‘Yeah,’ I said, and nodded. Like I said, I know what ‘catharsis’ means and I thought I understood what he was saying. But I really didn’t want to look at it much longer. ‘Let’s go have a beer, hey?’
The storm in Tom hadn’t passed, I could tell, and he still seemed to thrum with crackling emotions looking for an earth, but I thought the clouds might be breaking and I was glad.
And so we walked slowly over to Jack’s and had a few beers and watched some pool being played. Tom seemed pretty tired, but still alert, and I relaxed a little. Come eleven most of the guys started going on their way and I was surprised to see Tom get another beer. Pete, Ned and I stayed on, and Jack of course, though we knew our loving wives would have something to say about that. It just didn’t seem time to go. Outside it had gotten pretty dark, though the moon was keeping the square in a kind of twilight and the lights in the bar threw a pool of warmth out of the front window.
Then, about twelve o’clock, it happened, and I don’t suppose any of us will ever see the same world we grew up in again. I’ve told this whole thing like it was just me who was there, but we all were, and we remember it together.
Because suddenly there was a wailing sound outside, a thin cutting cry, getting closer. Tom immediately snapped to his feet and stared out the window like he’d been waiting for it. As we looked out across the square we saw little Billy come running and we could see the blood on his face from there. Some of us got to get up but Tom snarled at us to stay there and so I guess we just stayed put, sitting back down like we’d been pushed. He strode out the door and into the square and the boy saw him and ran to him and Tom folded him in his cloak and held him close and warm. But he didn’t come back in. He just stood there, and he was waiting for something.
Now there’s a lot of crap talked about silences. I read novels when I’ve the time and you see things like ‘Time stood still’ and so on and you think ‘bullshit it did.’ So I’ll just say I don’t think anyone in the world breathed in that next minute. There was no wind, no movement. The stillness and silence were there like you could touch them, but more than that: they were like that’s all there was and all there ever had been.
We felt the slow red throb of violence from right across the square before we could even see the man. Then Sam came staggering into view waving a bottle like a flag and cursing his head off. At first he couldn’t see Tom and the boy because they were the opposite side of the fountain, and he ground to a wavering halt, but then he started shouting, rough jags of sound that seemed to strike against the silence and die instead of breaking it, and he began charging across the square—and if ever there was a man with murder in his thoughts then it was Sam McNeill. He was like a man who’d given his soul the evening off. I wanted to shout to Tom to get the hell out of the way, to come inside, but the words wouldn’t come out of my throat and we all just stood there, knuckles whitening as we clutched the bar and stared, our mouths open like we’d made a pact never to use them again. Tom just stood there, watching Sam come towards him, getting closer, almost as far as the spot where Tom usually painted. It felt like we were looking out of the window at a picture of something that happened long ago in another place and time, and the closer Sam got the more I began to feel very afraid for him.
It was at that moment that Sam stopped dead in his tracks, skidding forward like in some kid’s cartoon, his shout dying off in his ragged throat. He was staring at the ground in front of him, his eyes wide and his mouth a stupid circle. Then he began to scream.
It was a high shrill noise like a woman, and coming out of that bull of a man it sent fear racking down my spine. He started making thrashing movements like he was trying to move backwards, but he just stayed where he was.
His movements became unmistakable at about the same time his screams turned from terror to agony. He was trying to get his leg away from something.
Suddenly he seemed to fall forward on one knee, his other leg stuck out behind him, and he raised his head and shrieked at the dark skies and we saw his face then and I’m not going to forget that face so long as I live. It was a face from before there were any words, the face behind our oldest fears and earliest nightmares, the face we’re terrified of seeing on ourselves one night when we’re alone in the dark and It finally comes out from under the bed to get us, like we always knew it would.
Then Sam fell on his face, his leg buckled up—and still he thrashed and screamed and clawed at the ground with his hands, blood running from his broken fingernails as he twitched and struggled. Maybe the light was playing tricks, and my eyes were sparkling anyway on account of being too paralyzed with fear to even blink, but as he thrashed less and less it became harder and harder to see him at all, and as the breeze whipped up stronger his screams began to sound a lot like the wind. But still he writhed and moaned and then suddenly there was the most godawful crunching sound and then there was no movement or sound anymore.
