it over. The damp earth felt like ooze, malign; the choke of darkness was a rope. His nerve failing him, he scrambled away from the burial site, banged his skull on a sheeted cage. The sound it made was a muffled chime like a funeral bell. Whirling from it, he saw the whipsnake laughing.

  Well, not exactly laughing. More like snickering. But mocking him anyway. His clumsiness and his panic, the dread that had brought him here. 982: FALLEN ARCHES: a sign of cowardice. And that was the plain fact. Chickenshit; some squeaming girl. To go in terror of three lousy hairs. To let them shrivel and burn him like this, drag him down into ignorance. Humblemumbling like a peasant, some toothless old woman from El Pajuil. When those hairs should have been a challenge, not a threat. A trial of strength. Like a Holy Grail, or whatever. Instead of running from them, or plotting to destroy them, he should have faced them headon. Blown on them when he had the chance. Or anything else he desired. Sucked them, bitten them, chewed them up and spat them out. Be possessed by them, yes, if that’s what it took.

  Would that have killed him?

  Hardly. For a beat, in his self-disgust, he almost went back to Osain’s grave and dug him up again. But the thought of that black slime running on his hands forbade him. What he needed was to get back to Brighton Beach, lay himself down flat on his brass bed beside the El, and try to steal back some of Bombo Garcia’s sleep. When he surfaced, he would face the hairs fresh. Be strong to master them. Flirt them, or tease them, or make them stand rigid and tense. Or bend them back, doubled over, corn sheaves before a storm. With their long stalks curved and graceful. Three swans’ necks waiting to be severed. Bowed helpless beneath the blade. A guillotine. Or a Harvey McBurnette.

  These vampires of today, they had it all too easy. In Kate Root’s youth the undead life had been one long heartache. If it wasn’t a crucifix it was garlic; if not dawn, a stake through the heart. But these days, it seemed to her, the damned were a bunch of pampered prima donnas, worse than baseball players. Power, glamour, la vie en rose—the world was their oyster. And did they appreciate it? In a pig’s ear. Nothing but moan, moan, moan, from first page to last. She hadn’t the patience. No, really she hadn’t. The paperback flopped from her hand, she stubbed out her Camel on its spine, and settled herself to sleep.

  She was a career insomniac, four hours in a night was a banquet to her, but in her middle years she’d devised a routine that sometimes helped. When all else failed, she’d play cricket with Fred Root in his back garden.

  Kate batted, he bowled. They used a tennis ball and a dustbin for the wicket, and she’d watch him run in from the lobelia beds, or shamble in rather, a big, ungainly, brick-faced man in baggy flannels and suspenders, his great feet in carpet slippers pointed outwards as he waddled like Charlie Chaplin. Plates of meat, he’d called them, but they looked more like frogman’s flippers to her. Flap, flap, double-flap, they went, and her focus moved to his right hand. He held the ball between his second and third fingers, beef sausages, they seemed. In the moment of release, his little finger flicked sideways, he flipped his wrist. The scuffed grey tennis ball swung down and in upon her, then kicked upwards, knifing straight for her chest and throat. Bodyline, that was called. She didn’t try to smite it, what would be the point? Broken windows were six and out. Her only ambition was not to be hit or hurt. To play the ball down safely. Lay it motionless at the feet of the sweet williams. One dead ball.

  Normally it took a couple of overs before she was lulled. But this night the vampires in their vanity had left her drained. Already by the third delivery she felt herself easing away, and the bat handle began to slip through her fingers, when she heard something moving downstairs.

  A random and somnolent scuffling, it sounded like a snake sleepwalking. Maybe one of the blind Texans; Maguire must have left its cage unlocked. God’s gift to boghopping, you couldn’t trust him to wipe a parakeet’s ass. Not that a parakeet needed its ass wiped, of course. But you couldn’t have trusted him if it did.

  Stumbling down the stairs with a stun-gun in her hand and her dressing gown untied, her hair all in her eyes, she had almost reached bottom before it occurred to her that this might not be a snake; it sounded more like a thief in the night.

  For a moment common sense almost got the best of her. But only for a moment. Then a giddiness possessed her, and she burst through the velvet curtain; she took three paces through the room, brandishing the stun-gun like Excalibur.

