Crazy (8 page)

Details. Never mind. Science ruled.

So I dredged for more proof that this really was Jane.

“What was the last thing on the East River walkway that you said to me about my father?” I asked her, and then I instantly threw up an impenetrable wall of white noise around my mind that no telepath could possibly penetrate, a feat that I accomplished by shutting my eyes and mentally reciting over and over the lyrics of the hit song “Three Little Fishies”:

“Joey!”

The kid snapped me out of it sharply.

“I told you that he loved you and to be good to him.”

Wham! And then of all the dumb luck, who do I see chatting and coming our way but Baloqui and Winifred Brady! When he saw me Baloqui stopped short for a second, maybe thinking of yelling, “Hey, I’ve got him! I’ve captured El Cheapo!” But then the two of them slowly started ambling toward us again. I looked down at Miss Enigma of 1941 and hoarsely whispered, “I thought you said the boardwalk was safe!”

And she hissed back, “Okay, so I
thought
it was safe! I never said I was a fucking oracle!”

My God!
I thought.
This really
is
Jane!

“Hiya, Joey! How ya doin’?”

Baloqui and Brady were now standing in front of us.

I said, “Fine, Baloqui. Fine. Where’s the gang?”

“They’re around.”

“Yeah, I thought so. Good. That’s good.”

For a second Baloqui eyed me inscrutably, then he lowered his droopy, dark gaze to Jane. “Who’s your friend?”

“You mean you
see
her?”

Baloqui looked up at me, squinting and knitting his brow.

He said,
“What?”

I said, “I think she’s something to see.”

Baloqui turned his head to exchange blank looks with Brady, then back to me, his black eyes crammed with suspicion, although of what he as usual had no idea. “You look relieved,” he observed. “Why is that?”

“I guess it’s just the kind of hairpin I am.”

Baloqui shrugged. “Free country.”

He returned his gaze to Jane. “So who is she?” he asked.

“My niece.”

“You got a niece, El Bueno? Since when?”

“Since she was born,” I replied under color of invincible thickheadedness. “She’s here visiting from Peru,” I then added.

Jane looked down and put a hand to her head and slowly shook it, while, as usual, Winnie Brady continued to say nothing, mutely staring with wide blue eyes, her forte.

“From Peru,” Baloqui echoed flatly. He was staring in a way I hadn’t seen since that time I was ticked at him over beating me badly at Monopoly and to wound him I’d quoted a made-up travel expert writing in
Holiday Magazine
that Manhattan was “by far a more glamorous, vibrant and exciting city than either Barcelona or Seville,” at which Baloqui had lifted his chin and with a look of glacial ice mixed with lukewarm pity said, “Even the Devil can quote scripture out of context.” It was the single black eyebrow sickling up that was the killer: it would have turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of guava jelly laced with pull-string recordings of her constant “I need my space!” total bullshit, although now she really needed it, you could say.

“Yes, from Lima,” I said. And then, after a pause, I quietly added, “Or thereabouts.” And at this Jane set up a howl of crying and sobbing.

I looked down and said, “What’s wrong, little niece?”

“I have to go baffoom!” she bawled.

His inner vision always turned to an azure sky where puffy cloudlets tinted gold and vermillion by a constantly setting sun framed his pantheon of Apollo, Zeus and Manolete, Baloqui flinched, the corner of his mouth pulling back in a grimace of both fear and distaste at the mention of eliminatory matters, this coupled with a dread of even more to come, such as “ka-ka,” or “DaVinci Dew,” or, worst of all in his mind, “number two,” in the presence of Brady in this halcyon, taffy-scented glow of the day. Taking hold of Brady’s hand and with a stare in which a clear threat of maiming could be detected, he growled, “That dollar reward’s a lot of money, El Bueno. As long as I am silent you are safe.
You owe me!
” With this he turned and they walked away, and with my eyes on Brady’s back, in the movie screen of my mind I saw the actor Jack La Rue, always typecast as a gangster, standing beneath a lamppost looking menacing—his only look—while flipping a quarter in the air and catching it over and over, which he did in every movie he was in, his movie dialogue now sounding in my head with a boomy echo-chamber effect:

When Baloqui and Brady were far enough away, Jane abruptly quit bawling to look up at me deadpan and utter, “I thought they’d
never
leave. Listen, Joey, I’m hungry. Can we eat somewhere now?”

