Need (31 page)

Willie found himself caught up in a wolfpack then. Not by his conscious choosing, but he was standing on a corner when hooded marauders passed by, and their slipstream sucked him in, he was swept along. Not running flat out, only trotting for now, moving back and forth across the avenue in zigzags whenever cops loomed.

So the laws were powerless; all their weapons and riot shields meant zip. They could hardly shoot down the entire pack, it would have been bad for their image. Besides, the shifting darkness kept shuffling their targets. Truthfully, they couldn’t do a thing but posture. Advance and retreat in a phalanx, point their guns in a meaningful manner, chew gum. While the pack rolled on unchecked, smashing every window it passed.

There was no fear, Willie didn’t have the time. All his concentration was taken up with business. Keeping in step with the headless runners up front, a jump ahead of those behind him, not slipping down, not getting himself stampeded. Adrenalin surged through him, he felt the power. If the right brick had come his way, he would have grabbed it, and welcome.

Everywhere he moved, shop windows gaped open, full of stuff he could use.
Free
, that word was an uncut drug. The jagged edges of glass, caught by flashlights, looked as though they were winking. Luring him to cross the line.
One step
. There was a satin Yankees warm-up jacket in there.
Just take that step. 7
, that had been Mickey Mantle’s number.
For free
.

But he did not cross, after all. He was just about to, his foot was on the threshold, his hand already reaching out. “Step right up. Help yourself,” some voice said. Then he caught a flash of Kate Root; her eyes at the end of his knife. It hit him a
clean shot, drove him backwards in the street. Almost floored him, so that he had to grab hold of a fire hydrant, steady himself against the crush. A moment later, the wolf pack had borne him on, he was back on track.

That was the moment of truth, right there. He had hung one step from falling by the wayside, losing sight of his true aim. His destination; his end. He wouldn’t get waylaid again.

Sliding back in place, he let the waves carry him uptown. The darkness was less dense above the buildings now, it would soon be dawn. Already he could sense that there was no sky above him, only smoke. And smoke below him, too. Everywhere that light showed, he saw tendrils curling up through manholes and vents, snaking from cracks in the sidewalk. Hooded men with flame-throwers were setting fires, torching parked cars and abandoned stores, running, whooping, between the massed fire engines that couldn’t stop them, only douse what they left behind.

Willie knew about fires; his Cousin Felix had fought them for his living. Black smoke meant conflagrations that were out of control, white smoke meant containment. But there was no white smoke in view, a nicotine yellow was the best deal going. A Foot Locker was blazing, and a Walgreen’s was belching clouds of mucoid green. Why green? But green it was, and a Burger King was crumpling like blue touchpaper.

At Columbus Circle the wolf pack swung right, heading for the hotels to the east. Plush pickings inside the Essex House and the Plaza, pirate’s treasure, but Willie refused to be tempted. Instead, pushing north, he travelled Broadway. Though his feet didn’t climb, he felt himself rising up, out of a gulf to higher ground. The crowds were not so hard-packed here, and there were gaps between the fires, he was able to move almost freely. Now that the dark had given way to a murky brown, he could see his own feet in their clown shoes,
see what and who they trod on. Next to a Shop Rite five bodies formed a ragged circle. A posse of horse thieves, they must have been, but they must have picked the wrong white mare to ride. One, a woman, sat propped upright in the doorway, the needle still stuck in its vein. A baby was on her lap, crying for the tit, but Willie could not stop, he was running late. Children were breaking in doors with hatchets and picks, cutting through metal gates with blowtorches, and a suffer-head in combat fatigues was brandishing an AK-47, and a burn victim lay stretched upon a pink blanket, black face roasted, no eyes. Ugly way to go, Willie thought, but he had moved beyond.

A late-model Mercedes that had rammed Nature’s Nurture sat hissing. The driver was still making noises, but the tyres were slashed, the hubcaps already stripped. As Willie fumbled with Anna Crow’s spare key, he heard the man gargle, go croak. Then Willie was inside, he was safe.

Down the passage and up the narrow steep stairway, sixteen steps; along, then he was in Kate Root’s bedroom. Its floor felt spongy with feathers.

