A movement caught his eye, and he turned slightly to watch.
Spider Granny, housecoat-wrapped and slapping-slipper shod, trundled down the other street on her morning pilgrimage to the porch where Sadie was already enthroned in ponderous splendor.
Ruthie, the retarded child, recognized her and bellowed a bull-like greeting from the playpen where she spent her days.
“There’s Granny’s little darling,” Sadie’s mother cooed. She bustled up onto the porch and fussed over the drooling idiot in the pen.
Sadie said nothing, but sat stolidly, her head sunk in the rolls of fat around her neck, and her face set in its usual expression of petulant discontent.
“She seems more alert today,” Spider Granny observed hopefully. “She recognized me right off—didn’t you, love?”
The idiot bellowed at her.
Sadie still said nothing.
“Are you all right, Rita?” Sadie’s mother asked her. “You sure are quiet this morning. I’ll fix us some coffee, and you can tell Mother all about it.” She patted the idiot’s head fondly and bustled on into the house. A few minutes later she came out with two steaming cups and offered one to her daughter.
Sadie did not move, and her face did not change expression.
“Will you take this?” her mother demanded irritably, bending over with the coffee.
Sadie sat, mountainlike in her gross immobility.
“Rita,” Spider Granny said sharply. “Snap out of it.” She set the coffee cups down on the porch railing and turned back to her daughter. “Aren’t you feeling well, dear?” She reached out and touched the sitting woman.
The scream was enormous, a sound at once so vast and so shocking that it seemed to lie palpably in the street. Even the birds were stunned into silence by it.
Spider Granny backed away, her hands to the sides of her face, and screamed again, another window-shaking shriek.
The idiot in the playpen began to bellow a deep-throated bass accompaniment to her grandmother’s screams.
Doors began to bang open up and down the street, and the losers all came flooding out in response to the primal call of Granny’s screams. Mostly they stood watching, but a few went down to Sadie’s house.
Sadie, sitting in vast and splendid silence, neither moved nor spoke, and her expression remained imperially aloof. “District Four,” the scanner said. “Four.”
“Fourteen-hundred block of North Birch. We have a report of a possible DOA on a front porch.”
“Have you got an exact address?” District Four asked.
“The complainant stated that there were several people there already,” the dispatcher said. “Didn’t know the exact house number.”
“Okay,” Four said.
Spider Granny had finally stopped screaming and now stood in vacant-eyed horror, staring at the solid immensity of her daughter. The idiot in the playpen, however, continued to bellow and drool.
More of the neighbors came down to stand on the lawn. The
children came running to gape in silent awe. Chicken Coop Annie waddled down, and Mousy Mary scurried across the street.
Queenlike Sadie, sat to death, received in silence this final tribute.
Then the police arrived, and shortly thereafter the ambulance.
Bob the Barber drove up and pushed his way through the crowd on his front lawn. He spoke with the policemen and the ambulance drivers on the porch, but he did not touch his wife or even seem to look at her.
They struggled with Sadie’s vast bulk, and it took two policemen as well as the two attendants to carry the perilously bending stretcher to the back of the ambulance.
The crowd on the front lawn lingered after the ambulance drove off, murmuring among themselves as if reluctant to leave. Two of the women led Spider Granny, weeping now, back up the street to her house, and the rest of the crowd slowly, reluctantly broke up. The children hung around longer, hoping to see something else, but it was over.
Bob the Barber sank into Sadie’s vacant swing and sat, his gray face seemingly impassive, but Raphael could quite clearly see the tears that ran slowly down his cheeks.
The idiot in the playpen drooled and bellowed, but otherwise the street was quiet again.
From up the street, his black hair glistening in the sun, Patch came. Somber-faced, he passed the house where the idiot bellowed and the thin, gray-faced man mourned. He crossed the street and walked on past Mousy Mary’s house. He glanced up at Raphael once. There seemed for an instant a kind of brief flicker of recognition, but his face did not really change, and as silently as always he passed on up the street and was gone.
Ave formosissima, gemma pretiosa, ave decus virginum, virgo gloriosa
i
They broke for lunch at noon as they usually did, and Raphael and Denise sought out a quiet place in the storeroom to eat. “You seem to be down lately,” she said. “Is something bothering you?”
“Not really. A woman died on my block last week. That’s always sort of depressing.”
“A friend of yours?” she asked, her voice neutral.
“Not hardly. She was a monster.”
“Why the concern then?”
“Her husband took it pretty hard. I didn’t think he would.” “What did she die from?” “She sat herself to death.” “She what?”
Raphael told her about Sadie the Sitter, and Denise sat listening. It was easy to talk to Denise. There was about her a kind of calmness, a tranquillity that seemed to promise acceptance of whatever he said. She was sitting in a patch of sunlight that streamed through a dusty window. He noticed for the first time as he spoke with her that her skin was not pale so much as it was translucent, and her sunlit hair was not really limp and dun-colored but was really quite thick and shaded through all the hues of blond from palest gold to deep ash. In repose, as it was now, her face was Madonna-like.
