Six Stories (6 page)

‘Squared away, baby, you better believe it.’

He leaves the office, closing the door with MIDTOWN HEATING AND COOLING printed on the frosted-glass panel behind him, and turning all three of the locks.

9:40 A.M.

Halfway down the hall, he sees Ralph Williamson, one of the tubby accountants from Garowicz Financial Planning (all the accountants at Garowicz are tubby, from what Willie has been able to observe). There’s a key chained to an old wooden paddle in one of Ralph’s pink hands, and from this Willie deduces that he is looking at an accountant in need of a wee. Key on a paddle, just like in grade school, he thinks, and you know what? That’s probably a comfort to him.

‘Hey, Ralphie, what’s doin?’

Ralph turns, sees Willie, brightens. ‘Hey, hi, merry Christmas!’ Willie grins at the look in Ralph’s eyes. Tubby little fucker worships him, and why not? Just why the fuck not? If I were Ralph, I’d worship me too. Last of the fucking pioneers.

‘Same to you, bro.’ He holds out his hand (now gloved so he doesn’t have to worry about it not matching his face), palm up. ‘Gimme five!’

Smiling shyly, Ralph does.

‘Gimme ten!’

Ralph turns his pink, pudgy hand over and allows Willie to slap it.

‘So goddamn good I gotta do it again!’ Willie exclaims, and give Ralph five more. ‘Got your Christmas shopping done, Ralphie?’

‘Almost,’ Ralph says, grinning and jingling the bathroom key. ‘Yes, almost. How about you, Willie?’

Willie tips him a wink. ‘Oh, you know how it is, brother-man; I got two-three women, and I just let each of em buy me a little keep-sake.’

Ralph’s admiring smile suggest he does not, in fact, know how it is, but rather wishes he did. ‘Got a service call?’

‘A whole day’s worth,’ Willie says. ”Tis the season, you know.’

‘Seems like it’s always the season for you. Business must be good. You’re hardly ever in your office.’

‘That’s why God gave us answering machines, Ralphie-baby. Believe it. You better go on, now, or you’re gonna be dealin with a wet spot on your best gabardine slacks.’

Laughing (blushing a little too), Ralph heads for the men’s room.

Willie goes on down to the elevators, carrying his case in one hand and checking to make sure his glasses are still in his jacket pocket with the other. They are. The envelope is in there, too, thick and crackling with twenty-dollar bills. Fifteen of them. It’s time for a little visit from Officer Wheelock; Willie expected him yesterday. Maybe he won’t show until tomorrow, but Willie is betting on today … not that he likes it. He knows it’s the way of the world, you have to grease the wheels if you want your wagon to roll, but he still has a resentment. There are lots of days when he thinks about how pleasant it would be to put a bullet in Jasper Wheelocks’s head. Rip his tongue out as a trophy, too, maybe - he could hang it in the closet next to Bill Teale’s tie.

When the elevator comes, Willie gets in with a smile.

It doesn’t stop on five, but the thought of that happening no longer makes him nervous. He has ridden down to the lobby many times with people who work on the same floor as Bill Teale - including the scrawny drink of water from Consolidated insurance - and they don’t recognize him. They should, he know they should, but they don’t. He used to think it was the change of clothes and the makeup, then he decided it was the hair, but in his hear he knows that none of those things can account for it. Not even their droning, numb-hearted insensitivity to the world they live in can account for it. What he’s doin just isn’t that radical - fatigue pants, billyhop boots, and a little brown makeup don’t make a disguise. No way to they make a disguise. He doesn’t know exactly how to explain it, and so mostly leaves it alone. He learned this technique, as he learned so many other things, in the Nam.

The young black man is still standing outside the lobby door (he’s flipped up the hood of his grungy old sweater now), and he shakes his crumpled Styrofoam cup at Willie. He sees that the dude carrying the Mr. Repairman case in one hand is smiling, and so his own smile widens.

‘Spare a little?’ he asks Mr. Repairman. ‘What do you say, my man?’

‘Get the fuck out of my way, you worthless, lazy dickhead, that’s what I say,’ Willie tells him, still smiling. The young man falls back a step, the Styrofaoam cup still at last, looking at Willie with shocked, wide eyes. Before he can think of anything to say, Mr. Repairman is halfway down the block and almost lost in the throngs of shoppers, his big, blocky case swinging from one gloved hand.

