77 Shadow Street (65 page)

Eyes bright with candlelight, the dog studies him, panting softly as if in expectation.

Crispin has nowhere to go. And if he thinks of somewhere to go, he currently has only four dollars to get there.

The dog seems not to have belonged to the dead man. Whatever his provenance, however, Crispin will need to feed him.

He returns the wads of cash to the stuffsacks and pulls tight the drawstring tops. The backpack is too big for him. He will take only the money.

At the threshold, Crispin glances back. Candlelight creates an illusion of life in dead eyes. With reflections of flame throbbing across the slack face, the drug addict seems to be a man of glass, a lamp aglow from within.

As they retrace their steps through the enormous warehouse, the dog halts to sniff one of the moldy playing cards lying on the floor. It is the six of diamonds.

When Crispin passed this way earlier, four sixes had lain at this spot, one in every suit.

He surveys the immense dark room, probing this way and that with the flashlight. No one appears. No voice threatens. He and the dog seem to be alone.

The LED beam, arcing across the littered floor, cannot locate the missing sixes.

Outside, in the alleyway, the western sky is crimson, but the twilight is overall purple. The very air seems violet.

In a pet shop on Monroe Avenue, he buys a collar and leash. From now on, the dog will wear the collar at all times, so that he will not appear to be a stray. Crispin will use the leash only on public streets, where there is a risk of attracting the attention of an animal-control officer.

He also buys a bag of carob biscuits, a metal-toothed grooming comb, and a collapsible water dish.

At a sporting-goods store, he ties the dog to a lamppost and leaves him long enough to go inside and buy a backpack of the size that kids need to carry books to and from school. He puts the stuffsacks of money and his pet-store purchases in the pack.

Their dinner is hot dogs from a street vendor. Coke for the boy, bottled water for the dog.

At a novelty store specializing in magic tricks and games of all kinds, Crispin window-shops for a minute or two. He decides to buy a deck of cards, though he’s not sure why.

As Crispin is tying the dog to a rack designed for securing bicycles against theft, the owner of the novelty store opens the door, causing a silvery ringing from an annunciating bell. He says, “Come, lad. Dogs are welcome here.”

The owner is elderly, with white hair and bushy white eyebrows. His eyes are green, and they sparkle like sequins. He wears six emerald rings on various fingers, all as green—but none as sparkly—as his eyes.

“What is your pooch’s name?” the old man asks.

“He doesn’t have one yet.”

“Never leave an animal unnamed for long,” the old man declares. “If it doesn’t have a name, it’s not protected.”

“Protected from what?”

“From any dark spirit that might decide to take up residence in it,” the old man replies. He smiles and winks, but something in his merry eyes suggests that he is not kidding. “We’re closing in fifteen minutes,” he adds. “Can I help you find something?”

A few minutes later, as Crispin pays for the deck of cards, a white-haired woman ascends from the basement and comes through an open door with a large but apparently not heavy box of merchandise. She has a smile as warm as that of the man, who is perhaps her husband.

When she sees the dog, she halts, cocks her head, and says, “Young fella, your furry friend here has an aura that a pious archbishop couldn’t match.”

Crispin has no idea what that means. But he thanks her shyly.

As the woman busies herself restocking a case of magic tricks, and as the many-ringed old man explains a three-dimensional puzzle to another customer, Crispin takes bold action that surprises him. With the dog, he goes to the open door and down the stairs to the basement, unnoticed by the proprietors of the shop.

Below lies a storeroom with rows of freestanding metal shelves crammed with merchandise. There is also a small lavatory with sink and toilet.

Boy and dog take shelter behind the last row of shelves. Here, they can’t be seen from the stairs.

Crispin doesn’t worry that the dog might bark and reveal their presence. He already knows that, in some mysterious way, he and this animal are in synch. He unclips the leash from the collar, coils it, and puts it aside.

After a while, the lights are switched off from the top of the stairs. The door closes up there. For a few minutes, footsteps echo overhead, but soon all is silent.

