Keys of Babylon (13 page)

But mostly it was the crust on the windows that made things grey. The
crud
. How he laughed at that word. Maybe crud was his favourite English word. Mary relished telling him to clean the crud off the lavatory pan rims, the crud in the sink which was a mixture of ketchup and carbolic and that sweatsweet Gallo from the winebox. The inescapable crud that everybody left behind wherever they went. Evidence of their passing. Proof of terrestrial life. Blast it, Mary would say, waving her brown coffee cup with the Bailey's in it. Blast the fooken crud. And she'd cackle and go back to her fillum.

So Juan had wiped the windows and the glassy shamrock bolted to the wall that Mary claimed was a genuine antique, and then the letters above the door.
Dave's Tavern
, now white on green again. With a gleaming apostrophe. Just like a teardrop, Juan had thought. A tear for Dave.

Juan should have been cleaning the restrooms. He flicked the lights and waited for the roaches to hide, the waterbugs that seemed to be made of metal. They ticked like something electrical. But the rooms didn't look too bad. He put the twenty in his pocket and pushed a mop over the floor in the Men's. The Women's could wait. Or maybe he'd polish the mirror there. He breathed on it and swept the glass with his sleeve. If the Women's was used, the mirror had to be clean. In one of the cubicles the lock was missing and the hole in the door filled with tissue. The mirror was even more important than that. Someone had scrawled
Hilary for President
on the wall. Someone had written S
he is, stupid
beneath it.

Juan worked five straight nights in the bus bays under the Port Authority. Where it was always dark. That week all the underground staff were talking about what had happened on a bus in Manitoba. A madman had decapitated the passenger in the seat in front. Juan had shrugged. It was a crazy time.

Those nights in that nether world he scraped oil from the concrete, cleaned mud from wheel arches and polished wind-shields, removing the excess before the buses went through the mechanical wash. Sometimes a driver told him there was skunk meat on the muffler and it was stinking the bus out. Get it off.

Yeah, Juan thought. Roadkill. Singed deer hide. Racoon guts. On another shift he had been assigned the grille of the Trailways down from Binghamton. It was caked with black snow and rocksalt. When he looked closer there was a bird impaled in the frets. Some kind of hawk. He thought it was dead but saw its eye follow his hand. An eye like a papaya seed. Hey, he said. Where you get on?

One night he'd been told to roust out a woman sleeping in Bay 26. She was rolled in a blanket on a strip of C Town cardboard. Around her were remains of a meal: a Ray's pizza crust, a Snapple bottle.

Hey, he said. Hey.

She rolled over and looked at him.

Hey, she said. And smiled.

This morning he was tired. Even with two jobs he had no money. When Juan came out of the Women's, Peevo was back with his beer and installed in his corner. That corner, between counter and far wall with its tobacco-coloured stucco, had been Peevo's for thirty years. Maybe forty. Peevo had once been the security man at Dave's. Now he sat and sipped, almost invisible in his lair, a urinous gleam from the glass in his fist. Peevo drank draft Bud. Maybe fifty glasses a day. Last week Juan had found himself next to the Pole in the Men's, watching him unstrapping his denim dungarees, observing him piss the colourless beer back into the bowl, one minute, two, a man venting from the white balloon of his body, three minutes of voiding himself until the next cold glass. A fat man, Peevo, an enormous sluglike man who had once held troublemakers by their lapels and tossed them on to the avenue. Yes, a swollen ghost Peevo, in his ammonia-crotched Wrangler's. Part of the furniture, Peevo, who wrapped himself close in the fog of the bar.

Mary Mack had deserted her post. She was watching the film, a bowl of Prairie City doughnuts and yellow Jell-O on the table before her. But sometimes she zapped to the television for sleeping draught ads. So many adverts, Juan noted, to put people to sleep.

Wanna sleep? Mary would shout. Buy our bourbon.

Then she'd switch back to Midnight Cowboy.

It was always Cowboy at Dave's. Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman becoming Joe Buck and Ratso. The hustler, the conman. And always Mary with the remote, replaying the scene when the bus comes out of the tunnel and the big blond Joe Buck finds himself in Manhattan for the first time. Joe Buck with his buckskin fringe aswing, aiming to put the man into Manhattan, rolling up the tunnel in a black Stetson.

And what does my beautiful Joe see? Mary Mack would cackle. Little ole us. Us good people at Dave's. Oh we were here in 1969 when that fillum was out. Oh yes we were here. Dave himself was here, as I live and breathe.

Mary Mack played Midnight Cowboy every day. Now she switched back to the ads.

Juan took over. This was the best time. He was the bus driver now. He was the patron, gazing round, taking in the glint of the mirror tiles, the empty booths down the wall, the tables with their wood-pattern formica.

Hey, he said to the Pole.

Peevo peered across. She's getting her place next week, Peevo said.

That's good.

She's getting her place next week.

Yeah, good.

Juan refilled the fat man's glass.

Two Sams, said a kid down the bar. His friend loitered behind.

Sam's off, said Juan. Got Bud.

Shit, said the kid. Give us two Turkeys.

Got ID?

The students showed their cards.

Two Wild Turkeys, smiled Juan.

The boys were looking round. Told you, whispered one. This is the real deal. None of that Shooters glitzy crap here. You seen the jukebox? Awesome.

Juan refilled Mary's cup. She was fast forwarding.

It's coming up, she nodded at the screen. Here it is.

Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight were on a Greyhound. They were going through the tunnel on the way to Florida. Then Voight was getting off at a mall stop and buying two summer shirts.

Real fancy Florida duds, hissed Mary Mack.

The placard man was in now. He had left his boards at the door. They said ‘Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth Death'.