I said, “You
eat?
”

“What does
that
mean?” she said, glowering up at me, and after telling her that I had no idea, hand in hand we started walking toward a modest little eatery I’d once seen at the end of the boardwalk where I thought there’d be almost no chance of another highly dangerous “brief encounter”—in particular with Vera Virago. I had to take baby steps so Jane could keep up, and as we walked I looked down at her pigtails and curly red mop, still trying to figure out what was happening. The time jumps. Jane. Were I older I’d have thought about bizarre disorders of the brain, like in that book
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
, but back then I was lost. At times I’d just helplessly snicker and shake my head, and once even wondered if I was just dreaming, except the dream was too long and the Nathan’s aromas too pungent. I mean, I see things and I’ve heard things in my dreams but never smelled them.

This was real.

Whatever
that
was.

“Oh, goody!” Jane exclaimed, her eyes beaming in a face as plump and shiny and round as a candy apple held in bright sunlight. Her hand still in mine, she was staring up at the sign for
NOT NATHAN’S!!!
, the only kosher hot dog server in Coney Island. The sign’s exclamation points sent a message:

GOYS, FORGET IT!
WE HAVE NOTHING YOU LIKE!

“What do you want, children? Tell me. I’m here for you.”

The paunchy little white-haired, middle-aged guy behind the counter—who I guess was the owner—was wiping his hands on his mustard-stained apron and could easily have been the actor “Cuddles” Sakall, who played the soft-hearted waiter at Rick’s in
Casablanca.
Already his eyes were welling up with forgiveness even before we’d done anything wrong.

He said, “Hot dog? Maybe bratwurst with mustard and onion?”

“You serve any beer or wine?” Jane asked him, her dimpled little face upturned and with her arms akimbo in a classic Shirley Temple mode of challenging sulk. Her voice even had that lispy pout.

The owner’s eyes bugged out, and now he looked even more like Sakall saying,
“Honest? Honest as the day is long!”
whereas Jane’s defiant comeback stare was more
“You played it for her, you can play it for me!”
“Only root beer, sarsaparilla,” he finally sputtered. “But also Joe Louis Punch. I forgot. It’s new.” He picked up a greenish colored bottle. There was a picture or decal on it of the bare-chested heavyweight champion, the “Brown Bomber,” in a fighting stance. The owner held it up to us. “We also have War Cards,” he added. These were like baseball cards and came with bubblegum strips, but instead of a photo of Dixie Walker or Cookie Lavagetto on the card there’d be these multicolored comic strip sketches of gory atrocities being committed by Japanese soldiers, things like bayoneting babies in midair and whatever else helped them calm their nerves that day.

“No, no War Cards,” I told him. “They’d make the kid sick.”

“I understand.”

I looked up at a posted menu list with the prices, then leaned over with my mouth very close to Jane’s ear. “Have you got any money?” I whispered. She pulled her head away and looked me in the eye with this deadpan, steady expression and said quietly and colorlessly, “Don’t you?”

“Uh, well, yeah,” I mumbled. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess. I mean, I’m sure. My treat. I insist, in fact. I
insist!
” I straightened up and we ordered some stuff and then took it outside to a bench looking out to the sea. There was a breeze and these jillions of gulls all circling and squawking forlornly but with great agitation and high excitement as if they were in factions that were blaming one another for the loss of some unspoiled world, some paradise where every automobile was a convertible and where hats and awnings did not exist. Meantime, Jane ate a hot dog washed down with sarsaparilla, perhaps if only to prove that she was real and not a ghost like some future scripture scholars, “The Completely Independent-Minded Seminar for the Truth About the Resurrection Scam,” as they called themselves, would be saying about Christ, as if the twelve apostles were in fact the Twelve Morons who even in the middle of a sunlit day weren’t able to tell a ghost from either Lou Costello or a pepperoni pizza or were just happy to be tortured and killed for what they knew was a lie. The seminar’s leader was a celebrated movie director who got famous with
Skyless,
a Norwegian film about a nuclear sub on patrol for three years without ever once surfacing and whose crew members never got irritable or raised their voices to one another. Crammed with subliminal advertisements for Prozac, the movie was a monster hit and the director quickly followed it up with
Sieve,
his controversial “film of supernatural terror” about a condom dispensing machine that’s possessed by the spirit of a drill punch. The seminar group used different-colored painted lima beans to vote on the meaning of various enigmatic statements by Christ, such as “Feed the hungry” and “Visit the sick.”

