by Nik Cohn
Paradise came in thirteen sections, two each for elbows, shoulders, hips, flanks, breasts and throat and one last for the topknot, but throwing knives below the waist had been illegal in Kate’s day, so the costume had no legs, only flesh-tan tights so riddled with ladders and bagged at the knees that she couldn’t use them, she had to leave her legs nude.
One glance in the mirror, and she saw that wouldn’t do. Her real flesh was too white and pink, much too torn to pass muster in any light. So she set to work with paint and brushes, powder and lotion, until she was sunset orange from ankle to crotch. Then she took a pair of eyebrow tweezers and plucked those long red hairs like weeds that were forever sprouting on the scar above her ankle. Though she knew it was a vanity. A little pathetic, really. Still, a girl had to be well-groomed.
Perhaps that would stop the itching, though nothing would stop the heat. Of all the broiling days in this killing field of a summer, today seemed the most brutal. The last day in creation that you’d choose to put on plumage. But then choice had nothing to do with this. It was an affair of honour.
Twenty pounds if not a ton the feathers seemed to weigh when she started to pin them in place. First an undercoat of dyed chicken and turkey, then blue jay and thrush at the hips, seagull in the flanks, and rising slowly, cardinal over the breasts, canary and greenfinch draped across the shoulders, peacock eyes of course for the headdress. And as the design took shape, the weight ceased to bother her. She no longer noticed the heat or the sweat rolling thick like sludge on her belly, down her spine. All that she felt was herself transformed. Age and hurt and damage wiped clean, and this high-flying bird in their place.
Orange-winged amazon at the elbows, white-eyed conure at the collarbones, and a spray of pied-pearl cockatiel, God forgive her, at the throat. Then she was completed, and she fluffed herself full, she flapped her wings, she took one look in the mirror.
She saw Mother Goose.
A stout party of undetermined sex, disguised as a woman with pantomime hips and a false bosom, disguised as an item of poultry.
Half an hour to get dressed, five seconds to strip. Birds flew helter-skelter through the bedroom, dashed themselves against the windows, such a fluttering and thrashing that the other birds downstairs in the Zoo took fright and started racketing again. The record player in Ferdousine’s room was playing Tea for Two, and the figure inside the mirror now was a plucked chicken, a Perdue oven-stuffer with a few stray feathers still clinging to its pelt, a bit of fluff wafting from one ear.
God grant her strength.
Or failing God, brandy. She helped herself to a tot of Ferdousine’s Courvoisier that she kept in an old bottle of Magie Noir for extremities. The burn of expensive alcohol didn’t feel much better to her than cheap, but it settled the stomach, it was dynamite for gas. Fred Root had told her that, so it must be true. Medicinal purposes, she thought in his rusty voice, and she saw her horse Baloney Breath munching oats in his stall. His coat looked thick and glossy, his eyes were sharp. For an old hobbled nag, he looked in fine shape, she wouldn’t have minded a ride.
Nothing too violent, no showing-off. Just an easy lope through woods or beside a stream perhaps, that would have set her up a treat. But this was not the right moment, of course. She didn’t have any clothes on.
To work effectively with knives, she ought to be dressed, she needed to look like business. She brought out the green tweed skirt, the sensible shoes and starched blouse that she’d worn to poor Godwin’s funeral, they made her look like a schoolmistress, a woman who didn’t jangle. She popped a few Tums for safety. Left off her girdle. And crossed herself. When she went downstairs to the Zoo, transformed, none of the animals knew her. Or if they did, they gave no sign.
The boy Wilfred came dressed like a flamenco dancer in black matador pants with a silk sash, a frilly white shirt and black satin vest. “You’re late,” said Kate, though he wasn’t, and led him through the velvet curtain into the barbershop. “Let me see your hands,” she said.
As he held them straight out in front of him, palms down like a schoolboy being checked for dirty nails, Kate caught a whiff of Christian Brothers. Or Holy Martyrs, that was right. One of the sisters had big red hands, fit for a lumberjack. Which was more than you could say for these dainty items, hardly fit for a poodle-clipper. Slender girlish fingers, freshly manicured, and a pampered child’s span. Skeeter Vaughn he wasn’t. Not even Charley Root. “Are these the best you’ve got?” she asked, but he only goggled at her, he seemed to be struck dumb.
