Ironweed (8 page)

          “Mighty nice, old gal,” he says.

          “Not bad at all,” Oscar says. “You’ll have to do it again sometime.”

          Helen closed her eyes and felt tears forcing their way out and knew life didn’t change. If she went away she’d come back on her knees. It is so pleasant to be appreciated.

          Helen, you are like a blackbird, when the sun comes out for a little while. Helen, you are like a blackbird made sassy by the sun. But what will happen to you when the sun goes down again?

          I do thank you.

          And I shall come again to sing for you.

          Oh sassy blackbird! Oh!

III

          Rudy left them to flop someplace, half-drunk on six beers, and Francis, Helen, and Pee Wee walked back along Green Street to Madison and then west toward the mission. Walk Pee Wee home and go get a room at Palombo’s Hotel, get warm, stretch out, rest them bones. Because Francis and Helen had money: five dollars and seventy-five cents. Two of it Helen had left from what Francis gave her last night; plus three-seventy-five out of his cemetery wages, for he spent little in The Gilded Cage, Oscar buying twice as many drinks as he took money for.

          The city had grown quiet at midnight and the moon was as white as early snow. A few cars moved slowly on Pearl Street but otherwise the streets were silent. Francis turned up his suitcoat collar and shoved his hands into his pants pockets. Alongside the mission the moon illuminated Sandra, who sat where they had left her. They stopped to look at her condition. Francis squatted and shook her.

          “You sobered up yet, lady?”

          Sandra answered him with an enveloping silence. Francis pushed the cowl off her face and in the vivid moonlight saw the toothmarks on her nose and cheek and chin. He shook his head to clear the vision, then saw that one of her fingers and the flesh between forefinger and thumb on her left hand had been chewed.

          “The dogs got her.”

          He looked across the street and saw a red-eyed mongrel waiting in the half-lit corner of an alley and he charged after it, picking up a stone as he went. The cur fled down the alley as Francis turned his ankle on a raised sidewalk brick and sprawled on the pavement. He picked himself up, he now bloodied too by the cur, and sucked the dirt out of the cuts.

          As he crossed the street, goblins came up from Broadway, ragged and masked, and danced around Helen. Pee Wee, bending over Sandra, straightened up as the goblin dance gained in ferocity.

          “Jam and jelly, big fat belly,” the goblins yelled at Helen. And when she drew herself inward they only intensified the chant.

          “Hey you kids,” Francis yelled. “Let her alone.”

          But they danced on and a skull goblin poked Helen in the stomach with a stick. As she swung at the skull with her hand, another goblin grabbed her purse and then all scattered.

          “Little bastards, devils,” Helen cried, running after them. And Francis and Pee Wee too joined the chase, pounding through the night, no longer sure which one wore the skull mask. The goblins ran down alleys, around corners, and fled beyond capture.

          Francis turned back to Helen, who was far behind him. She was weeping, gasping, doubled over in a spasm of loss.

          “Sonsabitches,” Francis said.

          “Oh the money,” Helen said, “the money.”

          “They hurt you with that stick?”

          “I don’t think so.”

          “That money ain’t nothin’. Get more tomorrow.”

          “It was.”

          “Was what?”

          “There was fifteen dollars in there besides the other.”

          “Fifteen? Where’d you get fifteen dollars?”

          “Your son Billy gave it to me. The night he found us at Spanish George’s. You were passed out and he gave us forty-five dollars, all the cash he had. I gave you thirty and kept the fifteen.”

          “I went through that pocketbook. I didn’t see it.”

          “I pinned it inside the lining so you wouldn’t drink it up. I wanted our suitcase back. I wanted our room for a week so I could rest.”

          “Goddamn it, woman, now we ain’t got a penny. You and your sneaky goddamn ways.”

          Pee Wee came back from the chase empty-handed.

          “Some tough kids around here,” he said. “You okay, Helen?”

          “Fine, just fine.”

          “You’re not hurt?”

          “Not anyplace you could see.”

          “Sandra,” Pee Wee said. “She’s dead.”

          “She’s more than that,” Francis said. “She’s partly chewed away.”

          “We’ll take her inside so they don’t eat no more of her,” Pee Wee said. “I’ll call the police.”

          “You think it’s all right to bring her inside?” Francis asked. “She’s still got all that poison in her system.”

          Pee Wee said nothing and opened the mission door. Francis picked Sandra up from the dust and carried her inside. He put her down on an old church bench against the wall and covered her face with the scratchy blanket that had become her final gift from the world.

          “If I had my rosary I’d say it for her,” Helen said, sitting on a chair beside the bench and looking at Sandra’s corpse. “But it was in my purse. I’ve carried that rosary for twenty years.”

          “I’ll check the vacant lots and the garbage cans in the mornin’,” Francis said. “It’ll turn up.”

          “I’ll bet Sandra prayed to die,” Helen said.

          “Hey,” said Francis.

          “I would if I was her. Her life wasn’t human anymore.”

          Helen looked at the clock: twelve-ten. Pee Wee was calling the police.

          “Today’s a holy day of obligation,” she said. “It’s All Saints’ Day.”

          “Yup,” said Francis.

          “I want to go to church in the morning.”

          “All right, go to church.”

          “I will. I want to hear mass.”

          “Hear it. That’s tomorrow. What are we gonna do tonight? Where the hell am I gonna put you?”

          “You could stay here,” Pee Wee said. “All the beds are full but you can sleep down here on a bench.”

          “No,” Helen said. “I’d rather not do that. We can go up to Jack’s. He told me I could come back if I wanted.”

          “Jack said that?” Francis asked.

