They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee (17 page)

Buddy Holly

There
were
unattractive areas in Riversborough, Oneonta Place was proof of that. It was an ugly street even under a frosting of virgin snow. Snow couldn't hide the boarded windows on every other L-shaped ranch. Snow could not hide the for-sale signs, the foreclosure notices posted on the lawns. Decay has a nasty habit of defeating the best camouflage.

Number 74 Oneonta Place was unremarkable as seen from the street. Half the slats were missing from the picket fence that surrounded the lot. The house itself was a faded gray, but it had been patched in various spots with asbestos shingles that neither matched one another nor the shingles that covered the remainder of the ranch. There were two headless lawn jockeys, half buried in snow, holding plaster lanterns on either side of the pink front door.

I pushed the button on the remote garage door opener as I pulled into the driveway and, much to my surprise, the thing actually worked. The light in the garage stayed on as the door closed behind the old Subaru. I could breathe again. The light popped off, but I stood there in the semidarkness for quite a while. Soaked with sweat, my body shaking beyond my control, I thought of Kira, the woman, not the victim, for the first time since I'd run from my room. It didn't take any courage to cry now.

I entered the house through a door in the garage. The house was neater than I would have expected. The furnishings and carpeting were old, but clean and dusted. All the shades were drawn, so I could move about freely without having to crawl by windows and doors. There was an eat-in kitchen, a big living room, and three bedrooms with one full bath at the end of a long hall. Only the smallest of the three bedrooms seemed to function as a bedroom. The middle-sized bedroom was set up as an office. There was a writing desk with an IBM Selectric typewriter on it, diplomas on the walls—a B.S. from Cornell, a Masters degree from MIT. There was no Ph.D., but there was a rectangular spot on the wall where another diploma might once have hung—a three-year-old calendar and an oil portrait of a breathtakingly exotic woman in traditional Indian dress. The gold accents and the vibrant reds and blues in her clothing flowed in stark contrast to her deep brown skin and pitch black hair. Her lips were simultaneously shy and inviting. And the artist had given the dark beauty a sense of motion I could not accurately describe. I could not say that her hair blew in a painted breeze. I could not say that her eyes followed me or that her mouth smiled when I turned my head a certain way. It just seemed so to me.

What would have been the master bedroom served as a storage area and library. If he had read half the books in the room, he had read twice as many as I had. Apparently, he also spoke several languages. But what I liked best was that he owned both the English hardcover and Chinese paper-back editions of
Coney Island Burning
and
They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee.
It took the translators quite some time to convert the Yiddish slang into proper Mandarin.

So, I thought as I turned out of the doorway, with the exception of the woman's portrait, the interior of Guppy's house was as unremarkable as the exterior. Then it struck me that there was no computer in sight, not even a word processor. And I felt confident Guppy hadn't built his legend on an old IBM Selectric. I didn't like it, not at all. I ran to find the stairs to the basement.

No sign of a computer there, just a line of bare bulbs with pull chains and the oil burner. There was a washer and dryer, a slop sink and a small shop. My head filled with maybes. Maybe Guppy's myth was just that, myth. Maybe he used a laptop, a notebook. Maybe he rented an office someplace. Maybe he used someone else's equipment. Maybe I was being set up like Humpty Dumpty to take a great fall. Maybe, maybe, maybe . . .

What I liked even less than the computer whiz with no computer that was down in his basement I was getting that same eerie sensation I had had twice in my hotel room, only stronger this time. There was somebody else here or there just had been. I wouldn't have been at all surprised to turn a corner and find a lit cigarette burning in an ashtray. But there were no corners I hadn't turned. The closets upstairs were mostly filled with air and there wasn't any spot in the cellar I couldn't see well from where I was standing. Like I said before, alcohol didn't work for me, but I needed a drink.

I stripped down, threw my collection of other folks' sweaty clothes in the wash, and went upstairs to shower. I stopped at the fridge—stocked better than any single man's refrigerator I had ever seen—and grabbed a bottle of Brighton Beach Brown Ale. I froze in my tracks. Brighton Beach Brown Ale, or Triple B as its devotees called it, was a gourmet microbrewed beer from Brooklyn. It wasn't widely distributed even in the New York City area. How did Rajiv Gupta come to have a six-pack, I wondered? It was as if I had been expected. This feeling like I was caught in the middle of a
Twilight Zone
episode was getting pretty tiresome, but I was nude and confused and had nowhere else to turn. I drank the Triple B in two gulps and took a shower that used up all the hot water the washing machine could spare.

I stepped out of the shower. I grabbed for the towel I knew I had left atop the hamper, but it was not there. The steam, thicker than London fog, conspired with the bright bathroom light to blind me. I would not have been able to see my own reflection in the mirror. I could not find the mirror nor could I find the hand I held up before my face. I did not panic. I pressed my palms to the wet tile and felt for the door. It was a tiny bathroom, not much bigger than an old-fashioned phone booth, but the walls were seamless and had swallowed the door whole. I dropped to my knees to feel the floor. The floor was mud and grass. I could see and smell down here. The root ends of tulips—I don't know how I knew they were tulips—stuck up in the air. The fine root hairs waved in a wind that blew only close to the ground.

I put my face to the earth and stretched out, my legs seeming to extend into infinity. I closed my eyes and prayed to sleep. My feet flapped in the wind like the points of pennants. I was warm from the inside out, but only for a moment. The tulip roots grew around my limbs, pulling me down into the earth. I could not breathe. I tried to move, but was frozen. Somehow, my left arm was free and I latched my hand onto the bathroom sink. Pulling myself up, I noticed I was floating. I willed myself to come down. My feet landed on cold tile.

