Barking Man

by Madison Smartt Bell

  After his second smoke was finished he got up and went back down the stairs and out to the promenade. It was still very hot but there was a breeze bringing a cool air current in off the water. He rearranged his display across the front of the dashiki and began to walk at a steady pace toward the cafés that were scattered across the promenade all the way back to Menton. Above the town, the mountains could now be most plainly seen, the bald rocks thrusting out through gaps in the skein of trees.

  Sometime a little after noon, Clay got just too played out to keep moving anymore. Already he could feel big liquid blisters rising on the balls of his feet just back of his big toes. Slick patent leather wasn’t good for this much rough walking up and down. He went among the cafés on the promenade, looking for a likely one. The place with the cushioned swings facing the water was irresistible, even though he supposed it might be more expensive than the others. When he sat down a girl with birdlike eyes shining from a mass of curly hair appeared, holding one of the round high-walled trays.

  “Uh bee-are,” Clay said.

  The girl receded. Christ, he hoped he wouldn’t end up with a lemonade or something. Already it had been a bad day, and he had not yet eaten. Everybody around here seemed to be white, though that wouldn’t have bothered him if he just could have talked. The girl came back with a stemmed glass of lager. Clay handed her a fifty-franc note and she gave him back four of the fat brown ten-franc coins along with a little silver. Oh God, now he was down to nothing but change.

  He sank back into the creaking swing and tried to smooth his mind completely blank. Under the sunshade he quickly grew cool, but his stomach would not come unknotted and he couldn’t keep his eyes shut tight. When they came open he saw one of the guys in the muumuus starting to work the tables in his direction, a tall lean dude with a scruffy white beard that scrambled over the jet-black ridges of his face. Clay’s eyes fastened on the cigarette clamped in the corner of his mouth; he hadn’t had a smoke all day either. Nobody spoke English but waiters and barmen, and with them nothing would ever be free. As the old man came closer he began to compose a sentence in his mind.

  “Voo—Voozahhh—” He gave up. “Cigarette,” he said hopelessly. “Cigarette, see voo play.”

  “Say you want a cigarette?” Ton-Ton Detroit said. “First one’s free.”

  Clay’s tortured mouth muscles went marvelously slack.

  “Hey, you talk English,” he said. “Come on and sit down a minute, tell me your name.”

  “Ton-Ton Detroit, you know, man, like Uncle Detroit.” The peddler dropped into the swing beside him. He smelled a little high up close but Clay was in no mood to mind it.

  “Clay, uncle,” he said, reaching for the cigarette. “You sound like an American. Where you from?”

  “Cleveland,” Ton-Ton Detroit said. “You?”

  “New York.” Clay lit his cigarette off Ton-Ton Detroit’s and held the first drag deep. “Man, that goes down good right now,” he said. “Hey, lemme ask you something, how come they call you Ton-Ton Detroit if you from Cleveland?”

  Ton-Ton Detroit smiled with long brown teeth. “People round here can’t wrap their lips around Cleveland too good,” he said. “It just makes things more easier. Where’d you blow in from yourself?”

  “Monte Carlo was the latest.”

  “Been losing?”

  Clay followed the old man’s eyes down to the elbows of his jacket and saw they were all scuffed up from when he’d gone skidding down the sidewalk trying to protect his face. Hadn’t even noticed that before. To take his mind off it he drew the three bent playing cards from his breast pocket and began to rearrange them swiftly across the tabletop, touching them just lightly by the edges with his long slim fingers.

  “I had a blackjack system,” he said.

  The old man’s eyes darted as he tracked the cards. “Don’t tell me it was one like I see,” he said.

  “Uh-uh,” Clay said. “I’m just a counter.”

  “I thought counters were supposed to make out.”

  “Musta lost count,” Clay said. “I can run monte too, though. I’m what they call multitalented. You know where they’d be a good pitch around here?”

  “Nowhere,” Ton-Ton Detroit said. “I wouldn’t even think about it, son, the flics around here can hear you think.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “I wonder did you ever see a matraque?”

  Clay looked up.

