Barking Man (10 page)

“You been a long time coming,” Clifton said. Inside, the light that leaked down from the street level was thin and watery. Clifton shimmered vaguely as he yawned and stretched; it looked like he’d been caught asleep, though it was well past noon. There was something that smelled to Stuart a little like old blood. He followed Clifton into the room and kicked the door shut behind him with his heel.

“The worried man,” Clifton said, bending away from Stuart to get a T-shirt from the bed. “Well, babe, you ready for me to make your troubles go away?”

“Can you?” Stuart said. “Clifton?”

When Clifton began to turn toward him, Stuart lashed at him with the rolled newspaper, and the heavy elbow of pipe he’d furled inside it knocked Clifton all the way over and sent him sliding into the rear wall.

“What in hell is the matter with you?” Clifton said. He sat up against the wall and stroked at the side of his mouth, his finger coming away red from a little cut. “Have you gone crazy or what?”

Stuart looked down at him, trying to feel something, anything, but could not. He thought for no reason of the trench, bags jumbled into it, barely covered with a damp film of dirt.

“Just curious,” he said haltingly.

“Yeah, well, are you satisfied now?”

“Not really,” Stuart said. The newspaper hung at the full length of his arm, pointed at the floor. “I was thinking I might beat your face out the back of your head, but I don’t really feel like it now.”

“That’s real good, Stuart,” Clifton said. “I’m glad you don’t feel like it now. You don’t maybe want to tell me why you felt like it a minute ago?”

“I don’t know why,” Stuart said. “What happened to Natasha?”

“Man, are you kidding me, man?” Clifton said. “I’m going to tell you the truth now, okay,
I don’t freaking know
.”

Stuart took a step forward, hefting the newspaper. Clifton raised one hand more or less in front of his face and pushed up into a crouch with the other.

“Hey, I would tell you now if I knew, man,” he said. “You got the edge on me, okay? Besides, what would I want to hide it for? I don’t know any more than you do, man.”

“Okay,” Stuart said, and let the newspaper fall back to rest against his thigh. Clifton reached into the side of his mouth and took something out and looked at it.

“This is my tooth I got here, man,” he said. “I cannot believe you did this over that dumb freaking chick.”

“I had a dream,” Stuart said, “but maybe this wasn’t what it was supposed to be about.”

Clifton pushed himself up off the floor and stood, pressing the T-shirt over the bleeding edge of his mouth. “Yeah, well, thanks for stopping by,” he said, words a little slurred by the cloth. “Next time I see you I’m going to kill you, you do know that, I hope.”

“No, you won’t,” Stuart said.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Clifton said. “Don’t turn your back.”

Almost every day he bought a paper and almost every day he didn’t read much of it. Sometimes he’d take a look at the want ads, but with barely focused attention, though the savings he’d been living on were about to empty out. Not long before he’d be Mr. No-Money Man for real, but mostly he’d just flip through the paper quickly and then roll it and carry it all day, till the front pages began to curl and tatter and the ink started to bleed off on his fingers. After a while the feel of the rolled newspapers stopped reminding him directly of Clifton and only made him uncomfortable in a dull way he couldn’t identify.

There was always too much news about missing people, and too many of the ones that weren’t missing were dead. Every time he heard about someone else missing he wondered how many just vanished without being missed. Every third person he passed on the street was probably missing from somewhere.

“Missing” was no more than a whitewash; a better word would be “gone.”
Gone people
. Whenever Stuart looked at the faces on the milk cartons, he had a deep feeling the children were dead. He didn’t own a picture of Natasha, but all the same he was convinced that if she’d died he would have known that too.

When it got warm enough to sit outside again Stuart sat in Tompkins Square with one more unread newspaper flattened on the bench beside him and watched Tombo coming across from the east side. He would have let him go on by, but Tombo saw him before he could get the paper up, came over and sat down.

“Long time,” Tombo said. “I wasn’t even sure you were still around.”

“I’m here,” Stuart said.

Tombo leaned back on the bench, shooting his long legs out before him. He had on a nice pair of gray pleated pants, expensive looking. None of it ever seemed to age or even touch him. He still had his dark and vaguely foreign prettiness, perfect skin, red pouty mouth, long eyelashes like a girl’s. Stuart watched him blink his eyes and sniffle.

