Solitary Dancer (6 page)

Grizzly tossed a handful of old shingles on the fire blazing inside the rusting forty-gallon drum. When the black smoke and flames roared out Grizzly laughed and held his hands, large and brown like catcher's mitts, in front of him to feel the heat.

“Cops don't like it,” the Gypsy muttered, wrapping her arms around her for warmth, huddled inside Grizzly's stained gray parka with the raccoon fur trim on the hood. Strands of her greasy black hair spilled out from around the fur trim, hair as dark and shining as her eyes. “Makes too much smoke. Might come by, just to raise hell.”

Grizzly laughed again and rubbed his hands together. He was wearing a blue kerchief tied tightly around his head, a denim shirt open nearly to his navel, and brown army surplus pants. “We'll tell 'em we jus' sendin' smoke signals to your brothers 'cross the way. Maybe that's First Amendment rights.” He looked across the flames at Django. “You figure that's maybe what it is?”

Django nodded and smiled, shifting his weight to one side and then the other, doing a shuffle around the blazing fire in the steel drum, sliding his feet in his white Reebok high-cuts. Django's black leather trench coat hung open and moved with his motion. A tweed pork-pie hat managed to remain propped at a sharp angle well back atop his small head. His eyes closed, he did a sideways step around the drum, staying near its warmth that softened the damp chill of the gray air.

Out on Washington Street at the end of the alley, a black Mercedes slowed to a stop. Its driver, an overweight balding man with an unruly salt-and-pepper beard, stared open-mouthed down the lane at the sight of Grizzly and the Gypsy, and Django prancing and stepping lightly around the fire that blazed in the steel drum, his head back, his eyes closed.

“Hey,” Grizzly said softly.

The Mercedes' passenger door opened and a dark-eyed man wearing only a dirty and faded sweatshirt emerged. He was nodding in response to something the driver of the car was saying but he was watching Django intently.

Django's back was to the car. “Hear you, Grizz.”

The man in the sweatshirt waited for the Mercedes to pull away. Then, with his hands thrust deeply in his pockets and his shoulders hunched against the wind, he walked unsteadily down the alley. The Mercedes drove off with a sound like a sigh.

“You got a customer.” Grizzly stood motionless, watching the man approach. The Gypsy scampered toward the unpainted wooden shed set against the rear wall of the building housing Tremont Adult Novelties and began fishing in her pockets for cigarettes.

Django swivelled his small head to look down the alley. “It's the Jolt, come back to life,” he called, extending his arms to welcome McGuire. “Hey, how you doin'?”

McGuire halted a few paces away. He nodded at Grizzly and glanced at the Gypsy. “I got twenty,” he said, giving Django the crisp bill Hoffman had just handed McGuire in the warmth of the Mercedes.

“An' I got some D's for you,” Django moved away from McGuire, his left arm extended. “Django's got some D's for his man, ain't he, Grizz?”

Grizzly smiled through the flames and smoke belching from the rusting drum. He motioned to the Gypsy who was taking long drags on her Camel Light and watching McGuire from the corner of her eye. She moved crabwise from the safety of the building wall to stand behind Grizzly, who reached into a pocket of the parka and withdrew a brown bottle the size of a coffee mug. In a quick, practised motion he removed the cap, shook ten small pills into his hand, replaced the cap and slid the bottle back into the parka. Then he was around the blazing metal drum, his hand extended to McGuire but his head and eyes in motion, looking everywhere.

McGuire counted the Demerol and said, “I used to get twice this much.” Not waiting for a reply, he picked two of the tiny pills from his palm, placed them in his mouth and swallowed them dry.

“Supply and demand, Jolt,” Django said. “Supply and demand.”

McGuire approached the fire and its oily warmth. Soon, he told himself. Soon.

“Hey, you hear the word, Jolt? Lady Day, she thinkin' a you, missin' you all a time.” Django nodded, smiling. “I tell her I see you, she gonna be glowin' again. She thinkin', worryin', wonderin' when you comin' back. Word is, you were kinda
mean
to a sweetie over on Newbury, one of your upward climbin' angora-style ladies.”

“Tell Billie not to worry about me,” McGuire said.

