“So what happened,” I asked Butchko, “your high school girlfriend said you were the greatest?” I was trying to figure the origins of his fantasy.
He seemed mystified by the question. “Well, yeah.”
There was something appealing about him. His delusions had originality, at least. All the other New York immigrants think they’re the greatest actor, artist, writer, whatever—it was nice to meet the greatest lover.
The whistling Cypriot would never quit. Verse chorus verse chorus verse. If there was a bridge, the man didn’t know it. I dug my knuckles into the corners of my eye sockets and breathed deeply.
“Mackenzie? You okay?”
“This song,” I whispered. “What is this song he’s whistling?”
“ ‘Paper Moon,’ ” said Butchko. He sang the chorus with the whistling as his accompanist. Butchko’s voice was gorgeous, a pitch-perfect tenor, and for a moment I believed everything, all of it, the cities, towns, and countrysides full of quivering women sloshing about their bathtubs, moaning his name, Butchko, Butchko, wetting a thousand tiled floors in their delirium.
“Lion,” he said, plowing the ketchup on his plate with the tines of his fork. “My first lion.”
As soon as I got home I began preparing the house for my father, transferring six steaks from the freezer to the refrigerator, vacuuming the carpet in the master bedroom, stacking the logs and kindling in the library’s fireplace, arranging the ivory chess pieces in their proper formations. I knew that he would have heard about the lion, that he would be on a plane crossing the Atlantic. We lived in a turn-of-the-century brownstone, the facade adorned with wine-grape clusters and leering satyrs. My room was on the top floor, beneath a skylight of pebbled glass. After the house was made ready for its master, I locked myself in my bedroom and turned off the lights.
Not counting the skylight there was only one window in my room, small and round as a porthole, facing south. Next to this window, mounted on a tripod, stood a brass telescope that my father had given me for my twelfth birthday. The telescope had belonged to the Confederate general Jubal Early; his monogram was stamped into the brass below the eyepiece. Humbled telescope: once used to track Union troop movements in the Shenandoah Valley, now spying on the bento-box apartments of New Yorkers. A red-haired woman watching television with a thermometer in her mouth; four young girls sitting cross-legged on the living room rug, folding origami cranes; an old man, bare-chested, arms folded on the windowsill, looking over me to Harlem; two women, one old, one young, slow dancing in the kitchen; a small boy with a bowl haircut, wearing Superman pajamas, lying in bed reading a book.
I peered into the building’s other windows to make sure everyone was safe. That was my nightly ritual—I was a responsible voyeur. Sometimes I half-hoped to see smoke pouring from a toaster oven so that I could call the fire department and watch the snorkel truck raise its boom to the redhead’s window, watch the fireman pluck her from danger. Even in my fantasies I wasn’t the hero.
I capped the telescope’s lens and eyepiece, undressed, climbed into bed. It was a marvelous bed, with four tall cedarwood posts and handwoven mosquito netting from the Ivory Coast. There weren’t many mosquitoes in the brownstone, but I loved how the netting swayed in the air conditioner’s breeze, pale lungs inhaling and exhaling.
In the strange space between sleeping and waking I imagined myself lionized. I paced the avenues, mane dreadlocked by city dirt. I met my stone brothers on the Public Library’s steps; I sat with them and watched the beat cop pass, orange poncho clad, walkie-talkie chattering on his hip. I went underground, below the sidewalks, prowled the subway tunnels. The big-bellied rats fled when they smelled my hide. I curled up beside a soliloquizing madman, a filthy bundle of piss-damp rags, once a babe in a cradle, a shiny possibility. I licked the dirt from his face; he buried his head in my mane. Soon he slept, and it was the first good sleep he’d had in years.
Rain pounded the pebbled glass of my skylight, the hoof-steps of a cavalry brigade heard from a great distance. It was almost dawn. The house was less empty than it had been. I pulled on a pair of green plaid pajamas, walked downstairs and knocked on the door of the master bedroom.
“Come in,” called my father.