They wait in the dark until they can be certain the store is closed for the night. Eventually, they make their way back through the stockroom, along the metal shelves, to the foot of the stairs.

Crispin is blind, but perhaps the dog is not. The boy fumbles for the light switch at the bottom of the steps. The dog, standing on its hind feet, finds it first, and the overhead fixtures brighten.

On one shelf, Crispin discovers a stack of quilted blue moving blankets. With them, he makes a bed in a corner, on the floor.

While Crispin strips the rubber bands from the wads of cash and places the flattened bills in three stacks according to denomination, he feeds the dog some of the cookies that he bought at the pet shop.

Together they count their fortune. Crispin announces the total—“Six thousand, seven hundred, forty-five dollars”—and the dog seems to agree with his math. He rolls the money into tight bundles again and returns them to the stuffsacks.

They will not starve. With this much money, they will be able to hide out for a long time, moving every night to a new refuge.

Exhausted, the boy lies back in the pile of blankets. The dog curls up beside him, its head on his abdomen.

Crispin gently rubs behind the dog’s ears.

As sleep is descending upon him, the boy thinks of the dead drug addict, mouth yawning and teeth yellow in the candlelight. He shivers but surrenders to his weariness.

In the dream, Crispin’s younger brother lies on a long white-marble table. His hands and feet are shackled to steel rings. A hard green apple is crammed into his mouth, stretching his jaws painfully. The apple is held in place by an elastic strap that is tied securely at the back of the boy’s head. His teeth are sunk into the fruit, but he isn’t able to bite through it and spit out the pieces.

The raised dagger has a remarkable serpentine blade.

Like a shining liquid, light drizzles along the cutting edge.

The cords of muscle in Crispin’s brother’s neck are taut. The arteries swell and throb as his heart slams great tides of blood through his body.

The apple stifles his screams. He seems also to be choking on a flood of his own saliva.

Crispin wakes in a sweat, crying his brother’s name:
“Harley!”

For a moment he doesn’t know where he is. But then he realizes that he is under the shop of magic and games.

You can undo what has been done and still save them
.

Those words whisper through his mind, but they seem like nothing more than wishful thinking.

When the terror recedes, he knows that he has found the perfect name for the dog. It is a name that will protect the animal from any malevolent spirit that might wish to enter him.

“Harley,” Crispin repeats softly. He names the dog for his lost brother. “Harley.”

The dog gently but insistently licks his hand.

3

ALL THESE YEARS LATER …

The night is cool, the sky deep, the stars as sharp as stiletto points.

At twelve, Crispin is strong and tougher than any boy his age should have to be. His senses are sharp, as is his intuition, as if from his association with four-legged Harley, he has acquired some of the dog’s keen perceptions.

This October night, the streets are filled with goblins and witches, vampires and zombies, sexy Gypsy women and superheroes. Some hide behind masks that look like certain despised politicians, and others wear the faces of leering swine, red-eyed goats, and serpents with forked tongues.

These people are on their way to parties in seedy lounges, in modest workingmen’s clubs, and in the ballrooms of older hotels that are desperate to have a profitable night in this economy that has been a mean Halloween for more than three years.

In this lower-middle-class district, Crispin feels safe enough to wander the streets, scoping the scene, enjoying the costumes and the bustle and the decorations. Halloween is swiftly becoming one of the biggest holidays of the year.

The people whom he fears are not of this neighborhood. They are not likely to descend to these streets for any celebration. Their tastes are more expensive and more exotic than anything that can be provided here.

Three months have passed since his most recent encounter with them. They had almost caught him in an old elementary school slated for eventual demolition.

His mistake then was to spend too many nights in the same place. If he remains on the move, they have greater difficulty locating him.

Crispin doesn’t know why being stationary too long puts him at risk. It’s as if his scent becomes concentrated when he lingers in one place.

He knows the legend of the Wandering Jew who struck Christ on the day of the crucifixion and was then condemned to roam the world forever without rest. Some say this condemnation was in fact an act of grace because the devil can’t find and take a man whose remorse drives him to wander ceaselessly in search of absolution.