Like they were on a string our heads all turned together and we saw Tom still standing there, his coat flapping in the wind. He had a hand on Billy’s shoulder and as we looked we could see that Mary was there too now and he had one arm round her as she sobbed into his coat.
I don’t know how long we just sat there staring but then we were ejected off our seats and out of the bar. Pete and Ned ran to Tom but Jack and I went to where Sam had fallen, and we stared down, and I tell you the rest of my life now seems like a build up to and a climb down from that moment.
We were standing in front of a chalk drawing of a tiger. Even now my scalp seems to tighten when I think of it, and my chest feels like someone punched a hole in it and tipped a gallon of ice water inside. I’ll just tell you the facts: Jack was there and he knows what we saw and what we didn’t see.
What we didn’t see was Sam McNeill. He just wasn’t there. We saw a drawing of a tiger in purples and greens, a little bit scuffed, and there was a lot more red round the mouth of that tiger than there had been that afternoon and I’m sure that if either of us could have dreamed of reaching out and touching it, it would have been warm too.
And the hardest part to tell is this. I’d seen that drawing in the afternoon, and Jack had too, and we knew that when it was done it was lean and thin.
I swear to God that tiger wasn’t thin any more. What Jack and I were looking at was one fat tiger.
After a while I looked up and across at Tom. He was still standing with Mary and Billy, but they weren’t crying anymore. Mary was hugging Billy so tight he squawked and Tom’s face looked calm and alive and creased with a smile. And as we stood there the skies opened for the first time in months and a cool rain hammered down. At my feet colours began to run and lines became less distinct. Jack and I stood and watched till there was just pools of meaningless colours and then we walked slowly over to the others, not even looking at the bottle lying on the ground, and we all stayed there a long time in the rain, facing each other, not saying a word.
Well that was ten years ago, near enough. After a while Mary took Billy home and they turned to give us a little wave before they turned the corner. The cuts on Billy’s face healed real quick, and he’s a good looking boy now: he looks a lot like his dad and he’s already fooling about in cars. Helps me in the store sometimes. His mom ain’t aged a day and looks wonderful. She never married again, but she looks real happy the way she is.
The rest of us just said a simple goodnight. Goodnight was all we could muster and maybe that’s all there was to say. Then we walked off home in the directions of our wives. Tom gave me a small smile before he turned and walked off alone. I almost followed him, I wanted to say something, but the end I just stayed where I was and watched him go. And that’s how I’ll always remember him best, because for a moment there was a spark in his eyes and I knew that some pain had been lifted deep down inside somewhere.
Then he walked and no-one has seen him since, and like I said it’s been about ten years now. He wasn’t there in the square the next morning and he didn’t
come in for a beer. Like he’d never been, he just wasn’t there. Except for the hole in our hearts: it’s funny how much you can miss a quiet man.
We’re all still here, of course, Jack, Ned, Pete and the boys, and all much the same, though even older and greyer. Pete lost his wife and Ned retired but things go on the same. The tourists come in the summer and we sit on the stools and drink our cold beers and shoot the breeze about ballgames and families and how the world’s going to shit, and sometimes we’ll draw close and talk about a night a long time ago, and about paintings and cats, and about the quietest man we ever knew, wondering where he is, and what he’s doing. And we’ve had a six-pack in the back of the fridge for ten years now, and the minute he walks through that door and pulls up a stool, that’s his.
A Place To Stay
‘John, do you believe in vampires?’
I took a moment to light a cigarette. This wasn’t to avoid the issue, but rather to prepare myself for the length and vitriol of the answer I intended to give—and to tone it down a little. I hardly knew the woman who’d asked the question, and had no idea of her tolerance for short, blunt words. I wanted to be gentle with her, but if there’s one star in the pantheon of possible nightmares which I certainly don’t believe in, then it has to be bloody vampires. I mean, really.