Now that she took him in whole, she saw a village idiot. The flash of his costume had fooled her at first, also the fading light in the Zoo. But here, by the spinning light of the barber’s pole, he looked a mess. The arrowhead on the bridge of his nose glowed livid; a nerve kept jumping at his temple. Bad posture and bloodshot eyes, dragging feet—he looked like a man on his way to get fried.
Best to take no notice, Kate thought. Just carry on with his lesson, as if nothing at all was amiss. She straightened his slumped shoulders, slapped at the bow of his spine. Then she pushed back the cowlick that drooped soft and glossy as a raven’s wing above his smeary eyes. “That hair’ll have to go,” she said.
Her fingers rubbed harshly at Wilfred’s scalp, roughing him up, while he suffered her. She’d never learned to cut hair properly, it was one of those courses she kept meaning to take but couldn’t ever be bothered quite. In any case, improper cutting was more fulfilling. It left her free to let the scissors snip and hack as they liked, and not be distracted from the skull beneath.
Wilfred’s was undersized but well-formed, deficient in Veneration, Sublimity, Mirthfulness and Conjugality, prodigal in Self-Esteem and Adhesiveness. No surprises there, but her true target like any phrenologist’s lay lower, more protected, in the shallows behind his ears.
The moment that she touched it, she saw him stretched on a brass bed surrounded by duck hunters, his skin blue and green like a fish seen underwater.
Odd way to carry on; a little disturbing somehow. But she had no time to ponder. That itchy spot on her ankle was giving her gyp again. Without a thought for modesty, she raised her leg and gave such a scratch that she almost drew blood. As she did so, she felt the boy shudder, and an odour like burnt Melba toast, or maybe it was scones, came to her.
Mysteries, she hated them, they stole your soul. In her perplexity she had no taste to test him further. His Alimentiveness and Continuity could remain between him and his manufacturer, she’d seen enough.
Admitted, the boy’s haircut was not her best work. One side had been cropped convict-short, while the other remained in tufts, carved seemingly at random. Better not to show him a mirror right off the bat, Kate judged, and laying down her scissors, she reached for the knives.
The shooting-gallery shape of the barbershop was ideal for the purpose. She had nailed the target to the far wall, with her spare mattress as a backdrop. In a perfected world, of course, the target would be custom-made by Crouch, something on the lines of Larry Cisewski’s Devil’s Doorway. But Crouch, as usual, was off gallivanting, so she’d had to make do with a toilet seat.
Consider it a horseshoe.
At least it was soft wood, absorbent. A worse problem was the spinning light, which created a whirlpool effect, a shifting pool of shadows. Still, this was only Lesson One. Subtleties of texture and lighting would keep. Right now, all that mattered was making a start.
Fifteen feet from the target, Kate placed the boy in throwing stance, the Address Position, with his left foot forward and his right drawn back, sunk into a half-crouch. Her hands moved briskly on his shoulders and spine, his butt, trying to set him correctly. But his body refused to be moulded. The harder she tugged and twisted him, the more he resisted her. Even gentleness failed to control him.
As a last resort, she gave her Introduction to Impalement speech. Back in Florida, when she used to give seminars, it had been considered a model of its kind. “Any determined sportsman who truly wants to becom
e proficient in the ancient art of impalement needs only to commence with the ability to throw a baseball, cast a fishing rod, crack a whip, or toss a playful dart,” she began. A few casual words that never failed to put novices at their ease. Only this time they failed utterly. The boy hardly even seemed to hear them. Just hung where she had placed him, tensed and rigid. Wound so tight that he couldn’t have thrown his own shadow, never mind a Harvey McBurnette.
Impatience flailed at her; whirled her into dizziness. To think that she’d passed this whole day and the endless night before in delirium, climbing walls and spitting nails. Been bombarded by pomegranate trees and peacocks, weeping yellow buttocks, women in chains, Rastamen with dreadlocks like flying kingsnakes. Debased and flogged herself, let herself be turned into Mother Goose. And all for what? This shivering, snivelling turd on toast.
This apology for a blade.
