“Awful young for a wet dream.”
Surprised, I said, “How’d you know there was water in it? At least the sound of water all around.”
Instead of answering me, she said, “Why did you follow me to the sixth floor, liar?”
“Like I said before. I recognized you from the dream. That’s the truth.”
At last an edge, just a thin one, came into her deadpan voice. “I don’t like you, snoop. I’d love to smash your monkey face. Don’t tempt me. Don’t you ever follow me again.”
“I won’t. Why would I? You’re not that interesting.”
“I can turn interesting from one second to the next, snoop, more interesting than you ever want to know. You stay away from the sixth floor.”
“I don’t need to go up there.”
“You don’t want to, either, unless you’re even dumber than I think. And you don’t want to be talking about me to anyone, not to anyone. You never saw me. We didn’t have this little chat. You get my point, snoop?”
“Yeah. All right. Okay. Whatever. Jeez.”
She stared at me for a long moment and then looked at the La Florentine box on the nightstand. “What’d you just put in there?”
“Nothing. Stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“My stuff.”
“Was it something you took from my satchel or my bedroll?”
“I didn’t touch your things. I just looked.”
“So you say, liar. Open it.”
I picked up the metal box but held it against my chest.
She wanted another staring contest, and I did my part even though her eyes were disturbing, full of wildness.
She said, “What’s black on the outside and red on the inside?”
I didn’t know what she meant, what she wanted. I shook my head.
From a pocket of her lightweight jacket, she took a folding knife. Switchblade. Seven inches of razor-sharp steel flicked from the yellow handle. “I’m very serious, boy.”
I nodded.
“I like to cut. You believe I like to cut?”
“Yes.”
“Open the box.”
21
Using the blade of the knife, she probed through the contents of the box while I held it out to her. “Just crap,” she said.
“It’s all my stuff.”
“What—you’re in training to be some junk-crazed pack rat? What did you put in here when I was watching you from the doorway?”
“The eye.”
“What eye?”
“I found it in the alley. From a teddy bear or something.”
She picked it up between thumb and forefinger. “Why this?”
“I don’t know. It’s interesting.”
“Interesting? Why?”
“I don’t know. It just is.”
She searched my eyes again, and then she rested the point of the knife on the tip of my nose. “Why?”
I was up against the wall, nowhere to go. Fear of the knife made me speechless.
She slid the blade into my left nostril. “Be very still, snoop. You move too suddenly, you’ll cut yourself. Why is this teddy-bear eye so interesting?”
“I thought it maybe had some juju.”
“Juju?”
“Yeah. Juju is—”
“I know what it is. Juju eye? You’re a real little freak in the making, aren’t you?”
She dropped the fabric eye into the box. Sparing my nose, she stirred the contents with the blade once more, but she quickly lost interest. “Put it away.”
After I put the box on the nightstand, I couldn’t take my eyes off the blade.
For maybe half a minute, she didn’t say anything, and neither did I, and finally she put the knife away. “Good thing you were lying about your mama coming home. If she’d walked in and seen me with that knife in my hand, I’d have used it on her and then on you. You love your mama, snoop?”
“Of course.”
“Not everyone does. Mine was a selfish bitch.”
I turned my attention to the window, to see if rain might be falling yet, though mostly so I wouldn’t have to look at her.
“If you love your mama, then you think about what I said. I like to cut. I could make her a new face in half a minute. Look at me, boy.”
No rain yet.
“Don’t you dis me, boy.”
I looked at her.
“You understand me, how it is, how it has to be?”
“Yeah. I understand. No big deal.”
She turned away from me, crossed the room, opened the door.
I don’t know why I needed to make one more revelation, except that I was a small boy, rattled, and not thinking clearly. “In the nightmare, you were dead, and I was very sorry for you.”
On the threshold she turned and regarded me as when she’d first appeared: not with robotic indifference, as it had previously seemed to me, but with the contempt of a machine intelligence that despised weak creatures of flesh and blood.
“What’re you trying to do with this seeing-me-in-a-nightmare shit?”
