Runaway (21 page)

She did not expect to find him any more.

This is my life, he thought.

This sewer is my life. The stink and the stench of it, and the city pressing down on me, this is my life. And the bleeding arm, that's all part of it, because I've really been bleeding all of my life.

You get used to the stench after a while. After a while, the stench becomes just a part of living. When you know only the stench, then that's normality. You perfume it a little, but it can never hide the stink, and so you adjust to it, and it becomes a part of your life, and you begin to think the stink isn't so bad any more, you begin to think everyone lives with the slime in his nostrils.

There's only a small part of you that tells you the truth, but nobody listens to the truth. That small part tells you that the stink is something unnatural, and sometimes you hear that whispering part of you, and maybe you listen, but you try to squelch it because the only way to live with the terrible smell is to accept it.

The smell is a very real thing.

It's in your nostrils when you awake in the morning. And if you flush out your nostrils with water from the tap, the smell goes away only momentarily, and then it returns again, too soon, and you can't go blowing your nose all day. The smell stays with you. It's a part of living. It's like living in a sewer, and that's why the sewer is not strange. Once you get used to the smell, the sewer is just like any other part of your life.

And the city up above, the weight of the city, that's not unusual, because the weight is always there. You can feel the city pressing down on you. You can feel it in the slab fronts of the tenements, crusted with the soot and gasoline fumes of a century, you can feel it in the rusted iron of a fire escape when you sit out there on a summer day and try to see the sky beyond the sloping fronts of the buildings. You can feel the heavy weight of the city everywhere, pressing on the walls of Harlem until you want to scream and get the hell out, anywhere, anywhere where you can breathe without the smell in your nose and the weight on your back.

You learn to carry the weight.

It's heavy at first, but you learn to carry it, and you learn the sound of a slammed door. You learn that sound well, because there are a lot of doors slamming, not so many doors as there used to be, but still a lot of doors, and they close on you, and that's when the weight becomes really unbearable, and that's when you have to try the hardest, just to stay alive.

You can hit the dream pipe if you like, but the dream pipe doesn't help much, only for a little while, and when the dream wears off, you're back in Harlem again. Dreams are very thin. Dreams can be bought for the price of a stick of M, but you can't live in a dream, not if you really want to live. The dream is only another slow way of dying.

You can hit the gas pipe if the weight gets to be too much for you. You can substitute the stink of gas for the other stink, and maybe someone lighting a match will take half the tenement with you, but what do you care as long as the stink is dissolved with the explosion, as long as the weight is lifted from your back? You can get so tired of living, so very damn tired.

And yet you can't let go of it, because you're a man. Under all the pressing, heavy weight, under all the filth and the stench and the stink, there's a man. That was the funny part of it. You realized you were a man only after you were denied everything else. And being denied all else, you became a man, and
only
a man, and being only a man, you somehow ceased to be a man. It was illogical and paradoxical, but it was true. When you stripped a man down to only his manhood, you stole his manhood. You crushed it flat into the pavement.

He was crushed flat into the pavement now, but he had found a hole in which to hide. And if he could hang to the rung with one arm, if he could just hang there until things got a little better, if they ever got a little better, if the bleeding stopped, if the people stopped chasing him, if he could come out and be Johnny Lane and not a cipher in a long list of ciphers, not a faceless, manless man in a community of other faceless, manless men, it would be all right. He would not get carried away to the river. He would not float among the garbage and the gasoline slick. If only he could hang on, even though he was bleeding, someday, sometime, maybe far off in the future, maybe his manhood would come back. Maybe he could be a man among other men, and by so being maybe he could be a real man again, and not a man forced to be only a man, naked in the streets.

Maybe. Maybe someday.

He listened to the rush of the water beneath his feet, and he listened to the hush of the city over his head, the occasional automobile passing. The city would be sleeping now, and the manless men in Harlem would be sleeping too, resting, relieved from the weight of the city for just a little while. He could not see the color of the water in the darkness. He could only hear its rush, and the rush sounded clean and sweet and cool, even though he knew it was dirty.

