“Where ya goin’, Froggy?” he shouted, even though it was perfectly obvious—I was taking the usual shortcut across the pizza place’s parking lot, to the Shop-Rite. What he wasn’t going to understand was why I wasn’t going into the supermarket, but around back. They throw pretty fair stuff out there, the beat-up vegetables and bread and such that not even the charity groups want. You can pick up quite a bit if you get there before the bagladies do.
I didn’t answer Jerry back, so when I went around to the dumpsters, naturally he came after me. He sounded a little worried. “Froggo? Whatcha doin’?”
“Go play in traffic, Friedman,” I said. I was annoyed. This wasn’t something he should be seeing, but I didn’t have the time to waste on chasing him away—the unicorns don’t wait around long. I got a paper bag from inside my jacket and started going through the first dumpster.
He looked at me as if I was from Mars.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, fine.” I found half a squashed head of lettuce and half a prune Danish that were just a little moldy around the edges.
“Your dad get fired or something?” He really sounded worried about me now. This was real cute coming from the kid who once took the locking washers off the wheels of my skateboard as a surprise.
“I’m fine, bug off!” I felt stupid then, for shouting so loud the whole city could have heard. The only thing I could think of to do was turn around and shove the squashed lettuce into his hands.
He stared at it. “But what—?”
“I’m going to feed the unicorns,” I said, hoping he’d think I was nuts and go away. Sure enough, he looked up from the lettuce with an expression that would make you hide your skateboard.
“You’ve finally flipped out…”
“Yeah,” I said. “Come on, you can call the men in the white coats after I’m done.” I threw the butt end of a bunch of celery into the brown bag, got down from the dumpster, and headed off fast.
He didn’t even begin catching up with me till halfway down the stairs to the Lexington Avenue Local station. It looked the way it usually looks that time of night—dingy concrete, dull light bulbs, peeling theater posters and cigarette ads. I was through the turnstile and a good way down the platform when he hollered after me again. He sounded upset this time. “Frog?”
I turned. He was on the other side of the turnstile with the lettuce in his hands, and the black lady in the change booth was staring at hime. “I don’t have a token,” he said.
“Wha’d you say? ‘Frog’?” I stuck a finger in one ear and started cleaning it.
“Oh, all right. Beth—”
I pitched him a token and headed down the platform again. In a few seconds he caught up with me. “What’re we doing, really?” he said, whispering loudly.
“I told you.”
“Oh, give me a break!”
“Shut up, smogbrain, you’ll scare them!” There was no one else on the platform—I looked up and down it, checking to see that no one was hiding in the tunnel either. The rails ticked a little as an express train squealed in on the lower level.
“Scare who?”
I leaned back against the wall at the very end of the platform, because it was a long story, or it had been when Dad told it to me. And I told Jerry the whole thing—what we though was true, anyway. How the city had grown around the unicorns, hemming them in. Some of them couldn’t adapt, Dad said, and so they stayed in the deep places in Central Park and never came out. But some of them were bolder—or not as smart. They’d learned to hide in the subway tunnels, always moving, hiding from the trains and the people. The bravest of the downstairs unicorns sneak up onto the street sometimes, on moonless nights or cloudy ones, or during power failures. They’re the reason the grass around trees on the city streets never grows long. But most of them aren’t so brave. The shy ones stay in the tunnels all the time. And because of the litter laws, people don’t throw so much food on the tracks for them to pick up anymore. The shy ones starve, sometimes. And the shy ones are the prettiest…
Jerry listened to all this with the hide-your-skateboard look on his face. But he didn’t say anything till I ran out of words and started to blush—there’s something special about those shy ones, something about their eyes; I felt dumb talking to a boy about it. Maybe Jerry saw me getting red. At least when he spoke up, he didn’t sound like he was teasing. “How do you know so much about this? Why hasn’t someone else seen them before?”
