Little Easter (3 page)

“I smell a good story here, Klein,” she tried that bit of triteness on for size.

“That’s your breath you’re smellin’, Ms. Barnum. Now why don’t you go home and write it up like I explained?”

“Because your telling stinks worse than my breath,” she slammed the evacuated tumbler onto the pitted counter and lit up a filterless Chesterfield. A few drinks and the first drag on her cigarette seemed to put some wind back in her sails. “You don’t fool me, Klein. I’m going to get this story. It wants me to get it.”

“There’s no story to get.”

“You’re right,” she agreed too easily. “When a middle-aged woman dressed in Salvation Army mink and made up like an orange day-glo hooker gets her brains rearranged and a canary stuffed in her dead mouth in this town, that’s not a story. That’s legend, my friend.”

With that pronouncement, she swept her collection of crushed dollar bills off the bar and into a hip pocket. She threw on a ski parka that’d probably never seen the slopes nor the insides of a dry cleaners. The beige coat was so worn and soiled you could divine the outlines of where the tape recorder was usually carried. And that’s the pocket she put it in.

“Save your Merry Christmases for someone who’ll listen,” the thoroughly braced reporter preempted, waving her right palm at me like a poor man’s Diana Ross. Kate Barnum was a veteran drinker. The straight, stumble-free line she made out of the bar proved as much. She didn’t have to tell me I’d be seeing her again. I knew I would. Parts of me looked forward to it. Still others smelled trouble in the wake of her perfume. I finally locked the Scupper’s front doors. Some of me wanted to collapse into sleep, but that was for books and movies and my three wishes. I tended to wear insomnia like a second skin. I shut the bar lights, settled down with the stuffed fishes and let the new TV babble once again.

Jacob Marley, wrapped in chains and moaning—sort of like my brother Josh getting his cavities drilled by Great Uncle “Who Needs Novacaine” Ziggy, in Brighton Beach in 1963—was busily laying guilt at the feet of old Scrooge. Ebenezer wasn’t having any, yet. He had three ghosts to go. I dangled the orphaned heart in the TV glare and wondered how many ghosts might be waiting to visit the likes of one John Francis MacClough.

Diary of Wasted Days

My right arm was warmly numb underneath her. The smooth inside of my left forearm could feel the soft ridges of branching blue veins buried just beneath the cloudy white skin of her breasts. Curling my left wrist with eager pain, I captured a bullet-hard nipple between the tips of my thumb and forefinger. I pinched the pink bullet and she shook. Suddenly, something else stiffened, something resting between the pillow of her buttocks and the moist opening of her soul.

She released her nipple from my grip and guided my fingers south along her abdomen, over the lightly downed skin below her waist and into a wet tangle of hair and hunger. My fintertip chased and caught an elusive button hidden under the coarse weave and slippery skin. I dipped my finger fully into her and brought the moisture to my mouth.

God, she was different. My finger smelled of patchouli and she tasted like bourbon and cigarettes on my tongue. I could feel my thighs tighten as a drop of me rolled onto her somewhere. She grabbed my hand and licked it, too.

“You don’t fool me, Klein,” her throaty whisper faded into the black.

I rolled her over to kiss her, to cut my tongue on her teeth. My hands cupped her cheeks and I pressed down on her. I never reached her lips.

Feathers and brittle claws!

We lay together on the train platform. Her eyes still vacantly searching the arc-lighted sky. There was blood, again, on the end of my finger, on my lips and rolling onto the snow from the tip of my penis.

I tried running, but my naked feet were tractionless against the frozen concrete and ice. I slid every second step, peeling my skin away in sheets. There was no pain nor much blood.

At the edge of the station, a dark form pulled me up. It was bound and shackled and wore a diamond heart at the end of a stethoscope.

“Your hands.” It grabbed them. “I want your hands. They want me to get them.”

The shadow man squeezed my hands. I could feel that more clearly, now, and the sweat consuming what was left of my unpeeled skin.

“Hey, Klein!” he shook my shoulders. “Klein!” a rough hand slapped my cheeks. “For chrissakes!”

My shoulders were free. A chair crashed. So did I.

“I thought a fall on that flat Jewish ass might wake you up.” Johnny MacClough stood over me shaking his head in mock disgust. “Must’ve been a helluva dream.”

“That,” I yawned, cracking my stiff neck, “was no dream.”