When he heard the other sound, he thought it was part of the water.

He clung to the rung in the sewer wall, and he listened. And the sound separated itself from the water, and for a moment he thought someone was trying to lift the lid of the sewer, until he realized the sound was coming from below him. He thought then that his foot had scraped against one of the rungs, but the sound persisted, and he listened to it and tried to make it out, tried to give it an identity as a sound.

It started as a scraping, but a scraping could mean anything. A million things scraped, but he was in the sewer, and so he tried to think of what could possibly make a scraping sound in a sewer. A hunk of wood lodged in the pipe, maybe, something like that. Except that this scraping sounded like a scratching, like someone clawing at something, like …

He heard a tiny squeak.

He looked down, but he saw nothing. He heard only the scratching, and then the squeak, not the squeak of metal or wood, but a curiously animate squeak, a squeak like …

He saw the pin points of light then. Two glowing pin points of light. Two round marbles with glistening dots in them, sparkling dots of light, darting. He caught his breath. He knew he was looking into the eyes of a rat.

He was scared. The fear shot into his skull, seemed to crackle there like a loosed lightning bolt. He was goddamned scared. He remembered that time with the jar, with the mouse clinging to his finger. He remembered the terror he'd felt then, and thinking of the terror, and thinking of what was down there below him, he began to tremble.

He screamed aloud when the rat leaped onto his foot. He screamed and the echo of the scream bounced off the slimy walls of the sewer, fled down to the elbow, rushed away with the water, and then reverberated in the sewer pipe on its long way to the river, howling like a banshee, filling his eardrums.

He could feel the rat clinging to his shoe. He shook his foot, climbing up closer to the manhole lid, but the rat clung, and it seemed as if every nerve ending in his body had suddenly moved into his foot. He forgot the pain in his arm, and he forgot the rusted rough edges of the brackets as he climbed closer to the lid.

He heard the breath rushing out of his mouth, and he could feel his heart pounding wildly, reaching up into his skull until he thought his head would shake to pieces.

“Go away!” he screamed, but the rat clung, and he shook his foot desperately, trying to climb at the same time, almost losing his grip. “Go away, go away!” he shouted, until the sewer threw back the shouts, multiplied them a thousand times, gave up a hundred thousand voices screaming, “Go away, go away!”

He looked down, seeing only those glittering, pin-pointed eyes below him, not able to see the rat's body in the darkness, only those eyes.

And then the rat began climbing up the tweed of his trousers, and the scream bubbled out of his mouth, real fear this time, terror that shook him. He kept screaming, screaming, until he couldn't scream any more, and then his head banged against the manhole cover, and he pushed up against it frantically, wedging his shoulders against the flat iron surface, trying to move it. He could not budge the cover. He tried it again, and he felt the rat's claws digging into his trousers, scraping against his flesh. He could hear the rat's thin breathing now, and he knew the rat had smelled the blood and was working up toward his arm.

“No,” he said. “No, please. No, no. Please, no. No!”

He scrabbled against the manhole lid, throwing all his weight against it, unable to move it. The rat moved again, and he tried to scream, but no sound came from his mouth. He pushed upward with his shoulders again, and this time the lid moved a little, and a fine sifting of dirt trickled down onto the back of his neck.

He shoved again, and then tried to brush the rat off his leg. The rat clung, snapping at his hand, drawing fresh blood. He pulled back his hand in terror, putting it to his mouth to suck the wound, then remembering that the rat's mouth had touched his hand, and yanking it away quickly. He could not breathe. The stink crowded into his throat, and his lungs seemed full, too full; they couldn't possibly hold any more air. He was babbling how. He was saying, “No,” and “Please,” and “God,” and “Go away,” all in a meaningless jumble, not knowing what he was saying, knowing only that a rat was on his pants leg, knowing only that a rat had bitten his hand, knowing only that he could not move the manhole cover. He shoved at it again, desperately now, feeling it yield only slightly. His eyes widened. His jaw muscles tightened, and he felt the cords in his neck stand out.

