Barking Man (9 page)

An hour or two and he’d remembered how to swim again, or glide. A thermal carried him up into a Times Square hotel, one of the kind where they did a take when he said he wanted the room all night, but by the week it turned out to be a bargain. Suspended in some other current, Stuart lazed back out onto the street and drifted, from a bar to a street-corner stand to one of the old needle parks to another bar, and so on.
Don’t go where you used to go
, they’d told him at the center,
don’t see those same old people or you’ll fall.
No doubt that bigger, meaner fish still eyed him from their neighbor eddies, but he wasn’t bleeding anymore, and a flick of tail or fin shot all of them away.

The weather was still bland down here, much milder than upstate, though it began to have its bitter aftertaste of cold. Stuart cruised up into the chill of the evening, watching whores and dealers check him over before they swirled away, always wondering if he might run into Natasha. He was not exactly looking yet, but developing a ghost of an intention. If he had asked himself
Why her?
he would have had no answer. Just … Natasha. He had written her a time or two from Millbrook, hadn’t had anything back, not that he’d expected it. Why Natasha? Others had been as close, or closer, and he didn’t want to look for them. He wasn’t looking for Natasha either. It had been spontaneous at first, this feeling that she was about to appear.

Clifton had been wrong about Rita, Stuart eventually found out. She wasn’t in L.A. after all; she was in Bellevue getting over hepatitis A. They made him take a shot of gamma globulin when he went in to see her, even though he tried to tell them how long he’d been upstate. He also tried a joke about needles, but the nurses didn’t laugh. When Rita invited him to sit down he had to tell her no.

“Funny, almost everybody seems to say that,” Rita said.

Her smile was not particularly bright. She was on a big ward, but curtains ran on tracks between the beds, and there were a couple of chairs pulled up to her nightstand with magazines piled on the seats. The whites of her eyes were still a funny color and she was so thin that Stuart had trouble telling what were the lines of her body and what were only wrinkles in the sheet.

“Well, now,” Stuart said. “You look good.”

“Don’t give me that,” Rita said. “I look like I’m gonna die.”

“You’re not,” Stuart said.

“Not this time,” Rita said.

Stuart groped for a commonplace.

“Clifton told me you went out west.”

“No way,” Rita said, patting the mattress with a bony hand. “I been right here.”

“When do you get out?” Stuart said.

“I don’t know. Two weeks more, maybe. They don’t want to give me a date.”

Rita’s folding alarm clock ticked loudly across the next patch of silence.

“You need anything?” Stuart said.

“Not that I can get.”

“Well, let me know, okay?” Stuart pulled the curtain back and paused in the gap. “Hey. I been kind of trying to get hold of Natasha, you wouldn’t know what she’s been up to, would you?”

“I know she hasn’t been up here,” Rita said. “Not a whole lot else. Last I heard she was tricking for Uncle Bill.”

“My God,” Stuart said. “That sounds like a losing proposition.”

“You know how it is,” Rita said. “She’s got a nice big nut to make every day.”

“I guess,” Stuart said. “Hey, but Clifton told me Uncle Bill was dead.”

“Is that right,” Rita said. “Clifton seems to be kind of full of bad information these days.”

Bars and coffee shops, coffee shops and bars. Stuart circled the island from end to end of the old boundaries: the Marlin, McCarthy’s, Three Roses, the Chinatown spots, anywhere she might have come in for any reason, rest her feet, get out of the weather, kill time waiting to score. Some places they remembered what he drank, but mostly not, and every now and then he’d meet somebody else who hadn’t seen Natasha.

“Nah, man, she ain’t been around
here
.”

“Didn’t I hear she went to Chicago? I can’t think if it was her or somebody else. Memory slips a little on the fourth one …

“Haven’t seen her in about eight months. Maybe not since last summer …”

“Hey Stuart, what ever happened to that snippy little black-haired girl you used to hang around with?”

Wish I knew …
On sleepless nights, he’d eat small-hour breakfasts at the Golden Corner or some place just about like it, hunched down behind a newspaper, eavesdropping on the booths around him full of hookers on break, waiting for the voice or the name. By the time winter set hard in the city he’d started on the false alarms, recognizing Natasha in just about any middle-sized dark-haired white girl. It happened more than once a night sometimes: he’d have to walk right up to whoever he’d spotted and then at the last minute veer away. He did that so many times that the hookers started calling him Mr. No-Money Man.