She looked up and caught him watching her. “Please don’t stareat me, Rafe,” she said, blushing slightly. Her tone, however, was matter-of-fact. “We don’t do that to each other. We don’t avoid looking at each other, but we don’t stare. I thought you knew that.” She turned slightly so that the dwarfed arm was hidden from him.
“I wasn’t staring at that. Did you know that your hair isn’t all the same color?”
“Thanks a lot. Now I’ve got something else to worry about.”
“Don’t be silly. Everybody’s hair has different colors in places. Mine’s darker at the neck and sides than it is on top, but you’re seventeen different shades of blond.”
“I’ll get it all cut off,” she threatened, “and start wearing a wig—bright red, maybe.”
“Bite your tongue.”
“Is what’s-his-name still around?”
“Who? Flood? Yes, he’s still here. I haven’t seen much of him lately, though. He’s found other diversions.”
“Good. Let’s hope it’s a sign that he’s getting bored and won’t stay much longer.”
“Be nice.”
“No. I don’t want to. I want to be spiteful and bitchy about him. I’d like to spit in his eye.”
“Sweet child.” He shifted around in his chair.
“There’s something else, isn’t there, Rafe?”
He grunted. “My caseworker’s been on my case lately.” It was an outrageous pun, but he rather liked it.
“I didn’t know you had one.”
“It’s sort of semiofficial. I pick on her a lot, but she keeps coming back for more.”
“You have to be very careful with those people, Rafe.”
“If I could handle Shimpsie, I can sure as hell deal with Frankie.”
“Who’s Shimpsie?”
“She was the social worker in the hospital where they modified me.” He told her the story of Shimpsie and of his daring escape from her clutches. “Frankie’s definitely not in Shimpsie’s league,” he added.
“That’s where you’re making your mistake, Rafe. You won once. You got away from this Shimpsie person,
and now you’ve got a caseworker who seems to be no more than a cute little bubblehead. You’re overconfident, and they’ll eat you alive.”
“Frankie’s hardly dangerous.”
“Don’t kid yourself.” Her pale face was deadly serious. “They’re all dangerous.”
“Only if you want something from them. I’m more or less independent, so I don’t have any handles on me. It makes Frankie crazy.”
“Their power goes a lot further than that, Rafe. The whole system is on their side. They have the police, the courts—everything—on their side. They can make you do what they tell you to do. They can put you in jail, they can tear your family apart, they can have you committed to an asylum. There’s almost nothing they can’t do to you. Isn’t it a comfort to know that some little froth-head who spent her college years on her back and graduated with a solid C-minus average has absolute power over your life?”
“Frankie’s not like that. She’s more like a puppy.”
“Puppies have very sharp teeth, Rafe.”
“You’ve had bad experiences, I take it.”
“We’ve all had bad experiences. Caseworkers are our natural enemies. They’re the cats and we’re the mice. You want another cup of coffee?”
“That’d be nice,” he said, smiling at her.
She got up and started to squeeze past him. There was a warm, almost sweet fragrance about her. When she was behind him, she touched his hair. “It is darker in places, isn’t it?” Her hand lingered on his head.
“Careful. It takes a week to untangle it.”
“I’d give my soul for curly hair like that.”
“It’s vastly overrated.”
“Why don’t you let it grow a little longer?” “I prefer not to look like a dust mop.”
“You’re impossible.” She laughingly mussed his hair and scampered away.
“Rat!” he called after her.
He felt good. For the first time in weeks he actually felt good. After work he ran a couple of errands and drove on home, still feeling in good spirits. The sun was warm, and the sky was bright. Ever since his accident he had become accustomed to a kind of dormancy, settling for the most part for a simple absence of pain, but now he began to perceive that somewhere—maybe a long way down the road yet, but someday certainly and inevitably—he would actually be happy again. It was a good feeling to know that.
A young woman he did not recognize was standing at the row of mailboxes at the front of the apartment. For an instant his chest seemed to constrict almost with fear. From a particular angle she almost exactly resembled Marilyn Hamilton. Then she turned, and it was all right. The similarity was not that great.
He got out of his car slowly in order to give her time to get her mail and go back inside, but she did not move. Instead, she stood looking somewhat distracted, one hand to her stomach, and her face turning suddenly very pale.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She looked sharply at him with quick, hard suspicion. Then she saw the crutches and relaxed. “I think I’m going to faint,” she announced quite calmly.
“Around here,” Raphael said, loping toward her with his long, one-legged stride. “Hang on to the building.” He led her around the corner to the stairs that went up to his rooftop. “Sit down. Put your head between your knees.”
Gratefully, she sank down onto the bottom step and put her head down.
“Breathe deeply,” he instructed.
“I know.”
“Are you sick? I mean, do you want me to take you to a hospital or anything?”
“No. I’m just pregnant,” she said wryly, lifting her head. “There’s no cure for that except time—or a quick trip to a non-Catholic doctor.”
“Is it—” He faltered. “I mean, it’s not time or anything, is it?”
She grinned at him suddenly, her face still pale. “Either you aren’t very observant, or you haven’t been around very many pregnant women. You swell up like a balloon before you get to the point of the trip to the hospital. I’m getting a little hippy, but my tummy hasn’t started to pooch out that much yet. I’ve still got months of this to look forward to.”
