by Paula Fox
Calvin stuck his head out of the crate. Clay saw the turbaned woman run out of the other side of the park. Two men, barely visible beneath rags and newspapers, rose from the ground like otters and swam away into the dark.
What gleamed so dully? Clay blinked, opened his eyes wide, and stared. The men held lengths of chain and baseball bats. “Monkey Island!” they howled.
“We got to get out of here,” Buddy said urgently, but he didn’t move.
Calvin was crouching by the crate. “The stump people … out for a night’s sport,” he muttered.
The three girls danced in a circle in the middle of the street, their screechy laughter as piercing as shards of glass. The men had begun to hit the railing with their chains and bats. Now their chant had changed, but the words were as familiar to Clay as his own name, written on walls or shouted and grunted and hissed everywhere he had ever been in the city.
They caught sight of Buddy. “Nigger!” they cried out in one great shout, and they hit the railing with greater force while they swayed from side to side like huge red worms in a tin can.
Clay felt Calvin and Buddy grip his arms. They ran, Calvin stumbling and groaning, toward the farthest exit from the park. Down the street they went, turned, turned again, running for what seemed hours, until suddenly Buddy halted.
Calvin was panting like a thirsty dog. Clay could hardly stand upright. All he heard now above the hum of distant cars was the click of the traffic light beneath which the three of them huddled. The buildings around them were dark.
“All right now,” Buddy said, his words barely audible.
“Never be all right …” Calvin mumbled.
Shadows moved in an entrance to one of the buildings, people trying to find better ways to sleep on stone, Clay thought. There must be no place in the city where there wouldn’t be those shadows, restless, stirring in dark places. He had learned to see them.
Buddy walked on, and Clay hurried to catch up with him. He was shivering so his teeth were clicking like the traffic light. Where were they going to go now?
“Buddy?”
Buddy stopped and turned. “Where’s Calvin?” he asked.
A truck rumbled down the street toward them. “Calvin!” Buddy called. He listened for a moment.
“Come on,” he said roughly to Clay, and pulled him onto the sidewalk. The truck went by. Clay was dizzy. The truck appeared to be riding on its two left wheels. He sank against a wall. The street was empty except for Buddy standing a few feet away from him, turning in a circle as he continued to call the old man’s name. He fell silent a moment, looked up at the sky, then glanced at Clay.
“We got to find a place to get out of the cold,” he said.
“Where did Calvin go?” Clay asked, startled by the loudness of his own voice.
“Someplace. I don’t know. He’ll get drunk. I don’t know when or where he’ll turn up. If he does.…”
“I’m cold,” Clay said.
He’d never said until that moment that he was cold or hungry or scared. Perhaps it was because he had known everyone else was too. But now, the words had fallen from his mouth. He had not been able to stop them.
“You’re cold. I’m cold. It’s wintertime,” Buddy said quickly. “Let’s go, little white-neck.”
7 Out Cold
They tried the park first. When they got within a block of it, Buddy went ahead to make sure the streets around it were empty. “Stump people gone,” he said when he returned. But as they passed the park, they kept across the street from it, close to the buildings.
It was as silent as a cemetery. The streetlight fell on empty benches. Buddy and Clay crossed over and went slowly down the path by the fountain. Clothing, rags, and one rusted eggbeater hung from a tree behind the crate, which was now a low tent-shaped pile of wood. From another tree hung one boot by its laces and Clay’s corduroy jacket tied by its sleeves. The straight-backed chair was smashed.
“See? They tried to start a fire in our pail, but it didn’t catch,” Buddy said, pointing at the pail. “They don’t concentrate so good, those people.”
“My jacket is on the tree,” Clay said.
“Calvin told you to wear all your clothes all the time,” Buddy said.
“It got too tight, anyhow,” Clay responded.
Buddy went to the tree, jumped up, and pulled the jacket down. The knot had been loose, and the two sleeves waved lazily as the jacket fell. “Never mind tight,” Buddy said. “You might need it later.”
He said they would go and try the basement windows of the church where they had been given Thanksgiving dinner. The doors would be locked. Everything in the city was locked except the bridges leading out of it, he said, and it was against the law to walk on most of them.
