Need (29 page)

Even the sight of Ivana could not deflect him for long. He had thought he would drop in on Deacon Landry, share a cup of news, but when he reached the Deacon’s apartment, the girl was strutting the front steps, head-to-toe in black leather, hot ice on every finger and a heart-shaped diamond stud in a brand-new nose. “Hot-sour soup. Get your good soup here,” she said, daring him to hit her. But he would not grant her the honour. Why sully himself? All his force and will were reserved for one thing alone. Willie D’s Last Stand.

By the time he reached Chez Stadium, and ordered his first apricot schnapps, he felt like the Man with No Name. He who rides alone, who trusts no man or woman born. Who needs nothing but need itself.

Mouse Williams and Warren White and Sandman Ames were drinking together in the corner booth, there was room for one more, but he chose not to join them, it would not be smart. One thing he’d learned, you could not change your act. Whatever it was you did in life, don’t stop. You could either be possessed, or you could possess, but you could never switch hit, your public would not permit it.

Better wait till he’d finished his business, and his mind was back in its proper place.
Physician, heal thyself
. Anna Crow said that.
Mortician, embalm thyself
, she said that, too. Both were equally apropos, you’d hate to have to choose. What he wanted right now was a mix of the two, and he would be dead to rights.

Finish his drink, then make his move. Wait till Kate Root would have shut up the Zoo and retired to her bedroom. Wait until there was no waiting left within him, only act. The deed itself.

Tilting his glass back to drain it, Willie glanced at the nylon butterflies dangling from the ceiling. The glitterdust was almost gone from their spread wings, he could see their plastic skeletons underneath. So he raised his empty glass to the ruins, and that was the moment the bomb went off.

It sounded like a bomb, anyway. A deep boom and shudder underground, you’d have said a mine caving in, except there were no mines around here. Willie’s glass trembled on its coaster, and the last of the glitterdust came down in a dandruff cloud. But that was all. No breakage, no blood. “Barry White burped,” somebody said, it might have been Warren White, and everybody started laughing, the way people did after false alarms. Mouse Williams called for a fresh round of drinks, and Willie started over to join the corner booth. Never mind his soiled shirt, forget his pits. Suddenly, he felt in the mood to celebrate.

Then the lights went dead.

The power blacked out, cut the jukebox and the ceiling fans, and there wasn’t a sound. Silence so profound Willie thought for a moment the world had simply quit, Planet Earth was a wrap. Then he heard a siren wail outside. Some man started muttering, and a body jarred against his own. Something heavy went crashing, sounded like a table overturned. There was another siren, and another. A wet hand touched his cheek, and he dropped to all fours. Got down on his belly and started crawling. A foot stomped his arm. People were shouting and cursing now, glasses shattered. His hand gripped an ankle. From the fact that it didn’t try to kick he would have guessed Shanda Lear. A shard of glass pierced his thigh, he felt a trickle of blood. “Fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck,” the woman with the ankle was saying. The sirens were wailing non-stop, too many to count. His knuckles bruised against wood, and the wood gave way, it was the door, he was out.

New York City was pitch-black, except for the cherries flashing on the roofs of the cop cars, but the street was already swarming, the sidewalks massed and spilling over. The surge of the crowd carried him downstream, scrambling along Eighth Avenue towards Port Authority, but when he reached 42nd Street it was like hitting a rubber wall. An unseen barrier bounced him back, and he was spun into the path of those rushing up behind, who flung him back again, and then again, a human pinball, slurping inside these shoes two sizes too big, thrashing out for balance, till at last his hand found something solid. A tube of metal, rising up, it could have been a street lamp, and there he clung, he would not be moved.

Between the blackout and the stampede, he couldn’t see much. Just a narrow strip of floodlit kerb between two ambulances, and a plain-clothes law with a walkie-talkie. Willie raised himself on tiptoe, and a man started running in and out of his sightline. A raggedy black stringbean with a dark stain on his shirt, could be blood or soot, he was waving his hands and yelling, but you could not make out the words above the sirens’ wail.
Shooting
, Willie heard, or was it
shitting?
And something like
fire alarm
, or it might have been
fiery brand
. Then a couple of cops got hold of the man, they wrestled him away, he was lost to view. “Hear that?” a woman said, close behind Willie’s head. “They shot Farrakhan.”

