Second Skin (New Directions Paperbook), page 18
“Got your hackles up, Chief?” I asked, “the boys ought to be able to do a little bloodsucking right here, don’t you think?”
So we hit the curb, drove over the curb, cut a swath through the rain, and just in time I braced myself against the battered tin dashboard and saved my head.
“Why, look,” I said, “they’re mostly women,” and all the gray tin doors flew open at once and we were accosting the women on Second Avenue and looking for trouble.
“Blew your buttons already, Chief?” I said, but he didn’t hear me.
And from deep in the crowd and choking herself with the bathrobe collar and shaking the bright rain in her long blonde hair and pulling the robe tight in the middle: “Hey, girls, the Navy’s here!” she said. But the bare throats were still—no laughter—and the robes and negligees were wet, the lips were wet, the eyes were full of something they had seen upstairs. No love. Mere sheep huddling away from death. Though the blonde pushed forward then and gave a tug on her bathrobe cord.
“What about you, Happiness?” she said. “What about you, Honey? ” But her eyes were full of another face, not mine, and something, I could tell, was wrong.
“All right,” I said. “Now tell me. Any sailors in trouble around here?”
And watching me, letting the rain run down her cheeks: “Upstairs,” she said.
“Thought so,” I said. “Well, Chief, lead the way.”
The entrance hall was dark and crooked and full of rotten vegetables, stray cats, one of the dark doorways off lower Second Avenue and lean, improvident, brushed here and there with scum. And there were five flights of stairs. Five long flights. Already the chief and the other gray members of our shore patrol—three more pairs of gaiters, three hickory sticks—and even the women had passed me on the second landing when I stopped for breath. Already the chief and armed sailors and women sounded like dark dray horses in an abandoned warehouse overhead, and I was puffing up the stairs with my hand ready on the T-bone steak and my full heart beating slow time to the climb.
The top. Rain on a little window, rain among broken aerials, another dark corridor in one more house of crumbling skin and I waited—a foot on the last step, foot on the landing, forearm across the upraised thigh—and took a few slow breaths to quiet everything.
“What is it, Chief?” I called, and tried to loosen my tight gaiters.
Then I walked down the corridor, pushed through the women, and looked for myself. I pushed through, blood or no blood, and fell to my knees beside his body while my face began to tingle and my stomach started to boil up like the radiator of an overheated car. I looked at the body and I swayed, glanced once about the room. And at least Fernandez had found his hideaway, his true hideaway, at last. Peruvian face mask, a pair of black castanets, long white tasseled shawl like the one he had once given to his bride, these he had hung at interesting artistic angles on that sagging wall of skeletal white lath and flaking plaster. Another rain-refracted neon light flicked on and off through the window, lit up a portion of the wall and fell across me where I was kneeling close enough to touch him and to memorize forever each shattered line of that little corpse. There was a woven straw chair with an enormous high rounded back and gently curving arms and a solid basket bottom, and the assailants, murderers, whoever they were, had knocked it over, hacked away at it with some kind of sacrificial hatchet. And they had found his collection of old silver coins, had flung the old bright coins all about the room where they glowed like blood money, old silver coins of honor, in the flickering cheap neon light. But no matter how destroyed, it was still his hideaway, I could see that: here on the top floor of the building of condemned lives, here he had gathered together his bric-a-brac—earthen jugs, horsehair switch, dried poppies in a little Chinese vase—here feathered the poor wrecked nest which I had found, stumbled into, invaded with my gaping shore patrol.
He was naked. Covered with blood. Yes, Fernandez lay on his back on the floor and his neck was fastened to the iron leg of the day bed with one of the strings of the smashed guitar. The murderers had jumped on the belly of his new guitar and smashed it. There was a white mountain-goat rug flung across the day bed but they had killed Fernandez on the hard bare floor. Stabbed, beaten, poked and prodded, but he was finally choked to death with the guitar string.
And the fingers. Yes, all five fingers of the left hand. All five. The clasp knife, the wine-dark pool, the fingers themselves, it was clear, too clear, what they had done and that the severed fingers were responsible for the spidery red lines scattered over everything. The wild tracings, the scene of blood—I touched him on the shoulder once and then I managed to reach the corridor and, while the blonde held me under the arm and cupped her wet hand on my forehead, I doubled over and let everything in my hot stomach boil up and out.