I was in New Orleans, and it was nearly Halloween. Children of the Night have a tendency to crop up in such circumstances, like talk of rain in London. Now that I was here, I could see why. The French Quarter, with its narrow streets and looming balconies frozen in time, almost made the idea of vampires credible, especially in the lingering moist heat of the Fall. It felt like a playground for suave monsters, a perpetual reinventing past, and if vampires lived anywhere, I supposed, then these dark streets and alleyways with their fetid, flamboyant cemeteries would be as good a place as any.
But they didn’t live anywhere, and after another punishing swallow of my salty Margarita, I started to put Rita-May right on this fact. She shifted herself comfortably against my chest, and listened to me rant.
We were in Jimmy Buffet’s bar on Decatur, and the evening was developing nicely. At nine o’clock I’d been there by myself, sitting at the bar and trying to work out how many Margaritas I’d drunk. The fact that I was counting shows what a sad individual I am. The further fact that I couldn’t seem to count properly demonstrates that on that particular evening I was an extremely drunk sad individual too. And I mean, yes, Margaritaville is kind of a tourist trap, and I could have been sitting somewhere altogether heavier and more authentic across the street. But I’d done that the previous two nights, and besides, I liked Buffet’s bar. I was, after all, a tourist. You didn’t feel in any danger of being killed in his place, which I regard as a plus. They only played Jimmy Buffet on the juke box, not surprisingly, so I didn’t have to worry that my evening was suddenly going to be shattered by something horrible from the post-melodic school of popular music. Say what you like about Jimmy Buffet, he’s seldom hard to listen to. Finally, the barman had this gloopy eye thing, which felt pleasingly disgusting and stuck to the wall when you threw it, so that was kind of neat.
I was having a perfectly good time, in other words. A group of people from the software convention I was attending were due to be meeting somewhere on Bourbon at ten, but I was beginning to think I might skip it. After only two days my tolerance for jokes about Bill Gates was hovering around the zero mark. As an Apple Macintosh developer, they weren’t actually that funny anyway.
So. There I was, fairly confident that I’d had around eight Margaritas and beginning to get heartburn from all the salt, when a woman walked in. She was in her mid thirties, I guessed, the age where things are just beginning to fade around the edges but don’t look too bad for all that. I hope they don’t, anyway: I’m approaching that age myself and my things are already fading fast. She sat on a stool at the corner of the bar, and signalled to the barman with a regular’s upward nod of the head. A minute later a Margarita was set down in front of her, and I judged from the colour that it was the same variety I was drinking. It was called a Golden something or other, and had the effect of gradually replacing your brain with a sour-tasting sand which shifted sluggishly when you moved your head.
No big deal. I noticed her, then got back to desultory conversation with the other barman. He’d visited London at some point, or wanted to—I never really understood which. He was either asking me what London was like, or telling me; I was either listening, or telling him. I can’t remember, and probably didn’t know at the time. At that stage in the evening my responses would have been about the same either way. I eventually noticed that the band had stopped playing, apparently for the night. That meant I could leave the bar and go sit at one of the tables. The band had been okay, but very loud, and without wishing them any personal enmity I was glad they had gone. Now that I’d noticed, I realised they must have been gone for a while. An entire Jimmy Buffet CD had played in the interval.
I lurched sedately over to a table, humming ‘The Great Filling Station Hold-up’ quietly and inaccurately, and reminding myself that it was only about twenty after nine. If I wanted to meet up with the others without being the evening’s comedy drunk, I needed to slow down. I needed to have not had about the last four drinks, in fact, but that would have involved tangling with the space-time continuum to a degree I felt unequal to. Slowing down would have to suffice.
It was as I was just starting the next drink that the evening took an interesting turn. Someone said something to me at fairly close range, and when I looked up to have another stab at comprehending it, I saw it was the woman from the bar.