The cloud-filtered morning light seemed to bend around MacClough on its journey to my crusty eyes. I rubbed them to no good end and began scratching at the ever-increasing gray of my beard. Why was it, I wondered, that gray hair looked so distinguished on everyone else. On me it looked like a diary of wasted days. On me it was a constant reminder of knees that stayed sore too long and breath that just grew shorter. It’s funny what you wonder about.

Johnny MacClough had no beard nor any gray hair in his full blond waves. Though a good ten years my senior, he’d always introduce me to people as his father. As yet, no one was quite blind enough to believe it, but sometimes, just sometimes, strangers hesitated a bit too long before laughing.

“Merry Christmas!” I threw my right hand out for a shake and a pull up.

“Bar looks like shit,” he observed accusingly, but yanked me up just the same.

“You heard?” I rolled my shoulders and stretched.

“I heard. Carney practically jumped me on my way in. I haven’t seen the old bastard that agitated since they cut out his right lung. He was a little sketchy on the details, but your name kinda got mentioned every third word.”

“Yeah, it was quite a party.”

“Do tell,” Johnny sat down at the bar where Kate Barnum had sat. “Do tell.”

I did. I told. Everything, this time. He wore his cop face, absorbing it all like a skeptical sponge. I hated that particular face, that cop face. The face that saw only enemies. The face that says: “Yeah, right! You lying scumbag. Stop wasting my time and tell me the truth. Truth? I wouldn’t believe it anyway coming outta your mouth.” I hated that face because it was reflexive and showed a MacClough I didn’t know, couldn’t know, didn’t want to know. I told myself he couldn’t help it. That attitudes couldn’t be left at the door like service revolvers and badges. But I still hated that face.

“Johnny Blue, huh?” the ex-detective peeled off the cynical make-up sooner than expected, almost too soon. “Good name for a rockabilly star.”

“So you’re not—”

“—Johnny Blue. No. Sorry to disappoint you.”

“And this doesn’t mean anything to you?” I fished the diamond heart out of my pocket.

“Not unless it means we’re goin’ steady,” he gave a cursory glance at the orphaned heart. “Thanks, Dylan,” he never called me that.

“For . . .”

“For putting on the stall until we talked. Merry Christmas ya heathen Jew bastard.” He hugged me.

“You’re welcome, but now how do I tell the cops about these new details? I wasn’t shocky or anything. It’s gonna look pretty suspicious.”

“Here,” Johnny snatched the jewlry out of my paw. “I’ll handle it.”

“But—”

“But nothin’. I said I’ll deal with it and I will. I do the cop-speak thing pretty damned well,” he bragged, sounding more like the man I knew.

“So whaddaya think?” I tried turning the page back to the subject of murder.

“About what?” MacClough wanted to know, sniffing at the cold coffee I’d left on the bar the night before.

“About raggy mink ladies with orange make-up. About little yellow birds and bullet holes. About—”

“Where’s my sweater,” John cut me off.

“The cops. I told you. Nitrate tests. Remember?”

“Yeah,” he waved carelessly. “I never believed half the shit those forensic guys came up with. I swear they used to make their results up as they went along.”

“What about the murder?” I refused to let go.

“What about it? Murder is murder. When you strip away all the frills, all you got is a dead human being,” was the ex-cop’s strangely undetective-like conclusion. “The bird? Could be window dressing. Could be it just flew into her mouth. Maybe Frank Perdue is a serial killer. I don’t know. It’s fuckin’ Christmas Day. Can we get off the subject?”

“Sure,” I gave in uneasily. “Let’s clean up.”

“No, not today. I’ll do it tomorrow.” He squeezed the back of my neck with brotherly affection. “Let’s go open some gifts.”

“Okay, MacClough,” I shook his calloused right hand.

He took one long look at the barroom and stood, head bowed, for some seconds. It seemed oddly like a moment of prayer.

London in December

Whenever I could not write, I’d assemble mental lists of authors and poets I could barely approximate and never be. There were very many lists. I would never be F. Scott or J.R.R. or e.e. or T.S. or J.D. or W.H. or D.H. or H.D. I’d never be Ernest or Ezra, Wallace or William, Kurt or Carlos, Richard or Raymond, Ann, Anne, or Ayn. I would never be Leo or Isaac, Hammett or Hesse, T. Wolfe or V. Woolf. I
would
always be Dylan, but neither Bob nor Thomas.

