Need

by Nik Cohn

  Dread had fixed his plumbing at least, he could move freely now, could work his path through the blackness as single-mindedly as any other animal. Circling still, he came upon other lights. A kerosene lamp inside an alcove showed him a man sleeping and a woman reading a magazine. This woman watched him pass by without interest, sucking at a chocolate bar, and John Joe was sore tempted to stop with her. But that would not be right. White light was in here somewhere, it was his job to track it down. He pushed on through another circuit, past a man with two candles, and a family eating under a bicycle lamp, and some youths standing over a fire, passing a strange class of pipe around, jiggling and laughing they were, their shadows thrown huge against the tunnel walls, as if this was any other night and black the natural colour of light. Soon after he reached a dead end.

  Beside the tracks was an alcove where he rested. When his breathing quieted, and he could hear beyond himself, he tried again to locate the noises of battle, some trace of Randall Gurdler’s men, but there was nothing, just water dripping, and the scurrying of the rats, and a faint quavering far above that might have been music, or more likely wind.

  Anna Crow came to him then, moving through her dressing room, her breasts and scrawny boy’s bum, the dimples on the backs of her thighs like vaccination scars, and her tongue inside his mouth, a sleeping slug. “Exfoliate,” he said, and wept a space. Then he started retracing his steps.

  Hand across hand, he moved himself back along the tunnel wall, only somehow it did not lead him to the same place. The black must have thrown his sense of direction out, or perhaps it was just exhaustion. In this deep place he could not tell, but instead of the youths and their fire the next light he reached was a medical flare, three men in rubber suits ran at him and grappled him close, rushing him upwards, level after level, out onto the street.

  The brightness up here dazzled him, though the people round him were blind. The sky was glowing, there were flickers and flashes of light up the block, a giant searchlight on a rooftop, and fires everywhere you looked. Hellfire could be no hotter.

  To escape that heat he wandered away, trailing through side streets, turning and turning to his left till his feet would carry him no further. He felt himself begin to stagger and weave, and finding a fire to shelter him, he fell down.

  How long he lay like a child in the street, he couldn’t tell. All he knew was that the fire was warm, the fire was good. A hand gave him something to drink, and that was a good fire also. Then some foot kicked him. Whacked him in the ribs, but it hardly hurt. The foot wore a loafer with the tassels cut off, a shoe without heft. After it had kicked him, it drew back, seemed to be considering, then it moved away. A woman’s face took its place. That face was streaked with soot and grime, displeasing to John Joe’s eye. He thought he had better move somewhere elsewhere. Then he was asleep.

  At the instant he woke, he glimpsed Anna Crow standing swaybacked in his bedroom doorway with her face invisible but the wild tangle of her red hair backlit from the landing beyond and her right foot turned out, its long shape wriggling and twitching like a stoat’s snout. “I might be wrong, I often am,” Anna said. “But I think the roof’s on fire.” Then John Joe was walking again, pushing back through the crowds, against the tide, working with his elbows and knees and even his fists where required, until he ran into a police cordon and a man with a gun made him stop.

  The cross-street ahead was deserted but vivid with light, any number of torches and flares, a TV crew with kliegs, so that its emptiness seemed ceremonial, a sort of red carpet. All that was missing was the star of the show, and that star shortly appeared. Led down the aisle by a phalanx of motorbikes, a black limousine came into view, cruising slow and stately as an ocean liner. Its back window was rolled down, you could see a beefy red face inside. There was time to catch a glimpse just, and then the limo had moved on. But that one glimpse was enough. Juice Shovlin was in there.

  In all this fuss and upset, John Joe had clean forgotten the man. The Shovlin Group, and the warehouse that needed a night manager, the whole shooting match had gone from his mind. But here was his chance to set matters straight. Calling out and gesturing, he struggled to reach the limousine, but the man with the gun mistook his intent, unkindly repelled him.

  A few more yards, and the limo stopped anyway. The back door was opened wide, then the passenger stepped out into a mob of microphones and flashbulbs. A goodly figure of a man, he was, Juice Shovlin’s height and size right enough. Only when he turned, John Joe saw he’d been misled. The high colour, the swagger, the cigar like a small torpedo, all the props were alike. But this person had another face. He’d had his teeth fixed, for a start, and his hair looked dyed. When you looked him over at leisure, you could see he was a slicker piece of goods altogether. A used-car salesman. And John Joe didn’t have to see his doorstep smile, nor listen to his speech, to know him by his right name.