“Oh, Billie not worried,” Django laughed. “She not worried, no darlin'.” A long cackle, rising in pitch. “She egg-
sight
-ed, Jolt. She hear you get rough, she near to fallin' in
love
with you!” and he laughed again.

McGuire turned from the fire and walked away, down the lane, back to Tremont.

“Shouldn't,” said the Gypsy from the other side of the burning steel drum. “Shouldn't do business with no cops.”

“Ex,” Grizzly corrected her. “He be an ex-cop.”

“Cops are cops,” the Gypsy said. “Dogs are dogs, shit is shit, cops are cops.”

“He something special though, Gyps.” Django twisted his shoulders from side to side and watched McGuire cross Washington on his way to the Flamingo. “Jolt special. And soon Jolt be special and happy. Happier'n he be now, for sure. Soon he be
real
again. The man be
real
,” and Django turned to face the fire, closing his eyes, warming his body and moving it in rhythm, always in rhythm.

It was five blocks from Grizzly's back alley place of business to the Flamingo and the knife through McGuire's head, the one that blurred his vision and tilted the world around him like a slowing down spinning top, carved its way deeper into his skull with every step he took.

Reaching the base of the fire escape, he ignored the heavy crust of bird droppings that had repelled Tim Fox two mornings ago and gripped the railing to pull himself up step by step to his room, shouldering the door open and walking unsteadily past the bed.

In the ancient wicker wastebasket next to the toilet he counted five condom wrappers. He dumped them into a plastic garbage bag beneath the sink and washed the guano from his hands. Then, soaking a small towel in cold water and wringing it almost dry, he walked back to the single bed, pulled from the shelf the only hardcover book he owned, a battered copy of
Wild Animals I Have Known
, removed the five ten-dollar bills left between its pages and stuffed them into his pocket. Then he sat on the hard backed chair, holding the cloth against his forehead, its cool dampness almost erotic in the pleasure it gave him.

When he opened his eyes a few moments later, there was a horse in the room. Small and dapple-gray, standing patiently in the corner. McGuire didn't look at the animal directly, knowing to do so would make it disappear.

“Hello, horse,” he smiled. He rose, steadied himself against the wall, took two steps to the bed and lay upon it, placing the wet cloth across his face and feeling the room turn slowly beneath him.

It was on the horizon of his mind and approaching slowly, the warm cloud of numbness he craved.

When you do not wish to feel, you go numb. On your own, if capable. On the wings of a drug, if necessary.

Waiting for the full effect of the painkiller, he numbered the missing pieces of his life, beginning with the music he loved, the quiet jazz that had once served as the foundation of his sanity and the inspiration of his youth. Gentle rhythms and melodic improvisation, masking passion and intensity. That was the power of it, the way the passion and intensity remained concealed beneath the surface. Without passion and intensity and control, the music was nothing. Miles, Desmond, Zoot, Coltrane, all their intense melodies and phrases had once flown like lovers to McGuire's soul and made his head nod, his eyes burn, his smile arise like a dawn sun. They were gone, the music and the musicians, and he missed them.

And Gloria. He missed Gloria, his first wife, dead four years. You'll be commissioner some day, she told McGuire soon after they were married and he said, No, don't be silly, I don't want that, and she said, Then please figure out what you want because until you do you'll never be truly happy and you'll make everyone who is a part of your life miserable.

He lay there, feeling his eyes grow damp, for perhaps thirty minutes until he heard two sets of footsteps climbing the fire escape, one heavy, one light. A girl from the club he figured, freelancing between shifts, leading a nervous morning customer on his way toward thirty minutes of fulfilled fantasy.

McGuire opened his eyes and the simple action drained weight from his body. Something had happened to his face and he realized he was smiling. The knot at the back of his neck had unravelled and the taut wire rope that had been his spine had fallen away. He watched as he extended his arms above his head, seeing the fingers spread, feeling the damp cloth slide from his face when he sat upright.

In the tunnels, moving through the runnels of his mind, the warmth of the medication advanced like a gently rising tide.