He shoved at the cover again, putting all of his strength into it this time, clinging to the bracket with one hand, and shoving his shoulders and his back and his head against the stubborn iron lid.

It moved aside. He almost didn't realize it. It moved aside, and the light from the street lamps splashed down into the manhole, illuminating his trouser leg and the rat.

It was a big animal, nine inches or so, not counting the tail. It was covered with matted, filthy fur, and the sight of the rat sent his spine up into his cranium. But the manhole lid was off now, and he thrust his head above the surface of the street, not caring about Bugs or his friends, not caring about anything now, only wanting to get away from the rat.

The rat pounced onto his arm, its teeth sinking into the sodden bandage. Johnny flipped up onto the asphalt, and the rat clung, only now Johnny didn't have to worry about holding onto an iron bracket. He balled his left fist, terror shrieking inside him, and he brought it down on the rat's head. He hit the rat again, and again, and again, feeling the squirming body under his fist, but the teeth seemed sharper now, clinging, biting, tearing flesh.

He got to his feet and ran across the street, stopping alongside the brick wall of a building. And then he began battering the bleeding arm against the brick, over and over again, slamming the tenacious rat against the wall, feeling each successive blow rumble up his arm, explode inside his head.

And at last the rat's jaws loosened and it fell away to the pavement, a whimpering ball of fur with a long, twitching tail. He did not look down at the rat. He was crying now, crying as he'd never cried in his life. The sobs started deep down within him, and they racked his body as he ran.

He ran west, wanting to get back to Harlem, wanting to get away from the broken body of the rat. He kept running, not seeing anything, the tears in his eyes blinding him. He ran, and he kept sobbing, and he kept wondering why he'd had to run all his life, all his goddamn life.

And then he stopped running and fell to the pavement, and blackness closed in on him.

Fifteen

She found him at three-ten in the morning, and she brought him home to Molly. The apartment was very cold, and Molly kept a quilted robe on, and Cindy did not remove her coat. The linoleum on the floor was dirty, but not because Molly had not scrubbed it. It was dirty because the filth had imbedded itself deep in the linoleum's pores, and no amount of scrubbing would ever get it out. The kitchen was black with the grease and soot of countless cookings. The windows were clean, but the paint on the window sills and sashes was chipped and cracking with old age.

The smell of urine from the hallways permeated the walls of the apartment. The cooking smells were there, too, and the smell of the gas stove, which had a very small leak. There was a calendar on the kitchen wall, and the calendar showed a picture of four monkeys playing poker. There was no other picture on the walls.

There were chairs and a table, but the wood of the table was scarred, and the chairs had broken rungs and backs. A radio set rested near the sink. The washtub was alongside the sink, and the washtub was used for baths whenever a bath was needed, whenever there was hot water.

They took Johnny into the other room, the bedroom, and then they called the doctor. The doctor came in ten minutes, a tall Negro who lived on the Golden Edge. He sniffed at the apartment, and then went in to see Johnny.

Molly and Cindy waited in the kitchen.

He was with Johnny for fifteen minutes. When he came out, he closed the bedroom door behind him and sat down at the table to write out a prescription.

“How is he?” Cindy asked.

“The arm is bad,” the doctor said. “I gave him a shot of penicillin, and an antirabies shot for the bites, but I'm still not sure they'll do the trick.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we may have to amputate.”

“Amputate? What's he going to do without his right arm? How can he possibly do anything without his arm? You don't really mean …”

“We'll have to watch it and see. It's a little early to tell now.” The doctor paused. “His hand is bitten, too. The same kind of bite that's all along his arm. Maybe a dog …” He shook his head.

“But will he be all right?”

“Will he live, do you mean? Yes, he'll live. He's lost a lot of blood, and he's suffering from shock and exposure, but he'll live. He may be a little delirious during the night. He was mumbling something about bugs and rats and boats. I imagine he had a rough time.”