The shouting and the cursing had almost stopped. Along the Deuce, unseen, someone was shouting through a bullhorn, repeating and repeating one short sequence of sounds, and those sounds were probably words, an order of some kind, nobody could be sure. Below the sirens, Willie could hear the herd breathing, hard and ragged at his back. Someone was weeping, saying,
Farrakhan, oh, not Farrakhan
, and someone else was groaning. All the rest stood still, hung fire.

Something smelled bad here.

Not flesh, or fear, but something chemical. A sharp and whippy smell that Willie did not recognize, but didn’t like. His eyes stung suddenly, he put up his hand to wipe them, and then the crowd was running again, everyone was screaming the same words, and he was ripped bodily from his refuge. The street lamp’s warm smoothness slid through his hands, and he was hurtled back where he’d come from, tossed and spun up Eighth.
A turd in the maelstrom
, Anna Crow said that. His shoulder was rammed into a wall or gate, felt like steel, and the shock of pain made him bite through his lower lip. Blood flushed his mouth, he punched the dark. Something pulpy splattered under his fist, a body went down, that felt good.
Don’t get too complicated
. Willie D said that.

Three blocks, maybe four, and the crush began to ease, he could hold his ground. Candles and torches showed inside a few windows now, there was enough light to make out shapes. People were sitting on the kerb, moaning. A few had been caught by the tear gas, the others moaned to moan. A man in a doorway was swinging a metal club. Stepping out, he took two steps along the street and smashed a shop window. Flecks of glass showered Willie’s face and throat, reminding him of his wounded thigh. His pants’ leg was stiff and matted, he could feel stickiness down to his shoes. A man’s stumbling shape brushed past him, bearing something big and square, might be a TV. Willie’s shoulder ached, his whole arm was numb. A block uptown, guns began.

On the corner of 46th there was a fire in a garbage can, it glowed like a brazier. In this choking heat men gathered round it to warm themselves, chafing their hands. Other men, hurt maybe, lay or huddled nearby.

The dog-face boy, for one.

D
on’t start me to talking,” she’d said. Her veil was gone, and she was somewhere beneath his hand, and then he was swept past her, she was gone as well. He tried to stop himself, turn back, but there was no chance of that, the force of flesh driving him was too great. The tunnel was blinded by white light, and a woman screamed. The most dreadful sound it was, worse than a boiled kettle.

When John Joe turned towards this scream, he saw Master Maitland framed in Mount Tabor’s doorway, beating at his burning body with clenched fists, his black robes bright with flame. Then the Master rocked back, toppled slowly like a great tree felled, and disappeared from view.

Beyond the white light lay nothing. Men in uniforms and gas masks stood guard at the border, grabbing up each Black Swan who blundered into range and snapping them into handcuffs. Randall Gurdler’s men, John Joe supposed. Ugly pieces of work they looked, best avoided, but what could he do? The parties shoving at his back were driving him straight into their clutches, he thought his goose was cooked for certain, when suddenly came an almighty bang. The biggest blast you heard or felt in your born life, and every man jack went down in a heap, Swans and guards and all living creatures together, you couldn’t tell them apart.

At that there was great confusion, and all manner of hasty speech. A hand sharp as a steel claw kept digging at John Joe’s ribs where he lay, trying to rob him he thought, but when he looked down it was only Crouch, hurting him for his own good.

One kick, a knee and a rabbit punch, then he was freed, and they were running up the tunnel, doubled over against the glare like Schwarzenegger or Stallone or any of those hard men.
“Receive not of her plagues,”
said Crouch, and the white light went out like a candle snuffed. Dark blackness cloaked them for safekeeping. Or black darkness, rather.

Crouch, being a caretaker by trade, had a pocket flashlight on his person. The beam it cast was faint and no fatter than a virgin’s finger, but sufficient to lead them out of the main channel, through a chink in the tunnel wall, up a metal ladder to a concrete ledge, far distant from strife. The sounds of battle and pain came to them faintly, without reality. “Don’t mind if I do,” said Crouch, pulling a pint flask from his hip pocket. “I thank you kindly,” he said.