When I returned to the room I pried open the window and let the rain beat in. I remained standing on my feet and staring at the second body until the job was done. The other belonged to a sailor and was fully clothed in white bell-bottomed pants, crumpled white middy blouse. A big man face down. Hands buried beneath the face. Legs kicked far apart. Killed by the single driving blow of another clasp knife which they had left in his back.
“His name’s Harry,” the blonde said.
“Harry,” I said. “Poor Harry.”
And then all of her weight was on my arm, her voice suddenly tremulous, she was crying. She said she knew what had happened and wanted to tell me. So I righted the hatcheted straw chair and made her sit down, held her cold hard hand and looked at Harry while the hand squeezed and the elbow shook and the voice talked on. She said that she had heard the noise upstairs and that there was nothing unusual about the noise, but that when the man came down and banged on her door, another sailor, she said, and as big as Harry, very much like Harry in fact, she told him she didn’t want to with anyone who had just been fighting, that she wasn’t going to give herself to anybody with a swelling eye and the blood still on his knuckles and running out of his nose. But she couldn’t help herself, she said, and it wasn’t bad, all things considered. So he waited until it was over and then while she was trying to do something with her hair and he, the sailor, was still breathing hard on her bed, why then he caught her eye and kept looking at her and told her all about it. He and a couple of others had killed a little fairy spic upstairs, that it was a game they had to let some fairy pick them up and then, when they were in the flophouse room, to pull out the knives….
“He waited, you see? Waited until he was done to tell me. So now for ten bucks the blood’s on my hands too, and all over I’m dying, I can feel it. That guy there, that Harry,” pointing down, drawing the robe tight between her knees, “he came in too soon, you see, and tried to save his buddy, so they killed him. … I wish it was me.”
I let go of her hand, I helped to turn up the bathrobe collar, I wrapped the white mountain-goat rug around her lap. Her head was down. I touched the thin blonde hair on the back of that small ageless skull and spoke to the chief, made it clear to him that I didn’t want to see the sailor’s face.
And then the chief gave orders: “Get the basket stretcher out of the truck. You two, wrap him in the sheet. But leave the little one alone, he’s not ours…
Was Tremlow’s first name Harry? Was it Tremlow lying now at the bare feet of the streetwalker sitting in the shiny partially chopped-up straw chair? Tremlow killed at last while defending my little lost son-in-law? Or was it Tremlow who had swung the sacrificial hatchet, destroyed the hideaway, lopped off the fingers? This, I thought, was more like Tremlow, but I could not be sure and was careful that I would never know.
I looked again and saw the little white calfskin book lying near the left hand of Fernandez. It was a book from the past, a soft white unread book just out of reach where I left it.
“Don’t worry,” I called softly to the bowed figure on the straw chair, “there’s no blood on your hands.”
And web belt, meaty automatic and gaiters, these I dropped into the back of the pickup truck with Harry’s body, stared at the sheeted form bound into the mesh of the basket, and stepped away, flagged down a taxi, returned as quickly as I could to the predawn silhouette of my own cheap hotel.
She was sitting in the straight-backed chair, poor Sissy, and wide awake, clear providential eyes fixed on the elevator. I held the door so it wouldn’t bang and took off my cap and smiled. Then wrinkled and bloodstained and more haggard than Sissy herself, I approached her slowly and helped her out of the chair and took her into my arms and kissed her. Her mouth tasted like old wax paper but it was the kiss of my life.
And we were wrong about him, Cassandra, weren’t we? Just a little wrong, Cassandra?
“Papa,” I cried, “no, Papa. Please….”
“I shall do it, Edward, I tell you. See if I don’t….”
“But please, please, what about Mamma, Papa? What about me?”
“Some things, Edward, can’t be helped….”
And crouching at the keyhole of the lavatory door, soft little hands cupped on soft fat knees and hot, desperate, hopeful, suddenly inspired: “Wait, Papa, wait, I will play for you, poor Papa.”
