The Canal (17 page)

"Joe has some involvement," Alan said. "He's
connected to this--"

"You think I'm stupid?" sneered Bleecker. His
face began filling with blood. "Look here, asshole, I took you into
my confidence. I made you my go-to guy. And you give me what? You
give me Joe? Who I'm not even seeing? Why the fuck am I not seeing
him, D'Angelo? Why isn't he here? Is...is he shutting me out? He's
pissed about Kozar, isn't he? Prick's feelings got hurt, and now
he's shutting me out!

"I swear, I can't tell who's more
incompetent, you or him. Actually, no, you're incompetent, and he's
merely disgusting. Actually, you're both disgusting. Fuck!"

Bleecker unholstered one of his fingers,
bringing the singing nail a mere centimeter from Alan's eye. "Two
bodies in two days. News vans are already barricading the fucking
block. This story's going national. Downtown's going apeshit. And I
gotta stand here and pretend like I got confidence in a couple of
dickheads."

Yes, he was actually touching Alan's eyeball
now. He was seriously squishing it inside the socket. "Grace
periods over. Next time we talk, you and your buddy Joe better be
making an arrest. You better have some bastard up against the wall
and in cuffs.

"Don't fuck this up, Alan. Don't make me
regret trusting you. Because otherwise I swear I'll do everything
in my power to make you..." his voice went breathy and cool,
"suffer." He capped it with a smile, a purely clinical one,
strictly a muscle exercise.

"There's worse things than being fired, Alan.
Things worse than death, even. And I know them all."

Bleecker took a step back and suddenly Alan
was out in the heat and noise, back among the bustle, with all the
other barn animals.

"A goddamn toilet," said Bleecker. It was
rumbled rather than voiced, spoken how a founding father might say
it, in rich, self-important tones, as if even that crude jewel
could stand as the opening stanza for a new Constitution. "I'll be
in my car." And it wasn't just filth that Bleecker repelled, it was
everything -- people, airborne fuzz, even automobiles -- all
parted, leaned, or yawed as he passed.

But Bleecker only got about ten feet before
stopping. Without warning, he spun around and pointed that finger,
the very finger so recently acquainted with Alan's now throbbing
cornea, and clearly and without question, specifically referred to
Alan's shirt via a vicious, twisting, stabbing motion.

"SHAME ON YOU," he snapped, teeth bared, the
loathing wafting from his words like steam. "SHAME ON YOU!"

And that, Alan felt, was deserved.

>> CHAPTER TWELVE <<

According to Susan's newspaper the heat wave
was dying. Low pressures, jet streams, off-shore flow -- they'd
colluded against the climate, sapping it of strength, drawing off
its life force. Oppressive, overcooked clouds had pounced in the
morning, reluctantly lurching in from the west and loudly
advertising rain. It was near evening now and they had yet to make
good on their promise.

From behind the glass sliding door she
watched Eugene. He was in the yard, leashed. He had tired of his
laps and was now resting cross-legged at the center of his
territory, tasting grass. It was unfortunate, but more than just
the heat was dying. We were all doing it -- even little Eugene.
Certainly not as quickly as Susan, and definitely not as quickly as
Alan, who would, she was confident, go before them all. It might
sound cruel, but that's all living was, really. It was dying. Even
the planet, it was dying. Even the solar system and the universe,
in all their limitless entirety, they too were dying. Just biding
their time, like the rest of us. Waiting to catch that bus.

Susan went back into the kitchen, taking the
bag of leftovers from the refrigerator. It was ready. The bag
bulged with filets, the various strata combined and colored to
Saturn-like effect. As you delved through these layers -- a
timeline of the past week, a historical record of
night-before-lasts -- heading southward through time, the
breadcrumb skin became fragile, sloughing off to reveal the dull
meat, yellowed to a tartar hue, until at the most distant bottom
lay a paste of bread crumbs, liquefied into a starch-based crude
that kept the deepest filets dubiously damp.

The freshest additions were supposed to have
been Alan's dinner from last night. But for a second night in a
row, he'd come home late, this time almost five in the morning.
Again a murder -- she'd seen it on television, a Breaking Alert,
and again this morning in the Times. SERIAL SKINNER, it had
said.