Straining against the dimness, he saw Kate’s big shape bulging under a white sheet. She seemed to be breathing hard and ragged in there. For a moment he thought she might be crying, but the sound was not right, it was probably just fear. Or expectation, who knows? When she turned to see him standing in his skin, when she realized what he’d come for. But you couldn’t guess from her expression; she looked at him dead flat. “What is the meaning of this?” she said.

The meaning of this?
She owed him, that’s all. Her bill had come due, and he was here to collect. Blunt instruments were hammering on the steel gates downstairs, baseball bats, by the sound of them, and Willie D whipped off the bed sheet, exposed her.

Splayed like a starfish, that heavy body inside its schoolgirl’s pink nightie with the coy little flowers embroidered at the neck and the hem rucked up high around her hips, she showed him all she’d got. Didn’t even try to cover herself, and what was to hide anyway? The three hairs were long gone, they would never grow back. Though he couldn’t help but sneak a look. In case of a miracle, you never could tell. But the bone-white dime above her ankle was barren. Void.

By the time he raised his sights, the pink nightdress had been lowered, there was nothing left to see. But this absence only goaded him. One hand ripped at the woman’s belly, the other turned her head. Her green eyes were inches below him, and the gap in her front teeth was almost his: “Have some popcorn,” said Kate Root.

And he was dead meat.

It was the apathy that broke him. Scratching and spitting he could handle, he was no stranger to wildcats, but neutrality did him in. The steady way Kate Root was watching him, measuring. That same level look she’d used the first morning he had clapped eyes on her, playing with her parakeet or whatever on the sidewalk. It had paralysed him then, it killed him now. “Put it away,” she said, and she didn’t even sound mocking, you wouldn’t hardly think she had triumphed. Almost conversational, she sounded, and she put her thick fingers to Willie’s face, she touched the bridge of his nose.

The hammering downstairs was getting more frenzied, now it sounded like steel smashing steel. Still, her fingertips were unhurried, butter-soft. They felt him, shaped him to themselves. And all his rage slid away. All his hungers, and his vengeance. Ask him why he’d come here, he couldn’t have said. To rest, probably. For a great weariness took him. Feeling these fat fingers mould and trace him, smelling Kate’s warm-bread breath on his eyes. Sensing home. Though he had none.

Loudhailers and sirens were moving up the block. “It’s been a long night,” Willie said, and he’d started to slide down along the rumpled sheet, he was drifting away with his eyes open, when the gates of the Zoo went in with a mortal crash that made the bed buck and shudder like a startled horse, and a moment later the screaming began. “My birds!” Kate Root cried, grabbing up her stun-gun. Then the screaming mingled with choking, an asthmatic gasping. “My snakes!” Kate roared, and charged.

Never even stopped to put on her dressing gown. Willie carried it for her, just in case, and followed her spoor down the stairs. In this early light he was struck by the wallpaper. Three gilded petals on a creamy shield, was that what you called a fleur-de-lis? And he turned the blind corner into the Zoo; he walked into an abattoir.

Three or maybe four kids, dressed up in black as Ninjas and wielding machetes, were slashing at every living thing. The cages had all been opened, and the birds beheaded as they flew out. Their bodies littered the floor, hung from the trees, lay broken against the walls. Some still flurried in midair, headless clumps of feathers, jetting blood; others were piled in the doorway where they’d dashed at the light. And still the Ninjas whirled their machetes, cutting now at the wandering jews, now at the snakes crawling underfoot, now at birds that hadn’t been killed cleanly, only maimed.

Kate Root kept rushing at them, howling with no words, and they kept taunting her, flirting their weapons in her eyes, slicing rips in her nightdress as she chased them. A blinded bear she seemed, striking out at air, slithering in the blood that lapped at her bare feet. Blood that the kids kicked up like surf, splashing her thighs and groin. They sported like Little Leaguers, tossing the severed heads of kingsnakes and whiptailss back and forth across the Zoo; they might have been playing pepper. And
Willie could not intrude. He knew it was expected, but he couldn’t enter that lake of blood. Only stood on the outside gawking, when Kate, with a last despairing lunge, pinned one of the Ninjas in the wreckage of the steel gate and began to crash his skull against a buckled strut. Gouging flesh and matter, body-slamming him, still howling. Not to be prised loose even when one of the child’s homeboys clutched her by the hair and wrenched, slid his blade against her throat.