“Nothing. I felt sorry, that’s all.”
“Am I supposed to be afraid? Is this a threat or something?”
“No. It’s just … the way it was. In the nightmare, I mean.”
“Then maybe you better not dream anymore.”
I almost spoke her name, so that she might believe me about the nightmare, but something stopped me, whether instinct or guardian angel, I can’t say.
“What? What is it?” she asked, as though she could almost read my mind.
“Nothing.”
Her face was simultaneously beautiful and cruel, but as I would learn in time, cruelty was the truth of Fiona Cassidy. She stared at me, and I held her stare because I thought that if I glanced away she would come around the bed again and hurt me. Finally she stepped into the hallway, leaving the door open, and moved out of sight toward the front of the apartment.
At that moment, as though she willed it to add drama to her exit, the sky loosed an entire quiver of lightning bolts, and cataclysmic thunder followed closely, rattling window glass and reverberating through the walls as if the building were a drum, and rain fell in torrents.
I stood there, trembling, mortified, having betrayed the image of myself that I had crafted and cherished. The man of the family. How absurd that seemed now. I was a boy, not a man, and the merest stick figure of a boy.
Grandpa Teddy often said that musical talent was an unearned grace, that I should give thanks for it every day, and that it was my obligation and my honor to make the most of the gift. But right then, I would have traded talent for brawn, youth for age, wishing myself a grown man, thick-necked and broad-chested, a tower of muscle.
Although I intended to give Fiona Cassidy plenty of time to leave the apartment, shame and a need for redemption compelled me to follow her sooner than might have been prudent. I hurried along the hallway to the living room, but she wasn’t there. The apartment door was shut, the deadbolt engaged, which suggested that she remained somewhere in our few rooms.
Summer rain slanted under the raised sash of each front window, spattering the sill and spilling into the apartment. I closed one, then the other, and with considerable trepidation, I searched our rooms and closets and even looked under my mother’s bed, and then under mine. I was relieved to find myself alone, but I was also mystified. Creepy. Definitely creepy. But nothing serious yet.
22
When Mr. Smaller, the superintendent and conspiracy theorist, failed to answer his bell, I sought him elsewhere. He might have been in any apartment, attending to repairs of one kind or another, but first I went to the basement, where he could often be found. I used the interior stairs instead of going outside to the alley entrance, and as I descended those steep wooden treads, I heard my quarry talking to himself from somewhere in the labyrinth of mechanical systems that sustained the building.
The footprint of that lower realm was the same as any floor of the apart
ment building, and yet it seemed larger, cavernous, partly because the pipes and boilers and electrical conduits and big fuse boxes and other equipment created a maze bewildering to one as small as me, and partly because the lighting scheme was decades old and inadequate. Shadows pooled everywhere and hung like funeral bunting along the work aisles. Here also were many unlabeled barrels and large packing crates stenciled with numbers that didn’t reveal what they contained, contributing to the basement’s air of mystery.
With the muffled tumult of the storm echoing down through vents that led all the way to the roof, with windblown rain churning at the narrow and filthy ground-level windows near the ceiling, the basement had become an even more off-putting realm than usual.
On the floor, a spider the size of a quarter scurried out of shadows and along a band of light. I froze at the sight of it. I didn’t like spiders, but my aversion to this one was inexplicably strong. The encounter with Fiona Cassidy had spooked me more than any movie about space aliens or voodoo. My nerves were taut. Instead of stamping on the spider, I watched with apprehension as it crossed my path, convinced that every moment of this strange morning was fraught with occult meaning and peril, and I thought, Worse luck than a black cat.
When the spider vanished into shadows, I continued to follow the voice of Reginald Smaller as he grumbled to himself. I found him in the downfall of light from a portable work lamp that was hooked to an overhead water pipe, performing routine maintenance on the third of three large boilers, the one that brewed hot water and sent it to radiators throughout the building to heat the apartments. Here in the waning days of summer, when no one needed heat, Mr. Smaller was draining sediment from the bottom of the big tank, an almost syrupy sludge with which he’d filled one bucket and was now filling a second.
