The Shaft (22 page)

    'God this is great. This is total. After a night like this.' She would have laughed, but strengthlessly. She made a bittersweet kind of snort. 'I'm not making any sense. S'okay. Don't have to. This is great.' She raised to sip and Jonathan watched the ripples. Her eyes widened, just a degree. 'Oh. Oh. This is perfect, too. Are you for hire? What do you charge? Do you do backs?'

    'Cheers.' He sipped his own and felt the strength spread in his chest, a bloom of warmth. So far he was doing manfully in the anti-uh department. He congratulated himself on his aloof deportment in the presence of naked ladies. He was not thinking about Amanda for entire minutes at a time, now.

    'So tell me what happened after all the cop cars went home.'

    Up-down went her brows. 'Hm. I've really gotta learn to watch my mouth in the presence of those assholes. You don't truly get away with fucking anything. You have to look your part. Any person not presenting a conservative middle-class fear/respect attitude is likely to be bullied and tested in order to determine their level of hostility to authority. I'm quoting a guy named Doc Stanley. There's a whole psychology to dealing with situations like the one we had tonight. Stanley calls it 'policemanship.' The whole objective is to avoid getting beaten up, arrested roughly, or shot. Since I'm here now, I guess it sort of worked anyway. I just get so fucking mad I forget my mouth. It always gets me in trouble later. Always.' She switched the steaming mug to her other hand, agitating wave patterns that distorted the contour of her body underwater.

    Jonathan's eyes were fall of her. When she spoke his brain tried to hit the HOLD button. He had to remind himself to intersperse semi-intelligent nods and grunts. Proto-man attempts to indicate he is actually paying attention mentally as well as physically. He hoped the spiked coffee would continue to clear his head and plane the sharp edges off staying up too late. His eyelids felt packed with grit, sore and sanded as though tortured by floodlamps.
You’ll stay awake
, he ordered himself.
You vill pay zee attention
.

    'Whatever happened to all that Dragnet stuff about due process?' he said. 'That Miranda stuff about reading your rights?'

    Her gaze met his in blinking disbelief. She tilted her cup against the curved lip of the tub against the tiled wall. 'I hate to be the one to tell you this, but Mighty Mouse is just a cartoon. Superman is an actor. And the Tooth Fairy was your parents.' She grabbed a barely used cake of Ivory and began sculpting a head of lather in her hands.

    'And TV cops follow by-the-book procedures that real cops know just ain't so,' he said, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

    'Plus which, I've had to deal with Stallis before. A real pig, and I don't just mean police brand pork. He's a pervert. Likes to be jerked off while you go down on another cop. He busts hookers so he can grab their ears and come in their faces. He likes smearing it around and making you lick it up. Sorry if I'm grossing you out.'

    'It's okay.' He remembered to bring his cup the rest of the way to his mouth; it had frozen halfway.

    'Sometime I'll tell you a horror story about Stallis and a girl named Little Oral Angie, no lie.' Foam drifted on the surface of the water as she lathered. 'Did you say you had a loofa? I didn't see it.'

    He rummaged around and uncovered it. The cat had pulled its vanishing act again. 'Oh, and by the way, the answer to your question is yes.'

    'What question?' She sat up in the tub with a slosh.

    ' “Do you do backs?' Yes.'

    'Boy, I was hoping you'd say that.' She leaned forward, hardly parting her legs. Her knees did not break surface. She was very supple. 'Why, here's a convenient back right here. And I'm sure you need the practice.'

    'Nah. I'm a black belt at backs. Say that fast three times.' He held out his hand for the soap. She drank, he scrubbed.

    He thought of his own recent past and waxed unexpectedly forgiving. Who in hell was he to judge someone like Jamaica? Everybody did what they had to do to survive, as the cliche went. Once you had that taken care of, you could think about living, not merely surviving.

    Without really knowing whether he'd be able to borrow Bash's truck again in time to get Cruz out of the slammer, he assured her that it would present no difficulty.

    'Is the sun up yet?' She was looking toward the darkness of the airshaft window. She pushed back, bracing herself against the pressure he brought to bear on the sponge.