Her teeth, white in red, looked like grinning when she looked at Willie in the doorway; then someone threw a dead snake. Twisting in air like a lasso, it flew at Willie’s feet, and splattered Littles Fernando’s loafers. And Willie snapped. Though they might be only borrowed, they were still shoes. Something heavy came in his hand, and he plunged. Swung his right arm once, swung twice, then again and again, feeling bones crack and flesh pulp, hearing screams that were no birds, till the blows hit only air.

The Ninjas had run off, nobody but Kate was left. She lay in twisted metal and shattered glass, no longer howling, not making any noise at all. Around her a few birds still twitched, one or two snakes lay coiled. Willie recognized the whiptail who’d teased him that night of Osain’s grave. Its yellow-rimmed eye still measured him, ironic, but no body was attached.

The weight in his hand was dragging at Willie’s arm. When he looked down to see his weapon of choice, it was the toilet seat from the barbershop, the one he’d aimed his blade at. So all things were connected, even here, and he helped Kate to her feet, the two of them slipping a little in the mire, bodies bumping awkwardly at hip and knee.

When she grabbed at him for balance, her palm left its red double on his shirt front. A perfect imprint, the Line of Destiny, the Girdle of Venus; you could have read her fortune.

Stumblebums, they staggered as they moved, clasping tight to each other to keep their feet. The counter was a few steps away, it seemed a distant shore, and when they reached it they clung to it shuddering, gasping for breath.

Close beside the Zenith lay a cockatoo, pure white, its plumes fanned like an umbrella. At first glance it seemed unharmed. Only one drop of blood blemished it white breast, one drop its beak. And Kate Root at last began to weep. Hid herself in Willie, and he took her in. Harboured her, why not? She was an old woman, after all.

Afterwards she lit a Camel, then passed it to him, but the blood like smudged lipstick put him off. A time like this, smoke failed to satisfy. And Kate Root must have felt the same way. At any rate she wiped her eyes, she blew her nose. Blood, snot and tears: “I need a drink,” she said.

“The need is mutual.”

“If it was mutual, it wouldn’t be need.” But gently, not looking to start an argument. “I have to powder my nose,” she said, and departed.

Willie D didn’t care to stay in this place by himself. This boneyard. Bumblefooted in another man’s shoes, he groped his way through the chasm where the Zoo’s door had been, looked out into the street. Already the main body of looters had passed, only scavengers were left. The sirens and the mob’s raging sounded a few blocks north, zigzagging towards Harlem. The Ansonia was burning, Willie saw, a wedding cake with its candles blazing. A flock of black birds streamed from its blazing turrets. And one brighter colour among them. A flurry of vermilion over turquoise, it looked like a cockatoo.

The escape artist, it must be. Must have hit the door too swift and wild for the Ninjas to cut it down. The notion crossed Willie’s mind to go out searching for other survivors,
but he hadn’t the strength left, or the will. Besides, he’d done enough. One true thing. It was all any man could deliver.

Through the velvet curtain in the barbershop, he perched on the high chair like a throne and rested himself, watching the striped pole spinning on the wall. The weariness was on him again, that same slow drifting he’d felt in Kate’s bed. The sense of home, against all meaning.

It lulled him to sleep.

And at last he dreamed.

He was in church, it was dead of night, a black stormy night full of lies, and he’d come to the chapel to pray. But his prayers came out all jumbled, back to front, and he was too tired to set them straight. He felt spent, no flicker of energy left.

Sitting by himself in this empty church, with only a solitary priest for company. But this priest did not regard him. He was kneeling at the altar with his back turned, robed and cowled like a medieval monk in
Robin Hood
. From where Willie sat, the priest’s face was hidden but he seemed to be making secret signs with his hands. Telling his beads, maybe, or casting a spell. Then Willie stood up, came close, and the priest turned. The light was bad and the angle of his hood covered up his eyes, but his attitude was stiff, intimidating, like somebody else’s father.

When Willie looked closer, he saw that the priest had a bandit’s moustache, he was dressed up like Zorro underneath his robes, and you could tell that he wasn’t so harsh or cold after all, that was just his front. Willie snuck a glance beneath his cowl, and the priest’s eyes were teasing, flirting. It was obvious that he hadn’t been telling beads, not casting spells; what he’d been doing with his hands was creating a paper aeroplane. Exquisite workmanship, indescribably intricate. Willie bent
close to inspect the details, and the priest spoke to him in a low voice.