Going Down Fast (9 page)

Leon persisted, “She break her engagement?”

Vera wriggled her toes. “Break it?”

Paul asked her, “Did she ever pay you for that whopping big phonebill?”

“Naturally.” Vera's lips shut tight. Turning her back she plumped up the pillow, piled the used plates, put the leftover juice on the outside windowledge. After she had watched the weak snow littering down, she turned around with a yawn.

Anna rose. “At any rate, I have to be going.”

As he got up Leon said to Paul, “If you really are flunking that course, get in touch.”

“Oh, Paul hates to be tutored. He's too stubborn,” Vera said.

“I wasn't offering to tutor. Still, I can guarantee you'll pass.” Leon let out a slash of grin and ducked out, tramping downstairs. The door across the landing opened an inch, an eye surveyed them. As she descended through the gloom she heard Vera's windchime laugh and the door bang shut.

That evening he spoke of them. “Sick scene, eh?”

“All those masks and dolls? It would get on my nerves.”

Leon shoved them away with a thick palm. “Not the decor. The way the kid is eaten up by his sister. She answers for him. She decides what he'll do. You hear that bit about ‘we'—if you aren't going to be an archaeologist, what will we do? She acts like she's married to him.”

“Well …” They had charmed her, the sense of play and private pastures and the longlegged games of young giraffes. “I'm not sure how much one controls the other. They both obey a certain style. He answers for her too.”

“Style? She's an ordinary domineering bitch with a kid brother under her thumb. Another sick family all hung up on each other. What choice does he have? Probably doesn't see what's happening. Doesn't see the obscene trap he's grown into.”

“Then you aren't interested in her.”

He snorted. “That frigid tank? A real castrator. Those managerial chicks, spade or white, they freeze my blood.”

“I thought maybe that's why we went.”

“Uh uh.” He slumped on the couch, with his massive head bent forward on his chest. With his sleeves rolled halfway up the hairs in the light made his arms look dipped in water. Slowly the lids over his milky eyes settled. When he did not speak she thought he had dozed off and took up a book to read.

“Very few things I want. Most of them I can't have. Not ever.” His brows were yanked together, his pale eyes fixed on nowhere. “What you don't see is I care a lot about her.”

She looked at him blankly. “Vera?”

“No! Caroline!” He rasped. “I have to find out what's happening. I have to know. It sticks in my throat. It gnaws on me. She's dying step by step and nobody cares. Nobody
sees
her but me—and she can't see me.”

Her stomach dropped like a fallen cake. He was in love with Caroline. Seemed like everybody was.

“I had her, and I screwed up. The way I screw up everything.” He slammed his fist on the table. “Everything. I can't deal with people, can't deal with things. That I get anything done, that I feed myself and get through a day and maybe make a short film once in a while is a miracle.”

“How did you happen to break with her then?”

“Joye was pregnant. Finally she really was.” He wiped the sweat from his forehead. “It's taken me a long time to undo the damage I did then. I got excited, I got desperate. I wanted them both to keep their heads and they both panicked. Joye wouldn't even talk rationally.”

What the hell did he expect her to do?

“But by not asking anything of Caroline, just being here, always being here so she knows she can come for help when she needs it … I've got to play it cool. Then she got this idea to go traipsing around Europe, running away from herself, from me. Comes back with that rock. What do you do with a person who says she's in love with somebody else? Even if you know it's a lie.”

“But do you think she loved you?”

“She's not capable of love. But I'm the chance she has.”

“Why?”

Again he struck his fist on the table. “It's a thing I saw—something I knew from the first time with her. Only I couldn't believe it then. Not being with her is hell. Who can tell what it's like at night when I'm alone. I hit the walls. I have to scrape myself off the ceiling. I think I'm losing my mind. She turns everything on me, and I can't con myself with anything less.”

When he talked about Caroline she had the feeling he was reciting an incantation, a formula. She believed and disbelieved.

“So I had a month, one month, between her sashaying back in here with that sparkler and the time her beloved gets here. And Rowley has to fuck up. He just has to.”