    It was Saturday morning. Work today was optional, he decided. 'It's daylight, but it's raining. The windows are iced up. Streets'll be a nightmare.' The snowpack would grow a thick, slippery crust of solid ice. Driving or walking through it would be like trying to juggle while seated on a chair balanced by one leg on an icecube - Nature's response to Jonathan's foolish assumption that the weather just could not get worse.

    Her resinous amber-green eyes sought him again. 'Mind if I crash here for now? I'll have to check in with Bauhaus later, but that's later. He won't talk to me because of my recent proximity to the cops. You have a cot. Right?'

    His heart sped up again. 'Uh - a cot.' He couldn't help that one. 'Yeah. My friend - Bash, that is - got me some sheets and blankets and stuff, plus I've got a good sleeping bag, which works better than a comforter. You can take the cot, I guess, and I'll the take the bag, and -'

    'I think we can fit two on the cot, Jonathan.' She closed her eyes and smiled at some internal joke. She saw his puzzlement, the facial evidence of turmoil, conflicting signals, hormones and adrenaline rampant. 'Stop being so gallant and do me a favor. We did a ton of coke tonight and when I drop off I'll be like a corpse. I don't want to sleep like that alone. I want to be held while I snooze. If you want a more complex explanation, I'm sorry, I don't have one. Okay?'

    He swallowed hard. 'Sure.' His throat clicked.

    'Great. Now get out of here because I don't want you to see the red marks this tub has left on my butt.'

    He laughed, relieved, and handed over a fresh folded towel. 'Vintage Holiday Inn linens, stolen by Bash. For guests, strictly.'

    'Thank you. I'm touched. Do you think you could find me a T-shirt or something I could wear to bed?'

    'I doubt it,' he said. Jonathan the Glib.

    Now would be a good time to see if the space heater Bash had loaned him worked. Jamaica 's mention of sleep suddenly twisted his weariness knob to full blast. His feet and shoulders decided to leadenly protest their new, extended hours. Too many chores.

    Somebody was arranging to pass cash to him. Maybe they were working furtive setups for Cruz's bail right now. This all might seem more thrilling if he could catch just a nubbin of sleep.

    He looked down and saw the cat waiting for him at the end of a trail of dark, wet little cat footprints.

    
You'll never guess what I just found.

    It was fastidiously licking beads of blood from its whiskers. It apparently liked the taste.

    

    

    Morning.

    As suburbs go, even in daylight Oakwood can strike you as being a haunted place. Jonathan thinks it might just be the winter, a ferocity to which he is unaccustomed, but it takes more than snow and cold to make a place this inhospitable. He cannot imagine it warmer, even in fair summertime weather.

    The streets here seem as disused as the corridors of a plantation estate abandoned to cobwebs and dry rot. By noon the town's pallor resists the sporadic penetrations of sunlight; by midnight, with the chemical light of streedamps lending an operating-theatre sterility to the snow and quiet, the shadows rearrange themselves into an unforgiving chiaroscuro that bespeaks not a natural scene, but a still life. Stilled life. The few pedestrians or motorists that dare manifest themselves seem to originate from somewhere outside the dry township cordon, and are bound for destinations nowhere near Oakwood. That imaginary boundary locks out so much of the real. Residents sleep here as deeply as hibernating vampires, cocooned in ennui and insulated by the cobalt television glow of business as usual.

    They do not even sleep in a true section of Chicago.

    The visages of the houses lining Kentmore and Garrison are as blank of identity as a busload of retards. The architecture is lively and Gothic, but in the manner of a jaunty and ornate tombstone. The designers and artisans had been alive and vibrant… but that time is long past. The houses, the monuments, remain shrouded in their annual quarter of coma. Somewhere, smothered beneath the four-foot snow-pack, are paving stones and tarmac and sidewalks, icons of a lost civilization awaiting archaeological excavation. The eyes of the walkers who pass Jonathan look not trapped, but hunted; not totally dead, but fatally brutalized. They dart at the passage of another human being, not afraid so much as shocked into jaded lifelessness. Once passed by, you cease to exist - the better to curtail the bloody fantasies of assault, injury, the swift rape or the blade in the spine. Urban terror refined to the sweet, sealant thickness of country honey.

