The Music of Razors (12 page)

He fought gravity, step-sliding down an incline, soil slipping away beneath decade-old boots. This was the way Felix would have passed, the most direct route to town. He remembered Felix’s story of the man who gave him that wound that refused to fester. He knew Felix lived in daily apprehension of the stalking Englishman finally tracking him down. Why hadn’t he just moved on?

“Don’t be dead on me.” It was out before he realized he’d said it.

If Felix was dead he was dead. Out of his hands.

There were towns, there were one-horse towns, and then there was this place. In total there was a regular population of about twenty. It existed to refresh horses because it lay on the main route to the west. It came with a baker’s, a barber’s, a supply store, and a watering hole that doubled as a place to sleep. Whores worked out of a few of the upper rooms. No one made any long-term plans to stay in a place like this, except the owner of the watering hole and Henry himself. Even the whores had loftier goals. If you wanted the law you rode south.

It was as quiet in town as it was out, save for the occasional sound of a door closing somewhere or a voice mumbling from some unseen place. A thin dog trotted across the dusty street, pausing to piss against a battered wall with brief efficiency. Henry supposed the best place to ask would be the hole.

The hole was a wooden building just as old and just as dried-up as the man who owned it. It wasn’t a big room, but it sold what you wanted. The floor was always dusty, though it got swept every couple of days. A few tables were scattered around and hardly used. Sometimes the baker and the owner of the general store got together with the man who owned the hole and played a hand or two with whatever passers-through had rented a room. Sometimes the four wives would gather and sing at night. That was the extent of society in that town without a name.

Henry stood for a moment, facing the place. Two weeks ago he’d spent six days locked inside his house. Henry had made Felix swear, no matter what he said or did, that he would not be allowed to take a drop of anything other than water. Henry’s guts had burned, he’d spent nights screaming and mumbling. He hadn’t known how bad he stank—how much liquor-stench had soaked out through his skin—until Felix entered with his food one morning and couldn’t keep his hand from his mouth. Only then Henry became aware of it, one of the sourest reeks he had ever known, comparable to that of shit and death. In a moment of lucidity he realized where he had come from, where he was meant to be in this life, and just how far away from it all he had wound up. He wasn’t the kid who had wanted to be a doctor. He wasn’t proud. This wasn’t his life. The man he had intended to be had died from neglect. All that remained was this aging, still-breathing corpse with a smell to match.

Now he stood there, in the street, with real blood in his veins for the first time in clear memory, and every day all he wanted was to replace it, little by little, with something else. He licked dry lips, lowered his head, and pushed his way through the door of the hole.

Except for the owner, Henry was the only person in the room. The barkeep was sitting at one of his tables flipping through one of those mail-order catalogs from out east. He either didn’t notice or didn’t care that someone had entered his place. It left Henry with a now common feeling of ghostliness.

There came a burst of song from somewhere upstairs, blooming loud as a door was opened, the gaiety of it at odds with Henry’s fear for his friend, and his desire to get away before he weakened.

Nelly Bly! Nelly Bly! Bring the broom along,

We’ll sweep the kitchen clean, my dear,

And have a little song.

Poke the wood, my lady love

And make the fire burn,

And while I take the banjo down,

Just give the mush a turn…

Where the hell was Felix? Henry’s boots were bricks. He should just ask the barkeep if he’d seen the man and be done with it…but he couldn’t.

Because if he opened his mouth the only words that would come out would be a request for the usual.

Hi, Nelly! Ho Nelly!

Listen, love, to me,

I’ll sing for you and play for you

A dulcet melody…

Henry felt pulled between bottles and door. He swallowed, drily. He would have to say something.

Nelly Bly has a voice like a turtledove,

I hear it in the meadow and I hear it in the grove…

It was an English voice doing the singing, from the corridor above the bar. There came the sound of a door closing, uneven footsteps jigging themselves toward the stairway. Dust fell in puffs from the boards above the racks that held lines of anonymous brown bottles. Henry closed his eyes. He thought of a morning, ten years past, on Boston’s Smoker’s Common, sharing an apple with a girl whose face he could almost remember…

Nelly Bly has a heart warm as a cup of tea,

And bigger than the sweet potatoes down in Tennessee…

Hi, Nelly! Ho Nelly!