He looked around the room. The horse was gone. Once he had seen a small black pig snuffling in the bathroom. And there had been snakes and roads the size of footstools. His hallucinations were often animals; animals were easy to accept, animals were fine. It was the others, the flayed corpses and staring naked women, that upset him the most when they appeared, daring him to look at them and vanishing from his sight but somehow never his presence when he did.

He was hungry, ready for a bowl of noodles and shrimp from a Vietnamese restaurant on Lincoln.

Voices were approaching his door, speaking softly, and he visualized them, the girl leading the way, the john nervous, maybe expecting a mugging and a knife in the ribs, then his wallet extracted and his body tossed from the landing to the alley below.

Shadows on the dusty window. McGuire rose to his feet, staggered slightly, walked to the door and swung it open before they could knock.

“How you doing?” Tim Fox, in his Burberry coat and small hound's-tooth check suit, smiled back at McGuire, then stood aside. “Brought somebody you know.”

She said nothing at first. She simply pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows at him, her hands clasped in front of her.

“Hello, Micki.” McGuire nodded as though confirming a fact.

“No surprise?” she said. Her eyes were shining.

“Maybe a bit.”

“Lady wants to talk to you,” Tim Fox said.

“And you want to listen,” McGuire said.

“Joe, it's really cold out here,” Micki said.

McGuire moved aside and gestured for them to enter.

Micki took a cautious step into the room. “It smells like . . .” Micki began.

“Like what?”

“Never mind.”

She sat lightly on the edge of the hardbacked chair while Tim Fox leaned against the closed door, his arms folded, his face a solemn mask.

McGuire crossed in front of them and sat unsteadily on the bed until his body swayed to one side and he said the hell with it and lay back, his hands behind his head, and watched the ceiling turn in slow circles above him.

“No problem at Nashua Street?” Fox asked McGuire.

McGuire shrugged. “Three hots and a cot.”

“Fat Eddie's holding the warrant open. Talked Don Higgins into doing it.”

McGuire closed his eyes. Three hours, maybe four the pills were good for, and he would need one every hour after that. What did Django call it? His tune. Django's tune. The good feeling, the only good feeling available, and it comes in such small packages. . . .

“Joe?” Micki's voice, from a great distance. McGuire always liked her voice. High-pitched and feminine. Micki, she always wanted a deeper voice. And other things she couldn't have. Bigger breasts. Longer legs. Higher cheekbones. More of him . . . He began humming an old Duke Ellington song.

“Joe?” Again her voice.

“Yeah.”

“What are you taking?”

“The ‘A' Train.”

“Drugs, Joe. You're taking drugs, aren't you?”

“Medication.”

“The same thing.”

Tim Fox leaned forward. “I gotta warn you, Joe. Guys in Narcotics know your source. I talked to them, Barker and Cummins, remember those guys? They got a file on Griswold and his weird Indian girlfriend that's as thick as your wrist. Soon as they work up a level or two they'll nail him and everybody connected with him.”

McGuire remained silent but he felt his pulse increase, felt panic weigh him down like bricks on his chest.

“Joe?” Micki again. “Are you going to sleep?”

“Thinking about it.”

“We have to talk.”

“That's what you said a few years ago. I come home, you're sitting on your bags, you got all the money out of our bank account and you're pissed at me for doing behind your back what you'd been doing behind mine—”

“Joe . . .”

“—and you said we have to talk. So you talked. Not us, just you. Then you walked out the door soon's the cab arrived. Talk like that I don't need.”

“I'm sorry, Joe.”

“Sorry? Hey, we went through all that last summer, down in . . .” He opened his eyes, rubbed them with one hand, closed them again. “Florida. Down in Florida.”

“Joe, you have to do something.”

“Well, I could always puke on you.”

Micki frowned and tilted her head, like a mother about to scold a child. “I'm serious, Joe.”

McGuire grunted.

“Was Heather blackmailing you?” she asked.

McGuire opened his eyes and swung his head to meet Micki's steady gaze. “Was she what?” Still prettier than she knows, he thought. Not as attractive as she wants to be, not as young as she used to be. But prettier than she ever knew.

“Blackmailing you.”

McGuire laughed. “Your sister? The woman who gave ball-breaking witches a bad name? Blackmailing me? With what? For what?”