Bernard Boyce Bennington & The American Dream (4 page)

And then it stops.

The stranger reaches out and presses the button, cutting off the silence.

Jim Leafman takes a drink and shakes his head.

Jack Fedogan stands up from the bar, thinks about reaching for his cloth and then decides against it. Instead, he turns up the volume again on his CD player, turns it up without hardly realizing he’s doing it, and the opening strains of ‘Self Portrait in Three Colors’, a song with no solos, the very same haunting music that graced John Cassevetes’s directorial debut movie,
Shadows,
fills the bar..

Edgar Nornhoevan looks at Jim and then at McCoy, whose eyes are closed, his hands thrust deep into his pants pockets.

And then Bernard Boyce Bennington speaks.

“You didn’t hear her, did you?”

The four men exchange glances and, silently, elect a spokesman.

Shaking his head, the Working Day’s bartender says, “No, there was only you…only your voice we heard.”

“
I
heard her,” a new voice says.

They turn around and come faces to face with the old man from the booth along the back wall. He must have come across while they were listening to the tape, come across real quiet so that nobody noticed him. And now here he is, sitting propped against the table right behind them, his battered valise by his feet. “
I
heard her,” he says, shaking his head, a smile playing across his mouth.

“She did me too,” the man says, and he reaches into his pocket, pulls out a small cardboard strip. “Did me in a train station down in Philly, late at night, in one of those booths where you can get four photographs for a dollar, behind a floor-length curtain oblivious to the world and the night. I fell asleep afterwards—right there in the booth, which was the only place we could find that offered any kind of privacy—and when I woke up, curled up on the floor like an abandoned child, there on top of my clothes was this.”

He hands the strip across to McCoy who accepts it and takes a look.

The strip has four photographs on it, each one with a man in the foreground, his back to the camera. The man appears to be naked, though the camera has only caught him to the small of his back, and his face, though it only appears in profile in just one of the shots, looks enraptured.

But more than that, tufts of his hair are sticking up no matter which way he moves his head…like someone is holding them, tugging them. Only there’s nobody else in the photographs.

Bernard Boyce Bennington lets out a stifled moan. “That’s her,” he says, “Oh my God, that is
her
.”

As McCoy Brewer hands the strip across to Jack Fedogan, the old man says, “But
you
don’t see her, do you?
You
see only me.”

“There isn’t anyone else on this except for you,” Jack says. “If it
is
you. Fella here looks a lot younger and, well…in a mite better shape than you look right now. No offense,” Jack says as he hands the strip across to Jim Leafman.

“None taken,” the old man says. “It was a long time ago, almost 20 years. She left me with that-” He nods at the strip of photos. “-and she took everything else that I had. My job, my home…and my sanity.

“I was getting a late train, going home after an all-day meeting that had gone on into one of those corporate dinners that offer only headaches and indigestion. I wasn’t looking for excitement, wasn’t looking for adventure—at least not right then, though I’d been getting a bit down, you know…lonely…wondering what life was all about. Maybe that was it: maybe I’d gotten the scent of vulnerability about me…because that’s what loneliness is, isn’t it? Being vulnerable.

“Then, out of the shadows, she came up to me. There was hardly anyone else in the station, just a couple of bums sleeping off the booze, and a guy sweeping up the concourse way down away from me. And she says to me, ‘Mister Yordeau, where can we go to be private?’”

“She knew your name, too?”

The man nods to McCoy. “Knew everything about me. Said she usually hung out in bars and clubs and so on—here in New York—same thing she told him.” He nods to Bernard Boyce Bennington. “And that was it. I went with her, may God have mercy on my soul…I went with her, looked around for someplace we could be alone, my heart thumping in my chest, and I saw the photo booth. We went inside and clothes started coming off right away, no questions asked, no conversation, no nothing.” The man stopped and shook his head. “I had never felt anything like that before in my life and I’ve never felt anything like it since.”

“So what did you do?” Jack asks, passing the old guy a beer and handing bottles out to everyone…like it’s a private party.

“Well, everything went to hell…like I said. I left everything behind me—and I mean
every
thing. And I started hanging around in bars trying to find her…to get her back…to-” He shrugged. “I don’t know what I was wanting—wanting her back, I guess…wanting to do it again.