“They have.” I still remembered that night Dad came home late from work, looking pale. He hardly said anything at dinner, and after everybody went to bed, I could hear him and Mom talking through the walls—not the words, but their voices. Dad sounded unhappy at first, then upset; and Mom got loud and finally told him to go to sleep, he’d been drinking too much again. That I heard clearly. For a couple of days he looked awful and kept muttering all the time—he does that when things are bugging him. Finally he waited till Mom was out food shopping, and sat me down in the living room. I was scared to death; I thought he was going to tell me about the facts of life. Instead he told me about the unicorn he’d seen run out of the tunnel at Fulton Street. It had come out just long enough to grab up a stale half-bagel smeared with cracked cream cheese, someone’s garbage thrown out on the tracks, and run back again. He cried when he told me. I nearly died. I’d never seen him cry about anything; it looked impossible. His face got all bent. “The poor creature,” he kept mumbling while he cried: “Poor little thing!” The next day we got some day-old bread and let my mother think we were going to Central Park to feed the ducks. But the ducks went without. They’re fat enough.
I didn’t tell Jerry about my Dad, though. “Some of the subway people who work down here—they’ve seen them. They leave them food in places where the rats won’t get it. And they don’t tell. If they told, there’d be all sorts of stuff happening. TV news people, with cameras and bright lights. Scientists. The Board of Health, for all I know. And the unicorns would go in deep, under the streets, and never come out again, and they’d all starve.” I looked at Jerry. His face was so blank it made me scared. “So keep you mouth shut!”
“I better,” he said, real quietly, looking past me. “They’re here.”
I turned around. The eyes had caught him as they’d caught me that first time. You might think they were cats’ eyes, except cats always have that kind of strangeness about them, when their eyes flash at you in the headlights. If humans’ eyes flashed in the dark, they would look like this. Only the shape is wrong—the eyes are spaced wide like a horse’s. The pair of glimmers looked at us from the dark. Looked mostly at Jerry, rather; they knew my voice by now. One pair of eyes, then two, a dull pink reflection in the tired subway lighting—just hanging out there where the track vanished into shadow.
They had no names. Dad and I always thought of names on the way to the subway, or on the way back; but seeing the unicorns, the names seemed cheap—they fell off. I felt around in the bag for the celery. Green stuff was always good to start with—they got so little of it, the shy ones. One of them heard the crunch of the celery snapping and took a step forward, barely into the light.
I heard Jerry’s breath go in as if someone had punched him. It was the same for him as it’d been for me the first time. Nothing that lives in a subway should be that graceful. Cats run, rats and mice scurry. But the unicorns just flow out of the darkness, and not even the cinders crunch when they put their feet down. Sometimes, if they’re playful, they walk on the rails like somebody on a tightrope, and don’t slip or make a sound. This one just took one step and stretched his neck out like a swan on the lake when it doesn’t want to come too close. The unicorn’s horn glinted, pearly, the only bright thing about him—everywhere else he was the iron-rust color of the gravel between the tracks. His eyes were so brown they were black. But the end of his horn caught the light like the edge of a knife as he stepped out. “Hey, they sharpen them back there,” Dad had said one night, when a touch of a horn dre
w blood from his hand. Maybe they fought among themselves; or maybe there were things down there that tried to eat them. I didn’t want to think about it.
“Give him some,” I whispered at Jerry, annoyed again; he was making them wait. “Throw it. They won’t eat out of your hand.” Jerry tore off some lettuce and threw it down on the tracks. The brown one looked at him for a moment, then put its head down to eat. You could see it was starving; every rib showed. But it lowered its head slow as a king sipping wine.
More came while the first was eating. Maybe he was the herd leader and had been checking the place out. Whatever, the tracks were full in a few moments—nothing but tails switching and necks stretching and eyes, those eyes. All the unicorns were dark this time, though I’d seen ones with white socks or blazes, and once a tan one with a light mane like a palomino’s. These weren’t any fatter than any others I’d seen, though, and while they ate gracefully, they did it fast. Two of them, a rusty one and a black, got rowdy and waved their horns at each other over a piece of the Danish. Jerry threw them more, and they stopped and each gobbled a piece.