“No, no, Edward, never mind…it will do no good…”
But I raised one of my hands then, clapped it over my lips, waited. And when I failed to answer him there was only silence behind the lavatory door. Was he caught off guard? Uncertain? Or stricken even more deeply with despair, sitting on the old brown wooden toilet seat with vacant eyes and pure white bone less mortician’s hands clasped vacantly between his knees? I knew by the peculiar intensity of that prolonged silence that I was safe for awhile, that he could do nothing at least until I had played him my Brahms. It was the dripping faucet that gave the silence its peculiar tight suspended ring, the dripping faucet that convinced me: it would hold his attention until I could play my Brahms.
“Are you there, Edward?”
But as small and fat and ungainly as I was, and as much as I wanted to talk with him, plead with him, I had just been inspired and knew enough, suddenly, not to answer. One sound, I understood, and he might well blow his head off then and there.
“Edward?”
But his voice was weaker while the monstrous dripping was louder, more dominant, more demanding. And my cheeks were fatter than ever with my held breath, my ears throbbed, my eyes throbbed, I stole away into the bright noon sun of that hapless Friday in midsummer. I flew to my room, as much as any inspired and terrified fat boy can fly, and for those few moments—mere sunlit suspended moments saved by a rotten washer in the right-hand faucet in the lavatory sink—for those extra moments of life he was none the wiser.
I ran to my room though I was not a quick child, ran with my short plump bare arms flung out in front of me and not a sob in my throat, not a snuffle in my little pink naked rosebud of a nose, so bent was I on staying his hand with my cello. And the sunlight, bright sunlight coming through every window in planes as broad as each sill and filled with motes and little stationary rainbows that warmed leg, knee, pudgy arm, home full of light and silence and suspended warmth. And only the two of us to share my Brahms.
The cello was under my bed and without thinking I flopped to my hands and knees and hauled it out, and then tumbled it onto my bed, turned back the corners of the old worn-out patchwork quilt in which my mother always wrapped that precious instrument. Cello in the sunlight, tiny shadows beneath the strings, wood that was only a shell, a thin wooden skin, but dark and brown and burnished. The sunlight brought out the sheen of my cello—tiny concentric circles of crimson moons—brought out the glow of the thick cat strings. I stood there, put my palm on its thin hard belly, and already it was warm and rich and filled with my slow awkward song.
So I tightened the strings, tightened the bow and hugged the now upright cello and held my breath, trotted back silently-bulging sway-backed child, bouncing cello—to my lonely sunlit post by the locked door. And then—no noise, no noise—the terror of touching the cello’s middle leg to the floor and of resting the waxen neck in my shoulder and pressing down a string and raising the bow, flinging up the bow and staring at the keyhole and waiting, watching the keyhole, smiling, in silence holding everything ready for the song.
“Now, Papa,” I said suddenly, and there was a startled jumping sound behind the door, “now I am going to play!” And my arm fell and the bow dragged, sawed, swayed to and fro—hair on gut, fat fingertips on gut—and the cello and I rolled from side to side together. I kept my eyes on the little black hole in the door, with every ecstatic rhythmic roll crossed and recrossed my legs.
So I played for him, played Brahms while my father must have been loading the pistol, played while he swept an impatient and frightened hand through the gray thinning hair and made fierce eyes to himself behind the door. I played with no thought of him, really, but he must have gagged a little to himself in there, choked like a man coughing up blood for the first time as he tried to decide how best to use the nickel-plated weapon, forced his fingers inside the trigger guard. I suppose the first sounds of the cello must have destroyed the spell of the faucet. So I played on, phantom accomplice to his brutal act, and all the while hoping, I think, for success and pleased with the song.
And then: “Edward!”
Bow in mid-air. Silence, catch in my throat, legs locked. Because his voice was loud. He had gotten down on his knees and had put his mouth to the keyhole: “Edward,” he said firmly, “stop it!”
And then cello, legs, bow, myself, heart, Brahms, all locked together for a moment of immobile frenzy because I heard the lock turn in the lavatory door and thought he was coming out to me.
“Edward! I have opened the door. There is no point in making someone break down the door to get me….”