  “There is no need to panic,” Randall Gurdler began. “There is no need at all.”

  She saw nothing. There was nothing to see. Looking down the length of the barbershop, she couldn’t see zip, only space, and that red mark on the boy’s nose.

  Funny thing, she’d never studied it before. Then again, why would she? It wasn’t much of a thing, hardly bigger than a zit. But curious in shape, it made her think of a coolie’s hat or the punctuation mark above a French ô. How had he come by such a design? Concentrate, and she should be able to see. No use. She could see nothing.

  She must be too tense, she had a lot on her mind. Well, she would have. Standing posed against this mattress like a coconut in a shy, about to be impaled by a total stranger. A lot on her mind? She must be out of it.

  What the fuck, it made a change. As good as a rest, Fred Root would say. It livelied up the blood, rejuvenated the tripes. Action, that was always the loveliest word. Try to show her one finer, you never could. And what was a Harvey McBurnette in the small intestines, more or less? When every swirl of the barber’s pole made those same intestines churn like riding a tilt-o-whirl when you plunge; when every part of her was melting. Feeling the rough ticking of the mattress fret and prickle her spine, and all the while trying not to breathe, seeing only that red mark, waiting on the knife.

  And waiting. Dear God, would he never deliver? Babies came quicker than this. Maybe he was teasing her, maybe he thought, if he kept her dangling long enough, she would flinch. Fat chance, she would see him dead first. Though she’d be the one that was dead, of course; be careful what you wish for. But throw the damn thing, anyway. Roll me over in the clover. Oh, Fred. Oh, Mary. Just throw.

  If the red mark didn’t fetch him, maybe the knife itself would. Shifting her sights a few inches, she drew a bead on the blade’s tip, and willed it to fly. Of its own accord, if necessary. Make it jump out of the bastard’s hand and wing its true way. To where? A hand would be nice. Split the uprights between a thumb and forefinger, so she could grasp the hilt without even moving. Just roll her fist over and pluck it out. Her very own blade. To have and to hold. Or throw back, if not satisfied.

  She tried to stare the blade down. Narrowed her focus till there was no existence outside the knife’s edge, the single bead of oil that had collected at its tip and now began to swell. Gathering to a greatness. Growing fatter and fuller until surely it must burst, it couldn’t hold together a moment more, must shatter into atoms. So it did. It went splat like a cartoon bubble, and what was in it?

  Not nothing, no, but nothingness.

  Such a jolt. With no warning, not a clue. Her first impulse, typical, was simply to cover up. Bury dread in bluster, and blame it on the boy. Kick the shit out of him and into the street, then get herself to safekeeping, tucked in her bed. Try to ignore the feathers on the bedroom floor, this was no time for paradise or any other bird. Just shut the door, shut out the light, and pray. Except that no prayers came cleanly to her mind. Agnus Dei, Agnus Dei. Her mother in the back room dying, that sweetsick medicine smell of burning flowers. Peccata mundi. Qui t
ollis peccata. No use. Miserere nobis. Dona nobis pacem. A form of words, and what words could paper the void? Yearning makes the heart deep, but that was for love of God, not this gross hunger, for what? Not a thing. Not one damned thing that had a name.

  Oh, but it was a desolation, an ache with no source and no end, she couldn’t be doing with this. God-buggering, Fred Root had used to call it, he said it wasn’t cricket. Not even rounders, he’d say, when he had sunk a few beers, and he held up his right hand to the light. Sausage fingers, scaly smooth, and his Charlie Chaplin feet. Plates of meat. When he showed her the grip for the googly, and she sucked on a Space Blaster. Or when he bowled tennis balls to her in the back garden, shambling in from the lobelia beds in his carpet slippers, that was peace, she could sleep then. But not tonight. Too many feathers, she couldn’t focus; even the tennis balls had blades. Billie and Bo were getting married, the wedding was any day now, but she would not be attending. No rest for the wicked, Fred Root said. None, nought. Nothingness.

