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As she remembered, she stripped. Pink spandex hotpants and a halter top, shiny black thighboots, and she searched herself for damage. “Believe it, I was a mess,” she said. “Hot soup was in my hair, soaked through my pants. So I started to fix my lipstick, and the fat bear Russian, what does he do then, he only bursts out sobbing. Kissing my hands, he wouldn’t stop.
I’m loving you
, he kept on saying and saying.”

“They blew my shoes away,” Willie said.

“
I’m loving you
,” Ivana said. Rolling back her lower lip, she studied its reflection in her compact mirror, a constellation of livid purple circles ringed in white. “What kind of statement was that?”

The El ran right past the window and, every time a train roared through, the whole room shook. Behind the drawn blinds, the walls were papered with a duck-hunting scene, green and yellow on faded teal—one duck flying high, two more lurking in tall reeds, and the hunter in his rowboat with his gun across his knees, a globular man puffed up like a gorged tick with ear-muffs and a walrus moustache.

A splash of white filmed the hunter’s left eye. It might have been a flaw in the printing process, but what it looked like was a cast. “What do I do now?” Willie asked.

“MSG brings me out in hives.”

“Go barefoot through the streets?”

“Then all my glands swell up, I look like a frog.”

“Wrap my feet in rags?”

“Or not a frog exactly. More like a salamander.”

Stripped, she dropped to her haunches and started to burrow for her drugs behind a skirting board. The angle that she squatted, doubled over with her butt stuck in the air, Willie could see in a single stretched bowbend from the pucker of her asshole to the back of her long neck where the dyed pink hair turned into fuzz soft as goosedown and the ends of her scar failed to meet.

Beneath the pillow on the metal-frame bed were two soup-sodden twenties, a ten and some singles. “Impervious to fire,” said Ivana, shooting up, and Willie D walked out into Little Odessa.

Along the dark channel beneath the El the morning papers were printed in Cyrillic, and the sidewalk stands sold
pirogis
and
kvass
. Even in this heat, the men lounging in shop doorways favoured woollen shirts, thick scratchy socks, double-breasted suits with wide lapels. Inside the Yalta Café, old women with headscarves spooned jam into glasses of lemon tea. And all of them saw the ruined shoes. The oil and ashes, the tongueless mouths; there never was such disgrace.

Each train pounding overhead set off its own shower of sparks. A peck of pigeons, burned, whirled up into Willie’s eyes. Behind the drumming of their wings, he saw the pearl-coloured bird drop like a stone, playing dead.

Now he started to get mad.

Which wasn’t his style. Ask anyone he did business with, Deacon Landry, Mouse Williams, whoever, they’d tell you he was a gentleman. Taste and class, the good life, he believed in the finer things. But that didn’t make him a pushover. No way the contract called for him to stand still and take it while some old douche-bag and her bird made a monkey out of him. Staring through him like shit on the half-shell, it wasn’t right. No respect.

Inside the Spyder, which was his office, there were seats in soft Corinthian leather to bolster his back and nestle his buns, book-tapes to ease his mind. Before she changed the locks Regina had bought him a self-help library.
The Road Less Travelled
, and
Chicken Soup for the Soul
, and
Release the Prisoner: Your Secret Self and You
, He didn’t follow the words, but the sound of the voices soothed him, they made a change from Rap.

One sentence he did recall. In
Release the Prisoner
, he thought it was: “In times of stress, repeat to yourself: THOU ART THE LION GOD.”

He tried it out for size; it didn’t sound as hot. Along the Coney Island projects, when he wheeled back towards the city, some of last night’s fires were still burning. Fourteen dollars and change, plus two twenties, a ten and some singles. Say seventy bucks total. You couldn’t buy a Gucci loafer or wing-tip Oxford for that. So there was no help for it. Though he’d sworn to himself he wouldn’t, not ever again, he went to see Mrs. Muhle.

Her apartment overlooking the East River was all shiny steel and glass, and she was baking zucchini bread. Flour whitened her hair, her flushed cheeks. When she saw Willie’s shoes, all she said was: “You poor boy. Oh, you poor, poor boy.”

She was a woman with no clothes underneath her clothes. Every movement she made, even raising her hand to touch his
cheek, sent loose flesh rolling and flopping, spilling over like tumbled pups. “I have made a significant salad,” she said. “Mediterranean chicken
aux herbes
.”