Listen, love, to me…

Black stovepipe pants that had long lost their crease and a white buttondown shirt that had never been starched, open at the collar. The Englishman danced down the stairs in well-used traveling shoes three tones darker than the dust outside. Henry could well imagine the dancer seeing himself in some music hall production back home.

He was a young-faced fellow. About Henry’s age. Strong, clear voice. Chestnut hair and matching eyes. He’d gained a little weight.

I’ll sing for you and play for you

A dulcet melody…

“Hello, Dorian,” Henry said.

The dancer stopped halfway down the staircase. He peered, scrutinizing the stranger in the hat, this nobody who knew his name.

“Do I know you, sir?”

Henry didn’t let the sting of those words show, except perhaps in the slight contraction of his lips, a flutter at the corners. He could still see the bottles.

“It’s been awhile,” Henry admitted. He could have removed his hat, made it easier for him, but he was in no mood to be helpful. “I guess Mexico didn’t agree with you.”

The Englishman’s forehead crinkled. “Mexico?” He moved farther down the stairs onto the barroom floor, moving toward Henry without reluctance. “I left Mexico some years ago.” He dipped his head slightly, an unconscious effort to get a better look at the face beneath the hat. And then, flatly…

“Henry.”

Now Henry removed the hat, ran a gloved hand through pale red hair that was thinning at thirty. “Leave it at that.” Let him see the face.

Dorian didn’t say anything. Henry had been shut away for the last ten years, away from people, from how they worked, but he could still read what was running through this man’s head. If Dorian had known in advance that Henry lived here, in this nowhere town, he wouldn’t have lingered. But here he was and now there was no getting away. That would be an unpleasant novelty for a man like him.

“So did you find it?”

Dorian blinked, uncertain. “Find what?”

“Whatever was so important that two people died and I was left holding the bag.”

Dorian swallowed, riffling through possible ways to buy time. “Would you like a drink?”

“I don’t drink.”

Dorian paused, lingering on Henry’s face. In that moment it was obvious Dorian realized exactly how uncomfortable Henry was, standing there, in that place.

“Surely…one drink?” said Dorian, earnestly. A trademark deceiver, once you knew him. “It’ll give us a chance to talk.”

Henry could feel teeth grind, couldn’t stop it. He’d stopped breathing.

“I said I don’t drink.”

“Then I’ll drink,” Dorian said reasonably, “and we’ll talk.”

Long after sundown Henry sat in the street, listening as the coyotes yapped to one another outside town, beyond the pale light cast from veiled windows. The song dogs were braver around this town than others Henry had visited in years past. Probably because this town was so small; less populated and less threatening. There was no clear definition of where the town stopped and the wilderness began. Late at night, they’d trot through town separately, each one a loner, hugging the darker shadows at the bases of houses and buildings. But in the hours before they came, they’d sing; and when they did, they sounded almost human. It was a dozen haunted voices in conversation, a grieving choir, a scattered family crying ululant news. Every night Henry would sit by his open window, to drink and eavesdrop.

No one owned pets here. Nothing that wasn’t in a cage, anyway. The storeowner once shot a coyote he’d found nosing around out back. Late-night gunfire made people nervous. Three men—out-of-towners, drunk and looking to impress—had turned up armed. The storekeep had been nudging the corpse with a slippered foot one minute, staring down a double barrel the next. No one bothered the song dogs since.

They wouldn’t be coming into town for a little while yet.

Soft steps on dry earth. “Doctor?” The voice was a whisper.

Henry glanced over his shoulder from where he sat, looking up at a sky of black and silver. “Where have you been?”

Felix crouched, pulling on the legs of his pants as he did so. They were a pair of Henry’s castoffs, and were a bit large on him. “He’s here, Doctor. We have to get away.” The way he whispered, so hushed, so scandalous, made Henry think of the secret things said in soft voices in childhood tree houses.

“I’ve been talking to him,” Henry said.

“
Talking
to him? You can’t talk to him!”

“I know him, Felix. We were in Boston together.”