When they came to the church, Buddy went up the stairs and shook the doors. From somewhere above came a ghostly agitated cooing. “Pigeons don’t care for their sleep being disturbed,” he remarked.
Clay followed him down a narrow passage that ran alongside the church. Every few feet there was a long window close to the ground. When they reached the last one, Buddy put both of his work gloves on his right hand and broke the window with it. “Sorry, church,” he whispered. He picked out pieces of glass and piled them neatly nearby. He put his arms around Clay’s waist.
“I’m going to drop you through there. Don’t stiffen up. Try to land soft,” he said.
It felt like a long drop. Clay landed in a crouch, his feet smarting. A second later, Buddy hit the floor with a thump. Clay walked into the sharp edge of a table and felt his way along it until he bumped into a chair that fell with a clatter. He let go of the table, took a few steps, and reached a wall. His fingers touched papers tacked to a cork board. Quickly, he backed to the table. Buddy was saying something he couldn’t make out, because of the pounding in his head. He sneezed violently, and the sound of it echoed and reechoed. They must be in a very large room.
Buddy had lit a match and was holding it aloft. Through the broken window came a wave of frigid air as if the night was breathing into it.
“I said, Why are you climbing up on that table, Clay?”
“I thought I could sleep on it,” Clay answered. He didn’t want to admit he was afraid of the floor, afraid he’d roll into some deep hole and disappear.
“Naw. You’d fall off. They been painting down here. I see some drop cloths in the corner. We’ll cover up with them.”
A few minutes after Clay had crawled under the cloths, he felt almost warm, although the fumes of paint set off the dizziness that had come over him earlier on the street.
He could hear Buddy close by, snoring faintly. Buddy could always find a place to lie down and sleep. Even if they were at the North Pole, Buddy would make a little house of ice. There’d be a big coal burning inside, and the heat of it would warm every part of him. He blinked at the coal. It blinked back, and he fell asleep.
“Wake up, Clay. Wake up …” he heard. It must be so hard to breathe because his head was under the drop cloth. But when Buddy peeled it away, Clay found it was still difficult. There was a fog in his chest. His nostrils felt as if they were stuffed with cotton balls, the kind his mother had kept in a glass jar in the bathroom. He could see that jar with a daisy painted on it. He coughed. He sounded like a dog barking.
“We’ve got to get out of here before the painters come,” Buddy told him.
It was hard to get up. Why not stay where he was? Let the workmen find him. They’d have to take him someplace where he wouldn’t need to walk all day long and climb into some hole at night and wake up and be hungry most of the day.
The light was gray and streaky like ink-stained water. He saw now how vast the room was in which they’d spent the night. It came to him suddenly that it was here he had eaten Thanksgiving dinner, probably at that same long table. There were piles of drop cloths everywhere, and mixed in with the smell of paint was the dry powdery smell of plaster. A stepladder stood in a corner. The table he’d wanted to sle
ep on was the only furniture in the room except for a few folding chairs. The one he’d knocked down last night looked as if it was yawning.
He got shakily to his feet.
“There’s a toilet over there behind that door,” Buddy said, staring at him. “You okay? Your face is red.”
“I feel kind of hot,” Clay replied. He went off to the toilet. There was a little mirror on the wall. His face was red. He washed it with cold water. Wet strands of his hair covered his ears. He hardly knew himself. In the mirror he saw, reflected, the toilet cubicles. He thought of the alleys he’d mostly had to use for bathrooms, anxious and ashamed lest someone see him, and he felt a flash of rage and shame as if some stranger had called him an ugly name.
When he came out, he wandered over to the board he’d touched last night. On one piece of paper was a notice that the parish council would meet Tuesday at 8:00 P.M. to discuss plans for the Christmas program and a dinner for the homeless.
Clay was faintly surprised. I can read, he thought.
“Let’s go,” Buddy said. “Come on. I’ll boost you up through the window. We’ll go back to the park and see if Calvin turned up.”
As they walked back, Clay said, “Gerald might come with breakfast.”