‘Wuh?’ I said, in the debonair way that I have. She was standing behind the table’s other chair, and looked diffident but not very. The main thing she looked was good-natured, in a wary and toughened way. Her hair was fairly blonde and she was dressed in a pale blue dress and a dark blue denim jacket.
‘I said—is that chair free?’
I considered my standard response, when I’m trying to be amusing, of asking in a soulful voice if any of us are truly free. I didn’t feel up to it. I wasn’t quite drunk enough, and I knew in my heart of hearts that it simply wasn’t funny. Also, I was nervous. Women don’t come up to me in bars and request the pleasure of sitting at my table. It’s not something I’d had much practice with. In the end I settled for straightforwardness.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And you may feel absolutely free to use it.’
The woman smiled, sat down, and started talking. Her name, I discovered rapidly, was Rita-May. She’d lived in New Orleans for fifteen years, after moving there from some godforsaken hole called Houma, out in the Louisiana sticks. She worked in one of the stores further down Decatur near the Square, selling Cajun spice sets and cookbooks to tourists, which was a reasonable job and paid okay but wasn’t very exciting. She had been married once and it had ended four years ago, amidst general apathy. She had no children, and considered it no great loss.
This information was laid out with remarkable economy and a satisfying lack of topic drift or extraneous detail. I then sat affably drinking my drink while she efficiently elicited a smaller quantity of similar information from me. I was thirty-two, she discovered, and unmarried. I owned a very small software company in London, England, and lived with a dozy cat named Spike. I was enjoying New Orleans’ fine cuisine but had as yet no strong views on particular venues—with the exception of the muffelettas in the French Bar, which I liked inordinately, and the po-boys at Mama Sam’s, which I thought were overrated.
After an hour and three more Margaritas our knees were resting companionably against each other, and by eleven-thirty my arm was laid across the back of her chair and she was settled comfortably against it. Maybe the fact that all the dull crap had been got out of the way so quickly was what made her easy to spend time with. Either way. I was having fun.
Rita-May seemed unperturbed by the vehemence of my feelings about vampires, and pleasingly willing to
consider the possibility that it was all a load of toss. I was about to raise my hand to get more drinks when I noticed that the bar staff had all gone home, leaving a hand-written sign on the bar which said LOOK, WILL YOU TWO JUST FUCK OFF.
They hadn’t really, but the well had obviously run dry. For a few moments I bent my not inconsiderable intelligence towards solving this problem, but all that came back was a row of question marks. Then suddenly I found myself out on the street, with no recollection of having even stood up. Rita-May’s arm was wrapped around my back, and she was dragging me down Decatur towards the Square.
‘It’s this way,’ she said, giggling, and I asked her what the hell I had agreed to. It transpired that we were going to precisely the bar on Bourbon where I’d been due to meet people an hour and a half ago. I mused excitedly on this coincidence, until Rita-May got me to understand that we were going there because I’d suggested it.
‘Want to buy some drugs?’ Rita-May asked, and I turned to peer at her.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘What have you got?’ This confused me until I realised that a third party had asked the original question, and was indeed still standing in front of us. A thin black guy with elsewhere eyes.
‘Dope, grass, coke, horse…’ the man reeled off, in a bored monotone. As Rita-May negotiated for a bag of joints I tried to see where he was hiding the horse, until I realised I was being a moron. I turned away and opened my mouth and eyes wide to stretch my face. I sensed I was in a bit of a state, and that the night was as yet young.
It was only as we were lighting one of the joints five minutes later that it occurred to me to be nervous about meeting a gentleman who was a heroin dealer. Luckily he’d gone by then, and my attention span was insufficient to let me worry about it for long. Rita-May seemed very relaxed about the whole deal, and as she was a local, presumably it was okay.
We hung a right at Jackson Square and walked across towards Bourbon, sucking on the joint and slowly carooming from one side of the sidewalk to the other. Rita-May’s arm was still around my back, and one of mine was over her shoulders. It occurred to me that sooner or later I was going to have to ask myself what the hell I thought I was doing, but I didn’t feel up to it just yet.
More Tomorrow: And Other Stories Page 22
