Need (28 page)

No value to struggling, though. “I need to go. I must,” Anna said, then she left him and started her pacing again, moving through the room in her nakedness with her scrawny boy’s bum and those dimples on the back of her thighs like
vaccination scars, he could never remember their name, and her failed breasts that would never hold a pencil clasped or even a cigar. A carrier bag was in her hand, and she was throwing in her possessions without looking. The Mango Body Butter, and the Exclusive Triple AlphaHydroxy Fruit Acid Complex, and the Exfoliating Gel. Exfoliate;
X-Foal-I-Ate:
“Take me down,” she said again. So he did.

She put on a long velvet gown, and over it the slicker that she used for camouflage. Shiny black like a watchman’s cape, the slicker’s insides stank of a grey-faced monkey, of urine and rot, John Joe knew that for a fact.

As for her new gold veil with the crimson trim, she wore it coiled like a bracelet at her wrist but left both ends free to flutter, twin pennants as she sailed out of her dressing room and through the reeking kitchens to the club where the fat girl called Yasmin danced in see-through underwear, wriggling her appendix scar in a turquoise spotlight.

The alternate barman stood filing his nails, too bored to speak when Anna raided the cash register, scooping up bank-notes in both hands and stuffing them down her cleavage; then departed.

The night as they walked crosstown towards Grand Central smelled like a storm, and the sidewalks were slick with wet, but no rain fell, there was only heat-mist. Outside the station the boys with their megaphones were still hard at it, they never gave up. “Would you say I was black?” John Joe asked.

“Black is beautiful. You’re yellow,” Anna said, and she drew him inside, across the grand concourse underneath the painted night sky and the electric stars flickering, into the subways, she brought him underground.

Never mind
Take me down
, it was herself that did all the taking. There was not a thing for any man to do, only trail three steps behind her and follow where she led, up steps and
down ramps, along platforms to other platforms, past the workmen laying down red carpeting and the runway for tomorrow’s fashion show, and the added guards with their bullet-proof vests, until they were good and lost. Only then did she pause for breath, take one look into his face. “Well, call it jonquil. Or maybe saffron,” she said. She trailed his cheekbone with her veil, placed one fingertip in the socket of his eye, blew softly on the burns. “A fetching shade of quince,” she said.

For some cause that no words fitted, John Joe felt guilty in her sight then. Unknowable she was to him, forever beyond his grasp, so he turned away in haste, let the tunnels swallow them.

Descending to Mount Tabor at this time of night was no easy task. Lawmen were prowling in posses, and fugitives running in packs, scurrying between the tracks and along the overhead ledges, smashing every source of light for secrecy. So that John Joe and Anna were forced to find their way by feel alone, groping at the tunnel walls, stumbling over garbage and sleeping bags and maybe fallen bodies, there was no means to know. “This is fun, this is a delight,” Anna said in darkness, “I always did like going down, I mean descending,
When the going was good, I got so good at going
, Waycross Martin wrote that,
I got so good at going, I forgot how to come
, or plummeting by any other name like skiing or snorkelling or even bungee-jumping, or diving into a vat full of feathers come to that, my natural element so to speak, freefalling is what I do best, and why not, it’s what I’ve done longest, my earliest memory, did I ever tell you that?”

“You did not.”

“Must have slipped my mind like I slipped through Chief Wigwam’s fingers when he was pushing me on the swing out by the boating pond. I must have been five, and he kept driving me
higher and higher with every push, clean over the treetops it seemed, till finally the rope snapped, and I was flung into the air. Flying then falling, I never was so scared, so thrilled, and when I tumbled back to earth, the instant before I crashed, guess what I thought,
I wish I could see me
, I thought.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Only when I landed,” Anna said. But when she hit bottom this time, it seemed the other way round. John Joe heard her gasp in relief, felt her hand soaking wet through his sleeve. “My lips are sealed,” she said, and he tapped at the metal steampipe with his keys, received the two taps in reply, then held open the door in the rockface while she passed into Mount Tabor.