God knows what else they did.

“Now, then, Joey, I think we need to talk.”

Hands in the pockets of my dashing “genuine Zelan” Windbreaker that I’d whined Pop into buying for me from Davega’s on 42nd Street even after he’d explained to me that “Zelan” was a word that Davega’s had invented meaning “Nylon for Idiot Children,” I turned my soft gaze from the gulls to look down at this pigtailed…What? Hallucination? Apparition?

But Baloqui saw her too. Which meant what?

That he was just another part of my delusion?

“Yeah, we
do
need to talk,” I agreed.

Boy,
did
we!

“Hold on.”

She got up off the bench and with her racing little steps thumping lightly on the wood of the boardwalk, she made a dash to a nearby trash can into which she dumped her napkin, paper plate and the empty sarsaparilla bottle, trotted back to the bench, sat down, clasped her hands in her lap and looked up at me gravely. The bounce of blue light from the ocean tinted her eyes to an aquamarine that seemed much less a color than a memory of seas on some other world.

“Joey, why are you so cheap?” she said.

I almost fell off the bench.

I said, “Huh?”

“You heard me. You’re a cheapskate, Joey. The worst! Haven’t you learned yet that money can’t buy you happiness?”

At this I relaxed a bit, for I was now on familiar ground inasmuch as I was greatly experienced in dealing with “Cliché Experts” and I thought about snappy retorts like, “I presume you are speaking of
Confederate
money,” but then decided to be prudent and withhold my friendly fire.

“I’ve got a few questions of my own,” I said.

“Such as what?” she demanded in that piping, sulky voice, her lower lip pouting upward like her muppety doppelgänger/aka Shirley Temple in
Wee Willie Winkie
asking Victor McLaglen why she couldn’t go along with him to fight the naughty Thugee assassins who were busy strangling everyone in sight who wasn’t wearing a dhoti and a turban.

“Well, for one,” I said firmly, “did you or did you not ever float about six feet in the air in front of the refreshment counter at the ‘Supe’ because they’d just run out of Peter Paul Mounds, not to mention did you ever get into a limo containing the Asp and Mr. Am?”

“Quit trying to change the subject!”

“
I’m
changing the subject?”

Well, at this she launched into her mind-reading thing, which was beginning to resemble Anne Corio at Minsky’s Burlesque, flashing quick, sly peeks at her Two Big Reasons at the start of her act to ensure that her audience was fully attentive and understood the point of the proceedings. “And get this straight, by the way,” Jane lectured. “The reason clichés are said and written over and over again is because what they’re saying is
true!
” Little Jane then went on and on with this theme as she hammered on my “shameful” dealings with Vera Virago, pointing out that at the end of the day all the thrills of the rides and the taste of creamed popcorn would be nothing but a memory and all I’d have is a bunch of regret and self-recrimination, plus a jillion whispered comments made back of shielding hands. “Joey, aren’t you even just a little bit sorry? And what would your father think if he knew?”

At that, I decided to listen.
Really
listen.

“Remember that time you were five years old and you found a nickel and a dime in the street in the middle of some thrown-away Alf Landon buttons you picked up because you liked the cheery sunflower on them? You remember what you did then, Joey? You remember? You ran to the five-and-dime,” she said, “to the Woolworth’s right across the street and you bought a little penknife for your father, a tortoise-shell hair comb for your sister, and got nothing for yourself. You remember?”

My God! She knew
everything!

I looked out at the ocean.

“Yeah, I remember,” I said.

“And how did you feel that night, Joey?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I guess happy.”

“Was it happy like eating ice cream or even seeing
Gunga Din
?”

No, it wasn’t. It had filled me up completely.

I said, “No. Not even close.”

Her little eyes were flitting back and forth across my face, and she said, “That’s right. When the ice cream and the chocolate are gone, all of that kind of happy goes with them. That’s the difference. The other kind of happy stays. So as long as you can smile or say a kind word to someone, you can never run out of giving, which means you can never run out of happy.”

A couple of pelicans had flapped their way into the melee of whacko gulls and were dive-bombing vertically into the ocean. Watching them, I nodded my head and said, “True.”

“And now you’re feeling it all over again a little, right, Joey?”

Again I nodded.