But how could John Joe rest easy? The moment he ceased to run, his mind returned the feel of something live moving under his foot, and the sight of that gold veil, floating out of reach. “I have to go back,” he said. “My fiancée needs me.”

“Polk-salad Annie?”

“She asked me herself.
Marry me, you might as well
, she said, the very first night we met, and in my heart I answered
Yes, I will, yes
.”

“You shit me.”

“Of course, I know that she has her career and all, her public has the first claim, but the pressures of stardom can be cruel, it’s a lonely life up there, and there’s a B&B for sale in Croaghnacorcragh, I heard, just a hop and a skip from Meenadreen; we could do worse.” But his voice did not sound
right to himself. In this black hollow full of echoes, it sounded like the voice of a backslider. “Don’t worry yourself. Crows don’t kill so easy,” said Crouch, tipping the flask back easy, but John Joe was already back down the ladder, it was his duty, he was running in mid-air.

Without the pencil light, he had only his senses to guide him, and they led him straight up the arsehole of nowhere. He tried to head towards the loudest noise of conflict, but whatever direction he turned, the war seemed always at his back. Groping his way by fingers and thumbs along the tunnel walls, he had not even a TV or any watching eyes to steer by, no break of any nature in this blackness like no blackness he had ever known, not sable or soot or raven, not nigger black, not carbon black, but black its very self, without end, black, black.

He had a desperate want of a bathroom. The strain of holding himself intact forced him to move crabwise, in baby steps, and drove all other thought from his mind. In Mount Tabor was a Port-o-San, there he would find relief. By his calculation, that place was below him now and somewhere to his left, so he travelled counter-clockwise, descending in spirals and loops. Sometimes the tunnel wall vanished and he felt empty space. Other times he missed his footing, stumbled over some dead thing. Certain creatures skittered against his legs, and flying objects that might be bats flurried in his face. The rasp and rattle of his own breathing lurched at every step. When he paused to listen, that breathing was all he could hear.

At last he found light. Not a radiance, but a glimmering at least. Where the tunnel bent a corner round he found a stalled train full of passengers. Trapped inside the carriages, they were burning matches and cigarette lighters. It looked like a vigil in there, a midnight mass.
And I will compass thine altar, O Lord
, John Joe remembered. But those eyes staring out at
him unseeing were terrible in grief, he could not meet their gaze. A ship of the dead, it might have been.
Take not away my soul, O God
, he thought, and ran.

Dread had fixed his plumbing at least, he could move freely now, could work his path through the blackness as single-mindedly as any other animal. Circling still, he came upon other lights. A kerosene lamp inside an alcove showed him a man sleeping and a woman reading a magazine. This woman watched him pass by without interest, sucking at a chocolate bar, and John Joe was sore tempted to stop with her. But that would not be right. White light was in here somewhere, it was his job to track it down. He pushed on through another circuit, past a man with two candles, and a family eating under a bicycle lamp, and some youths standing over a fire, passing a strange class of pipe around, jiggling and laughing they were, their shadows thrown huge against the tunnel walls, as if this was any other night and black the natural colour of light. Soon after he reached a dead end.

Beside the tracks was an alcove where he rested. When his breathing quieted, and he could hear beyond himself, he tried again to locate the noises of battle, some trace of Randall Gurdler’s men, but there was nothing, just water dripping, and the scurrying of the rats, and a faint quavering far above that might have been music, or more likely wind.

Anna Crow came to him then, moving through her dressing room, her breasts and scrawny boy’s bum, the dimples on the backs of her thighs like vaccination scars, and her tongue inside his mouth, a sleeping slug. “Exfoliate,” he said, and wept a space. Then he started retracing his steps.

Hand across hand, he moved himself back along the tunnel wall, only somehow it did not lead him to the same place. The black must have thrown his sense of direction out, or perhaps it was just exhaustion. In this deep place he could not tell, but
instead of the youths and their fire the next light he reached was a medical flare, three men in rubber suits ran at him and grappled him close, rushing him upwards, level after level, out onto the street.