Buddy looked down at him distractedly. “I don’t know,” he murmured. Clay had never heard him sound so sad. Buddy had always set off each morning as though it might be a day of change, a day when his luck would turn.
Under his breath, Clay heard him say, “Monkey Island …”
“Why did they come? Why did they howl at us and then break everything up?” Clay asked.
“Nothing inside their heads,” Buddy answered. “They got to do something to make sure they’re alive. Can you walk faster? We’ll have to look for Calvin. He can’t take care of himself too well.”
Had Buddy been taking care of the three of them? Calvin had once said Buddy was ingenious, and had told Clay to look up the word if he ever got next to a dictionary. Clay thought he knew what it meant.
“Here. I got an apple saved,” Buddy said, taking it out of his jacket pocket. “You eat it.”
“I’m not hungry,” Clay said. He sneezed.
“You’re not hungry?” Buddy said. He smiled. “That’s a first!”
As dizzy and hot as he was, Clay was relieved that Buddy was friendly again, not the way he’d been last night, so distant and almost cold.
“Maybe there’s more left in the park than we saw last night,” Buddy said. “We’ll go and check it out, and then I’ll look in the alleys around, see if Calvin’s somewhere, and get back in time in case Gerald comes.”
As they passed the drinking fountain, Clay saw Mrs. Crary’s paperback books lying among their own scattered pages. Under a bench nearby lay a small pillow with torn lace edges.
“I didn’t see Dimp and his dog last night before those people came,” Clay said. He felt tearful, as though he might at any moment burst into sobs.
“Dimp and his dog haven’t been around for a week,” Buddy said. “What’s the matter with you? Losing your memory?”
Clay said nothing because they had reached what remained of the crate.
It looked to Clay like the kind of debris he had often seen on the street, a heap of wood and rags in which you could sometimes find something useful. Then he saw a pair of feet sticking out wearing pink rug slippers. Buddy saw them too. “Oh, God!” he exclaimed, and began to pull everything apart, tossing the split and jagged boards aside as he dug. Beneath it all, lying on his back, his mouth open, was Calvin.
“Is he dead?” Clay asked, his voice trembling.
Buddy was bending over the old man, feeling under his neck. “He’s not dead,” Buddy said after a minute. “He’s out cold.” He held up an empty bottle that had been concealed by Calvin’s arm. “Rye whiskey,” he said. “He got hold of this someplace or took it off another drunk. If they want it bad, they can always find it.”
Clay heard a moist snort coming out of Calvin’s long nose. His beard fluttered slightly.
“I got to get help,” Buddy muttered. He stood and looked around. A few cars were passing now, but neither Clay nor Buddy looked in their direction.
“Won’t he be all right if he’s breathing?” Clay asked, looking down at Calvin. He willed him to speak, to say anything, even if it was sarcastic. The old man groaned; his legs quivered for a second. He sighed deeply, but he didn’t open his eyes.
“You stay here. I’ll go see if a phone’s working somewhere,” Buddy was saying as he looked at a handful of change he’d taken out of a pocket. It was mostly pennies.
Clay sat down next to Calvin and pulled up his knees close to his chest. He was shivering with cold; yet his face felt on fire. “You don’t look so good yourself,” Buddy said worriedly as he turned to go down the path.
Clay, huddled next to Calvin, didn’t move a muscle until the ambulance arrived and drove into the park to within a few feet of the crate. As doors opened, he raised his head. By then, the light had broadened and deepened, a lake of sooty light that had slowly filled up with Clay in the middle of it as still as a stone.
The sound of traffic as it banged and clattered down the streets seemed a continuous echo of a noise inside his skull. He watched the movements of the two ambulance men as though they were taking place in a series of photographs. One lifted Calvin’s eyelids with his thumb, took his pulse, felt his slack arms and legs. Both rolled him onto a stretcher, covered him with a blanket, and finally slid him into the ambulance like a coin into a slot.
Buddy touched his shoulder. “You asleep?” he asked.
Clay wasn’t sure what he was. Everything else was peculiarly distinct, the worn grainy soles of Buddy’s shoes as he now knelt to pick through the debris around the destroyed crate, the ripped pages of a book on one of which, after two tries, he made out the word Crusoe.
