When the Nines Roll Over (12 page)

Nobody saw the lion for the next five days. Wildlife experts on television speculated on his disappearance and proposed various possibilities for his whereabouts, but nobody knew anything. My father met with the chief of police and the mayor to coordinate the hunt. He inspected the sites where the lion had been seen and carefully studied all the eyewit ness reports. In the terse interviews he gave to carefully chosen members of the press, he urged the public to remain cautious. He believed that the lion was still on the island of Manhattan.

Six days after I first saw the lion, on a humid afternoon—the kind where every surface is wet to the touch, as if the city itself were sweating—Butchko called and invited me to come over. I had forgotten that I gave him my number, and at first I was reluctant to go all the way downtown in the miserable August heat. But I had nothing better to do and I was curious to get a look at his one-hundred-and-fifty-dollar apartment.

I met him on the stoop steps of his building. Before I could speak he raised a finger to his lips and motioned me to sit beside him. The hysterical dialogue of a Mexican
telenovela
spilled from the open window of the first-floor apartment. I let the language wash over me, the rolling
r
's, the sentences that all seemed to rhyme. Every few minutes I'd recognize a word and nod.
Loco! Cerveza! Gato!

“Te quiero,”
said Butchko, practicing the accent during a commercial break.
“Te quiero, te quiero, te quiero.”

“You speak Spanish?”

“I'm learning. Gregory Santos said bilinguality is one of the seven steps to the full-out shudders.”

Bilinguality? “What's the full-out—”

The soap opera came on again and Butchko hushed me. We listened to a hoarse-voiced man calm a distraught woman. A swell of violins and cellos seemed to signal their reconciliation and I imagined the kiss, the woman's eyes closed, tears of happiness rolling down her face as the darkly handsome man wrapped her in his arms. Butchko nodded solemnly.

When the show ended he led me into the brownstone and up a poorly lit staircase, pointing out various obstacles to avoid: a dogshit footprint, a toy car, broken glass. At the top of the last flight of stairs he pushed open a graffiti-tagged door and led me onto the tarpapered roof. A water tower squatted on steel legs alongside a shingled pigeon coop.

“You hang out up here?” I asked.

“This is home,” he said, closing the door behind me and securing it with a combination lock. “Look,” he said, pointing. “That's a pigeon coop.”

“I know it's a pigeon coop.”

“Ask me why it has two doors.”

The coop was windowless and low-slung, narrow and long, hammered together of gray weathered boards. Splits in the wood had been stuffed with pink fiberglass insulation. A yellow door hung crooked in its frame on one end; I circled around the coop and found an equally crooked red door on the opposite end.

“Why does it have two doors?”

“Because if it had four doors it would be a pigeon sedan.”

He was so happy with the joke his face turned bright red. He opened up his mouth and shined his big white Pennsylvania teeth at me. “Oh, Mackenzie. You walked right into that one.”

I opened the red door and stepped inside. There were no pigeon cubbies, just a green sleeping bag, patched in places with electrical tape, unrolled on the bare wood flooring; a space heater, unplugged for the summer; a clock radio playing the Beatles; a blue milk crate stacked with paperbacks; an electric water-boiler; and a pyramid of instant ramen noodles in Styrofoam cups. The wires ran into a surge protector connected to a thick yellow extension cord that snaked down a neatly bored hole in the floor.

“The super sets me up with electric,” said Butchko, standing in the doorway behind me. We had to stoop to fit below the steeply canted ceiling. “Pretty good deal, I think.”

“Don't you get cold up here?” Even with the space heater at full blast, the coop could not be good shelter in the depths of winter.

Butchko shrugged. “I don't sleep here most nights, you know?”

I picked a paperback off the top of the pile.
The Selected Poetry of Robert Browning
. I read a few lines then returned the book to its brothers. “There's a toilet somewhere?”

“Down in the basement. And a shower, too. If I need to pee I just go off the roof, see how far I can get. Here, look at this.” He ushered me out of the converted coop to the edge of the roof. We leaned against the parapet and looked at the brick wall of the building opposite us. “See the fire escape? I hit it the other day. What do you think, twenty feet across?”

With my eyes I followed the ladders and landings of the fire escape down to the alley below, deserted save for a blue Dumpster overflowing with trash.

“It's just rats down there anyway,” said Butchko. “They don't mind a little pee. Or maybe they do, but screw 'em, they're rats. And then, here, this is the best part. Come over here.”

In the cool shadow of the water tower he grabbed a canteen off the tarpaper and began climbing the steel rungs welded onto one of the tower's legs. I walked back into the sunlight to watch his ascent. At the upper lip of the tower he turned and waved to me, thirty feet below, before pulling himself over the edge and disappearing from view. A minute later he started climbing down. He jumped with five feet to go and hit his landing perfectly.

“Here,” he said, offering me the canteen. I drank cold water.

“There's a tap up there for the inspectors. They come twice a year and check things out, make sure there's no bacteria or whatnot floating around.”

I handed him back the canteen and watched him drink, watched his heavy Adam's apple bob in his throat.

“Are you ever going to tell me what the full-out shudders are?”

Butchko grinned. “Come on, Mackenzie, you've been there.”

“Where?”

He capped the canteen and laid it down in the shade of the tower. “The shudders are reality,” he said, and by the way he said it I knew he was quoting. “The shudders are the no-lie reality. Listen, women are very different from men.”

“Oh! Ah!”

“Well, okay, it sounds obvious, but it's important. For a man, sex is simple. He gets in and he gets off. But it's not automatic for a woman.”

It wasn't automatic for me either, but I kept my mouth shut.

“The thing is, women are more sensitive than men. They don't want to hurt our feelings.”