Still, she would not admit defeat, surrender wasn’t her style. “The science of knife-throwing is constructed and predicated on one elementary physical act,” she continued, and when this too failed to get a response, she grabbed the boy by his shoulder. “One elementary act,” she said, and gave him a shake. “To wit?”
“Don’t know.”
“Letting go,” said Kate.
In the morning Willie D had woken a healed man. As if he’d been sick with a fever and now the disease had left him. When the train pulled into his room at first light, it hadn’t rolled and tumbled him, or crushed him under its wheels like it had in his affliction, but raised him up refreshed. He’d only slept a few hours, but he felt made new.
Not only did he feel primed to take on Kate Root, he was ready to conquer worlds. Swallow a pound of pig iron and spit it out as razor blades. Deacon Landry said that.
The same as any other sickness, now that he was freed of it, it seemed mostly fuss about nothing. He had been temporarily indisposed, that was all. Put it down to the heat.
That’s not to say he wasn’t nervous. Of course he was. Like any other performer before a major premiere, his stomach disputed him, and his mouth was sandpaper dry, there was a burning behind his eyes. Moving at random through Ivana’s room, his balance felt wrong, and he had to watch himself every step, in case he veered off course, stumbled over a stray duck hunter.
But edginess was no bad thing; not as much. He had seen boxers in their dressing rooms before the Golden Gloves, and they were like men with St. Vitus’s dance. Twitching and jiggling, running to the bathroom, punching the walls. Anyone who didn’t know better would have said they were terror-blind. So many pigs to slaughter. And anyone would have been dead wrong. Ready to rumble, that’s all those fighters were. Hot to trot.
Likewise with Willie. The way he felt, everything that he had suffered in the past month had been down to training. Roadwork, sparring, getting whipped into shape. What was that dumb Jane Fonda phrase? No pain, no gain. Well, just maybe it wasn’t so dumb after all. He had been subjected to hell on earth. Stripped naked, half-broken on the wheel. But he had come through. He was on the other side now, and if you wanted his humble opinion, not a thing alive could touch him.
What gave him such certainty? It was obvious. Everything that went down in the Zoo last night had been a dead giveaway. The style that snake had stared at him, challenging. And the way he had responded. Not cowed, in no way abashed, but rising up redoubled. Raw to conquer worlds. Take on any species of red hair that dared come at him, and bring it to order, to heel. And Kate Root, of course, she’d felt that. Sensed the change. The moment she came down the stairs and inside the room, brandishing that gun, she’d known him for another man. No pushover, no more. No shape or size of weak stuff, but a contender. A horse.
She hadn’t even tried to face him down. What would have been the point, when they both knew the truth? The way her hand flew to her throat, clutching at her nightdress. Her face and throat all flushed, and the gun spinning from her fingers, you couldn’t fake stuff like that. Nor the look she gave him when she ducked behind the counter, and handed him the knives. Not looking through him, no. Not as if she saw nothing, and there was nothing to see. But as if they were joined somehow. Allies, or partners in crime. “Seven o’clock,” she’d said. Or whispered, to be exact. And Willie was set free.
Looking back now, all the way from the morning after, it seemed almost humorous to think. To picture that a few hours ago he had lived and died over three red hairs, used, shopworn, not even clean. It just went to show.
Part of him was tempted to walk away. Leave the old trout flat, wham bam thank you ma’am. That would have been the percentage move, no question; not a man at Chez Stadium would have blamed him. Still, he didn’t like to be discourteous. The true Man of Power did not run. Didn’t even jog.
Besides, the story was unfinished. Not to be vindictive, but he had a score to settle. The image of Kate Root in pink tights and a whalebone corset, pinned helplessly against a wall while he buzzed knives like hornets round her ears, teased him still. It was the least he deserved.
Of course, he’d need new shoes.
Picture a black boot.
A black boot, calf-length, in Verona leather. A black Verona boot, matte finish, with stacked heel and a tapered toe of timeless elegance terminating in a blocked wedge and decorated with a strong yet tasteful motif. A classical black boot embossed with a silver blade.
Of course, it would take finance. This time around, he would need to earn his feets the old-fashioned way; anything less would be bad karma. So he sprinkled his toes with sandalwood talc. To lend him intestinal fortitude while he suffered Mrs. Muhle.