“Hey, you know Clifton’s been talking you down a lot,” Tombo said, shifting around in Stuart’s direction. “He keeps on telling everybody he’s gonna fix your business.”

“Good,” Stuart said. “If he’s talking about it, then he won’t do anything.”

“You think?”

“Clifton’s got a temper,” Stuart said. “But he’ll never let it take him all the way to jail.”

“Maybe not,” Tombo said. He snorted, pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose. “Allergies, man,” he said. “It always gets to me around this time of year.”

“What are you giving me that line for?” Stuart said. “I’m not a cop.”

“Right, I forgot,” Tombo said, glancing over at him under his eyelashes. “You still clean?”

“Yeah,” Stuart said.

“They do a pretty good job on you up at Millbrook, huh? It sticks?”

“So far,” Stuart said. “One day at a time and all that kind of thing.”

Tombo shifted around on the bench. “I’d been thinking maybe I might go up there sometime myself,” he said.

“Well,” Stuart said, “when you decide to go, then you’ll go.”

“People tell me you’re looking for Natasha,” Tombo said.

“Do they,” Stuart said. “Everybody likes to talk to you about my business, seems. Why, you haven’t seen her, have you?”

“Not in a year at least, nope. Sorry, bud … What are you looking for her for?”

“I quit looking for her,” Stuart said. “You can’t look for somebody around here, it’s ridiculous. I’m just … I’m just waiting to find her, that’s all.”

“Interesting strategy,” Tombo said, standing up. “Well, good luck.”

With the improving weather, Stuart started making trips to Brooklyn, back to what had been Henry’s place, though he didn’t much like the feel of it, not after the remodeling. Why he kept going out there he didn’t really know, maybe just for the inconvenience of it, for the journey. Clifton had stopped coming in, the new bartender was a stranger, there was seldom anyone he knew there except the dog. They still hadn’t opened up the restaurant section. Sometimes Stuart’s visit would coincide with Henry’s, who tended to drop in most Thursday and Friday afternoons. He’d take Captain out around the block and then come back and sit at the bar, drinking white wine on ice from one of the old straight glasses they’d apparently saved just to serve him with. It pleased Stuart that this one little thing was still the same, and he felt happier in the place when Henry was in there too, though they didn’t have much to say to each other past hello, and though the old man looked all wrong, sitting on the Outside of the bar.

Whenever the weather was good enough he walked back across the bridge and caught the subway at Delancey Street on the Manhattan side. He was in a lot better shape than he’d been in the old days, but it was still enough of an effort that doing it fast set his heart slamming. That sense of an urge out in front of him was familiar, though now he wasn’t going for a fix; the energy he set out ahead of him had become its own point. The walkway was a little more run-down than he remembered it. A lot of the tiles had come loose and blown away and now he could look through cracks in the steel plating and see all the way down to the place far below the roadway where the water slowly turned and moiled. But the rise of excitement was the same as it always had been as he pushed himself up to the crux of the span, where the howling of the traffic stopped being a scream and became a sigh. Arrived just there, with the afternoon barely past its daily crisis, he stopped and looked farther across at the tall buildings limned explosively with light, exultant, thinking,
This is what you always will forget, this is what you never can remember, this is what you have to be here for
.

It’s not the first but the fifth or sixth day of spring when Stuart finally finds Natasha. All winter he’s felt old and moribund, frozen half through, but now a new green shoot of youth begins to uncurl inside of him. It’s a fresh and tingling day, the weather so very fine that it alone would be enough to make you fall in love. Everybody in Washington Square has bloomed into their summer clothes and they all look almost beautiful. Stuart walks around the rim of the fountain, hands in his pockets, a cigarette guttering at the corner of his mouth, smiling a little as the fair breeze ruffles his hair, he’s headed straight for Natasha before he’s even seen her, and then he does: she’s tapped out there on one of the benches just at the bottom edge of the circle, head lolled back, mouth a little open, hands stretched palms up on her knees. When he gets a little closer, he can even see her eyes darting under the closed lids, looking at the things she’s dreaming of. Man, she’s way too thin, she’s got bad-looking tracks, infected, and it’s a fifty-fifty chance she’s dying, but Stuart won’t think about any of that right now, just keeps on walking, up into the moment he’s believed in for so long.