    Jonathan's mind tells him that this is not a place for those interested in living. One can subsist here, as in the Arctic, but beyond the challenge of survival no rewards await. It reminds him of an ancient bastille, gone to ruin and occupied by nomads. Life here had made sense once. Now there was no life, only occupation. Customers shuffle listlessly in and out of markets, clutching sacks. Snow is robotically shoveled from drives and walkways. At the coffeeshop where Jonathan takes most of his solitary meals for convenience's sake, the locals seem salty and inimical. Nobody wanted to be bothered. They shuffled to the churches of their choice every seventh day with the same zombiatic lack of expression. It was nearly atavistic, a behavior remembered but no longer comprehended.

    When daylight intrudes it lends a funereal aspect to the denuded trees. Still they reach, skeletally, toward a sky that cannot offer photosynthesis. What leaves linger, dead, are bereft of autumn hues and have gone utterly black. When Jonathan considers the iron-colored sky, the frozen mud, the black leaves, he thinks again of Usher's tarn.

    Not merely the sky, but the downpour itself is gray - the stained hue of unclean ivory. Fat drops, ice-cold, plash through swirling mist; the combination chills to the very strands of muscle fiber. Jonathan no longer feels the cold and the rain fails to touch or despoil Amanda, who stares down upon him. He is posed all wrong inside a casket that is too small for him. Her eyes flare. They tell him that if he wanted to get horizontal so badly, then this arrangement is fine by her. She plucks the best irises from the floral groupings while rainwater rapidly fills the casket. Wet silk is disgusting. Amanda smiles, keeps the flowers for herself, and continues to watch dispassionately as the freezing water rises to cover Jonathan's open eyes.

    Nobody fit in Oakwood. But most stayed. Jonathan does not fit here, and neither does Bash, for that matter. Or Cruz, or Jamaica.

    Jonathan wishes he could save somebody.

    

    

    He awoke spooned into Jamaica from behind, still wearing his pants and socks.

    His left arm was draped over her and cradled between both of her forearms. His hand had nested just under her chin. When first he tried to retrieve it, her sleeping grip tightened. Don't go. He could feel her breathing. Beneath the sleeping bag her scrubbed skin exuded a teasing aroma that made him want to close his eyes and return to dreamland, to stay this way forever.

    Except that would mean fossilization deep in the calcified heart of Oakwood, and Jonathan would rather die. The sound that had awakened him was itself like a heartbeat.

    
Boom-cha-boom-cha-cha
. He timed it against the noise of blood traversing his vessels, the backbeat of his own heart muscle.
Boom-boom-boom-cha. Boom-boom-cha-cha-cha
.

    First it was 4/4, then almost a rap beat. It seemed to vibrate in his direction from the outer walls of the building, sounding distant, easily blanked by the ambient noise of the other apartments. Transmitted, perhaps, via beam and bricking from the rooms on the far western side, in the manner of canyon acoustics. Perhaps from the other floors.

    A hard and a soft. Then hard/soft-soft. Then hard-hard-hard/soft/hard-hard/soft. Then over again. Same cadence each time, now. It stabilized.

    His mind wanted to explain it so he could forget it. Kenilworth Arms had been sliced and diced into forty or more units by his reckoning, its less vintage walls like pasteboard. Transient tenants and odd hours were factors of an equation whose product was this foundation rhythm,
boom-cha
, hard to soft. Somebody somewhere in the building would be spinning tunes no matter what the hour. Or staring at nightowl music shows on the tube. Someone was always awake, watching or listening or fighting, in a place like this. If Jonathan had hoped for respite by marking time in this place, then he'd better get used to the extended dance mix -
uh huh uh huh boom-cha-cha
.

    It was not an authentic part of the barrage of salsa and heavy metal native to the building's constituency, whom Jonathan had seen knocked rudely up just hours previously. Nor was it the raw noise of those occupants or residents themselves moving up and down the narrow firetrap stairways in the metronomic march of life in America below the poverty index. It was not outside traffic. Any sound could obliterate it. But it was always there, like a base coat buried beneath the twenty-plus layers of generic paint that Fergus the super tended to slap all over every wall and door in the joint.

    A lone car slushed past on Garrison, compressing snow. Jonathan lost the mystery sound - what he fancied the heartbeat of the building.