“And I had conversations with bartenders and their regulars, showed them the photographs. And nobody could see her. Pretty soon, I realized she’d done something to my head. And after a few years, I changed.”

“Changed?” says Edgar. “Changed how?”

“Oh, I still looked for her—and I still do, even now—but not with the idea of getting her back again. I stopped showing people the photographs. Now I just go to a few bars every night…and I watch. And when I find her…” He turns and glances down at his bag, then stoops and picks it up, runs the zipper along and pulls it open.

“Jesus Christ!” says Jack Fedogan.

The man pulls out a wooden-headed mallet and a fistful of sharpened stakes, each one about a foot long.

“I mean to end her power,” the old man says, dumping the mallet and the stakes back into the bag. “I mean to free myself, free others—like him—and I mean to make the world safe from her, whatever she is.”

Bernard Boyce Bennington lifts the brown paper bag from the counter, having returned the player into it, and slips it into his pocket.

Jim Leafman says, “So how come you both end up in here…tonight?”

The man shrugs. “Coincidence. Nothing more. I guess it had to happen one day in one bar…two of the people she’s tainted coming together in the same place at the same time.”

“You followed me,” says Bernard Boyce Bennington, backing away now, backing towards the stairs.

The old man shakes his head, eyes closed.

Jack, also shaking his head…and waving his arms around, says, “Hey, hold on now…this guy was in here bef—”

“You followed me and you want me to lead you to her.”

And right about now, there’s a sound from up the stairs…maybe even from out on the street, and jack feels a breath of fresh air on his face.

The four men facing the stairs look up at the first footstep, then Jack looks too, and Horace Parlan lets his fingers drift along the piano keys in Jack’s CD player, lost in that long-ago impossibly wonderful session with Mingus. They look up the stairs, suddenly aware of the silence contributed to the scene in classic western style, the way any good honky-tonk ivories man would do when someone walked in through the saloon doors…aware of that and the foot on the wooden stairs, hearing another step, leaning over to try get a glimpse of whoever’s coming down into the bar, but they can’t see anything.

Then Bernard Boyce Bennington stops right where he is, his heels jammed up against the bottom stair, his brown paper bag clasped in his hand, and he breathes in deeply.

McCoy Brewer notices that there are tears running down B. B. Bennington’s cheeks, and he breathes in again, savoring the smell of the outside must be, McCoy thinks and he takes a step forward.

The man turns and looks up the stairs.

The others lean still further, like vaudevillian stuntmen or Keystone Kop fallabouts, still trying to see up the stairs. The feet have stopped, and all they want to see is an ankle…a shapely ankle, maybe…in a high heeled pump, standing in that narrow right-angle triangle of a gap between the upstairs floor and the banister rail leading downstairs…but then whatever made that foot-stepping kind of noise turns right around before they can see anything at all, never mind put a leg to the imagined ankle, and a waist to the leg, and a torso to the waist, a neck to the torso and, most desired of all, a head to crown off their creation. It turns and moves back up the few stairs its come down, back to the outside world and the mischievous air that waits there.

And for a few seconds right now…and even more seconds and minutes and maybe hours in the times to come and all the times that these men have left to them to think their midnight thoughts, the four men watching the stairs and the stranger called Bernard Boyce Bennington think maybe they imagined it, the footsteps…that maybe the night and the hour and the stories have gotten the best of them…that maybe it was the wind blowing down the New York City streets the way it does, a lonesome wind looking for a little late-night company, blowing the door so it clanged a little, nothing more: because, hey…it was late for a woman to be walking down into a bar by herself wasn’t it?

But not all of them harbor such doubts.

Without so much as a word, B. B. Bennington takes the stairs out of the Land at the End of the Working Day, a low deep sad moan building in his throat as he takes the stairs two and even three at a time, putting distance between himself and the people still standing watching him…McCoy’s hands partly outstretched in a mixture of defense and reasoning, Jim Leafman holding onto Edgar Nornhoevan’s arm, and the old man with the black valise already starting for the stairs. Jack Fedogan watches it all in dumfounded amazement.

“Hey!” Edgar calls, sliding off of his stool, though nobody is sure whether Edgar’s calling out to Bennington or to the old man with the valise.