A new photograph was forming: Gerald stepping from a taxi to the sidewalk, carrying two straw baskets and a large thermos bottle.
“What happened here?” he cried out to Buddy as he walked quickly to them. When he was a few feet away, he stopped short and stared at Clay.
“You’re a little boy,” he said wonderingly, as though it was the first time he’d truly seen him. His mouth widened in his habitual smile that had once reminded Clay of a blind person’s, thanking someone for help in crossing a street or avoiding running into a mailbox. It didn’t remind him of anything now—any more than Gerald himself did.
“These creeps came last night,” Buddy was saying. “Like you see, they tore up the park.”
“Where is the old man?” Gerald asked, still looking at Clay.
“On his way to the hospital,” Buddy replied. “He got hold of some liquor.”
“The others?” Gerald asked.
Buddy shrugged and dropped the slat of wood he was holding to the ground. How slowly it falls, thought Clay, like a feather. He was so cold except for the burning in his cheeks. He heard Buddy say, “We all ran out of the park. They looked like they wanted to kill somebody.”
Gerald lifted the top of the basket and took two doughnuts from it. He held them out.
“Please, take these. This is all so terrible,” he said in his gentle voice. “I’ll make some telephone calls. I’ll protest it, this horrible—” And he looked helplessly at Buddy as though waiting for him to supply the one word that would explain what had happened last night.
Buddy kicked a foot through the heap of rags and wood. “Trash makes trash,” he said. Then he took the doughnuts from Gerald’s outstretched hands and offered one to Clay. But Clay pushed it away and shook his head.
“The boy is shivering so,” Gerald said.
“He’s got a bad cold,” Buddy said.
“It looks worse to me than a cold.”
The cars poured by like metal fragments in a chute.
“He’s all right,” Buddy said gruffly. “As all right as he can be. I’m going to have to find a place for tonight. Maybe even th
is afternoon. I’ll find somewhere to get him in out of the cold.”
The dark would come so early. Clay didn’t see how he and Buddy would have time to find a warm hole to crawl into. His shivering was so violent. He felt like a rattle in the hands of a giant baby.
“I think he needs a doctor,” Gerald persisted. He looked at Clay closely. “That old man isn’t his grandfather, is he? I suppose I knew all along. I didn’t wish to think about it.”
“His face is awful red,” Buddy said with sudden alarm.
Clay rested his head back on his knees. It was almost pleasant to listen to a conversation about himself, though he was so very tired, very sleepy, he found it difficult to follow. Something inside him was loosening like a knot untying itself. He was not going to have to make sense out of this new day. He was glad of that, glad to be free of the strain of it.
He felt himself being lifted up into the air in Buddy’s arms. Buddy was saying to Gerald, “The taxis won’t stop for me. You’ll have to get one and take him.”
The strain came back to Clay at once like a weight dropped on his back, pressing the air out of him. “Buddy!” he cried out.
He was held out like a tray, and Gerald took him. It seemed only a second later that he heard a car door opening, and felt himself lowered to a seat. Already the taxi was pulling into the traffic. Clay looked through the window, his head bumping against the glass. Buddy was standing beside the drinking fountain, his arms held loosely at his side, looking off above the cars in the direction of the river. Clay felt tears cooling his burning cheeks. Then the knot inside him untied itself completely, and holding an end of a silky strong rope in each hand, he slipped into darkness.
8 Oxygen
Clay was lying inside a large crib. Through its railing, he glimpsed several other cribs, a white wall, a tall radiator, and a double window that appeared to have been painted black. He puzzled over that. After a moment, he realized it was not black paint but night, and he felt less afraid.
There was a dim light in the room, a dream light. He turned his head in the opposite direction from the window and saw a partly open door, and above it, a bulb upon whose surface he could see dust. Just to the side of the door was a large bulge of scarlet and white. He stared at it until, gradually, it became recognizable. The white was beard and hair, the scarlet was jacket, billowing pants, and tip of nose. It was Santa Claus.