I opened the door. He sat cross-legged on the floor, the parts of his rifle disassembled, gleaming and oiled, on a spotted towel thrown over his steamer trunk. He wore his undershirt and a grass-stained pair of khakis; wire-framed glasses; a black steel wristwatch with a nonreflective face, the gift of a Ugandan general.
If you are sitting in your home, late at night, alone, strange noises echoing down the hallways, disturbing your mind, and if you look out across the street, look through the window of a stranger’s apartment, the apartment lit only by the television’s static, and the stranger’s room glows a cool and eerie blue—that was the exact color of my father’s eyes.
He wiped his hands clean on a corner of the towel, stood up, walked over and clasped my shoulders, kissed me on the forehead. “You look thin.”
“I was sick for a while. I’m okay.”
“You’re eating?” He watched me carefully. I was never able to lie to my father. I mean, I was able to lie to him but I never got away with it.
“I forget sometimes.” That was the truth. On bad days the idea of eating seemed somehow ridiculous, or indulgent.
He walked to his desk, a rolltop of luminous mahogany that supposedly belonged to Stonewall Jackson. Hanging on the wall above the desk were four masks—carved wood embellished with feathers and shredded raffia—that my father had bought in Mali. Each represented a figure from the old Bambaran saying: “What is a crow but a dove dipped in pitch? And what is a man but a dog cursed with words?”
My father pulled a sheaf of fax papers from his desktop and looked through them. “I saw your name in here. You were one of the witnesses?”
“He winked at me.”
My father continued reading through the papers, holding them at arm’s length because his prescription was too weak and he never bothered to get reexamined. Being farsighted had no effect on his aim, though. I remember reading a profile of my father in a glossy hunting magazine; accompanying the article was a photograph of a silver dollar that had been neatly doughnuted by a high-caliber bullet. The caption below the picture read: Shot by MacGregor Bonner at 400 Yards in the Transvaal (prone position). My father had bet a drunk Johannesburg socialite one thousand dollars that he could make the shot; when the woman paid up she told him, “I hope I never make you angry, Bonner.”
My father read through the fax papers and I said again, “He winked at me. The lion. He was staring right at me and then he winked and then he walked away.”
My father removed his glasses and hung them, by one stem, from the neck of his undershirt. He pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment and then laughed.
“All mammals blink, Mackenzie. It keeps the eyeballs from drying out.”
“Wink, not blink. He winked at me.”
A sad smile lingered on his face as he regarded me. It was the Smile for Mackenzie, the expression he reserved for me alone. This is what you need to know about my father: He was a man who made a living killing animals, though he adored animals and disdained men. But I was his love’s son and that gave me immunity from disdain, immunity from the cool hunter’s stare he aimed at everyone else. His turn in this world was far from gentle, but he was gentle with me.
Nobody saw the lion for the next five days. Wildlife experts on television speculated on his disappearance and proposed various possibilities for his whereabouts, but nobody knew anything. My father met with the chief of police and the mayor to coordinate the hunt. He inspected the sites where the lion had been seen and carefully studied all the eyewit ness reports. In the terse interviews he gave to carefully chosen members of the press, he urged the public to remain cautious. He believed that the lion was still on the island of Manhattan.
Six days after I first saw the lion, on a humid afternoon??
?the kind where every surface is wet to the touch, as if the city itself were sweating—Butchko called and invited me to come over. I had forgotten that I gave him my number, and at first I was reluctant to go all the way downtown in the miserable August heat. But I had nothing better to do and I was curious to get a look at his one-hundred-and-fifty-dollar apartment.
I met him on the stoop steps of his building. Before I could speak he raised a finger to his lips and motioned me to sit beside him. The hysterical dialogue of a Mexican telenovela spilled from the open window of the first-floor apartment. I let the language wash over me, the rolling r’s, the sentences that all seemed to rhyme. Every few minutes I’d recognize a word and nod. Loco! Cerveza! Gato!
“Te quiero,” said Butchko, practicing the accent during a commercial break. “Te quiero, te quiero, te quiero.”
“You speak Spanish?”