  What was she playing at? She was being a supervixen. The style of desperado in movies who shouted Freeze! and Up against the wall, motherfucker!, slapping heads and kicking tails, reducing the bad guys to jello. If the intruder had made one wrong move, she would have pulped him. With pleasure. But he didn’t stir. Caught in the act, bending low above the cash register with his sticky hand in the till, he did not have the decency to stick his hands up. He didn’t even look startled, certainly not terrified. Just stared at the dressing gown slipping her shoulders, and her shape inside her pink nightie with the sky-blue periwinkles at the neck, or were they forget-me-nots? And her legs, her bare legs, exposed to above the knee. And her feet not even in their mules, she hadn’t had the time. And her breasts.

  He could see her nipples.

  How could he miss them? Whenever she was overheated, at all agitated, they popped right up. Dark and swollen they’d look, absolutely depraved.

  Her first reflex was to grab at the errant edges of her gown, pull them shut. Her second was to put away the gun before it hurt someone. And as she laid the gun on the counter, she saw the thief’s hands. They were not full of banknotes, or even the back copies of Soap Digest she kept stashed in the cheque compartment. In fact, they held nothing at all. But she knew what he had sought, even so. She knew just what he’d been after.

  Wilfredo Whoever; Anna Crow’s pet delinquent.

  Of course, she knew. How could she not? With the boy’s eyes still on her under his nice hair, all blurred and smeary they looked, and dreadful in their hunger.

  Something broke in her then. Though he had caused her only turmoil, had turned her life to sewage, she could not stand those eyes on her. Anger went from her. So did contempt. “You poor sap,” said Kate.

  “It was just …” Wilfredo began, but she had no time to hear his excuses or explanations or any other whines. Already she was bustling around behind the counter, kicking aside sacks of birdseed and dried rape, opening the safe concealed by the poster of Billie and Bo. “Tomorrow night. Seven o’clock,” she said, handing him Abel Bonder’s knives in their red-leather case, and she flushed him from the Zoo a second time.

  She was beat.

  Upstairs, though safe in her bed again, she couldn’t stop twitching. Her room was a cell, twelve foot square, and painted flat white. Its only artwork hung crooked, a hand-painted photo of Fred Root, the blown-up frontispiece from his autobiography, A Cricket Pro’s Lot, which showed a man with a face like forty miles of bad road, smirking lopsidedly through a hard-scrabble of seams and potholes and ruts. At Worcester in 1926, the very first day of summer, he had ripped out Australia’s heart in a morning, then polished off a beefsteak, a complete veal pie and four bottles of light ale for lunch. But he brought her no help now.

  She couldn’t be bothered to straighten him even. All that registered on these walls were their smudges and scars, a landscape so bleak that she snapped out her nightlight, risked the dark for preference.

  Immensity. In which swam a boychild tucked into a foetal curl, his spine pressed against a plywood screen. In the next room a wax model of a man’s corpse lay surrounded by plastic lilies, watched over by an illustrated woman. A bottle of brandy sat on a table by an open window that looked out across a funfair to an elevated railroad and a bedroom full of ducks. Or no, not ducks. On second look they were fighting cocks w
ith steel spurs on their legs. One of the spurs pierced an eye. A single drop of blood appeared, and that was when Kate switched her light back on, saw herself in her bedside mirror: a fright, flushed and sweating, her hair a total disgrace.

  But desired.

  An object of passion.

  She didn’t know why this boy wanted her, and she didn’t care to speculate. Wilfredo, Wilfredo … Diliberto, that was it. But she could call him Wilfred. With his slant eyes and tiny feet, his olive skin the tint of a lizard’s underbelly. She couldn’t guess what his game might be. But she knew the smell of need.

  It made a change, at least. During these last years she had felt like an invisible woman. Men didn’t notice her, other women did not compete. Some little trollop like Anna Crow would give her one glance as she passed, then dismiss her. Spinster, old maid. A single lady of equinoctal years. As if she had no sex. As if, deepest down, she didn’t exist.

  Anna as in anathema, Crow as in carrion, what gave her the right? A couple of failed marriages, a dose of clap, a few dozen or a hundred one-night stands? Kate herself had been engaged eight times.

  Never married, that was true. But affianced, betrothed or otherwise plighted eight times, in five cities and three states, to accredited suitors from all walks and stations of life. A pastry chef, an oculist, a fallen priest, a steeldriving man, a trombonist, an ambulance chaser, a barber, a pawnbroker. All of them had loved her, or that was the word they’d used. And she had liked all of them in return.

  In the long run, of course, it couldn’t ever work. Sooner or later they’d find out who she was and what she did, exactly what her history had been, and then the jig was up. Either they lost their nerve. Or, what was worse, much harder to endure, they turned into acolytes. Psychic groupies, forever harping at her for instant visions like so much Reddi-whip, till she couldn’t stand it, she had to blow them off.