In addition to his good dog, Crispin’s constant companion is remorse. That he could not save his brother. That he could not save his little sister. That he was so long blind to the truth of their stepfather and to the treachery of their unloving mother.

Now he and Harley pass a two-story buff-brick building that houses the local VFW post. The structure seems to tremble and swell with the muffled backbeat of a band playing an old Beatles tune, as if such rock and roll can’t be constrained without risk of explosion.

A wave of laughter and chatter and louder music washes across the sidewalk when two men, fumbling packs of cigarettes from their pockets, push open the door and step outside for a smoke. One is dressed as a pirate. The other wears a tuxedo, a fake goatee, and a pair of horns.

They glance at Crispin. The devil thumbs flame from a butane lighter.

The boy looks away from them. He takes up the slack in the leash, and brings the dog to his side.

Fifty yards or so from the VFW post, he dares to look back, half expecting the men to be following him. They are where he last saw them, smoke pluming from their mouths as if their souls must be on fire.

At the end of the block is a nightclub called Narcissus. No smokers loiter outside. The windows are two-way mirrors, offering no view of the interior.

A tall man stands beside a taxi. He assists a woman from the vehicle.

His dark hair is slicked back. His cheeks are rouged, his lips bright red. His face is painted like that of a ventriloquist’s dummy, with prominent laugh lines from his nose to the corners of his mouth. The woman’s makeup matches the man’s.

Attached to their white clothes at key points are thick black strings that have been broken. They are not costumed as ventriloquists’ dummies but instead as marionettes freed from their puppet master.

The man says to Crispin, “What a handsome dog,” and the woman says, “Your sister tasted so sweet.”

The encounter is by chance, but you can be killed by chance as easily as by someone’s design.

The dog runs, the boy runs, the man snares the boy by his jacket, the leash jerks from the boy’s hand, and the boy falls …

4

BEFORE CRISPIN WENT ON THE RUN …

He lives with his younger brother, Harley, and his little sister, Mirabell. They share a house with their mother, Clarette.

Each child has a different father because many men are drawn to their mother.

Clarette is so beautiful that one of her in-between boyfriends—in between the rich ones—tells Crispin, “Kid, your mom she’s like the magical princess in some fairy-tale cartoon movie, how she can charm kings and princes, even make animals and trees and flowers swoon and sing for her. But I never did see a cartoon princess as smokin’ hot as she is.”

At that time Crispin is seven years old. He understands the princes, animals, trees, and flowers part. Years will pass before he knows what “smokin’ hot” means.

Their mother is drawn to many men, not because their beauty matches hers but because of what they are able to do for her. She says that she has expensive tastes and that her “little bastards” are her ticket to the good life.

Each of their fathers is a man of great prominence for whom the existence of a little bastard would not only be an embarrassment but also a wrecking ball that might smash apart his marriage and lead to an expensive divorce.

In return for specifying on each birth certificate that the father is unknown, Clarette receives a one-time cash payment of considerable size and a smaller monthly stipend. The children live well, though not nearly as well as their mother, because she spends far more freely on herself than on them.

One night, she enjoys too much lemon vodka and cocaine. She insists that eight-year-old Crispin cuddle with her in an armchair.

He would rather be anywhere else but in her too-clingy arms and within range of her exotic breath. When she is in this condition, her embrace seems spidery, and for all her expressions of affection, he expects that something terrible will happen to him.

She tells him then that he ought to be grateful that she is so smart, so cunning, and so tough. Other women who make their living by giving birth to little bastards are likely sooner or later to have a well-planned accident or to become a victim of a supposedly random act of violence. Rich men do not like to be played for fools.

“But I’m too quick and bright and clever for them, Crispie. No one will take your mommy from you. I’ll always be here. Always and always.”

Time passes and change comes.…

The change is named Giles Gregorio. He makes the other rich men in Clarette’s life seem like paupers. His wealth is inherited and so immense as to be almost immeasurable.