9:55 A.M

He goes into the Whitmore Hotel, crosses the lobby, and takes the escalator up to the mezzanine, where the public restrooms are. This is the only part of the day he ever feels nervous about, and he can’t say why; certainly nothing has ever happened before, during, or after one of his hotel bathroom stops (he rotates among roughly two dozen of them in the midtown area), but he is somehow certain that if things every do turn dinky-dau on him, it will happen in a hotel shithouse. Because it’s not like transforming from Bill Teale to Willie Teale; that feels clean and perfectly normal. the workday’s final transformation, however - from Willie Teale to Blind Willie - has never felt that way. The last morph always feels murky and furtive, and until it’s done and he’s back on the street again, tapping his white cane in front of him, he feels as a snake must feel after it has shed its old skin and before the new one has grown back.

He looks around and sees the restroom is empty except for a pair of feet under the door of the second stall in a long row of them - a dozen in all. A throat clears softly. A newspaper rattles. There is the ffft sound of a polite little midtown fart.

Willie goes all the way down the line to the last stall. He puts down his case, latches the door shut, and takes off his red jacket. He turns it inside-out as he does so, reversing it. The other side is olive green. It has become an old soldier’s field jacket with a single pull of the arms. Sharon, who really does have a touch of genius, bought this side of his coat in an army surplus store and tore out the lining so she could sew it easily into the red jacket. Before sewing, however, she put a staff sergeant’s stripes on it, plus black strips of cloth where the name-and-unit slugs would have gone. She then washed the garment thirty or forty times. The stripes and the rest are gone now, of course, but the places where they were stand out clearly - the cloth is greener on the sleeves and the left breast, fresher in patterns any veteran of the armed services must recognize at once.

Willie hangs the coat on the hook, drops trou, sits, then picks up his case and settles it on his thighs. He opens it, takes out the two pieces of his cane, and quickly screw them together. Holding it far down the shaft, he reaches up from his sitting position and hooks the handle over the top of his jacket. Then he relatches the case, pulls a little paper off the roll in order to create the proper business-is-finished sound effect (probably unnecessary, but always safe, never sorry), and flushes the john.

Before stepping out of the stall he takes his glasses from the jacket pocket which also holds the payoff envelope. They’re big wraparounds, retro shades he associates with lava lamps and outlaw biker movies starring Peter Fonda. They’re good for business, though, partly because they somehow say veteran to people, and partly because no one can peek in at his eyes, even from the sides.

Willie Teale stays behind in the mezzanine restroom of the Whitmore just as Bill Teals stays behind in the fifty-floor office of Western States Land Analysts. The man who comes out - a man wearing an old fatigue jacket, shades, and tapping a white cane lightly before him - is Blind Willie, a Fifth avenue fixture since Reagan’s first term.

As he crosses the smaller upstairs lobby toward the stairs ) unaccompanied blind men never use escalators), he sees a woman in a red blazer coming toward him. With the heavily tinted lenses between them, she looks like some sort of exotic fish swimming in muddy waters. And of course it is not just the glasses; he is Blind Willie now, and by two this afternoon he really will be blind, just as he was blind when he and Bernard Hogan, his best friend, were medivacked out of the DMZ back in ‘67. Only then he had been damned near deaf too. I’m blind, he kept telling the guy who was kneeling between him and Bernard. He could hear himself talking, but faintly, as if his mind had come loose from his head and blown like a balloon into another room while his stupid mouth just went on quacking. I’m blind, oh Christ, kid, the whole world blew up in our fucking faces and now I’m blind. The kid had cheek. You look okay around the eyes to me, he said. If you’re lucky, maybe it’s just concussion blindness. And that was what it turned out to be, although it hadn’t worn off for nearly a week (well, three days, but he’d never let on until he was back in the States). Bernard hadn’t been so lucky. Bernard had died, and so far as Willie knows, that doesn’t wear off.

‘Can I help you, sir?’ the woman in the red blazer asks him.

‘No, ma’am,’ Blind Willie says. The ceaselessly moving cane stops tapping floor and quests over emptiness. It pendulums back and forth, tapping the sides of the staircase. Blind Willie nods, then moves carefully but confidently forward until he can touch the railing with the hand which holds the bulky case. He switches the case to his cane-hand so he can grasp the railing, then turns toward the woman. He’s careful not to smile directly at her but a little to her left. ‘No, thank you - I’m fine.’