A few hours just had passed since John Joe had been here last, yet the mood was changed utterly. Instead of a clubhouse, it felt like a bunker now. No children played Power Rangers, no women hung washing, and rifles were piled high at the feet of Crouch’s sculptures. Under the gas lanterns, Master Maitland sat surrounded by his troops, each man garlanded with an ammunition belt.

Seeing Anna Crow, a stranger, the Master did not rise to greet her. Hunched massive in his black robes, he merely surveyed her, indifferent. “What are you good for?” he asked.

“I can dance,” Anna said. “Well, not just dance, I can sew and cook as well, nothing fancy you understand, just home-style Southern cooking, smothered pork chops, meatloaf, my chicken-fried steak has won golden opinions, and then I’m training for a nurse, I can heal, I can make you well.”

“
Good for
, I said.”

But Anna had no time to answer him afresh. Before she could compose her thoughts, there came a noise like a stampede, massed footsteps thundering in the tunnel outside, weights hurled against the walls, a shouting and blaspheming
that sent the Black Swans scrambling and left her by herself, coiling and uncoiling the gold veil with the crimson tongues round her wrist.

John Joe made no move, merely stood against a wall among the three unclean spirits, watching Master Maitland, with his bull’s head lowered as if to charge, and Luther Pratt and Jerzy Polacki and Joe Easter racing for the grenades, and Marvella Crabtree with her hand across her mouth to keep the screaming in when the door in the rockface exploded, when the first shot was fired.

He didn’t see who fired it, couldn’t tell you who it hit. There was no reality to this at all, so he felt no special alarm. When something shattered the third spirit, and the gas lamps blew out, and fat popping sounds like pellets of blood sausage dropped sizzling into the pan were all around his head, even when everyone started rushing outwards, he let himself be carried on the tide, not straining to resist or shelter, only searching for Anna’s veil. And he found it. Right ahead of him, a few inches out of reach, the red tongues were drifting towards the broken doorway, out into the white light that flooded the tunnel beyond. For a second he almost had them, but then he slipped down. Something live was moving under his foot, it pulled at him. “Don’t start me to talking,” Anna Crow said, and her veil got away.

5
83: soiled shirt: you are prey to remorse or regret; and sweating armpits meant shame. You sat in Chez Stadium, drinking apricot schnapps to forget, but your pits wouldn’t let you. Every time you started to wriggle free, they snapped on the cuffs again.

He should have showered, only he could not stand to lay hands on himself. Just the thought of his own flesh returned him to that barbershop, sighting down his blade at Kate Root.

Even now he couldn’t figure what had happened. Certain people had told him dreams were the same way, they made sense while you were in them, but when you woke everything was twisted. Bombo Garcia would know, but Bombo was not around. Nobody was.

How had it all gone so wrong? He’d come to the Zoo on such a high. Nervous, yes, but full of hopes. Thinking
Love
, even though it made no sense. Resigned in his mind to surrender. Let himself be taken over, swept away; let the fat bitch have her way, if that was what she needed, Willie D would not fight back.

And she had pissed on him. She’d taken the good faith he offered, and turned it to puke. Instead of giving him solace, she’d looked at him like the devil incarnate. So the knife had slipped from his grasp, and he had stabbed his own boot.

You couldn’t call it fair play. Nobody could claim that was playing the game. The plain truth was, the woman had taken
advantage. Like the Deacon was always telling him, Willie had been too soft with her, and she’d played him for a sucker. Too trusting, too big in heart.

Ivana all over again.

It just went to prove the thought that kept running and running like the Times Square tickertape through his head:
I am not my self
. If he had been, he would never have stood still for this jive. He would have marched her straight back to the target, handed her one of her own Camels for a last cigarette, even offered her a blindfold if she liked; then he wouldn’t have stopped throwing till the lights went out. Not until he had pleased himself.

Please myself, and pleasure her
—Mouse Williams had said that. Instead of which, he had raised his face the same way a boxer does when he’s all through and secretly wants to be knocked out, he had abandoned ship.

But no more.
Don’t get too complicated, Eddie. When a man gets complicated, he gets unhappy
. No more twisting in the wind, no more puzzling and theorizing, racking his brains for explanations that didn’t exist.
And when he gets unhappy, he runs out of luck
. Sweaty armpits meant shame.