“I’m learning. Gregory Santos said bilinguality is one of the seven steps to the full-out shudders.”
Bilinguality? “What’s the full-out—”
The soap opera came on again and Butchko hushed me. We listened to a hoarse-voiced man calm a distraught woman. A swell of violins and cellos seemed to signal their reconciliation and I imagined the kiss, the woman’s eyes closed, tears of happiness rolling down her face as the darkly handsome man wrapped her in his arms. Butchko nodded solemnly.
When the show ended he led me into the brownstone and up a poorly lit staircase, pointing out various obstacles to avoid: a dogshit footprint, a toy car, broken glass. At the top of the last flight of stairs he pushed open a graffiti-tagged door and led me onto the tarpapered roof. A water tower squatted on steel legs alongside a shingled pigeon coop.
“You hang out up here?” I asked.
“This is home,” he said, closing the door behind me and securing it with a combination lock. “Look,” he said, pointing. “That’s a pigeon coop.”
“I know it’s a pigeon coop.”
“Ask me why it has two doors.”
The coop was windowless and low-slung, narrow and long, hammered together of gray weathered boards. Splits in the wood had been stuffed with pink fiberglass insulation. A yellow door hung crooked in its frame on one end; I circled around the coop and found an equally crooked red door on the opposite end.
“Why does it have two doors?”
“Because if it had four doors it would be a pigeon sedan.”
He was so happy with the joke his face turned bright red. He opened up his mouth and shined his big white Pennsylvania teeth at me. “Oh, Mackenzie. You walked right into that one.”
I opened the red door and stepped inside. There were no pigeon cubbies, just a green sleeping bag, patched in places with electrical tape, unrolled on the bare wood flooring; a space heater, unplugged for the summer; a clock radio playing the Beatles; a blue milk crate stacked with paperbacks; an electric water-boiler; and a pyramid of instant ramen noodles in Styrofoam cups. The wires ran into a surge protector connected to a thick yellow extension cord that snaked down a neatly bored hole in the floor.
“The super sets me up with electric,” said Butchko, standing in the doorway behind me. We had to stoop to fit below the steeply canted ceiling. “Pretty good deal, I think.”
“Don’t you get cold up here?” Even with the space heater at full blast, the coop could not be good shelter in the depths of winter.
Butchko shrugged. “I don’t sleep here most nights, you know?”
I picked a paperback off the top of the pile. The Selected Poetry of Robert Browning. I read a few lines then returned the book to its brothers. “There’s a toilet somewhere?”
“Down in the basement. And a shower, too. If I need to pee I just go off the roof, see how far I can get. Here, look at this.” He ushered me out of the converted coop to the edge of the roof. We leaned against the parapet and looked at the brick wall of the building opposite us. “See the fire escape? I hit it the other day. What do you think, twenty feet across?”
With my eyes I followed the ladders and landings of the fire escape down to the alley below, deserted save for a blue Dumpster overflowing with trash.
“It’s just rats down there anyway,” said Butchko. “They don’t mind a little pee. Or maybe they do, but screw ’em, they’re rats. And then, here, this is the best part. Come over here.”
In the cool shadow of the water tower he grabbed a canteen off the tarpaper and began climbing the steel rungs welded onto one of the tower’s legs. I walked back into the sunlight to watch his ascent. At the upper lip of the tower he turned and waved to me, thirty feet below, before pulling himself over the edge and disappearing from view. A minute later he started climbing down. He jumped with five feet to go and hit his landing perfectly.
“Here,” he said, offering me the canteen. I drank cold water.
“There’s a tap up there for the inspectors. They come twice a year and check things out, make sure there’s no bacteria or whatnot floating around.”
I handed him back the canteen and watched him drink, watched his heavy Adam’s apple bob in his throat.
“Are you ever going to tell me what the full-out shudders are?”
Butchko grinned. “Come on, Mackenzie, you’ve been there.”
“Where?”
He capped the canteen and laid it down in the shade of the tower. “The shudders are reality,” he said, and by the way he said it I knew he was quoting. “The shudders are the no-lie reality. Listen, women are very different from men.”