  “It’s like a rubber billy stick with weight loaded in the hitting end. Got nearly a foot of flex to it when it goes wong wong upside your head and knock all them bad thoughts clear out.”

  “I get it. “Clay slid the three cards together and held them covered under his hand. “Don’t suppose you could use any help with your thing, could you?”

  “Not unless you want to buy something,” Ton-Ton Detroit said. “I’m barely making it one day to the next right now.”

  “What about all them other cats I see, they all from Cleveland too?”

  “Uh-uh. They North Africans mostly. Maybe one or two from Haiti.” Ton-Ton Detroit shook his head. “I’d leave ’em alone, they mostly crazy. Don’t bother with ’em too much myself.”

  Clay shoved the cards back into his pocket and stared off along the line of swings. People sitting at the other tables were starting to get served plates of food. A plump boy with olive skin was weaving among the tables, trailing behind a black toy poodle on a thin red leash. The kid was so out of it he let the dog drag him to bump into people without even noticing; all he did was hum to the dog in a kind of whiny singsong.

  “Man, I think I got my tail in a crack,” Clay said. “I thought they was gonna be tourists here talking English.”

  “You just a little bit early for that,” Ton-Ton Detroit said. “Right now it’s mostly just the French.”

  “You looking for it to pick up soon?”

  “Praying, is what.” Ton-Ton Detroit stood up. “But it’s apt to be tight another two, three weeks.”

  “You kidding me,” Clay said. “Man, I just got to find some kind of thing to get into.”

  “Luck to you,” Ton-Ton Detroit said, moving away.

  “Hey, thanks for the smoke,” Clay said. “Maybe I’ll see you.”

  “Look careful,” Ton-Ton Detroit said, and walked out of the area of the café.

  When she had finally dragged herself to the top, Mindy turned around to look back down the zigzag staircase that climbed to the small irregular square before l’Église Saint-Michel. The patterns the black and white pebbles made on the landings were kind of neat looking from up here, though it wasn’t really worth it when you considered she’d felt every one of them right through her shoes on the way up. One thing she was already sick to death of was climbing up and down all these steps; it seemed like everywhere was either straight up or straight down. There were a hundred and seventy-seven steps down to the beach from the dump they were staying at, which was going to really be a bitch, and it was a lot longer if you tried to go around by the road, so forget it. If she could talk Daddy into letting her rent one of the little mopeds all the French kids in town seemed to ride, life would start getting a little bit easier.

  “Mindy,” Nadine was calling, “come over here a minute and read me what it says on this sign.”

  Mindy turned her head partway around and then switched it back, remembering to pretend she hadn’t heard. Another thing she was already good and sick of was being everybody’s interpreter all the time. It was just a scam of Daddy’s anyway, to keep her tied to them every minute; she was pretty sure he could at least read French himself—anyway, he’d read through all that stuff the goddamn apartments sent him. She stared out past the highway below; the view of the beach from here was great. One thing the place had going for it was that the water looked fantastic. From up here its color was almost turquoise, and it was so clear that she could see all the way to the whitish bottom for quite a good way out. Just before the line of yellow buoys that marked off the swim
ming area, the water changed sharply on a clear line dividing the pale light-flooded water from the deeper opaque blue. Barely beyond that drop-off point floated the white square of a diving raft with five or six miniature figures splashing around it. She just hoped the water was as warm as it looked.

  “Oh, Mindy,” Martin was calling, “why don’t you just hotfoot it on over here right now and have me a look at this sign.”

  Mindy made her slow-motion turn and arched herself all the way back with her hands on the balustrade for support, so far back her hair hung straight down and she saw the sea where the sky should have been. All those people swimming upside down: it was a wonder they didn’t fall out. When she straightened up she peeped through her hair to see if she’d scared him, but he didn’t seem to be paying her any attention. She smoothed her hair back over her shoulders; it had got sticky in the heat. In a patch of shade by an angle of a building, some little brown-skinned kids were bouncing a dirty white ball up and down. A short way from them a bigger boy was letting a tiny black poodle lead him around at the end of a red leash. Otherwise there was no one around but her parents, standing in the doorway of the church. Mindy shrugged and went over to glance at the descriptive plaque.