A short man with a big middle, he wore as usual a white tank-top undershirt, khakis with an elastic waist, and suspenders as insurance against a failure of the elastic, industrial suspenders that looked as if they had been fashioned from racehorse tack. He once said that he had been raised by a grandmother who was “a mean old cuckoo-bird,” and when he was a young boy, if he displeased her, she stripped him down to his underpants and turned him out into the street to be mortified. He insisted there was nothing worse than being pantsless in public, especially if you had bandy legs and lumpy knees that made people point and laugh. In Mr. Smaller’s case, I thought it was just as bad to wear a tank top, because his chest and back and arms were covered in wiry, poodle-curly hair, glossy black against his white skin, like the coat of a bear with an advanced case of mange.
When I came upon him that morning, he was on his knees beside the hulking boiler, muttering almost as if he were two people having a vigorous debate, but when he saw me, he smiled and said, “Ain’t it but Sammy Davis Junior himself. Will you sing ‘What Kind of Fool Am I’ for me, Sammy?”
“You know I don’t sing, Mr. Smaller.”
“Now, don’t go pullin’ my chain, Sammy. You sing all the time in Vegas when they pay you the big bucks.”
“Maybe I would sing if I got the big bucks.”
“Soon as I drain this disgustin’ muck,” he said, indicating the soupy stuff coming out of the boiler hose, “I’ll hustle upstairs, get a couple thousand from my cookie jar. That be enough for just one song?”
“Sometimes you’re really silly, Mr. Smaller.”
“Yeah, I guess you won’t never sing no song that cheap. How much they pay you to star in Ocean’s Eleven?”
“About a hundred million.”
He pretended to be impressed. “Why’re you still in this dump?”
“Living flashy isn’t my style.”
“Guess it ain’t.” The last slop oozed out of the boiler, and he twisted shut the petcock. “Wish you really was Sammy Davis. Then you’d know that actor Peter Lawford. I’d sure like to talk to Peter Lawford. He knows somethin’ about who really killed the president.”
“You mean President Kennedy?”
“Don’t mean Abe Lincoln. Lawford, he’s married to that Patricia Kennedy. Tell you one thing, it weren’t no Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the real trigger. Castro mighta been mixed up in it. If I had your hundred million, I’d bet it all ties back to Roswell in July of ’47.”
“Who’s Roswell?”
“Ain’t a who. Roswell is a what, a place. New Mexico. Flyin’ saucer crashed there, July of ’47. Some dead aliens was recovered, and maybe one alive. Government’s been lyin’ about it ever since.”
“Wow.”
Disconnecting the short hose from the boiler drain, Mr. Smaller said, “For sure the April ’62 saucer crash near Vegas is part of it, ’cause it just so happens Jack Ruby was in Vegas then.” When I asked who Jack Ruby was, Mr. Smaller said, “He killed Lee Harvey Oswald right after Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy. Them Bilderberger bastards are mixed up in it, too.”
From past conversations, I knew that the Bilderbergers were an international secret society headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, formed to be the secret government of the world in league with the aliens from other planets who lived among us. Being only nine years old, I didn’t know if the Bilderbergers were real or something Mr. Smaller invented. I thought he was a little crazy, but mostly in a nice way, and some of his stories were fun to hear. Because he was so much older than I was, I owed him respect, and I never expressed disbelief.
That morning, however, I’d been spooked by Fiona Cassidy, who was without a doubt real and who was a more immediate threat than the Bilderbergers out there in Geneva. I hoped it would seem the most natural thing in the world when I changed the subject: “The new lady is pretty.”
Getting to his feet, Mr. Smaller said, “All that’s goin’ wrong these days, war and riots, it’s them damn Bilderbergers.” He picked up a bucket of sludge in each hand and walked toward the exterior basement door, which was served by a short ramp. “All them tornadoes last year, two hundred dead, that nurse killer in Chicago, them dangerous new skateboard things, and Nat King Cole gone from lung cancer, only forty-five.”