The Lemon Man was next. He asked for a quarter lemon. Juan passed it over and the man left. He would return two minutes later, asking for a cup of hot water. Juan would also pass that over. This happened every day but only happened because it had always happened. The Lemon Man was another Pole. Sometimes he spoke Polish to Peevo but Peevo only said that she was getting her place next week.

Juan glanced at the film. Dustin Hoffman had died on the bus, just like that passenger up in Canada. So who cleaned up after that greasy little Ratso pissed his pants? In the script they laughed it off. Called it an unscheduled rest stop. But, like Mary, Juan loved the movie. How those boys shivered on the streets, in the burning floes of cold that blew off the Hudson. How they scraped a life, from Broadway's iron kerb to the Bronx brownstones where they might blag a bed.

Juan had long realised that hunger was this city's pimp. And winter its enforcer. Voight had to let that pervy kid suck the jelly out of him. But the kid was broke. Not a dime for the dick. That's where chasing cooter had got Jon Voight.

How quickly after he came out of the tunnel, out of its black tube, it had gone wrong for Joe Buck. As to Ratso, he had been coughing from the start. There was blood on his vest like ketchup on the crackers. Everyone in that movie was cursed by their own dream.

Ratso and Joe Buck? Mary Mack would announce. Of course they came in here. They were my best regulars. They had a drink here before getting on the bus. Dave remembered they was always scrounging peanuts off the bar. Then they was going down in the dark, down with their bundles to where the Greyhound was waiting, waiting to go through the tunnel, all the way down that tunnel and into the light.

The first chords of Europe's ‘The Final Countdown' crashed out of the jukebox. Right on time, Jesus arrived. Juan poured Jesus a macadam-black coffee. They would have spoken their Spanishes but Mary Mack didn't hold with language. Jesus worked in the tunnel, picking up garbage. Soda bottles, shredded tyres like crows' wings.

The students were discussing whether Europe was an American or Swedish band.

Hey fellahs, hollered Mary. What youse think of the place? Grand's the word. You know that Tom's Diner? Tom's up on Hundred and Twelve? They say they filmed Seinfeld there. Kind of a comedy show, they say. But this is the place to be. What you call authentic. Take a booth, boys. You like meatloaf?

Meatloaf's off, said Juan.

Bat Outta Hell, said one of the students. It's on next.

Mary went back to the sleeping pill ads.

Recently she had asked Juan where he came from.

Salta, he had said.

Where the fook's that?

Argentina.

Why you washed up here then?

Money, he said. Banks. The politicians changed the money. No, they murdered the money. And they killed me.

Mary Mack girned at him. Oh yes, those politicians, she hissed. Anybody ever say you look like that Barack Obama? Only like, whiter. How old are you?

Forty, Juan had said. He couldn't believe it then. He couldn't now. He was forty. A man of forty looking out of a dirty window. At the black snow. At the mouths of the tunnel, the three open mouths. On his wall was a picture of somewhere that wasn't Salta. One of the hawk's wing feathers, a foot long, barred brown and black at the tip, stood in a glass.

In Salt
a, J
uan used to go up the street until he was almost out of town. But there was the house. It was the house they held at the
Peña
, a labyrinth of rooms where couples gazed into one another's eyes. He'd make his way through the chambers until he came to the garden. The
parrilla
would be glowing, the coals reddening as two cooks turned the spits, prepared the
chorizo
, the
lomo
. How that roasting meat scented the air. And the guitarists would be crooning their songs, the poets their rhymes. He would slip in. Nobody stopped him. Men and women danced in candlelight, the waiters hurried past with jugs of wine. One of the cooks might pass him a piece of
cabrito
and Juan would laugh, knowing the goat fat oiled his chin.

The twenty bucks was folded stamp-size in his pocket. For my
Peña
, he thought. Might a
Peña w
ork here? It could work here. Real charcoal grill. Grease on the chin and a guitarist's cries as the diners unwrapped, like his special presents to them, the corn leaves of their
humida
.

Dead man in the tunnel, said Jesus. But we didn't stop traffic. Oh no.

She's getting her place next week, said Peevo.

Mary Mack was asleep with the zapper in her hand.

Peña
– traditional music and song.
Parrilla
– grill or barbecue restaurant
Chorizo
– one of the first meat courses at an Argentine parrilla.
Lomo
– fillet steak
Humida
– corn (maize) paste served in corn leaves.

The children Fabien knew lived near the bus station at Tiete. That's where they'd go before and after school, running round the Santa Ritas coming in from the suburbs, the thousands disembarking, the thousands waiting to get on.

At first, it never occurred to him to ask where these people were going. But by the time he was twelve, he'd often watch the cometas loading up for the outlandish places beyond his city, the other cities of his country, his country which the teachers said was bigger than all the other countries, his country with its jungles and waterfalls and all that wild
cerrado
.

And as Fabien watched he wondered. Step on, he learned, and in three days he might step out in Brasilia. Wasn't that the new capital where no one had ever been? Or he might go to Rio. Rio with its white sand. He knew a rhyme about Rio, its thieving cariocas who wore sparkling wedding dresses. How long was the road to Rio?

The passengers would look at their bundles. Then they doubtfully proffered them to the luggage handlers and pressed coins on those perspiring men who used pikes to push their possessions into different compartments. Once a woman brought two cockerels fighting in a Panasonic cardboard box. He grinned as the handler slid the box into the darkness under the bus and both birds grew quiet.

Fabien learned the bus companies' liveries. They reminded him of the city's football teams. Fabien's team was Corinthians although he had never seen a game. There were ancient buses with turnstiles and tickets on clicking wheels, while a modern coach, hot from Buenos Aires, purred like an aeroplane. He watched a couple emerge from its smoked glass, blinking in the dawn. After forty hours their journey had ended. Now they must start again.