This day she prepared a simple but nutritious lunch of Sauteed Chicken Livers with Blueberry Vinegar, the tart fruity sauce a perfect complement to the richness of the livers. “One pound livers halved, trimmed and patted dry, four tablespoons sweet butter, four scallions including green tops chopped, vinegar, crème fraîche, and a generous pinch each of ground ginger, allspice, mace, nutmeg and cloves,” said Mrs. Muhle.
Her plateful cost her $300.
And afterwards, when Willie walked into A Shoe Like It, Mariella neither smiled nor flinched, merely bowed her head. Allowed the long black veil of her hair to shelter her. “What do you have in the way of half boots?” he asked.
“Would that be cash or theft?”
The exact design he had visioned was not in stock; no silver blades came to hand. Instead, he was forced to settle for a retro Beatle. The toes were too pointed, the heels too Cuban, and the leather was mere Padua, but at least they were not disfigured by buckles. Leaning forward to try them on, he smelled the bottled horses running wild in Mariella’s hair, and he felt himself rise and swell, stiffen.
That was when he knew he was truly saved. But he did not take advantage. For this moment it was enough to feel Mariella’s hands on him, her touch like answered prayers, and to breathe in that smell of virgin shoe leather which was the sweetest aroma in creation.
According to Deacon Landry, the dancer Bojangles had had his coffin lined with stage shoes that he didn’t get around to wearing in life. They were his conception of eternity’s scent; of paradise.
A thought like that, it brought you up short, forced you to take stock of deeper things. “Do you want to wear those right now?” Mariella asked.
“Ask rather,” said Willie D, “ ‘Do they want to wear me?’ ”
The manner the girl looked at him then, you would have thought he had proposed a suicide pact. Position one, mouth open wide; position two, mouth open wider. Obviously, the spiritual plane was beyond her compass, she couldn’t begin to follow him there.
“It’s a concept,” he explained, off-hand. “I get them all the time.”
Which was the truth. When he was firing on all cylinders, his brain was an 007, licensed to kill. Sister Teresa with the moustache had told him once, if he didn’t slow his smartness down he would do someone an injury. Maybe even himself. “If you be sick, your own thoughts make you sick,” she’d said. But that was just her
ignorance. Being smart had a trick to it, same as anything else.
Keep It Simple, was all.
There was an old movie, he couldn’t remember the title, but some of the lines had always stuck in his mind, they went right to the heart of everything. “Just don’t get too complicated,” this character said. “When a man gets complicated, he gets unhappy. And when he gets unhappy, he runs out of luck.”
Someone should carve those words in marble someplace.
But enough philosophy. What signified here was practice; strictly business. His new boots in street action proved tough and rigorous, yet bracing; in a nutshell, hard but fair. There was a jut to their strut worlds away from the armadillo’s languorous glide. It made him feel like a conquistador. A warrior born, and he carried the knives to prove it.
$73.26, after tax, still nestled in his hip pocket, but Willie didn’t take a taxi uptown, he walked. To let the Beatles get used to him, and he to them. To work up a full partnership, with no dirty secrets, and nothing held back.
All the way up Broadway he felt rabid, scraped raw, but exulting; a thoroughbred on the muscle. Every bitch he passed, it seemed, had legs up to her armpits. Long, lissome and luciferous—what man had said that? With their hard butts and tip-tilted tits, creamed butter. And the pussies, oh those pussies; those sleek sugar slits. Jailbait jamming on the crosswalks, the green light meant Go.
At the corner of 42nd, a girl in cut-offs saw his boots, and she flashed him her scars. Razor slashes, they looked like, and maybe a cigarette burn or two.
If there was one thing that lit Willie’s candle, always had done, it was a quality deformity, and these looked aces high. Still he kept on keeping on. Kept his mind on the blowfish, and nobody else. Because she was his. Yes, she was. Because.
Only when he came in sight of the Chemical Bank clock, and Sweeney’s, and Blanco y Negro, did his guts start to lurch again. And what man would dare to downrate him for that? This was no easy riding, after all; it was his life’s destination. Kill or be killed, as the saying said. Confidence was one thing, arrogance another. Like at the Golden Gloves. Any fighter who stepped in the ring, let himself go naked under those lights, and he wasn’t aware that he might be carried out in a bodybag—that wasn’t bravery; that was just bone ignorance.