So the bow swung free and again I was squatting, leaning close to the door: “But, Papa, may I come in then?”
The shot. The tiny acid stink at the keyhole. And the door opened slightly of its own accord, hung ajar so that I saw one twisted foot, trouser cuff jerked above the ankle, and my own release, my cry, my grief, the long shocked moment when I clung to the cello and heard the terrible noise and wondered when it would ever end. He may have spoken to me one last time—“Good-by, Edward”—but I couldn’t be sure. The shot, after all, killed everything.
Everything, that is, except my love. But if my own poor father was Death himself, as I think he was, then certainly I was right to tell Cassandra how familiar I was with the seeds of death. Wasn’t I myself, as a matter of fact, simply that? Simply one of those little black seeds of death? And what else can I say to Father, Mother, Gertrude, Fernandez, Cassandra, except sleep, sleep, sleep?
Land of Spices
High lights of helplessness? Mere trivial record of collapse? Say, rather, that it is the chronicle of recovery, the history of courage, the dead reckoning of my romance, the act of memory, the dance of shadows. And all the earmarks of pageantry, if you will, the glow of Skipper’s serpentine tale.
Cinnamon, I discovered when I was tossed up spent and half-naked on the invisible shore of our wandering island—old Ariel in sneakers, sprite surviving in bald-headed man of fair complexion-cinnamon, I found, comes to the hand like little thin brown pancakes or the small crisp leaves of a midget tobacco plant. And like Big Bertha who calls to me out of the black forest of her great ugly face I too am partial to cinnamon, am always crumpling a few of the brittle dusty leaves in my pockets, rubbing it gently onto the noses of my favorite cows. And what better than cinnamon for my simmering dreams?
Yesterday, if I can trust such calculations in my time of no time, yesterday marked the end of Catalina Kate’s eighth month. Four weeks to go and right on time, and Kate has stretched and swelled and grown magnificently. My Kate with a breadbasket as big as a house, tight as a drum, and the color of old brick and shiny, smooth and shiny, under the gaudy calico of that tattered dress. And wasn’t Sister Josie pleased? “Baby coming in four weeks, Josie,” I told her. And weren’t we all? But yesterday was also the day I knocked up Sweet Phyllis in the shade of the calabash tree. A big day, as I told Sonny, a big day all around.
“Cow’s calling, Skipper. Just hear if she ain’t!”
Dawn. The first moment of windy dawn, and the bright limes were dancing, the naked flesh hung down from the little cocoa trees, and already the ants were swarming. Red-eyed Sonny stood there—metamorphosed, waiting forever—among the broad leaves and shadows framed in my large white rotting casement. Sonny was waiting, yawning, rubbing his eyes in my view of the world.
“Cow’s calling for sure. And ain’t that Sweet Phyllis, Skipper? Sounds like Phyllis to me!”
“All right, Sonny,” leaning forward, scratching myself, smearing the ants, watching the shifting torso in my window, listening, “it’s all right,Sonny. She’ll wait.” I could hear the faint far-off appeal, the dumb strained trumpeting of Sweet Phyllis in heat. She sounded ecstatic, was making a brassy sustained noise of grief. Sonny had a good ear.
“Tell Big Bertha to fix us a lunch, Sonny. We might as well make a day of it. And tell Bertha that she and Kate and Josie may come along if they’d like to. Fair enough?”
“Oh, they’ll want to come along, Skipper,” grinning, shifting softly and erratically in the window with his arms pressed tight to the long thin torso and somehow active, up to something, though in no way suggesting his intention to be off, to be gone about my business, “them girls wouldn’t miss a hot fete for Phyllis if you allows them the privilege and lets them get off from work. Skipper, you knows that!”
The old smashed petty officer’s cap this time, the indecent angle of the cap, the long shrunken torso like a paste of hickory ash and soot, the fixed grin, the unshaved black jaw working. “Well, Sonny,” I said, “how about it? Are you going to tell Big Bertha what I told you?” And then, listening, watching, returning his grin: “Sonny,” I said softly, “Sonny, are you relieving yourself against Plantation House? Under my very window, Sonny? You have no scruples. You have no scruples at all.”