  “It says it was built in sixteen-whatchamajiggy,” she said. “It says it’s very old and very boring. A bunch of Catholics used to come here and pray after they got through burning people at the stake.”

  “I would call that kind of a free translation,” Martin said, a slight edge to his tone. “Care to try to tighten it up a little? You know, like pretend it’s on an exam.”

  But Mindy turned away from the plaque and moved toward her mother, who was backing away to get a better angle on the rise of the church’s façade. When she had backed nearly to the head of the stairs she twirled herself around, arms spreading wide and her purse flying out to the end of its long strap, and then leaned forward, braced on the wall.

  “If that isn’t the most marvelous view,” she said. “Wonder if you ever see whales out there.”

  Between Mindy and Nadine, the boy was meandering in slow circles after his dog who seemed to be following some invisible but intricate trail around the patterned pebbles of the court. The boy looked to be about eleven or twelve and was rather fat, with plump rolls of flesh pushing into every fold of his clothing. He had a mop of dark curly hair and a face shaped a little like a sheep’s and his eyes were large and liquid brown. All his attention seemed to be buried in the dog, to whom he sang little rhyming endearments in a high sweet voice.

  “Viens ici, petit jou-jou … Vas-y, mon chou, petit cachou …”

  Mindy walked around him and came to the wall to check out the view again herself. She couldn’t see any sign of a whale but there was a nice-looking red speedboat ripping a high wake across the water. She wondered if people did much water-skiing around here. Daddy had peeled himself off of that sign finally and was headed their way, taking a detour to clear that kid with the dog, who seemed almost incredibly out of it, totally unaware that anything else was going on around him. Within the ring of smaller children, the ball kept thumping steadily; the whole group was starting to drift their way. Mindy propped her hip on the wall and adjusted herself with a hand on her mother’s shoulder.

  “Ouch! Careful,” Nadine said. “What have you had your hand on? It feels sort of hot.”

  “What?” Mindy said. When she took her hand away she could see pale finger lines against a faint rose flush just rising on her mother’s normally ice-white skin. “Oh, Mom, did you get burned again? You forgot the sunscreen, right?”

  “Oh no, I didn’t forget,” Nadine said. “I have it right here in my purse.”

  “Yeah, but did you, like, put any on your skin?” Mindy said. “I mean, it actually doesn’t work too well down there in the bottom of your bag. I can’t believe how you always do this.”

  “Well, I like to get a little sun,” Nadine said. She pressed her fingertips to her lower lip and lowered her eyes. “I think I put some on,” she said. “Didn’t I?”

  “Not a chance,” Martin said as he came up, “not unless you did it in secret some way or other.” He turned sideways, stumbling a little. “Hey, watch where you’re going there …”

  Nose tight to the pebbled pavement, the little poodle had snuffled its way into the space between the three of them, and the red leash was sawing against one of Martin’s legs. The boy jostled into him and came into the center of the group, looking up wide-eyed into all their faces as if he’d just that instant realized they were there. At the same moment Mindy saw his free hand dip into Nadine’s open purse and spirit away the long leather wallet that held her traveler’s checks. She had to play the whole scene back to make sure she really had it right: the kid looking up so sweetly at all of them while that pudgy hand flicked into the purse like it had a mind of its own. By the time she had started to try to think of the words for “stop” and “thief,” he had already started moving away. She made a dash after him, shoving Martin to one side, but the boy and dog had faded out through the knot of smaller children to slip into the mouth of a hidden alley, where, she could tell, they’d be long gone.

  In the early evening after he had eaten, Ton-Ton Detroit walked back out to the promenade and moved in the direction of the castle at the harbor’s edge, aiming for the bench below the wall, where he could see the Haitian was already sitting. The Haitian shifted a little to make room for him, exposing a thumbnail-sized packet of foil that had been hidden under his thigh. Ton-Ton Detroit vacuumed the shiny square speedily into his dashiki sleeve and reached across to shake hands with the Haitian, transferring a bill folded in accordion pleats into the center of his palm. The Haitian enunciated a rather long sentence in his impenetrable Creole.