Though the steam was still thick, it was cold on my skin like a marble shroud. I could see the mirror and myself in it, covered in mud. Someone was there with me in the cold steam. It was a woman. The scent of her raw patchouli filled up my senses, but I could not see her. I felt her hands surround me, spin me, stroke me. I was faint. I felt her lips pressed to mine. I heard the rustle of fabric. I opened my eyes and she was there; the woman in the portrait. Her tongue tasted of honey and fire. Her hard nipples pressed through her sari into my flesh. We spun as we kissed, faster and faster. I was dizzy with her scent, her kisses, the spinning. She bit into my tongue and the spinning stopped.

I heard her laughing from very far away. A hand pushed me through the shower curtain and I fell through the bottom of the earth. I did not fall through air. I could breathe well enough, but it was like falling through black tar that restricted me without adhering to me. A door opened somewhere in the universe and the tar let go. The ground rushed up to greet me. I landed so hard the air exploded out of me. I felt skin beneath me. Kira's body had broken my fall. Her dead eyes looked up, accusing me. An icy cold hand shook my shoulder. I rolled over.

“Mr. Klein. Mr. Klein, are you quite all right?”

I was looking up from the living room floor at Rajiv Gupta, his coat sprinkled with snow.

“I'm not sure what all right means anymore,” I said, picking myself up.

“You were dreaming?”

“That was no dream.”

“No,” he agreed, “in your circumstance, I don't imagine dreaming is what a man does in his sleep.”

“What time is it?”

He looked at his wrist. “Two twenty-seven in the afternoon.”

“Lunchtime. “ I wiped the sleep from my eyes.

“Normally, yes, but because of the weather, I am finished for the day.”

I put my right hand out. “Thanks for saving me. Maybe we can talk about why you did it a little later.”

“We can do that.” He shook my hand. “Are you hungry?”

“For answers.”

“You and the police. That woman at the end of the aisle heard a news report on you when she arrived back at her flat.”

“I was afraid of that,” I confessed. “Were they rough on you?”

“Not at all.” He laughed. “I played the frightened immigrant, waving my hands and praising God. I've perfected it over the years. It's gotten me out of a number of fixes. That day I met you in the coffee house, I was doing a variation on the theme. The wise Eastern philosopher, full of vague platitudes for anyone who will listen.”

“Who is the woman in the portrait?”

“Has she gotten under your skin already?” He smirked, then remembering the scratches on my face and the reason for my being here, he apologized. “That was unforgivable.”

“Forget it. Who is she?”

“No one, really. An ideal woman. She has come to me in my dreams for years. In exchange for some help I gave a friend, she painted that portrait from my description. It is quite good, that painting.”

I agreed. “Amazing.”

“I know she exists somewhere,” Guppy explained, tapping his heart. “She may look nothing like the portrait, but I will recognize her spirit.”

“I believe you will. So . . .”

“So?” he puzzled.

“Where's the computer? And please, don't wave your hands around and praise God. I don't give up so easy as the Riversborough Police.”

“You do have questions.”

“I'm just getting wanned up,” I said. “How is it you just happen to have Triple B in the fridge? And what is it you know about Zak you weren't telling me that day at the coffee house? And how in the hell do you know I didn't kill the girl?”

“Come, Mr. Klein, let me unburden your heart. The questions will answer themselves.”

I was getting a little tired of Guppy the wise philosopher and I would have appreciated a straight answer. Instead, I followed him down to the basement. We went into his little workshop. There was a workbench with some hand tools. There were shelves with rows of baby food jars used to store screws and nails and nuts and bolts. Unlike the furnishings upstairs, the shop was a bit dusty. Suddenly it occurred to me that this was the one place in the house that seemed not to fit. The furniture upstairs certainly wasn't new, but it was modern, more or less. The tools on the workbench were wooden-handled, from another era. Even the baby jars seemed dated. I picked one up. The lid was the old-fashioned kind from when I was a kid, the type you had to pry off with a special tool.

“From the original owner,” Guppy said, sensing my curiosity. “And so is this.”

He reached down to the floor and unhinged some latches hidden behind the legs of the workbench. He stood and repeated the process with some other latches hidden in a storage cabinet. If you didn't know they were there, you would never have noticed those latches. I got the feeling that that was the whole idea. Guppy tugged at one end of the workbench and it pulled off the wall quite easily. He pulled away a strip of old yellow insulation to expose what looked like a bulkhead door from a WWII submarine.

“If it's not a U-boat,” I said, “it must be a bomb shelter.”

“Very good, Mr. Klein. A bomb shelter it is.”

Guppy unscrewed the heavy steel wheel, releasing the thick pins which sealed the door against nuclear attack. There was an audible gush of air as the seal was broken. He yanked the door open and stepped in before me, flicking on a light switch. He asked me to come in, but to wait as he pulled the workbench roughly back into place. When he had done so, he pulled the bulkhead door closed and spun the handle shut.

We were on a short flight of metal stairs surrounded by bare concrete. The concrete was probably a good foot or two thick. The light fixture was a simple steel cage fixed over a lightbulb. At the bottom of the stairs was another bulkhead door, only this one was more of a hatch than a door. Again, Guppy spun the heavy wheel to release the seal. Almost immediately, I could hear music coming from inside the shelter. I recognized the song, but not the band. It was a techno-pop version of the old Buddy Holly song, “Maybe Baby.” Guppy opened the hatch and pointed to a bar above it.

“Feet first,” he instructed as I grabbed the bar. “And, Mr. Klein, try to remember what desperation feels like to you.”

Some more vague advice to be shrugged off. I climbed through the open hatch. The music was louder now, but the room was black. Beneath the bassline of the music, I thought I could hear someone snoring. Guppy bumped into me as he came into the shelter. He apologized and before turning on the lights, said: “What we did, we did to save an innocent person. Our intentions were pure. You have to believe that. We could not foresee what would happen to the girl.”