Uncle Bill’s place was up at 125th Street near the Chinese restaurant, just past the train trestle. A black kid with his hair done up in tight cornrows was waiting by the entry when Stuart arrived, one leg cocked up on the railing, the loose foot swinging to its limit like the pendulum of a clock. Stuart stood sideways to keep one eye on him while he studied the row of bells. The third one now said
CHILDRESS
instead of
B.B.
like it should have, but he reached to ring it anyway.

“Man done gone,” the black kid said.

Stuart turned all the way toward him. “What man is that?”

“Billbro, who else?”

“Know where he went?”

The kid spat over the railing. “You got a cigarette on you, man?”

Stuart passed him a single Marlboro.

“He in the trench,” the kid said. “There’s a place just about ten blocks up can fix what it is you need.”

Stuart laughed briefly. “You think I’m the right color to be going about ten blocks up from here?”

The kid grinned and blew some smoke. “Long’s you go with
me
you are.”

“Thanks anyway,” Stuart said. “It was a personal visit kind of thing. What was this trench you were talking about?”

“Out on one of them islands, I forget.” The kid’s tennis shoe, fat with thick lacing and white as new bones, beat back and forth on the hinge of his knee. “You know, when you die without no money, then they shove you in the trench.”

“Oh,” Stuart said. “That trench. Do you get a box, at least?”

“I don’t think so, bro,” the kid said. “Maybe you might get a bag.”

Up at Millbrook, Stuart’s image of Natasha had been clear as a photograph tacked to the wall, but once he was back in the city it began to blur and fade and run together in a swamp of other faces: magazine covers, or actresses on posters outside the movies, and always and especially the dozens of near-misses that kept on slipping past him. Now her memory was less a face and figure than just a group of gestures, and these too began to dissipate and dissolve, until when he thought of Natasha he often thought of a painting he’d once seen by Manet: a full-length portrait of a woman in a gray dust coat down to her feet, one hand lightly extended toward … what? A bird cage? He couldn’t even remember the painting all that well. The woman in the portrait was nothing like Natasha; she had a totally different face, was taller, heavier, had red hair. Yet the cool repose of her expression also managed to suggest that she was poised at the edge of something. Stuart began to doubt if he would recognize Natasha when he found her, and what if he’d already passed her by? He recognized people that
weren’t
her frequently enough, that much was for sure.

Stuart was trying to outlast a drunk with a three
A.M.
breakfast at the Golden Corner when a hooker slid into the booth across from him.

“I been thinking about you, Mr. No-Money Man,” she said. “I been thinking, if you ate a little bit less breakfast, you might have a little bit more money.”

When she laughed, her eyes half disappeared into warm crinkles at their corners. Stuart, saw she was a lot older than she wanted to appear, but not bad looking still, in a stringy kind of way. He sort of liked her face, under all the makeup. She was wearing white lipstick and white eye shadow on skin the shade of tan kid leather. The wig she had on was a color no hair had ever been. “I bet you got fifty cent right now,” she said. “Buy me a cup of coffee.”

“Get the number ten breakfast if you want it,” Stuart said. “Or anything else they got.” He was in a slightly reckless condition and a lot of his concentration was being spent on keeping her from splitting into twos and fours.

“
Hell
, yes,” she said, and shouted an order toward the counter. “I knew you had that money all along.”

“Not that much,” Stuart said, laying down his fork.

“Enough,” she said, aiming a long fingernail at his nose. “Your trouble is, you think you can’t find what you need. You know I seen you looking. Up and down and up and down—” She slapped the table. “You might not think it, but I can do it all myself, do it real well too.”

“Breakfast only,” Stuart said, and as if those were the magic words, an oblong plate of hash and eggs came skidding into the space between her elbows.

“I got it now,” she said, biting into a triangle of damp toast. “You not looking for some
thing
. You looking for some
body
, right?”

“Yeah,” Stuart said. “Right.”