“Oh! Ah!”
“Well, okay, it sounds obvious, but it’s important. For a man, sex is simple. He gets in and he gets off. But it’s not automatic for a woman.”
It wasn’t automatic for me either, but I kept my mouth shut.
“The thing is, women are more sensitive than men. They don’t want to hurt our feelings.”
“Ha,” I countered.
“In general,” he said. “So they act, sometimes. They pretend. Now, for me, given my circumstances, it’s very important that I know exactly what works and what doesn’t. And I can’t rely on what she’s saying, or the groaning, the moaning, the breathing, none of that. Arching the back, curling the foot, biting the lip—none of that is a sure thing. Only the shudders. There’s no faking the full-out shudders. You see those thighs start to quiver, I mean quiver, you know you found the pearl. Oysters and pearls, Mackenzie. Everybody knows where the oyster is—finding the pearl is what makes a good lover.”
I stared at the water tower looming above us. The kid was a genuine lunatic, but I liked him.
“I’ll tell you the first thing I learned, living in the city,” said Butchko. “Puerto Rican women are excellent lovers.”
“All of them?”
“Yes,” he said. “All of them.”
I smoked Lucky Strikes on the rooftop and talked with Butchko about women and lions until he told me he had to get ready for his date. Twenty minutes later I was riding the First Avenue bus uptown. “Air conditioner’s broken,” the driver told me before I stepped on. “There’s another bus right behind me.” He said the same thing to everyone, and everyone besides me grunted and waited for the next bus, but I paid the fare and sat in the back row. My decision displeased the driver. I think he wanted to drive his hot empty bus at high speeds, slamming on the brakes at red lights with no passengers to complain. I wouldn’t have said a word. He could have cruised up the avenue at ninety miles per hour, swerving around the potholes; it didn’t matter to me. I was easy.
When we passed under the Queensboro Bridge I saw the lion. I shouted, a wordless shout, and the driver looked at me in his mirror and hit the brakes, as simple as that, as if he were used to riders shouting when they wanted to get off. I shoved through the heavy double doors at the rear of the bus and ran back to the bridge, under the shadowy barrel vault.
It could be that I read too much in a wink, and I wouldn’t have been the first, but it seemed to me that the lion knew who I was. I believed that. I believed that the lion
had a message for me, that the lion had come Lord knows how many miles in search of me, had evaded countless hunters in order to deliver his intelligence. Now he was here and my father had been hired to kill him. The lion would never make it back to Africa.
He waited for me on the sidewalk below the bridge. Flies crawled in the tangles of his mane. He watched me with yellow eyes. His hide sagged over his bones; the sore on his shoulder was inflamed, graveled with white pustules. His belly was distended, bloated from hunger. I thought of how far he was from home, how many thousands of miles he had traveled, so far from the zebras and wildebeests, the giraffes and antelopes of his native land, his nourishment. Here there were only people to eat. I could not imagine this lion stooping to devour the neighborhood mutts or the blinkered carriage-horses.
I wondered how long it would take him to gobble me down, and how much it would hurt, the long white teeth, the massive jaws, how long, and would he strip me to the wet bone or leave some meat for the pigeons to peck at, would he spit out my knuckles and watch them roll like gambler’s dice, would he look up from my carcass, his muzzle painted red, watch the taxis race by like stray gazelles frantic for their herd?
“Speak to me,” I pleaded, hungry for revelation. “Speak to me.”
If you have ever stood near a lion, you understand humility. Nothing that lives is more beautiful. A four-hundred-pound lion can run down a thoroughbred, can tear through steel railroad car doors with his claws, can hump his mate eighty times in one day.
The lion rose to all fours and walked closer, until his whiskers were nearly brushing against my shirt. I closed my eyes and waited. The carnivorous stink of him, the low purr of his breathing, the mighty engine of him—I was ready. I got down on my knees on the sidewalk, below the Queensboro Bridge, and the lion’s breath was hot as steam in my ear.