They were close, right up by the platform. I’d never seen them so close. Jerry was so amazed by the whole thing, and the rusty one standing right in front of him with its lower jaw going around and around—even unicorns look a little funny when they chew—that he nearly lost his balance and fell down when the black unicorn snuck up beside him and grabbed at the rest of the Danish in his hand. Even though he was surprised, though, Jerry didn’t let go for a second. He just stood there looking at the black, while it tugged at the Danish and gazed back at him with those deep, sad eyes. I know that look. My eyes started burning, and my nose filled up. Nothing that lives in a subway should be that proud, and that hungry, and feel that helpless. Nothing that lives anywhere should. The black unicorn got the last piece of Danish away from Jerry and ate it, delicately, but fast. Jerry looked a moment at the hand the unicorn had touched, and then wiped his nose on the sleeve of his jacket.
All their heads went up then, all at once, as if they were a herd of gazelles in a nature movie when the lion’s coming. They stared down the tracks toward the downtown end—and there was just a flicker of motion, and they were gone, headed uptown and into the dark too fast to really see. Jerry looked over at me and opened his mouth—then shut it again as he started to hear what they’d heard: the ticking and the rumbling and the squeal of metal a long way down at the next station. I crumpled up the bag and stuck it inside my jacket. We waited for the train to come in—it would’ve looked weird to just go down to the platform and then come up again before a train came. The subway seemed much louder than usual, especially compared to the quiet ones who’d been on the tracks a few moments before.
Fifteen or twenty people got off, and we went up the stairs with them. Jerry wiped his nose again, and sniffed. “Subway people feed them?”
“And my Dad.”
“I thought they only came to virgins.”
So had my Dad. “I dunno,” I said. “Maybe they can’t afford to be so picky anymore.” That was one thing Dad had said. I didn’t tell Jerry the other, what Dad had said the first time one let him touch it—him, a man who empties garbage cans for a living, and comes home smelling like what the city throws away. He’d looked at his hands like Jerry had, and finally he said, “It must be love.” And he’d sat down and watched baseball that whole night and said not another word.
“You feed them every night?” Jerry said.
“When we can. Sometimes it’s every other night. My mom gets suspicious and thinks Dad’s out messing around, or I’m sneaking off doing drugs or something.”
“We got up to the street. Jerry snorted at the thought. “You do drugs? You wouldn’t know which side of your nose to stick the joint up.”
That was true, so I punched him a good one in the arm and he yelped. When we were about halfway to my building, Jerry said, all of the sudden, “What about the survival of the fittest, though? Maybe only the strong ones should live, to make more strong ones…”
I thought about that for a moment. “Well, yeah. Normally. But this isn’t normal. They were here first. Then we built all this around them.” I waved my arms at the city in general. “Maybe there’s nothing wrong with helping them handle it. They’re an endangered species.”
Jerry nodded and wiped his nose again. “Survival with the fittest,” he said.
He was smart. That was one of the reasons I didn’t mind him following me sometimes. Maybe even this time had been a good idea. “Yeah,” I said.
“You gonna feed them tomorrow?”
“I think so. Dad’s still sick.”
“Can I come with you?”
I looked at him. “If you go to the A&P first. I’ll go to the Shop-Rite, and meet you. We’re have twice as much.”
“Great.” He looked down the street at my building. “Race you?”
“Okay.”
“Go!”
After about half a minute he tripped me. I’m used to always having my elbows and knees skinned, but I don’t think Jerry’s real used to having black eyes. He was going to have some explaining to do at school the next day.
As long as it didn’t make him late for feeding time, though, neither of us cared.
About “A Swiss Story”
This is another of those stories you’d now have a hell of a time getting past BS&P if you tried to tell it in the clear.