And the man with jaundice; JoJo, the dog-faced boy. How could he have allowed a freak like that go trampling on his patch? Giving him horns by candlelight? For a moment after he pulled the knife quivering from his stabbed boot, and Kate Root had pushed him out in the passageway, Willie thought he heard the fucker moving upstairs, messing with Anna Fucking Crow, and never mind the language, fucking Man of Power be fucked, if he’d got his hands on that fuck the fucker would have been fucking dogfood right then.

But JoJo had been too tricky. By the time Willie got up the stairs in his crippled boot the man had already gone out the window or over the wall, whatever, and Anna was on her own.

Naturally, she acted innocent. Like she couldn’t guess why he was there. Gave him that look dumb and dazed, shell-shocked almost, as if cum wouldn’t melt in her mouth, and the next thing he knew, he didn’t know a thing.

What had brought him round? The windowpane. He’d heard a blind, trapped sound like a bird makes when it blunders into glass, and he opened his eyes to see stars. Someone must have set off a skyrocket or maybe a Roman candle. It burst above the rooftops, shooting out flares of silver and gold, then tailed away in a shower of sparks, and as it faded, it darkened. Deep molten red, it turned to smoke, and the smoke turned to wisps. Within thirty seconds, the only traces left were three snaky plumes, faintly pink. They looked like uncut hairs.

More red than pink, on second look.

So there was no end to it. And never would be, it seemed. He was stuck with this disease till the fat lady sang. Sickness or possession or love, the terminology didn’t matter. Bottom line, his number was up, and that number was 223:
DEATHBED
: if you witness your own death, you will experience melancholy.

In a way he was almost relieved. Knowing the worst, he could at least stop his struggling. No point in going back to Tia Guadalupe for another offering to Osain, or Sly Sy Stein for another blade. The cards were finally face-up, his position was plain. There was only one move left for him to make, and that was to take back his life; get equalized.

A stillness came over him then, a backhanded sense of peace. When he looked around him and noted that he was in bed with Anna Crow, he felt nothing but weariness. There were so many traps, the flimflams never ended. All these bimbos in limbo. But they no longer bothered him. Let her use him while she could. Milk him and drain him, haul his ashes, if it helped. Even play with his hair.

His hair!

Full recall returned at that, the whole nine yards. The barbershop and the knives and the toilet seat, the light from the spinning pole, that look in Kate Root’s eye.

A frozen calm wrapped him, the same neutrality he’d felt once in a car wreck, flipping over the median barrier on the BQE, hanging upside down and barely moving, meanwhile thinking with perfect composure
I am going to die. Deacon Landry can have my shoes
; and as the car hit the wall broadside, slewing back against the traffic,
These Blazers have lousy shocks
, and finally, coming to rest,
The wing-tip Oxfords would look better on Sandman Ames
.

Same thing now. In freefall, his thoughts were
She got me. I’m done for
. But he would have his revenge.
Take the A Train, then change to the D at 125
. He would fix his hair, he would walk in new boots. If it killed him, he would be freed.

Get out at Tremont Avenue, walk across to Crotona, and he made it to Littles Fernando’s. Fernando Littles, his name had been when he was playing shortstop for the Piscataway Pirates and Bombo Garcia was in rightfield. Now he was a certified hair artiste, the self-styled Michelangelo of Heads, whose sculpted designs graced some of the def skulls in New York. Bobby Bo wore his Manhattan skyline, Frankie Knuckles his fire-breathing dragon. “What you got for a man on a mission?” Willie asked.

“The gryphon be boss,” Littles Fernando told him. So a gryphon it was. The razor sliced him, the tongs singed him, then the scissors remade him. The body and wings of an eagle, the head of a lion, etched black on olive like a woodcut: “That’ll be forty bucks,” Littles Fernando said.

“Take a hundred,” said Willie. “Just give me your shoes.”

Fernando’s loafers were old and scuffed, down at heel, but at least they didn’t have a knife in their ribs, they were not bleeding to death. Willie gave them a quick fix of plastic
surgery. Amputated their tassels, fleshed out their instep with foam for a sleeker line, camouflaged their cracks and wrinkles with mascara. Then he turned his feet to the city again.