“Ha,” I countered.

“In general,” he said. “So they act, sometimes. They pretend. Now, for me, given my circumstances, it's very important that I know exactly what works and what doesn't. And I can't rely on what she's saying, or the groaning, the moaning, the breathing, none of that. Arching the back, curling the foot, biting the lip—none of that is a sure thing. Only the shudders. There's no faking the full-out shudders. You see those thighs start to quiver, I mean
quiver,
you know you found the pearl. Oysters and pearls, Mackenzie. Everybody knows where the oyster is—finding the pearl is what makes a good lover.”

I stared at the water tower looming above us. The kid was a genuine lunatic, but I liked him.

“I'll tell you the first thing I learned, living in the city,” said Butchko. “Puerto Rican women are excellent lovers.”

“All of them?”

“Yes,” he said. “All of them.”

I smoked Lucky Strikes on the rooftop and talked with Butchko about women and lions until he told me he had to get ready for his date. Twenty minutes later I was riding the First Avenue bus uptown. “Air conditioner's broken,” the driver told me before I stepped on. “There's another bus right behind me.” He said the same thing to everyone, and everyone besides me grunted and waited for the next bus, but I paid the fare and sat in the back row. My decision displeased the driver. I think he wanted to drive his hot empty bus at high speeds, slamming on the brakes at red lights with no passengers to complain. I wouldn't have said a word. He could have cruised up the avenue at ninety miles per hour, swerving around the potholes; it didn't matter to me. I was easy.

When we passed under the Queensboro Bridge I saw the lion. I shouted, a wordless shout, and the driver looked at me in his mirror and hit the brakes, as simple as that, as if he were used to riders shouting when they wanted to get off. I shoved through the heavy double doors at the rear of the bus and ran back to the bridge, under the shadowy barrel vault.

It could be that I read too much in a wink, and I wouldn't have been the first, but it seemed to me that the lion knew who I was. I believed that. I believed that the lion had a message for me, that the lion had come Lord knows how many miles in search of me, had evaded countless hunters in order to deliver his intelligence. Now he was here and my father had been hired to kill him. The lion would never make it back to Africa.

He waited for me on the sidewalk below the bridge. Flies crawled in the tangles of his mane. He watched me with yellow eyes. His hide sagged over his bones; the sore on his shoulder was inflamed, graveled with white pustules. His belly was distended, bloated from hunger. I thought of how far he was from home, how many thousands of miles he had traveled, so far from the zebras and wildebeests, the giraffes and antelopes of his native land, his nourishment. Here there were only people to eat. I could not imagine this lion stooping to devour the neighborhood mutts or the blinkered carriage-horses.

I wondered how long it would take him to gobble me down, and how much it would hurt, the long white teeth, the massive jaws, how long, and would he strip me to the wet bone or leave some meat for the pigeons to peck at, would he spit out my knuckles and watch them roll like gambler's dice, would he look up from my carcass, his muzzle painted red, watch the taxis race by like stray gazelles frantic for their herd?

“Speak to me,” I pleaded, hungry for revelation. “Speak to me.”

If you have ever stood near a lion, you understand humility. Nothing that lives is more beautiful. A four-hundred-pound lion can run down a thoroughbred, can tear through steel railroad car doors with his claws, can hump his mate eighty times in one day.

The lion rose to all fours and walked closer, until his whiskers were nearly brushing against my shirt. I closed my eyes and waited. The carnivorous stink of him, the low purr of his breathing, the mighty engine of him—I was ready. I got down on my knees on the sidewalk, below the Queensboro Bridge, and the lion's breath was hot as steam in my ear.

When I opened my eyes the lion was gone and I was shivering in the August heat. I hailed a taxi and directed the tur baned driver to the Frick Museum, but when I got there the front doors of the old robber baron's mansion were bolted shut. It was Monday, I remembered. The museum was closed. That's why Butchko was home. It was the worst possible time to be Monday, and I imagined that all days would now be Monday, that we would suffer through months of Mondays, that the office workers would rise day after day and never come closer to the weekend, they would check the newspaper each morning and groan, and the churchgoers would find themselves, perpetually, a day too late for the Sabbath.

I needed Bellini's Francis. I needed to stand with the virgin saint and experience the ecstasy, to feel the rapture driven through my palms, my feet. I needed to understand the language of animals, the words of the beasts, because when the lion whispered in my ear it sounded like nothing but the breath of a big cat. I needed translation.

I walked all the way home. The house was empty, every clock ticking solemnly until, in the space of a terrifying second, they yodeled the hour in unison. Whenever my father was in Africa I would quit winding the clocks; in every room their dead hands would mark the minute the pendulum stopped swinging. He always synchronized them the day he came home.

In my bedroom I uncapped the telescope's lens and eyepiece and studied the apartments across the street. The old man leaned against his windowsill, gazing toward Harlem. The redhead one floor below him seemed healthier; she lay belly-down on her carpeted floor, propped on her elbows, chewing a pencil, still working on Saturday's crossword. Behind her, on the television, Marlon Brando smooched Eva Marie Saint. The redhead never turned the TV off: not when she was away at work, not when she was sleeping. I understood—voices comforted her, even strangers' voices.

The redhead finished her crossword and began checking her answers against the solution in Monday's paper. The television behind her flashed an urgent graphic: BREAKING NEWS. A reporter wearing a safari hat and sunglasses began speaking into his microphone, gesturing to the crowd surrounding him. I tried to read his lips. Bored of the game, I was about to swing the telescope away when I saw the lion,
my
lion, staring into the camera. He sat by a fountain, a great round fountain with a winged angel standing above the waters.