“Are you feeling better now?”
“I’ll be all right. It’s a family trait. My mother used to faint all the time when she was carrying Brian—that’s my kid brother.” She got up slowly.
“Maybe you ought to sit still for a little longer.”
“It’s all passed now. Thanks for the help.”
“You sure you’re going to be all right?”
“I’ll be fine. Do you live here?”
“Up there.” He nodded his head at the steps.
“The penthouse? I wondered who lived there. Isn’t it a little …” She glanced at the crutches.
“It’s no particular problem.”
“Well, I guess I’d better get back to cleaning my apartment. I think that whoever lived there before kept goats or something.” She smiled at him. “See you.” She went back around to the front of the building again.
Later, on his rooftop, Raphael thought about the girl. In some ways she seemed to be much like Marilyn, but there were differences. Her voice was lighter, and the expressions were different. And this girl seemed wiser, less vulnerable than Marilyn had been.
It surprised him that he could think about Marilyn now without pain or even the fear of pain that had locked away that part of his memory for so long. He found that he could even remember Isabel without discomfort. He experimented with the memories—trying consciously to stir some of the old responses, wondering almost clinically if there might be some vestigial remnants of virility left. But there were not, of course. Finally, disgusted with himself, he thought about other things.
Flood drove by late that afternoon and came up to the rooftop instead of stopping at the house where Heck’s Angels lounged belligerently on the lawn, daring the neighbors to complain. Raphael resisted the temptation to make some clever remark about Flood’s new friends. Things were uncomfortable enough between them already.
Flood leaned negligently against the railing as always. His face seemed strained, and his complexion was more sallow. There was something tense about him, almost as if somehow, in some obscure fashion, things were going wrong, and he was losing control—not only of the situation, but of himself as well. He smoked almost continually now, flipping the butts out to arc down into the street below and almost immediately lighting another. “I hate this goddamned town,” he said finally with more passion than he’d probably intended.
“You don’t have to stay.”
Flood grunted and stared moodily down at the street. “It doesn’t mean anything. This is the most pointless place in the whole damned universe. What the hell is it doing here, for Chrissake? What possessed them to build a town here in the first place?”
“Who knows? The railroad, probably.”
“And the people are just as pointless as the town,” Flood went on. “Empty, empty, empty—like the residents of a graveyard. They have no meaning, no significance. I’m not just talking about your losers—I’m talking about all of them. Good God, the vacancy of the place! How the hell can you stand it?”
“I grew up in a pretty vacant place, remember?”
“You’re wrong. I saw Port Angeles. At the end of his life a man there can say, I cut down some trees and made some lumber. They
took the lumber and built some houses with it.’ That’s something, for God’s sake! What the hell can a man say about his life here? I buried my grandpa in 1958, my mother in seventy-two, and my old man in eighty-five; I contributed about eight tons of shit to the sewage-treatment plant; and they’re going to bury me right over there in that dandy little graveyard on the other side of the river.’ Fertilizer—that’s all they’re good for, fertilizer.” He turned to Raphael suddenly. “Well, by God, I decline to be a fertilizer factory for the greater glory of the shit capital of America. I’ve had it with this place.”
“When do you think you
’ll be leaving?” Raphael asked, his voice neutral.
Flood grinned at him suddenly. “Gotcha again,” he said.
“Damon,” Raphael said in annoyance, “quit playing games.”
“Oh no, Raphael,” Flood declaimed. “You won’t escape me so easily. I will hound you; I will dog your footsteps; I will harry you out of this vacuum and deliver your soul to the Prince of Darkness, who sits expectant in steamy hell. Double-dipped in vilest corruption shall I send you to the eternal fire and the loathsome embrace of the Emperor of the Inferno.”
“Oh, that’s good,” Raphael said admiringly. “I thought you’d lost your touch for a while there. That was particularly fine.”
“I rather liked it,” Flood admitted modestly, and then he laughed, the mocking laughter that Raphael remembered so well, and his eyes glittered in the ruddy glow of the dying sun.
ii
And then in mid-July it turned suddenly hot. With no apparent transition from pleasant to unbearable, the temperature soared to the one-hundred-degree mark and stuck there. The streets shimmered like the tops of stoves, and lawns that were not constantly watered wilted and browned under the blasting weight of the swollen sun.
Sleep was impossible, of course. Even long past midnight the interiors of the houses on Raphael’s block were like ovens. The losers sat on their porches or on their lawns in the dark, and the children ran in screaming packs up and down the streets. Fights broke out with monotonous regularity. Since they lived in continual frustration anyway, always on the verge of rage, the added aggravation of the stunning heat made the smallest irritation a casus belli.
Raphael’s tiny apartment on the roof was unprotected from the sun for the largest part of the day, and the interior heated up like a blast furnace. The rooftop was unbearable under the direct weight of the sun. He lingered at work, finding refuge in the dim coolness of the barnlike store, and he helped Denise with the volumes of paperwork that were a part of her job.