Following him, I said, “She has nice eyes, how they’re blue and purple at the same time.”
“Girls in silly go-go boots, miniskirts, all them weird-fangled new dances, the watusi, the frug. What kind of dance is a frug? Don’t nobody fox-trot no more? It’s all their plan, the Bilderbergers.”
As he put the buckets down and ascended the ramp to unlock the door, I said, “I guess she’s renting on the sixth floor.”
Disengaging the deadbolt, opening the door, seeming to be surprised by the rain, he said, “Makes no sense in this weather. Sludge can wait. It’s just sludge.” Closing the door, locking it, turning, he said, “Lung cancer ate up Edward R. Murrow, too, but pardon the hell out of me if I ain’t grievin’ over that, ’cause all them big-time newsmen like him ain’t nothin’ but puppets for the Bilder—”
He cut off in mid-word, cocked his head, and looked at me as if what I’d been saying had gotten to him on a delayed broadcast.
“Who’re you talkin’ about, Jonah?”
“The pretty lady in Six-C.”
When I had seen her sleeping bag and satchel, no furniture or other luggage, I thought maybe she was a squatter, that she might have picked the lock and settled in until someone found her and made her leave. She seemed too good-looking for a squatter, but you never know. When she’d threatened to hurt me if I talked about her to anyone, my suspicion seemed to have been half confirmed.
Now Mr. Smaller proved me wrong. “You think she’s pretty?”
“Well, sure, because she is.”
“Not to me she ain’t. Truly pretty’s more than looks. She’s got a hard, cold edge can’t never be pretty. A piece of work, that one.”
I knew what he meant. But now I was puzzled. “Then why did you rent to her?”
Coming down the ramp, he reminded me of a well-meaning troll in a kid’s book I’d read. On the part of his head that wasn’t bald, the black hair bristled everywhichway, like ragged twist
s of steel wool.
“Son, I don’t do no rentin’. The lease agents work downtown, where corporate bastards get big pay for pickin’ their noses.” He stopped at the buckets, considered them, decided to leave them where they were. He walked back toward the boilers. “Black-hearted company owns maybe a hundred dumps like this. I’m just a guy gets free rent, piss-poor pay, and all the cockroaches I want in return for keepin’ this here place from fallin’ down on top of us.”
Following him, I said, “What’s her name?”
“Eve Adams.”
“Are you sure?”
“So I been told. Name could be Frankenstein, for all I care. She ain’t no business of mine. Ain’t a renter. She gets free rent like me, but only two months, till she scrapes off all the peelin’ wallpaper in Six-C, takes up the crumblin’ linoleum, paints the walls. She goes place to place doin’ the same. Everybody has a way of gettin’ by in a hard world.”
As he picked up his toolbox from beside the boiler, I said, “She doesn’t look like an Eve Adams.”
“Is that so? What does an Eve Adams look like?”
“Not like her. She should have a prettier name.”
He stared at me for a moment and then put down the toolbox. He settled into a squat, so that we were eye to eye. “Young boys, they get crushes sometimes. Had one on my second-grade teacher. Not just how she looked. The way she was, all she was. Figured she’d wait till I growed up, so then we’d be together forever. Damn, but don’t I find out she’s married. Broke my stupid heart. Then what happens but she divorces him and marries some other guy. I realize she don’t know—or care—how I love her. So then I hated her as best I could, but that hurt me, not her. When you grow up, Jonah, women are gonna break your heart so often, you lose count. You want my best advice? Don’t let them start on you so young as you are.”
I didn’t have a crush on Fiona Cassidy, aka Eve Adams, who in my experience might have been a maniac or even a witch. But for two reasons, I chose not to reveal as much to Mr. Smaller. First, it was nice of him to care about what happened to my heart, and he might be embarrassed if I told him that his tender advice was misdirected. Second, and more important, he must never let the woman know that I had been asking about her. She liked to cut; I didn’t like being cut. His assumption that I had a crush on her gave me reason to plead with him not to humiliate me by informing her of my infatuation.