By midnight Anna was exhausted, while Leon's voice had lost its sullen thunder. He was finally cheerful and had her make cocoa. Her chest felt hollow, her head ached. Why should she mind if he loved Caroline? They decided she was to spend the night on the couch. Obviously he liked that. As he said, he hated to be alone.

As she was making up the couch he said offhand, “Don't know why you live in that rathole. They won't even tell you when it'll come down around your ears.”

“It's cheap.” The curse had left. She liked her rooms again.

“You ought to move in here—plenty of room for two, three.… Save yourself money and be comfortable, ha ha.”

“And fight like caged cats, ha ha.” She sat on the couch and kicked off her shoes. “You're genuinely domestic, but I'm not.” He was out of his mind to imagine she would live with him in bloodless brotherhood!

“No? Who asked you to clean this barn?”

“That's not what I mean.”

“Evidently.” Leon grinned.

For the first time she felt a polarization of the air, a sexual question between them. I wonder, she thought, I wonder how real that obsession with Caroline is.

Leon

November

He kept noticing the building as he came from Woody's bar or her apartment, not because they were tearing it down but because they had stopped. A foot of snow fell on the weekend. The next day the air softened, the sun poured down melting snow that froze that night in a jagged crust. His car was soldered to its parking place. All week in the brittle cold, the wolf wind sinking its teeth in his neck, he kept passing the building.

The doors had been ripped off and stood as a fence. The windows were broken, the roof kicked in. Part of the facade had been knocked away. The apartment—built on rough gray stone the color of Chicago—stood against the night sky half buried in its own rubble and ominously dark. Buildings are hardly ever that dark. Moon froze on its streaked walls in ghostly almostpinks and almostyellows. In the wind a forgotten chandelier tilted and swung.

From looking at that building every time he came past, he noticed a light in the redbrick tenement next door that he had thought empty. A glimmer showed at one second-floor window. A wavering light like a flame.

In Woody's he found out that an old woman clung there barnacle-like, alone. He saw her a greatgrandmother, outliving children, forgotten by her descendants. In the daytime she crouched at a window with its cracks stuffed with rags, looking out at the busy street. People said she had lived there thirty years. People said she was crazy. She beamed at the Saturday street of shopping carts and dragged babies and drunks and linked couples. The electricity, the gas, the heat had been cut off. The city had delivered written warning the water would go next. They had given her every chance, they said. Now when he walked by he watched for her lamp.

He came past one morning in blurred dawn and saw that they had begun wrecking the gray apartment again. The crane reared above the shattered torso, ready to strike. In the halflight he saw the rats come out in lines, in slow deliberate rows, then the stragglers alone and hurrying after: he saw the migration of the rats from basement crannies and wall bowers of the broken building. They did not go into the old woman's tenement next door. They poured in orderly measured haste toward the houses in the street behind, the townhouses with their shoveled walks and snowcapped hedges. He stood with his worn tweed overcoat pulled up around his ears and watched. In ten minutes they were gone. A case of relocation in superior housing.

Rowley

Saturday, October 25

He woke feeling great. The night before he'd been drinking, but he had burned it up. The bedroom faced the next house across two feet of hard earth, but lying in its gloom he felt sure the day was good. Harlan's boy was whamming a ball thump off the steps. In the next room Yente was chasing something.

Last night he'd barely made it from the studio in time to take over from the second singer at a hoot. He had done his show live because of turning up another Black Jack record. He swung out of bed, sat scratching his toes. The song seeped through:

For each time I make it it's seven times I lose
,

Yeah for each time winning it's seven times I lose
,

That's how come I got the California Boulevard Blues
.

House of detention. Jack Custis' rawhide voice working it over, voice from the late thirties with the flab and lilt scoured from it, a black singer who sounded as if the grit of a dirty world had honed him mean and powerful.

He stumbled on the first record by accident in a secondhand store, in a pile that looked like nothing but Guy Lombardo. Opened his September twelfth show with it. One side was a battered verson of “Jail-House Blues,” the other “Why Don't You Get Out Of Here and Get Me Some Money, Too.” Sung by a man that was audacity. Turned the song on its noggin. He quit scratching. Imagine Annie not digging it. She had lit into him for something he'd sung and nothing about his find. He shrugged and got up as a crash came from the livingroom.