When she recited the recipe, she made it sound like erotic verse. “One medium-size yellow onion, peeled and quartered. Two carrots, peeled and chopped,” she sighed, and began to unbutton his shirt. “One leek, white part only, cleaned and sliced.”

“I need a century,” Willie said.

“One teaspoon dried thyme, one bay leaf, six parsley sprigs, twelve black peppercorns, four cloves. Salt, to taste.” Her touch was damp, slightly oily, like her bread. “Three whole chicken breasts, about three pounds. One-third cup virgin olive oil, two teaspoons dried Oregano, two tablespoons drained capers, and one cup of imported olives, Niçoise preferred.” Then her mouth was on him, suckling. “The juice of a fresh lemon,” she said.

Through the plate-glass window on the terrace, he saw the pied-pearl bird again, fluttering with wings outspread. It did a back-flip, drifted as if hang-gliding. The fat white woman looked at him head on. “Eight cherry tomatoes, halved. A quarter pound green beans,” said Mrs. Muhle. But Willie D had been there, and gone.

All afternoon he drove and drove without direction, set adrift in alien neighbourhoods, Flatbush, Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy, where no one knew his face or name, till he came to a park with a snot-green lake where you could paddle with bare feet, and there he stayed among children pushing model boats and old women feeding the ducks, waiting for the light to soften and fade, the evening to come and protect him.

At dusk in the West Village he left the Spyder idling outside a boutique with a moron name. A Shoe Like It, some kind of play on words.

The fragrance of footloose shoes inside was gamy, lush, abandoned. The girl that served him, the name printed on her breast was Mariella, and she said she came from the Philippines. Somewhere like Cerveza, it sounded like, but Willie couldn’t tell for sure, her voice was so low and she swallowed her words. When she bent her head to tend to him, her hair was a long black veil that hid both her hands and his feet.

She had the gentlest touch. Her fingers moving on his ankles, then his insteps, felt like whispers in the dark, and her hair smelled of horse shampoo.

Roberta Gold’s smell.

His Freshman year, it must have been. The year she’d sat at the desk in front of his. American History or maybe Algebra. The only girls he had smelled before were his Cousin Humberto’s castoffs, and all of them had wigs or processes, or they slavered their hair with abusive substances. With all the garbage they sprayed on, you couldn’t ever tell their real scent from bottled. But Roberta Gold, you knew without asking, she was all her own work. She wore her hair styled thick and tangled on top, cropped close against her cheeks, with one side flipped up in a curl like a crescent moon, and the texture was kind of coarse. You knew without thinking that her pussy was a Brillo pad. But the hair on her head, ash blonde, was only fuzzy; a dense fur.

It wasn’t that she was pretty. The moment she turned round she was just another Jewish princess with braces and zits, a shape like a fire hydrant. Only her hair signified, the way she smelled like a horse, and the tiny sweet spot like a bud exposed at the crown, dead white.

From where Willie sat, he could number each blanched strand where it sprouted from that bud’s opened pores. All he’d needed to do was reach out and pluck.

He never had.

Or rub them the wrong way. Make the hairs stand up stiff like hackles or the nap on a cat’s back. Or bury both hands to the wrist, and scratch till he got satisfied.

Never.

His erection in A Shoe Like It was not so shy. It bobbed against Mariella’s cheekbone, the shell of her ear. Still she did not cease to minister. The dead shoes were laid to rest in a plain white box, nothing ostentatious. Muzak played, and cool air soothed his soles. Looking down through the dark cascades of Mariella’s hair, he glimpsed virgin armadillo.

What was that line Mouse Williams used? “Good shoes talk, great shoes walk.” Willie D had never rightly known what he meant till now. When the armadillo’s mouth kissed his heel, and he felt himself slide under, his left foot swallowed whole. And then the right, slick like oil, sweet as Tupelo honey. And when they raised him up of their own volition, twin powers greater than he could control. When they walked him outdoors and away for free, and Mariella never moved.

The streets were night now, and everything starting over. In the Spyder, rolling uptown, the metal brightness of noon seemed days ago, all its messages false alarms. Willie felt drained, out of blood, but pacified. Armadillos swaddled his feet, and the rest of him lay at rest.
Null’s the void
. Sandman Ames had told him that. Or was it Warren White?