Poor Alan. Something in the way he had
wordlessly lain in bed -- on his stomach and atop the sheets, feet
hanging carelessly off the end of the mattress, his head socked
deep inside the cheek of his pillow -- suggesting a pose of defeat
rather than rest. And he was marked; he had been claimed by another
mistress, the stench of its awful fragrance was on him still. This
was certainly a shock as far as Alan was concerned. For a moment
she wondered if this man was truly her husband, or some foul
impostor.

She awoke just a few hours later to find Alan
already missing, his side of the bed still stinking faintly. He was
in Eugene's room. He was clutching their son pathetically, as if
their roles had been reversed, he the baby, Eugene the adult. Susan
didn't interrupt, she just watched her husband in the pre-dawn
spoil.

Susan quietly returned to bed. After Alan
left for work she donned her robe and began piecing together the
strange events of his morning. She started with the bathroom, and,
incredibly, found no trace of him -- his toothbrush remained
alarmingly dry, his razor unsheathed, his gargle untouched, his
deodorant forsaken. He had dressed, gone to Eugene (who was
understandably fussy and out of sorts because of it), and then he
went downstairs to the kitchen, leaving the bag of leftovers out on
the counter. Every filet was accounted for.

Susan frowned.

Of all the unusual things she had witnessed
today -- this one bothered her most of all.

*

Susan would visit Mr. Paul Zarella once a
week. She'd ring the bell and eventually a hand would come out,
curling around the edge of the door, revealing fingernails like
paring knives. Next, Paul's spotted head would float through,
blinking in the light. His hair was spare and limp, like a
radiation-sick houseplant. White stubble flecked his chin, skewers
that clung to morsels of food and fluff. Everything on him looked
about to come off. She was afraid if he tripped she'd catch nothing
but quarter-sized pieces.

She liked to pity these types, the
poverty-stricken. For their hardship and squalor. At first she
tried helping the women among them, but they were suspicious and
untrusting. The men, well, they just grabbed at her and made
remarks. But Mr. Zarella, she could tell he was different. First of
all, he loved animals. He loved them limitlessly. His door was
always open to the neighborhood's luckless pets. A man like that
deserved her help. Susan found out where he lived (followed him
there, from afar, actually) and the very next day she was
delivering leftovers.

On her first visits Susan brought meatloaf --
it was her favorite dish at the time. She'd perfected, or was it
ruined, a recipe that yielded a stew rather than a solid. Out of
some seemingly innate sense of propriety the ingredients would
frantically uncombine themselves, leaving a slurry of onion here, a
couple of reanimated egg yolks there, everything run through with a
vein of salt. Zarella, for his part, was always polite and always
grateful. If he ever noticed that Susan's offerings were sometimes
adorned with a beard of mold, he never mentioned it.

As for Zarella's home, Susan's glimpses of it
were always brief, and, since he never invited her in, they were
always from the doorstep. Over time she'd put together this general
picture: there was a painting immediately to the left, tilted ten
degrees too many and surely authored by some sort of convict or
institutionalizee, of an impotent water mill tending to a stream of
what could only be described as orange-colored entrail. There were
bales of newspapers, photographs and other mulching junk on the
floor. There were the tumbleweeds of dust that sometimes escaped
and seemed thankful for it. And there was always, always the
uncomfortable scent of neglect, all the un-'s: uncared, unaired,
untended, uncleaned, unloved.

But even though Zarella's company was always
poor and his presence always mediocre, Susan remained undeterred.
She felt that this man, in his deepest pit of darkest bachelorhood,
this man needed her, whether he wanted to admit it or not.

And of course, it saved her the guilt of
having to throw away all that food.

*

The bag of leftovers was nearly as heavy as
Eugene and just as fidgety. Carrying it and her child took constant
attention, both seemingly determined to dive headfirst onto the
sidewalk. Normally she would have left Eugene in the yard, but with
rain imminent, she decided otherwise. She hadn't bothered, however,
to take off his harness.

As she walked to Mr. Zarella's house, she
thought about how Alan always made it sound like they lived miles
from the crud. In reality the crud was technically only a couple of
blocks away. Susan liked that about their neighborhood (murders
aside, of course). She felt it was accurate, having the good and
the bad so close together. It wasn't like in the suburbs, with
their buffers of distance and boredom, their mindset of false
complacency. And while she would gladly complain about the canal's
dangers to Alan, privately, she didn't mind it.