Hands twisted Henry around till he found himself staring into a very hard pair of brown eyes.
“He kills!”
Sweating. Something was happening inside Felix’s head, making his eyes jitter side to side, making him let go, lean back. He stood, looking down. “You’ve been drinking.” Forced calm.

Henry closed his eyes. “Not now, Felix.”

Felix nodded, manic, lank hair falling before his face. “Damn right not now. Not here. Get up.”

Henry looked away. Felix grabbed his collar and hauled him toward the blackest shadow in the street, between two buildings. Blood rushed to Henry’s face as he watched his legs kick and skid, trying to regain both footing and dignity. He was dumped on his back between the general store and an outhouse. His first thought was to deck Felix on principle. Then he tried to get upright but found the movement arrested, jerked to a halt around the shoulders. He was lying on his coat, stretched flat. He had to roll, loosen it, get up on his hands and knees. Henry rose in time to see Felix step away from the lip of the lane, having stolen a quick glance back at the hole, and get very close to his face.

“Do you want to see my back?”

“Look, Felix, there’s stuff—”

Felix ripped at his shirt. A button stung Henry’s cheek. “Shit, Felix, come on…” His friend spun. The wound widened, stretching stitching, as Felix arched forward a little. Even in the dimness the artifact buried there gave back more light than it received. Henry took his friend’s shirt and slipped it back up over his thin shoulders. “Give it a rest.” Felix turned, shrugging reluctantly back into the old shirt, now open at the chest. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

There was a look to Felix’s dark eyes now, like good-bye. It made Henry’s next words harder. “I’m staying here tonight. I have to keep talking to him.” Felix said nothing. His long fingers worked at the thread from one of the missing buttons. “He hasn’t mentioned you, you know.”

“I am not surprised.”

“I need to keep him talking. Not just for you. I need answers.”

“You will drink.”

High yipping sounds. Echo made them sound like they were everywhere. The coyotes would be in the streets before long.

“You should maybe go back.”

“I will wait,” he said.

“C’mon, Felix…”

“I will wait here,” he said. “But I cannot promise for how long.”

Henry crouched, picked up his hat. “I don’t trust him, if that’s what you’re thinking.” The high sounds fell silent. “Grayson at the general store’ll put you up. Coyotes are moving down.”

Felix sat down at the base of the darkest wall, head up, eyes closed, arms flat on his raised knees. “Ten years is a long time.”

Henry experienced the arrival of a moment. Hair falling around a beautiful face that rose in perfect detail from fractured memory. Slightly upturned nose, dark lips, and eyes that dared.

“The police in Boston,” he said. “They think I killed a girl.”

“I believe you did no such thing,” Felix murmured. “He killed her. He kills. I told you.”

“S’not so simple as that.”

“Then explain to me, why it is not so simple.”

“We were looking for something, all of us. It was a risk. We understood that.”

“I see,” Felix said. “Then explain to me why it is that you must go back if her loss is so easily understood.”

Ten years was a long time.

Henry slipped his hat on, tugged at the brim, and walked back toward the hole.

Low shadows at the edge of town spread out at the sight of him.

Dorian seemed done with whatever whore he’d busied himself with. He was back in his own small room, on his own small bed against the sepia-toned tar paper wall, smoking a cigarette by the light of an oil lamp. The window’s smudged pane was raised to a breezeless evening. Dorian’s brown suitcase lay beneath the bed, a few books piled on the floor by the head.
The Perfumed Garden
by Sheik Nefzawi, Shakespeare’s
Macbeth,
and something in Hebrew—probably kabbalistic. The sight brought a wave of nostalgia.

“Life’s been treating you well,” Henry said.

“It’s a good life if one denies oneself nothing,” Dorian was saying. There was a half-killed bottle of bourbon on the small desk. Dorian’s glass rested on the sill. Henry sat on the one chair in the room, back against the wall, glass in hand. “Though it was difficult for the longest time. I feared for my mind.”

“So what happened?”

Dorian reached for his drink, swirled it, swallowed a little. “I woke one morning and my problem was gone. Simple as that. Outlasted it, I suspect.”