As regards some details in the text: Anton was a real Swiss bartender, but that wasn’t his real name, and he didn’t work at the Drei Könige. Mike the hotel manager is real too, but his hotel was elsewhere in Switzerland (before he went off to work in high-end hotel and event consulting somewhere in the States). Bellow was real, but he worked at the Hotel zum Storchen in Zurich, not Basel. Peter, of course, is at least as real as half-a-century-plus of busy life and twenty-five years of marriage can make him. The jacket is real, and has its own fandom. And the Vogel Griff is very real indeed, three times each year, usually in January unless Fasnacht is very late. Google for it and you’ll see.
A Swiss Story
January is a peculiar time of year to be in Basel. In the grim grey weather, the locals sometimes seem to wonder why they’re there themselves, let alone why a tourist should come to their city after Christmas, and almost a month before Fasnacht, their hyperenthusiastic version of Mardi Gras. You get odd looks when you speak English there in January, followed by almost sympathetic expressions; the Baslers are immediately sure you can only be there on some horrible and unavoidable piece of business, and they go out of their way to make you welcome, to make up for it.
Things are quiet there in the slack season. There aren’t lots of people in the shops, the hotels are at maybe their lowest occupancy for the year; even the Rhine seems subdued, grey water under a grey sky with grey stinging sleet pelting down into it out of the fog, and the barges that go up and down the river hoot disconsolately in the mist, like lost cousins of Nessie looking for an escape route. If you can see far enough down the river-course to make out where the three metal sails of the Dreiländereck boundary monument jut up from the water, half the time they’re sheeted over with ice, so that even the seabirds are too uncomfortable to roost there for long.
You could attempt this view from the beautiful arches of the Mittlerebrücke, but you would have to be nuts, the way the wind comes howling down the river from the north and the North Sea, and rips across the bridge. So the best other place from which to attempt it would be the river-terrace of the oldest hotel in town, the Drei Könige am Rhein: and better still, since the river-terrace at the “Three Kings” is not heated this time of year, all the sane patrons having retreated inside to eat in the Rôtisserie des Rois, better still is to forget the wretched grey view entirely and go sit in the bar.
The Dreikönigs Bar is a snug wood-panelled hideaway off the “main drag” of the restaurant, with quiet Expressionist paintings hung on the dark panelling, and an archway-door opening out onto the wi
ndows which look toward the river: all the rest of the lighting is recessed pinpoint spots and shaded lamps, highlighting occasional glitters of gold and brass. There is a grand piano, but on a grey January afternoon no one plays it. Come along about three in the afternoon, and there’s no sound but the occasional grunt and hiss of the ruminative espresso machine hidden behind the bar, and the soft click or clink of glasses being washed and put away. Anton, the barman, uses the dishwasher at busy times, such as the evenings, when half the politicians and “beautiful people” in Basel are crowding the place. But he hates the dishwasher, really, and prefers to do the glasses himself, thoughtfully, in the slow hours, while gazing out the window toward the Mittlerebrücke, and Kleinbasel across the river.
Anton is one of those old-fashioned barmen who linger here and there in special places. He likes the old-fashioned bartender’s clothes, white shirt with full sleeves, sleeve garters, red suspenders; his hands are big and capable and don’t seem to mind dishwater. He seems to be in his fifties; his hair is dark and a bit long, and he has a full mustache that goes right around to his ears, drooping a little over an easy smile.
The other nice thing about Anton is that he’s easy to be around when the bar is otherwise empty. He has a gift for telling when you don’t want to be talked to, unlike some bartenders who will spend half an hour at a time trying to cheer you up when all you want in life is to drink a glass of wine and stare into space, letting your legs recover after hauling shopping bags full of assorted swag around the Old Town. Equally, Anton has the gift for knowing when you don’t mind being talked to. At such times he’ll go off into slightly Joycean stream-of-consciousness, expounding to you on everything and anything with the same easy unconcern he expends on Bellow, the ancient white-muzzled black Labrador who lies at the end of the bar and watches the cash register when Anton steps out. Anton’s English passes the merely “fluent” stage: it soars. I wish I spoke German a hundredth as well as he does English. I like him a lot.