“That was you. The real you. It’s still inside you, Joey. See, all you had to do was remember.”

I turned my head to look down at her and saw her looking up at me and so pleased. Then she turned to the sea again and the white-flecked foamy surf rolling in. “You like movies a lot, don’t you, Joey?”

“Oh, well, sure.”

“Did you ever see
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
?” she asked, a fond faraway dreaminess in her voice. “Maybe not. Maybe it hasn’t been made yet. It’s about this beautiful young widow who’s played by Gene Tierney and she’s living in a house overlooking the sea that once belonged to a handsome ship’s captain who’s played by Rex Harrison and the Captain’s ghost begins to haunt her and he falls in love with her, but then this smirky snake, this creepo who’s played by George Sanders, he worms his way into her affections. The Captain foresees it will end for her in heartbreak, but he also knows Lucia—that’s the widow—well, she has to live her life and he shouldn’t interfere, and just before the Captain’s ghost disappears for the very last time he looks out through a window at the sea and starts talking emotionally about things they could have done had they met when he was still alive, the great romance and the excitement of the sea and all the faraway places they’d have sailed to together, then at the end of it he breaks your heart when he’s still looking out the window and says, ‘Oh, Lucia, what we’ve missed!’”

“And that’s the end of the movie?”

“No. It’s really the beginning. She grows old and when she dies while she’s napping in a chair the Captain’s ghost comes back, and taking both of her hands in his, he says, ‘And now Lucia you’ll never be tired again,’ and he lifts her ghost to her feet and she’s young and beautiful again and they walk away hand in hand and disappear.”

“So what’s the point? Are you saying you’re a ghost?”

She shook her head.

“Just thinking of what might have been, Joey. That’s all.”

She fell quiet, a soft and sad kind of quiet, and I folded my arms across my chest and had joined her in staring out at the sea when a much louder squawking arose among the gulls, infuriated now because one of the pelicans had scooped up a fish and was flying a victory lap around them. “Come on, Jane,” I pleaded. “What the heck is going on here! My head’s about to split in two!”

“Oh, well, who knows?” she said, sighing, her eyes still on the sea. “Maybe somebody’s dreaming us. Maybe it’s God: God dreaming this world, this bench, those gulls with their blasé, happy-go-lucky, ‘What do we care who we crap on just so long as it’s fun’ way of thinking. They’re just freaking flying sociopaths with beaks.” She turned her head and looked up at me intently. “Well, there’s one thing that I
do
know,” she said, “and it’s that the world you’re in now isn’t the real one. The real one’s waiting patiently for you while you make yourself fit to be there and be able to enjoy what it’s got to offer. Maybe heaven and hell are the same place, Joey. If it were a restaurant and everything they served had lots of garlic, if you love the taste of garlic it’s heaven, but if garlic makes you vomit, it’s hell. Life is learning to develop a taste for what heaven’s got to offer, and then growing that taste to the max. You know, ‘soul formation’? That’s really just learning how to be happy, which is learning how to love,
really
love, which is by giving. And then maybe, Joey, one day we’ll both be in heaven eating blueberry pie with chocolate ice cream and knowing that we’ll never run out of either one, which is just a way of saying we’ll have a happiness we know won’t ever end. That’s the world that you’ve got to be in training for, Joey, and you get there like Kurt Vonnegut says, which is,
‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’
”

“Who’s Kurt Vonnegut?”

She turned to me now with a warm little smile of bemusement. “One day you’ll find out for yourself,” she said. “In the meantime, just do like he says.”

“Okay. Also who’s this Rex Harrison?”

“An actor.”

“Never heard of him.”

“You will.”

And it was then I remembered the weird thing that she’d said about that movie, that maybe it hadn’t been made yet, and at that a kind of answer to her mystery came to me, the Peerless El Bueno, avid reader of not only
Doc Savage
,
The Avenger
and
The Shadow
while standing for hours by the magazine rack in Boshnack’s, but also of
Astounding
and
Amazing
magazines!

“Are you saying you’re from the future?” I gasped.

She gave a shrug. “Future. Past. What’s the diff?”

“Yes, I see,” I said, nodding and looking thoughtful. “Good point.”

The little Jane creature eyed me inscrutably, doubtlessly gauging me as brimmingly full of hot peaches, which so often I’ve been and am and will be. Then she gave a little sigh and leaned back.