“Have to be a girlfriend.”

“As a matter of fact, no,” Stuart said. “Just somebody I used to know.”

“What for, then?”

“I don’t know,” Stuart said. “I think I got survivor syndrome.”

“Say what?”

“I feel responsible,” Stuart said, hearing his words begin to slur. “For like … for everybody. Don’t ask me why, but I always felt like she’d be the only one I could do anything about.” He elbowed his plate out of the way and clasped his hands in front of him. “It’s got to be like a long chain of people, see? I take hold of her and she takes hold of somebody else and finally somebody takes hold of you, maybe, and then if everybody holds on tight, we all get out of here.”

The hooker shoveled in a large amount of hash and eggs with a few rapid movements and then looked back up. “Out of where?”

“Ah, I can’t explain it,” Stuart said, fumbling out a cigarette. “Whose idea was this, anyway?”

The hooker stared at him, not smiling so much now. “You be knee-walking drunk once you stand up, won’t you?” she said after a while. “Man, where you coming from with this kind of talk?”

“Straight out of hell,” Stuart said, trying to get his cigarette together with his match. “You familiar with the place?”

Over the winter he started going to the kung fu movies along Forty-second Street and around Times Square. It was a better time killer than drinking for him now; he’d tried getting drunk a few more times but he didn’t much like where it took him. He went to the movies at night or sometimes in the afternoons, wearing a knit cap pulled down to his eye sockets so others couldn’t tell much about him in the dark. It would take him a while, sometimes, to find a seat. Often whole sections had been ripped out, and also he liked to get one that put his back to a post or some other barrier. In the half light reflected back from the screen, the rest of the audience milled through clouds of dope smoke, dealing for sinsé or street ludes or dust, each cluster playing a different boom box, usually louder than the soundtrack. They only turned to the screen when there was fighting, but the fight scenes always got their whole attention, bringing screams of approval from every cranny of the huge decaying theaters.

Stuart, on the other hand, always watched all the way through, even the tedious love scenes. He was not very discriminating, could watch the same picture again and again, often staying so long he would have forgotten whether it was day or night by the time he returned to the street. The movies were all so similar that there was not much to choose between them, if you were going to bother to watch them at all. He observed that the theme of
return
was prevalent. What the returning person usually did was kill people, keeping it up until there was no one left or he was killed himself.

Twisted among the lumps and rickets of his moldy ricket of a bed, Stuart falls into a dream so deep and profoundly revealing that at every juncture of it he posts his waking self a message: you
must
remember this. The dream is room within room within room, each suppressing its breathless secret, and on every threshold, Stuart swears he will remember. Each revelation has sufficient power to make him almost weep. When he sits up suddenly awake, the message is still thinly wrapped around him, bound up in a single word, a name.

Clifton
. Stuart stared at a gleaming crack in the gritty window pane, an arm’s reach across the space between the bedstead and the wall.
Clifton
, that was nothing but nothing, and the dream was entirely gone. He flopped back over onto his side, eyes falling back shut, fingers begin to twitch and a shard of the dream returns to him. The self of his dream comes hurrying from a building and in passing glances at a peddler on the sidewalk, a concrete-colored man propping up a dismal scrap of a tree. Its branches are hung with little figurines carved in wood and stone, and Stuart, hastening on his way, takes in as a matter of course that each of them astonishingly lives, is animate, moving toward the others or away. In the dream he rushes past as though it were completely ordinary, but now he is transfixed by the gemlike movement of the tree, this nonsense miracle, a mere wonder outside the context of the dream, and uninterpretable. Stuart sat back up in the knot of his grimy blanket, muttering,
Clifton
. Surely, somewhere in all of this there must be something to extract.

Back in Brooklyn, Stuart checked in Henry’s old bar to see if anyone knew where Clifton was living now and found that no one did. He tried the old place up on Broadway and the super sent him back around the corner to a half-renovated building between two shells on South Eighth Street. It was a sunny day, though cold, and even the well to the basement door was full of light. Stuart rolled his newspaper tighter in his right hand and rapped on the door with his left. It took five or ten minutes of off-and-on knocking before the door pulled back on the chain, then reclosed and opened all the way.