He sauntered over to pluck Yente from the door where the cat was cliffhanging. From his leaping point, the top of the bookcase, books had cascaded. Near the ceiling a fat horsefly buzzed. Rowley reached up, held off a minute, grabbed. Bringing his hand slowly down with the fly knocking against the palm, he released the fly in Yente's face, laughing as the cat spilled forward.

Then the second disc with two original blues. In the meantime a listener wrote that Black Jack had been in Chicago during World War II and performed around bars on the South Side. So he told his listeners and urged that any tapes or records be dug up. If Jack himself were alive he should get in touch and the same with anyone who knew him. Just after he went off a woman phoned. She said her son had called her in the middle of the first song, he had FM and he was a student at Roosevelt. That was surely Jack Custis, but he hadn't sung she thought in a long long time. Yes, he'd been in Chicago, got a janitor's job, but right after VJ day they fired him and she lost track. However, his sister Lucille had married a man named Thomson in the post office. Lucille had three sons, but she helped Jack after he got turned out of his job. She told him the church Lucille had belonged to and where she'd lived.

The day was bright and clear with a long clean wind off the lake. He carried his typewriter out and answered his mail sitting on Harlan's steps—the straight flight leading to almost secondfloor level was a local style dating from the era when Chicago was filling itself out of the mud and nobody knew what height the sidewalks would be. Yente thrashed around in the cottonwood leaves on the lawn. Touch football in the street. In a backyard little kids were playing some counting game, shrill, rhythmic.

He stopped upstairs on his way out, tried to get Harlan to come with him. Harlan at the dinette table with documents on federal urban renewal laws a foot deep around him. “No I'm not going to go playing hide-and-seek with some rickety old race hustler all around the South Side. I got twenty phonecalls to make. And I thought you were going to help me put up posters?”

He had lunch at his favorite rib place full of the spicy smoke and ate an order with hot sauce standing. Then he drove west. Everybody was out riding around and it took forever to get by South Park and 47th, with cars making turns from the wrong lane and Bobbie Blue Bland drawing a crowd at the Regal. He did not think he would find Jack Custis today or next week, but he was sure he would find him.

He'd never taken himself seriously as a performer. He played for the pleasure and the cash. The women sometimes. He had good presence and rapport with an audience, but he liked best playing backup for somebody first rate. He wanted to play behind Jack Custis.

If only Harlan had come, that would heighten the game as well as increase the chances for success. They would be kidding and hustling each other. They didn't get that much time together any more.

He found the big yellow apartment house the woman had described though it was on the corner of 43rd and not 41st. No Thomson. No Thompson, Tomson or Tompson. He rang the super, which did nothing. Finally stumbled on him at the back basement entrance.

The super was not a heavy man yet he looked flabby. Gray had worked into the brown of his skin and his hair was grizzled, but he had all his teeth and he locked his jaws together. No. He didn't know nothing. No, no Mrs. Thompson, Thomson or otherwise lived there or ever had. He had been super more years than he could remember. No, nobody else would know. His eyes narrowed, his jaw set and he said No, No, No. Rowley tried to explain. Hatred flashed off the super like the blinding beam of a lighthouse.

He drove back slowly. He still had a lead: the Baptist church Lucille had belonged to, but next time he would try to go through helpful channels. He stopped to comb new releases at a shop that carried a lot of rhythm and blues and stopped again to pick up posters Harlan had ordered.

“You can't just go around putting those posters on people's property!” Shirley said. Her smooth brow puckered. Shirley was a thin bigboned woman with honey skin and a high rounded coiffure worn just to her nape. She was a fierce housekeeper and an earnest mother and without trusting Rowley admired him—he could never figure why since she disliked music with more thrust or grit than Mantovani. Harlan's previous girls had been ones to make men's heads turn in a bar rather than to warm a teacher's heart at the PTA. But he had to admit the kids were great. Harlan spent a lot of time playing with them, going over homework or teaching them to make things (often with a how-to book in hand, since his own childhood had been anything but what he was providing).