For Wyn Cooper

M
ACKIE
L
OUDON LIVED ALONE
in a small house made of iron and stone on a short street west of Twenty-first Avenue. She had lived there, alone, for a long time. Old ivy grew in a carpet across her front steps and in her yard the grass was tall, with volunteer shoots of privet standing in it. The street was old enough to have a few big trees and the houses were raised on a high embankment above the sidewalk. It was quiet down the whole length of her block, almost always very, very quiet.

Indoors, it seemed that inertia ruled, though maybe that was just a first impression. The front room had once been a parlor, but now, scattered among the original furnishings were all of Mackie Loudon’s sculpture tools. There were pole lamps, a rocker, a couple of armchairs, some fragile little end tables, also hammers and chisels and files and other devices, and a variety of sculptures in wood and stone. In former times people had come from the North to take the sculptures away and sell them, but it was a long time since their visits had stopped. She did not remember the reason or care about it, since she was not in want.

The things she didn’t need to use stayed put exactly where they were. In the kitchen, on the gas stove, an iron skillet sat with browning shreds of egg still plastered to it, a relic of the very last time Mackie Loudon had bothered to make herself a hot meal. Asians had moved to a storefront within walking distance of her house, to open a store and cafeteria, and she went there to provender herself with things she never knew the names of. She bought salt plums, and packets of tiny dried fish whose eyes were bigger than their heads, and crocks of buried vegetables plugged with mud. She dumped the empty containers in the sink, and when it filled she bagged them up and carried the bag down a rickety outside staircase to a place in the alley from where it would eventually disappear. There was one pot that she used for coffee and that was all. On the window sill above the sink was an old teacup, its inside covered with a filigree of tiny tannin-colored cracks. Each morning, if the day was fair, a bar of sunlight would find a painted rose on its upper rim, warm it a moment, then pass on.

She wore flowered cotton dresses, knee length with no shape, and in winter a man’s tweed overcoat. With the light behind her, her legs showed through the fabric. They were very slightly bowed, and her shoulders were rather big for a woman, her hands strong. She had a little trouble with arthritis, but not so much she couldn’t work. Her features were flat, her skin strong and wrinkly like elephant hide. A few long white hairs flew away from her chin. The rest of her hair was thick and gray, and she hacked if off herself in a rough helmet shape and peered out from underneath its visor. Her right eye was green, her left pale blue and troubled by an unusual sort of tic. Over five or so minutes the eyelid would lower, imperceptibly and inexorably closing itself till it was fully shut, and then quite suddenly fly back open in a startled blue awakening. Because of this, some said that Mackie Loudon had the evil eye, and others thought she was a witch, which was not true, although she did hold colloquy with demons.

Before the fireplace in the parlor was a five-foot length of a big walnut log, out of which Mackie Loudon was carving a great head of Medusa. For a workstand she used a stone sculpture she’d forgotten, mostly a flat-topped limestone rock with an ill-defined head and arm of Sisyphus just visible underneath it. She stood on a rotting embroidered ottoman to reach the top of the section of wood, and took her chisels from the mantelpiece where they were lined. The front windows had not been washed in years and what light came through was weak and dingy, but she could see as much as she required to. Her chisels were ordered from New York and each was sharp enough to shave with. She didn’t often need to use her mallets; wherever she touched her scoop to its surface the walnut curled away like butter. She carved, the strange eye opened and closed on its offbeat rhythm and the murmur and mutter of her demons soothed her like a song.

There were two of them, Eliel and Azazael. Each made occasional inconsistent protestations of being good, or evil. Often they quarreled, with each other or with her, and at other times they would cooperate in the interlocking way of opposites. Eliel reported himself to be the spirit of air and Azazael the spirit of darkness. Sometimes they would exchange these roles, or sometimes both would compete to occupy one or the other. They laid conflicting claims to powers of memory and magic, though Mackie Loudon could always point out that there was little enough in the real world they’d ever accomplished on their own.