  “Ouais,” Ton-Ton Detroit said, not having understood a word.

  He offered the Haitian a cigarette and sat beside him, smoking. Now and then the Haitian said something more and Ton-Ton Detroit said ouais again without knowing what he was agreeing to. When he was done with his cigarette he got up and went up the steps on the far side of the castle and through the doorway onto the outer sea wall.

  Out among the rocks of the breakwater were two flat-topped stone pillars of unknown function and Ton-Ton Detroit vaulted up onto the top of one of these. He changed from his dashiki into his jeans and packed all his other odds and ends away into his bag. The sea was a little rougher than it had been in the morning, slapping and tugging more hungrily at the rocks. He sat down cross-legged and carefully unwrapped the chip of hash, then doubled the foil and rolled it tight around a pencil and slipped the pencil out. Once he’d pinched a right angle in the short tube he’d made, it was good enough for a one-shot pipe. He snapped a kitchen match alight with his thumbnail and drew in a long sweet draft of smoke as deep as it wanted to go. The sea had turned a solid blue all the way up to the rocks it chopped at. Far, far out, a tiny triangle of a windboard bounced along in the rising swell, but otherwise the horizon was blank. Ton-Ton Detroit let the fire in the hash go out and reached into his bag with his other hand to find his fisherman’s sunglasses. Aided by the filtered lenses, his eyes cut into the water to find a school of silvery sardines hovering just a foot deep.

  Watching the fish, he struck a match to the pipe and drew on it. The foil heated up just enough to scorch his lips a little. He had just begun to think that he might save the other tokes for later and put his hand on his flute right now when he saw the New York kid with the straightened hair coming up the steps toward the doorway. Automatically his thumb flattened the pipe bowl and crushed the spark out of the hash. He had done that so many times before he had a callus there, so he felt no pain. The flics barely tolerated him and the other peddlers, and even the most minor kind of drug arrest could alter his life quite seriously for the worse. If he had not had his sunglasses on he would have tried to flatten the New York kid with a thought beam. Now and then it was nice to hear a voice from home, but Ton-Ton Detroit had one of his special feelings that this
boy would be more trouble than fun, and he had never liked New York people all that much in the first place. He rolled the foil to protect the hash and slid the little lump into his watch pocket.

  “Anything shaking, uncle?” Clay said as he came up. “This the spot you like to hang?”

  “Sometimes,” Ton-Ton Detroit said, looking out over the water.

  The windboard had disappeared somewhere, and a long white yacht had just rounded the point from the Italian side, pointed toward Monte Carlo. Down under the surface, the sardines scattered in a flickering star pattern as something long and indistinct approached them from below.

  “Cool place, real quiet,” Clay said, and wrinkled his nose. “Little bit rank, though, I have to say. They’s a whole lot of dogs around this town, you notice?”

  “Sometimes,” Ton-Ton Detroit said. Clay moved up a little closer but Ton-Ton Detroit was sitting right on the edge of his post, so it was not really possible for Clay to hop out there and be with him.

  “I been kinda wondering something here, uncle,” Clay said, lacing his fingers together in front of his crotch. “Like if you could maybe let me hold a hundred francs, you know, just until tomorrow?”

  Ton-Ton Detroit said nothing at all.

  “Fifty?” Clay said.

  Ton-Ton Detroit’s lips drew back to show how tight his teeth were clenched. After a second he relaxed his jaws.

  “You dead out of luck, son,” he said. “I hadn’t touched fifty francs this week myself.”

  “Didn’t mean to bother you,” Clay said hurriedly. “Well, I guess I’ll just go on and leave you to your thoughts.”

  He turned and went back through the doorway and down the steps. When his head had bobbed down below the level of the sill, Ton-Ton Detroit and the ocean let out a long sigh together. Then he got the foil out of his pocket and began to shape it back into a pipe.