  She lay undead in this place for hours or days. Then the earthquake came and rescued her. Or if not an earthquake, another convulsion that buckled the world. Its fathoms-deep shudder made the windows shake and the feathers swirl, the back copies of Soap Digest tumble off her bedside table. “Shuffering shuccotash!” Kate said, grabbing at the bedclothes, and she was in another place, some other time.

  Where would that be? Dade City, Highway 301. In a hot-sheet motel with Eddie the Blade, watching Tweety Pie and Sylvester on afternoon TV.

  The Motel Malarkey, they’d called it, and were proud to sign themselves Smith. Drinking Coke and snacking on junkfood and fucking themselves bow-legged like regular persons, with a whole afternoon for their honeymoon before they had to get back on the road, make their evening show in Zephyrhills.

  At this exact moment, they were between bouts; Kate was lying on her stomach, hanging off the end of the mattress with her head hung low; and Tweety Pie had just sent Sylvester crashing smack into a brick wall.

  Picture it: the cat-shaped hole in the bricks, and the way his whiskers were bent at right angles like wires when he came crawling back into view, his eyes revolving in opposite directions. Spilled popcorn on the sheets, melted butterscotch sticking to her belly, and Eddie’s good hands, a born blade’s hands, cupping her. “Sheesh!” Sylvester said, and when Kate looked down at the carpet below, a cockroach was watching her.

  Waiting on its tea, she supposed; and meantime licking its chops. Quivering the long black tentacles that looped back in a horseshoe from its snout, she didn’t know their names. Fact of the matter, she’d never really noticed how a roach was made before. Too squeamish, or she’d simply been in too much of a hurry. But there was no rush in Room 43, she had all day. Not a thing in the world to disrupt her studies when she wriggled down off the bed, propped her elbows on the floor for balance.

  The roach was only inches away, and wondrous to see. The blunt triangle of its head like a Stone Age arrowhead; its antenna cocked like Pompey’s trick ear, with that same sense of tireless vigilance; and the feathered hairs on its front legs, the faint flickering of its wings. “Sweet Jesus, look at this,” she’d said, but Eddie wouldn’t, he was not that kind. Loveliness escaped him, and he came tumbling down on top of her, rolled her on her back.

  So then the cockroach was lost to sight, and by the time she was free to concentrate again, all there was to look at was Sylvester again, this time being shot into space from a homemade catapult. “Shuffering shuccotash!” he’d said, then Kate was back again in her own bed, the room still dancing about her, and the earthquake’s last aftershocks slowly dying.

  The street lights had gone out, it seemed. Or maybe the fires were burning stronger. Either way, the birds downstairs in the Zoo weren’t happy. Much yammering and squawking, no end of rattling cages.

  Which reminded her, she must remember to talk to Maguire. Get him to fix Pearl’s swing, it was hanging by a thread. Though, for all the good Maguire was likely to do, she might as well save her breath.

  Search her why she suffered him. Soft-headedness, most likely. Plus that odd sense of knowing him from someplace. Not in another incarnation, nothing feeble-minded, but somewhere quite specific, she was sure she’d known him well. Either him, or his born double. Only she could never pin him down. Like smoke he bothered her eyes, she could never see him straight.

  But why would she want to, anyhow? Why on earth was she fussing herself with Maguire? In the middle of an earthquake, too, with all those sireens downtown? She ought to get up, she ought to go see. But she was not in a seeing mood. Earthquakes, cyclones, cataclysms out the kazoo, they could take a running jump. Claim her if they wanted her, just don’t leave a mess.

  Let her be. Free to get back to Dade City and the Motel Malarkey, Room 43, and the cockroach.

  When the cartoons were over, she had drifted into sleep, and afterwards they had packed, gone out to the car. Eddie liked to drive, and she let him. Squeezed in beside him, kissed his ear for luck, then suddenly she’d had a thought. Run back inside the motel room, the bag of buttered popcorn in her hand. And she scattered it on the shag carpet. Left the roach a tip.

  The stuff the computer cast up! Twenty-eight years, that must be, why ever would it kick back tonight? Never mind, she’d take it anyhow. It was not nothing, not nothingness either; she’d take it and no questions asked.