Sheherazade’s dim blue light burned halfway along a neon block on Eighth Avenue, squeezed between a pawnshop and a porno house, two floors above a noodle shop.

Upstairs behind a beaded curtain was a room tricked out with anchors, fishing nets and Greek travel posters left over from when the club had been the Taverna Phaedra. Anna Crow drank brandy at a bar festooned with bazoukis and orange ceramic lobsters.

She stood in a dancer’s pose, left foot angled out, tight belly thrusting. Below the frizz of her wild hennaed hair, her face showed chalky white. “My love, my heart,” she said.

“Pernod and blackcurrant,” said Willie D.

Anna was not dressed so much as costumed in a long black Edwardian dress with lace frills down the front, a red shawl, and Spanish combs in her hair. “Guess what you’ll never guess,” she said. “I got a job.”

“With a twist,” said Willie.

“One of those Verse-o-Grams. All I have to do is go where I’m sent and no questions asked on people’s birthdays, anniversaries, at Xmas or Easter dressed to order and recite their favourite poems, say
Trees
or
Blowin’ in the Wind, The Lake Isle of Innisfree
on St. Patrick’s Day, some speech from Shakespeare even, who knows? Like today for instance there was this Irishman whose wife died, she was a Gogarty, and I had to go to Downey’s, where all his buddies were drinking and singing and weeping buckets except for him, he sat over a ginger ale with his face like a well-kept grave, but whose fault was that, not mine, it was a sweet poem anyway.”

In a spotlit circle that served as a stage a woman in see-through underwear did a belly dance for one table of Japanese tourists, another of drunken sailors. “
I will live in Ringsend
,” said Anna Crow, and stiffened her spine, “
with a red-headed whore and the fanlight gone in where it lights the hall door, and listen each night for her querulous shout as she streels in and the pubs empty out
. Funny word,
streels
, where was I?
Pubs empty out
, that’s right.
To soothe that wild breast with my old-fangled songs till she feels it redressed from inordinate wrongs, imagined outrageous preposterous wrongs, till peace at last comes shall be all I will do
. Now listen.
Where the little lamp blooms like a rose in the stew, and up the back garden
the sound comes to me
, and here’s the bit I like
comes to me
right here
of the lapsing unsoilable whispering sea
, I don’t know what it’s meant to mean exactly,
unsoilable sea
, but it sounds sort of noble and sad, don’t you think? I do.”

Willie never should have come here.

He’d known it up-front. Every time he saw her it got his nerve-ends disordered.
Yakety-yak, don’t come back
, whose poem was that? And humping her was worse. All angles and bones where no bones should be, black nails ripping at his butt. “Tomorrow it’s Coleridge,” she said. “
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
, a stag party for the Sons of Neptune, I get to go as a mermaid, and flash my tits, my bazookas, my heavenly spheres.”

“What tits?”

“I hope you die screaming.” Her breath when she kissed him was rank, half-starved. Fucking mermaid was right. Or it would have been, only Deacon Landry had told him once that Men of Power never used foul language, not even in their sleep, it sapped their strength.

The woman belly-dancing detached her bra and threw it across the spotlights. It landed askew on one of the drunk sailors and clung to his ear, white strap dangling. Each time that Willie drew his toes in like claws, then slowly released them, he could feel the armadillos move with him, their soft bodies rippling and slithering in rhythm, sinuous as snakes.

Looking out towards the anchors and fishing nets, he watched the dancer’s breasts rolling lazy like buoys at low tide, and fingered the unspent banknotes tucked in his hip pocket. “THOU ART THE LION GOD,” he thought, took one sip at his drink, and instantly his stomach turned, his mouth was flooded with bile.

That bird. That fat white woman. “Who does the bitch think she is?” cried Willie D.

T
he year she was seventeen, a senior at Mrs. Sweetwater’s in Charleston, there were days she danced ballet in a high white room under two chandeliers; and nights, moonlighting, she danced on King Street bartops in a red garter and G-string, and at spring break she drove home to Savannah in the Mustang her father gave her for not marrying the bass player with Easy Greasy.

Her father then was Chief Wigwam, he manufactured toys and novelties, Red Indian knick-knacks like rubber tomahawks and feathered weather-bonnets, buffalo-head bronzes and flaming spears, inflatable squaws complete with sex parts, his family called him Arnold, and they lived in a Spanish-style mansion called Camp Pocahontas, hard by Bonaventure Cemetery.