Need (15 page)

Some soap. The garbage on daytime TV, he wouldn’t stoop to soil his brain, and those black-and-white Zeniths anyhow, you couldn’t see squat for snow. “I never was around knives before, they always seemed so dangerous,” he was saying now, like some pantywaist, a pillow-biter; he was mortified. But at least this time Kate Root looked up. At least she showed him her face.

It wasn’t so old.

Hardly old at all, in fact. Once his eyes had adjusted and he could see past the pudding-bowl grey hair and not a trace of make-up, she looked almost unused.

What had he been expecting? Lines and wrinkles, drastic damage. But there was only a faint tracery around her eyes and mouth like the painted cracks on those ornamental Russian eggs they sold underneath the El in Brighton Beach, and the rest of her was freckles; she could have been some kid.

Her green eyes were childish, too. They didn’t angle or slide, just looked straight past him at something outdoors. “At
least let me show you my equipment,” Willie said, not so much like a flit this time, more like some used-car salesman kissing ass. But Kate Root refused to look, she turned her back. Climbed on the stool that led to her bird, and shut him out, leaving him to roam the aisles.

He tried to track down those cats, their stink was eating him alive, but he couldn’t find them anywhere. In the end he came full circle, and that was when he saw it: the white patch on Kate Root’s leg; the three reddish hairs.

Just one blow. One little puff.

A sigh would do.

Then he was outside the Zoo. And now a month had gone by. The summer, this burning season, was almost done, but still this craving rode his back. This monkey he could not spank.

His business was in shambles. He must have visited with Pacquito Console a dozen times or more, and a dozen times he’d lost the thread, forgotten what brought him there or why he was meant to care anyway. Tygers, mermaids, topless gerbils—let somebody else decide. The lease was up on the Spyder, and the rent was past due in Brighton Beach, and his left shoe pinched; the armadillo was raw and fraying at the heel. And the plain truth was, he didn’t give a toss, a flying fish. None of this was his concern.

Twenty-eight pairs of shoes were sitting in Regina ’s closet. Hi-tops and wingtips, loafers and Oxfords, Roscoe de Llama lizardskins, Havana flats by Miami Mort Amity, two-tone Berkeley Musser suedes and steel-heeled Kahlil marengos, green-olive canvas Piccozis, Just A Gigolo co-respondents, black-and-tan fantasies, burnt-almond Lamourettes. Everything beneath the sun but tassels, you wouldn’t catch him castrated in those. All he had to do was give Patsy O a call, and he’d have the whole collection back in a New York minute. But he just couldn’t seem to find the dime.

There were nights when he had no stomach for Chez Stadium even, couldn’t look the Deacon in the eye, and, as for Anna Crow, he couldn’t conceive how he’d ever stood to stand her, never mind feed her sex.
Deep down, you really don’t like women
, she kept telling him now. Which was a bare-faced lie. Women, cars, shoes, he liked them all fine. But Pacquito Console’s word was correct: right now, they were not apropos.

Most nights these days he stayed to himself in Brighton Beach, holed up in the room beside the El. Tried to catch a doze between trains. Or catch a dream, to be exact.

Time was, dreams had been his speciality. When he was a child, he couldn’t seem to lay down without popping one. He used to dream so profuse and vivid, his mother kept
The Success Dream Book
by Prof. De Herbert always handy at his bedside, so that they could work out the meanings the minute he woke, and the messages wouldn’t get lost. Even now he could recite the book’s equations by heart, “
ABDOMEN
: a sure sign of flattery,
GOULASH
: you will suffer from indigestion in the not far distant future,
JELLYFISH
: you will cause trouble on account of a slip of your tongue,
LONGSHOREMAN
: you will be caught stealing by your employer. Nevertheless, you will not be punished,
PARACHUTE
: you are a lion-hearted person, and for this reason you are going to succeed in all your undertakings.
SLAUGHTERHOUSE
: you will succeed in obtaining your wishes,
TWIST
MOUTH
: you are being scandled by your neighbours.
UKELELE
: you will become a great sportsman as the years roll on.”

After each image came its matching number in bold type, to help turn it into money. Many times, when a Lottery drawing was due, a wolf pack of aunts and nieces under Tia Guadalupe would sit up howling in the next room, waiting on him to dream a
PALACE
, dream a
YARD
, dream
WRAPPING
PAPER
, and if he came across, they gave him trinkets or candies, even dollars sometimes.