He starts downstairs, tapping ahead of him as he goes, big case held easily in spite of the cane - it’s light, almost empty. Later, of course, it will be a different story.

10:10 A.M.

Fifth Avenue is dressed up and decked out for the holiday season - glitter and finery he can only see dimly. Streetlamps wear garlands of holly. Trump Tower has become a garish Christmas package, complete with gigantic red bow. A wreath which must be forty feet across graces the staid grey facade of Bonwit Teller. Lights twinkle in show windows. In the Warner Brothers store, the Tasmanian Devil which usually sits astride the Harley-Davidson has been temporarily replaced by a Santa Claus in a black leather jacket. Bells jingle. Somewhere nearby, carolers are singing ‘Silent Night,’ not exactly Blind Willie’s favorite tune, but a good deal better than ‘Do You Hear What I Hear.’

He stops where he always stops, in front of St. Patrick’s across the street from Saks, allowing the package-laden shoppers to flood past in front of him. His movements now are simple and dignified. His discomfort in the men’s room - that feeling of gawky and undignified nakedness about to be exposed - has passed. Now he feels like a man in the heart of some ritual, a private mass for both the living and the dead.

He squats, unlatches the case, and turns it so those approaching from uptown will be able to read the sticker on the top. He takes out the sign with is brave skirting of tinsel, and ducks under the string. The sign comes to rest against the front of his field jacket.

S/SGT WILLIAM J. TEALE, USMC RET

SERVED DMZ, 1966-1967

LOST MY SIGHT CON THIEN, 1967

ROBBED OF BENEFITS BY A GRATEFUL GOVERNMENT, 1979

LOST HOME, 1985

ASHAMED TO BEG BUT HAVE A SON IN SCHOOL

THINK WELL OF ME IF YOU CAN

He raises his head so that the white light of this cold, almost-ready-to-snow day slides across the blind bulbs of his dark glasses. Now the work begins, and it is harder work than anyone will ever know. There is a way to stand, not quite the military posture which is called parade rest, but close to it. The head must stay up, looking both at and through the people who pass back and forth in their thousands and tens of thousands. The hands must hang straight down in their black gloves, never fiddling with the sign or with the fabric of his pants or with each other. The feeling he projects must continue to be that sense of hurt and humbled pride. There must be no cringing, no sense of shame or shaming, and most of all no taint of insanity. He never speaks unless spoken to, and only then when he is spoken to in kindness. He does not respond to people who ask him angrily why he doesn’t get a real job, or ask him what he means about being robbed of his benefits, or accuse him of faking, or what to know what kind of son allows his father to put him through school by begging on a street corner. He remembers breaking this ironclad rule only once, on a sweltering summer afternoon in 1990. What school does your son go to? a woman asked him angrily. He doesn’t know what she looked like, by then it was almost four and he had been as blind as a bat for thee hours, but he had felt anger exploding out of her in all directions, like bedbugs exiting an old mattress. Tell me which one, I want to mail him a dog turd. Don’t bother, he replied, turning toward the sound of her voice. If you’ve got a dog turd you want to mail somewhere send it to LBJ. Federal express must deliver to hell, they deliver everyplace else.

‘God bless you, man,’ a guy in a cashmere overcoat says, and his voice trembles with surprising emotion. Except Blind Willie is not surprised. He’s heard it all, he reckons, and if he hasn’t, he soon will. The guy in the cashmere coat drops a bill into the open case. A five. The workday has begun.

10:45 A.M.

So far, so good. He lays his cane down carefully behind the case, drops to one knee, and sweeps a hand back and forth through the bills, although he can still see them pretty well. He picks them up - there’s four or five hundred dollars in all, which puts him on the way to a three-thousand-dollar day, not great for this time of year, but not bad, either - then rolls them up and slips a rubber band around them. He then pushes a button on the inside of the case, and the false bottom drops down on springs, dumping the load of change all the way to the bottom. He adds the roll of bills, making no attempt to hide what he’s doing, but feeling no qualms about it either; in all the years he has been doing this his case has never been stolen. God help the asshole who ever tries.

He lets go of the button, allowing the false bottom to snap back into place, and stands up. A hand immediately presses into the small of his back.