And then there’s the sound of a car horn, squealing brakes, raised voices…and the unmistakable dull
crump!
of something being hit out on the street.

Already, the old man is nearing the top of the stairs.

Edgar Nornhoevan is halfway up.

McCoy and Jim are on the first couple of steps, and Jack is stepping from behind the bar.

They arrive in that order out on the rainy windswept street.

It’s late at night on the corner of 23rd and Fifth, and there’s nobody to be seen. Nobody except a small man with what might be the beginnings of a beard or just stubble from laziness. He’s wearing a small peaked cap, a sleeveless cardigan sweater and his rolled-up shirt sleeves are already soaked. He’s standing by the side of a yellow cab, its motor still running, the driver’s door wide open and the strains of rap music drifting out into the night, savoring a freedom of sorts. The man is looking down at a bundle in the road, partly covered by his cab, and every few seconds he looks around, his arms spread in confusion…and just once in a while he glances across the street at the empty sidewalk which carries on along 23rd in the direction of Park Avenue South and, beyond that, Lexington which, of course, gives onto Gramercy Park.

“Not my fault,” the man is explaining to anyone who will listen. “Not my fault, man,” he says again, waving a hand whose fingers are kind of pointed and kind of curled in, waving it at the people who have suddenly gathered on the sidewalk. “Guy comes up out of-” The man looks around and sees the sign,
The Land at the End of the Working Day
, and his eyebrows flick up, just for a second or two, and everyone knows there’s a voice in the back of his head asking
What the hell kind of a place is that, man?
but immediately dismissing it because he’s a New Yorker and he’s seen many strange names on the buildings around town and many strange people coming out of them. “Guy comes up out of there, man, runnin’, and he gets to the curb and he looks around and then it’s like he sees somethin’ across the street and he just steps off, man…I mean-” He does the wave with his pointy-curly hand again and then smacks both hands together. “-and
Blammo!
, you know what I’m sayin’, man? I couldn’t do nothin’, I mean I couldn’t do nothin’ at all. Dude just steps out and
Blammo!
Shit,” he concludes, dragging the word out so that it’s two syllables, ‘shee’ and ‘itt’. He shakes his head and pushed his cap back. “I ain’t never hit nobody, man, and I been drivin’ cabs for eighteen years.” His voice is a little high-pitched and he sounds close to tears. He turns to the others and says, “Any of you guys a doctor or somethin’?” He looks down at the bundle again. “Shit,” he says, “you think maybe he’s dead?”

Jack steps across and leans over Bernard Boyce Bennington and looks into the man’s open eyes, watching the rain drops fall on the pupils without so much as a blink. There’s a thin trail of darkness at the corner of his mouth—his
smiling
mouth, Jack notices—which washes away every three or four seconds and then reappears, and there’s a wide stain of blackness on the man’s shirt front.

The cab driver has turned away and is now looking down 23rd. “You know, he says over his shoulder, “there was somebody across the street, you know what I’m sayin’ here? Some woman, looked like. She must’ve seen it wasn’t my fault, man but she just up and went. Where the hell did she go?”

The old man with the black valise steps forward and places a hand on the driver’s shoulder. “Where’d she go?”

“Huh?” The cab driver looks like someone’s just asked him an arcane algebraic formula known only to Harvard lawyers.

“The woman. You see what she looked like … where she went?”

The driver shrugs. “She looked like…I don’t know what she looked like, man,” he says. “She was…she was just a woman.” Then he shakes his head. “Maybe there wasn’t any-”

“You see where she went?”

“I think it was a woman, man,” the driver says looking around at the street and trying to piece it all together again because everything has happened just so fast. “Too dark and too wet to tell for sure. But seems to me she was standin’ right there, like she was makin’ to cross but standin’ well back from the curb.” He shakes his head again, trying to shake free the sight of a woman’s face—oh, such a
sweet
face—looking up at him, speaking silently to him about the loneliness of the streets and the night…telling him, deep down in his head, down where everything mattered and nothing mattered…telling him that she understood and that one day she would take that loneliness away from him…and that all he had to do was wait, wait and keep silent…because one day they would meet again. And she reached down to the man on the road way and lifted a brown paper package from his hand.