He had been lord of his manor then, a household name in his own household. If not for Bombo Garcia, he could have written himself a free ticket.

The man was some breed of cousin. A semi-pro ballplayer, played rightfield with the Piscataway Pirates. He had the God-given tools to go to the top, he had everything it takes but desire. Pick any baseball cliché you like, he fitted it. He didn’t hit homers but moonshots, he had a rifle for an arm, and trying to throw a fastball past him was like trying to throw a lamb chop past a starving wolf. Major-league scouts would come to watch him play and go home drooling. All he needed was work, and he could have been the next Roberto Clemente. But work was not Bombo’s speed. He was too busy with the babes, too hungover half the time, and the other half he was sleeping. So you could write his epitaph, right there:
He had the biggest dick in Piscataway, but no ass to push it with
.

Babes and the booze he could have survived, but sleep was the death of him. There never was such a slugger for slumber. Man slept in the showers, in the batting cage, on the bench. He even nodded off in rightfield, dozing under lazy flyballs.

Scratch Johnson, his manager, kept trying to give him wake-up calls.
You can’t play this game on snooze control. You have to give it no per cent, like your back’s to the wall, every day’s for all the marbles, there’s no tomorrow. You gotta believe
, he said.
You have to have a dream
. All that good stuff. But Bombo Garcia didn’t know from dreams, he only knew sleep.

In the end the Pirates ran out of patience and pillows. When they caught him sawing logs in the manager’s office, right in the middle of the seventh-inning stretch, they kicked his butt in the street. So Bombo went on a six-day drunk. He rambled
halfway across Jersey and back, Trenton to Asbury Park, Teaneck to East Orange, and then he showed up at Willie’s house with his raggedy ass hanging out of his pants, a breath like kerosene. Mumbling how he had to have a dream, he’d never make it otherwise. And Willie’s mother, like an idiot, fell for it.
Dreams? We got a million of ’em
, she said.
Come in and rest your bones
.

Bombo, of course, was not the man that needed to be asked twice. Before Willie’s mother could get the door half-open, he was up the stairs and into bed, knocking out the Zs in triplicate.

Willie’s bedroom was right next door, there was only a plywood wall no thicker than a screen or a membrane almost between them, and he was trying to get some sleep. With so much pressure on him, between Prof. De Herbert and his relations waiting on him for numbers, he could never get his proper rest, he could not sleep for dreaming. A few minutes’ doze, then he’d cough up his dream like some Speak Your Weight machine, and the rest of the night he’d spend staring at the walls, with an endless tickertape,
ASPARAGUS
,
DIPHTHERIA
,
LOBSTERS
,
ROOSTER
,
TURPENTINE
,
VOMIT
,
ZIGZAG
, spooling through his sleep-starved brain.

So anyhow, cut to the chase. He couldn’t swear to what happened next, not in so many words, he had to take Tia Guadalupe’s word. But it seemed like he was trying to sleep on one side of the screen, and Bombo Garcia was trying to have a dream on the other, and somehow screwy they must have got confused, half-unconscious as they were, curled back to back like Siamese twins. By some freak their spirit-spines must have fused and their chemistries swapped places. At any rate, when Willie woke again it was the day after tomorrow, he’d slept for thirty-two hours. And afterwards, he never could remember another dream, not to save his life. While Bombo, he had all
the dreams he could handle. But they didn’t concern the Yankees or the Orioles, they only showed him a dry cleaner’s in Canarsie with a crack house in the basement.

Or that was the tale handed down. The gospel according to Tia Guadalupe. Which explained why Willie now, stretched on his bed in Brighton Beach, had a dream he couldn’t remember, and then he was between sleeping and waking, dying on Kate Root’s leg.

When the next train plundered through and set the bed’s brass frame to shuddering, he sat up straight and dreamless to find himself surrounded by the forty-nine duck hunters with their walrus moustaches and green eye-patches, their forty-nine guns that didn’t shoot, and one sentence stood plain as a thought-bubble in his mind:
I am not my self
.

Course he wasn’t.

His true self would not put up with this. Would never have stood still to be used and abused, thrown away like a broken toy. Not unless the fix was in.