  Keep her sights on that watching head with the blob eyes like a man from Mars, those praying-mantis legs, and maybe she’d be granted repose. An hour’s respite, maybe two, staring black on white when first light broke. But the sound of the sirens crept closer. Noise shaped itself into a wave, gathering and rising. Not rolling in a straight line, but zigzag, a serpentine undulation, shimmying up Broadway, banging cans, breaking glass. She heard a gunshot, it seemed quite close, the birds were outraged, and she almost sat up. Then another shot, but this one muffled, somewhere underground she thought, and she subsided again.

  Light was crawling on her feet, she felt peckish. Tell the truth, she could have done with some popcorn. Forget it; better that the cockroach had it. One good deed in a lifetime, it wouldn’t look good to take it back. Not now, when fire alarms had started clanging up and down the block. Not right this moment, when she turned her head and that boy was back, Wilfredo, he was standing over her, and he wasn’t wearing a stitch.

  Should of, would of, could of. Maybe he should have offed the dummy where he lay, he would have been fully justified. Then he could have got some peace round here. But he didn’t shoot fish in a barrel, that was not his concept of sport. And anyhow, his wants had evolved.

  He had progressed to a higher plane, you might say. Even in the span of these few hours since the blades in the barbershop, he’d come to see things in their true perspective. Kate Root was his only target now; the one score that he must settle. What use was there in another dead mick, more or less? That man had only been a hired assassin, not the mastermind. Correction was all he required; a boot in the ribs to teach him respect. Only Littles Fernando’s shoe had proved a weak sister. Too fat and too slow, no rhythm, no sense of balance. Like working with a limp dick, the only one you hurt was yourself.

  At every minute more lights cut the darkness. Stare into the night, and it looked like a nigger with plague, a blue-black skin violated by numberless sores and blotches. Everywhere that Willie moved, people were talking about Farrakhan getting shot. They sounded mad, they were getting evil. Then the news spread that it wasn’t Farrakhan after all, it was some other name that sounded the same, not Farrah Fawcett, but close, and then another name, not close at all. “My baby. They killed my baby,” a woman started to screaming, you could hear her blocks away, and soon after that the stoning began.

  Willie found himself caught up in a wolfpack then. Not by his conscious choosing, but he was standing on a corner when hooded marauders passed by, and their slipstream sucked him in, he was swept along. Not running flat out, only trotting for now, moving back and forth acros
s the avenue in zigzags whenever cops loomed.

  So the laws were powerless; all their weapons and riot shields meant zip. They could hardly shoot down the entire pack, it would have been bad for their image. Besides, the shifting darkness kept shuffling their targets. Truthfully, they couldn’t do a thing but posture. Advance and retreat in a phalanx, point their guns in a meaningful manner, chew gum. While the pack rolled on unchecked, smashing every window it passed.

  There was no fear, Willie didn’t have the time. All his concentration was taken up with business. Keeping in step with the headless runners up front, a jump ahead of those behind him, not slipping down, not getting himself stampeded. Adrenalin surged through him, he felt the power. If the right brick had come his way, he would have grabbed it, and welcome.

  Everywhere he moved, shop windows gaped open, full of stuff he could use. Free, that word was an uncut drug. The jagged edges of glass, caught by flashlights, looked as though they were winking. Luring him to cross the line. One step. There was a satin Yankees warm-up jacket in there. Just take that step. 7, that had been Mickey Mantle’s number. For free.

  But he did not cross, after all. He was just about to, his foot was on the threshold, his hand already reaching out. “Step right up. Help yourself,” some voice said. Then he caught a flash of Kate Root; her eyes at the end of his knife. It hit him a clean shot, drove him backwards in the street. Almost floored him, so that he had to grab hold of a fire hydrant, steady himself against the crush. A moment later, the wolf pack had borne him on, he was back on track.

  That was the moment of truth, right there. He had hung one step from falling by the wayside, losing sight of his true aim. His destination; his end. He wouldn’t get waylaid again.

  Sliding back in place, he let the waves carry him uptown. The darkness was less dense above the buildings now, it would soon be dawn. Already he could sense that there was no sky above him, only smoke. And smoke below him, too. Everywhere that light showed, he saw tendrils curling up through manholes and vents, snaking from cracks in the sidewalk. Hooded men with flame-throwers were setting fires, torching parked cars and abandoned stores, running, whooping, between the massed fire engines that couldn’t stop them, only douse what they left behind.