I was furiously making lists today. I was making lists to camouflage the bald spot on my brain where the words had stopped coming from. I was making lists to distract my eyes from the mounting pile of crumpled white paper surrounding my desk like unmelting snowballs. I was making lists to ease the frustration of blank pages. Blank pages; the only thing that ever made insurance work seem like romance.

When the lists didn’t work, I’d read. I was reading today. I was reading my own stuff; the three poems and two short stories that’d been published since my change of career. Sometimes reading my own printed words would pump me up, slap me, throw cold water in my face, fool me into believing there was hope and promise in the world and within me. Today, I wasn’t fooling so easy. Early on, I tried to juice myself by staring at photostats of the publishers’ payment checks, but today their sparse digits only fueled the frustration.

I switched to the product of someone else’s pen. I picked up the
Whaler
and studied something other than the grocery ads for the first time in five years. God, she really
was
good. Her sentences were as clean and taut as an old sailor’s knots. Her skepticism was sharp, but veiled like the microscopic teeth on a scalpel. Didn’t you know? All knives have teeth. All knives. She had knives. She had teeth. She knew how to use them. Again the question came. What had she done to fall this far?

Yeah, I’d pulled Kate Barnum’s name out of my memory’s hat. Her prose, however, had not been so readily retrievable. I guess I didn’t really have much respect for tabloid journalism. To me, newspaper writing was like newspaper print; easily washed off, easily forgotten. It really was some feat, you know, my recalling her name. Considering a good part of my newspaper reading had been done between sips of burned-bitter coffee in dull, heaterless front seats during eternal nights of mostly fruitless surveillance, it’s a wonder I could remember my own name. Then another question arose. Why did I remember hers?

The phone clicked or buzzed or whatever it was that phones did now in the digital age. I let its chips exercise their synthesized lungs until another wonder of the age threw its robotic two cents in.

“Hi! I’m not in right now,” my recorded voice lied, “or I’m listening to make sure I’m in the mood to speak to you.” That was more like it. “In any case, leave your name, number and time you called. I’ll try to get back to you soon as possible.’Bye.”

“Mr. Klein, this is Kate Barnum. If you’re there, please pick up. . .” she waited. I waited. “Okay, then,” she went on, “I’d like to apologize for my behavior at the bar the other night. God, I’m sounding like such a jerk.” There was real discomfort in that pronouncement and it was followed by real anger. “I hate these fucking machines. If I could go back in time, I’d go back and kill the bastard who invented them.”

“Not me,” I picked up, interrupting her vengeful ramblings. “I’d go back and kill Van McCoy.”

“Van McCoy?”

“Van McCoy. You remember. ‘Do the hustle, doo doodoo doo doo doodoo doo doo. . .’ I hated fuckin’ disco music,” I was actually gritting my teeth.

“Oh, him. He’s already dead,” Barnum delivered the good news.

“Hey, the guy who invented phone machines is also probably dead,” I chimed in sarcastically.

“Yeah, it sure is a wonderful life.”

“Ain’t it grand, though,” I paused. “I know there’s a point here somewhere and don’t tell me you really called to apologize.”

“It gave me a convenient opening,” she admitted easily enough.

“To. . .” I wondered.

“To invite you to dinner tonight.”

I answered with silence. The kind of silence heavier than spent uranium wrapped in lead. The kind of silence louder than sonic booms in the Grand Canyon. She understood.

“No,” she replied to the unspoken questions, “my motives aren’t purely social. And yes, I’ll probably ask about the dead woman and your lame story concerning the events surrounding her demise. Look,” she cleared her throat, “I was a bit of an ass the other night—”

“A bit,” I agreed.

“Thanks for making this so easy,” Barnum replied sarcastically.

“Think nothin’ of it.”

“Will you shut up, please!” There was strain, all right. “You know you aren’t half bad looking for a guy as gray as London in December. And if you really are the man who wrote this dark poem I just finished reading,” she ruffled some pages by her phone’s mouthpiece, “then we should be able to get through dinner without much bloodletting. Even if you don’t answer my inevitable questions. What do you say?”

“I say you’re tryin’ too hard,” I paused a few beats, “but it’s been a long time since anyone’s tried at all. So, yeah, sure. I’m game.”

“My digs. Eight, eight-thirty.”

The rest of the conversation consisted of directional babble: “Make a sharp left after the alley behind Smythe’s Antique’s . . .” That sort of thing. Sound Hill didn’t really have a wrong side of the tracks, but her address was located in that part of town which came closest to qualifying.