Take a look at the story straight on, as if this had all happened to a stranger, some other body entirely, and see how it printed out. A man of power at his age, a blowfish at Kate Root’s—the only way the set-up made sense, there had to be another force at work. Why else would he be brought to his knees? Howling at the moon for three red hairs?

Possession was an ugly word.

But sexy, just the same. The moment it spelled itself, he felt renewed. Blotting out the duck hunters, he put on a pair of dove-grey flannels, an absinthe cambric shirt. He brushed and creamed and oiled the armadillos, then he brushed and creamed and oiled them some more.

Tia Guadalupe lived in Morrisania, five floors up in the last tenement still occupied on a block of gutted shells. The walls were so rotted you could look clear through, there were holes
like open wounds, but Guadalupe’s own apartment was kept immaculate, a Santeria shrine.

Though she wasn’t connected to Willie by blood, she had been
madrina
to his mother and his aunts, she seemed like family. An outsized woman of maybe seventy, painted bright as a Dutch doll, in a plain white dress that flowed like robes. When she saw him at the door, her first glance was at his feet, coated in dust and nameless crud from his subway ride, and her second glance scoured the street below. “What happened to the Spyder?” she asked.

“Possession is an ugly word.”

“Repossession’s uglier.” Still she let him inside her hallway, where candles burned and one cabinet was filled with her Warriors and Eleggua, another with the otanes of Babalu-Aye, and she brought him a glass of dusty water, she placed her hot fingers on his wrist. “A full sack of woe,” she said, and lit a cigar, a White Owl. “What is it you want?”

“A hair.”

Next to Willie’s foot was a drum draped with necklaces of corn that spilled loosely across an altar made from a pair of baby shoes, a model car, a set of maracas, and a cluster of wooden axes, red and white in honour of Chango, god of lightning. “Male, female or other?” Tia Guadalupe asked.

“A lady of a certain age.”

“Head, pubic, underarm or excess?”

“A leg.”

“Money, sickness or love?”

“523,” said Willie D. “A hunger.”

He told her everything then, the Zoo, the knives, the birds and snakes, the black-and-white Zenith, the three reddish hairs, and Tia Guadalupe heard him without comment, only moved when he was done. Puffing at her cigar, she dipped inside a wooden chest and brought forth a miniature bottle of
rum, a brown-paper sack filled with smoked fish, dried possum and popcorn. “Where’s the problem?” she asked.

“Left shin. Two inches above the ankle, maybe two and a half,” Willie said, and Tia Guadalupe lifted the hem of her white dress. Raised it coyly like the flap of a tent to reveal monumental legs swathed in black hairs as thick as a pelt, and she snipped off three with the kitchen scissors, she dropped them in a plastic bag. “You should never have let the Spyder go,” she said, puffing deep. “How do you travel without it?”

“Flat feet.”

“982,” said Tia Guadalupe, and she pushed him out on the stairway, she started to close the door. “A sign of cowardice.”

Penetrating the Zoo was easy. Anna Crow in a moment of false hope had given him a key. All he had to do was wait till Kate Root’s reading light went out upstairs, and prowl.

Stealing by flashlight from the hallway through the barbershop and the crushed-velvet curtain into the menagerie, his only enemies were the smell and the graveyard silence. Instead of creeping he’d have liked to kick out, raise an uproar. Anything to break the stillness.

His torch tracked the rows of masked cages, the climbing jungles, the aisles crawling with unnameable growths. At any moment an anaconda might uncoil from the darkness with flashing tongue, or some man-eating plant clutch at his throat. Well, they might do. But the only creature awake seemed to be one snake, and that was safely caged.

California Whipsnake
, its label said. A glitzy-looking character, black with flashes of pink and orange, and a yellow-rimmed eye that measured Willie calmly, seemed to find him somehow amusing.

Kate Root had looked at him the same way. Contemplating the whipsnake, Willie saw the woman—her gapped front teeth and her freckles, her wide flat forehead that carried no lines,
her green eyes with their steady gaze as if she was studying fate or flying fish behind your back, as if she held some secret she wasn’t telling, no money or angle would tempt her.

A conspirator’s look.

That was it. The look of privileged data. What was it the FBI agents always said in movies?
Classified information, We are not at liberty to divulge
. And her snake was down with the same jive. Its blinkless gaze withered him and ranked him, sucked out what was left of his resolve.