She passed the iron works, the salvage yard,
the soup kitchen. The doom, the destruction, the defeat. Then she
turned on a street not far from the bridge. Zarella's was the only
home on the block. At one point long ago there had been others, but
they'd long since been condemned or razed. Rather unfortunately,
the house had come to resemble its owner, suffering from an intense
state of disrepair -- the paint bubbled like peeling sunburn and
monstrous weeds, grossly thorned, curled from the foundation line.
Everything was covered in a membrane of soot.

Susan rang the bell. Eugene pawed at the bag
of leftovers. She rang again and waited. It was unusual for Mr.
Zarella to not be answering. He was always home around this time,
close to sundown.

She shifted Eugene and the food to one arm,
then took hold of the doorknob. The door opened easily. She put her
mouth to the opening, about to call Paul's name, when a carrion
breeze crept from the house and kissed her on the lips, knocking
her off balance.

That smell. Death. When it came, death wanted
everyone to know it. Another boaster. Death was definitely a man.
It was also inside this house.

She opened the door wider and tried again:
"Mr. Zarella?"

Still no answer. She stepped inside, into a
haze of lint and dust.

The hallway was crowded with garbage bags,
each one near bursting. A fungus crept up the walls, reaching to
the ceiling. Through the center of the hallway floor wandered a
meager trail, leading to the living room from whence a halfhearted
glow of milky outdoor light beckoned.

"Mr. Zarella?"

A clock was tapping away the seconds: pok,
pok, pok. There were other sounds, strange frequencies and gasps
that emanated from all the debris. Alive sounds. A thought briefly
occurred to her: where were Mr. Zarella's pets?

Eugene looked at his mother. She thought he
might be questioning the wisdom of this. But then again, who knew
what sluggish things crept through that small brain of his.

Susan went deeper. She passed a stairway. It
was completely impassable, clogged with debris: a humongous
sputnik-style television without dials, parcels of frayed books,
oil cans, hubcaps, drawers uprooted from an absent bureau. A
cornucopia of junk, retched from the upstairs, tumbling to the
ground floor like manna from the city dump.

It was easy to imagine things, to have
visions, here in this place. Here in this dungeon passage. Things
like Mr. Zarella, like him standing just inches behind her.
Stopping when she stopped, moving when she moved. Half naked, his
body decimated with bedsores, spiders in his hair, blowing rancid
air on her neck. Reaching for her with a bloody grin.

Susan felt a tickling...

She spun around, ready to scream, ready to
fight, ready to protect her son and her leftovers at any cost...
But there was nothing. No gape-faced Zarella. No slack-jawed
corpse. Just the flies, fat and feeble-minded, the size of bullets,
careening into her hair. Just the puddles of brackish jelly seeping
from all the garbage, bubbling with maggots. Just the view through
the open door, a flat plane of pavement and cement, like the
outside world was no more real than a photograph.

She should call somebody. Definitely. The
paramedics. The police. Or better yet, Alan. Alan would know what
to do.

But something... Why did she hesitate? What
was it that urged her onward? Was it the sense that here, in this
house, was death in flagrante, au naturale? This wasn't the death
presented in funeral homes -- with candles, with a cherished dress,
with makeup. No, somewhere here was the real article. Somewhere
here lay Mr. Zarella, a gas-filled carcass with brownie eyes.

Or was it another thing? Like the feeling
that, after everything she had done for him, pitying him, etc.,
didn't Mr. Zarella owe her? Susan's charity had to have earned her
something, like a peek at this man in his most unguarded of
moments. Maybe to poke at his body with her foot if it wasn't too
far gone, too melted. Just for a second, just to be sure.

She would hurry. It would be quick.

Deeper in, the low morale of the living room
began to reveal itself. A door at the back was open, leading to the
yard. There was a bookcase along the rightmost wall and over to the
left was an exhausted-looking shape, a dead elephant maybe, or a
couch. So much shadow -- everything was reduced to depthless
profiles. The clock was louder in here: POK, POK, POK. Was
something moving out there? Out in the back yard? She could only
make out shapes. Quick and scattered. A bird maybe, or trees being
lady chased by the wind?