          “Those were his words.”

          “Then let’s shag ass. Jack’s all right. Clara’s a crazy bitch but I like Jack. Always did. You sure he said that?”

          “‘Come back anytime,’ he said as I was going out the door.”

          “All right. Then we’ll move along, old buddy,” Francis said to Pee Wee. “You’ll figure it out with Sandra?”

          “I’ll do the rest,” Pee Wee said.

          “You know her last name?”

          “No. Never heard it.”

          “Don’t make much difference now.”

          “Never did,” Pee Wee said.

                                       o          o          o

          Francis and Helen walked up Pearl Street toward State, the absolute center of the city’s life for two centuries. One trolley car climbed State Street’s violent incline and another came toward them, rocking south on Pearl. A man stepped out of the Waldorf Restaurant and covered his throat with his coat collar, shivered once, and walked on. The cold had numbed Francis’s fingertips, frost was blooming on the roofs of parked cars, and the nightwalkers exhaled dancing plumes of vapor. From a manhole in the middle of State Street steam rose and vanished. Francis imagined the subterranean element at the source of this: a huge human head with pipes screwed into its ears, steam rising from a festering skull wound.

          Aldo Campione, walking on the opposite side of North Pearl from Francis and Helen, raised his right hand in the same ambiguous gesture Francis had witnessed at the bar. As Francis speculated on the meaning, the man who had been sitting with Aldo stepped out of the shadows into a streetlight’s glow, and Aldo’s gesture then became clear: it introduced Francis to Dick Doolan, the bum who tried to cut off Francis’s feet with a meat cleaver.

          “I went to the kid’s grave today,” Francis said.

          “What kid?”

          “Gerald.”

          “Oh, you did?” she said. “Then that was the first time, wasn’t it? It must’ve been.”

          “Right.”

          “You’re thinking about him these days. You mentioned him last week.”

          “I never stop thinkin’ about him.”

          “What’s gotten into you?”

          Francis saw the street that lay before him: Pearl Street, the central vessel of this city, city once his, city lost. The commerce along with its walls jarred him: so much new, stores gone out of business he never even heard of. Some things remained: Whitney’s, Myers’, the old First Church, which rose over Clinton Square, the Pruyn Library. As he walked, the cobblestones turned to granite, houses became stores, life aged, died, renewed itself, and a vision of what had been and what might have been intersected in an eye that could not really remember one or interpret the other. What would you give never to have left, Francis?

          “I said, what’s got into you?”

          “Nothin’s got into me. I’m just thinkin’ about a bunch of stuff. This old street. I used to own this street, once upon a time.”

          “You should’ve sold it when you had the chance.”

          “Money. I ain’t talkin’ about money.”

          “I didn’t think you were. That was a funny.”

          “Wasn’t much funny. I said I saw Gerald’s grave. I talked to him.”

          “Talked? How did you talk?”

          “Stood and talked to the damn grass. Maybe I’m gettin’ nutsy as Rudy. He can’t hold his pants up, they fall over his shoes.”

          “You’re not nutsy, Francis. It’s because you’re here. We shouldn’t be here. We should go someplace else.”

          “Right. That’s where we oughta go. Else.”

          “Don’t drink any more tonight.”

          “Listen here. Don’t you nag my ass.”

          “I want you straight, please. I want you straight.”

          “I’m the straightest thing you’ll see all week. I am so straight. I’m the straightest thing you’ll sweek. The thing that happened on the other side of the street. The thing that happened was Billy told me stuff about Annie. I never told you that. Billy told me stuff about Annie, how she never told I dropped him.”

          “Never told who, the police?”

          “Never nobody. Never a damn soul. Not Billy, not Peg, not her brother, not her sisters. Ain’t that the somethin’est thing you ever heard? I can’t see a woman goin’ through that stuff and not tellin’ nobody about it.”

          “You’ve got a lot to say about those people.”

          “Not much to say.”

          “Maybe you ought to go see them.”

          “No, that wouldn’t do no good.”

          “You’d get it out of your system.”

          “What out of my system?”

          “Whatever it is that’s in there.”

          “Never mind about my system. How come you wouldn’t stay at the mission when you got an invite?”

          “I don’t want their charity.”

          “You ate their soup.”

          “I did not. All I had was coffee. Anyway, I don’t like Chester. He doesn’t like Catholics.”

          “Catholics don’t like Methodists. What the hell, that’s even. And I don’t see any Catholic missions down here. I ain’t had any Catholic soup lately.”

          “I won’t do it and that’s that.”

          “So freeze your ass someplace. Your flower’s froze already.”

          “Let it freeze.”

          “You sang a song at least.”

          “Yes I did. I sang while Sandra was dying.”

          “She’da died no matter. Her time was up.”

          “No, I don’t believe that. That’s fatalism. I believe we die when we can’t stand it anymore. I believe we stand as much as we can and then we die when we can, and Sandra decided she could die.”

          “I don’t fight that. Die when you can. That’s as good a sayin’ as there is.”

          “I’m glad we agree on something,” Helen said.

          “We get along all right. You ain’t a bad sort.”

          “You’re all right too.”

          “We’re both all right,” Francis said, “and we ain’t got a damn penny and noplace to flop. We on the bum. Let’s get the hell up to Jack’s before he puts the lights out on us.”

          Helen slipped her arm inside Francis’s. Across the street Aldo Campione and Dick Doolan, who in the latter years of his life was known as Rowdy Dick, kept silent pace.

                                       o          o          o

          Helen pulled her arm away from Francis and tightened her collar around her neck, then hugged herself and buried her hands in her armpits.

          “I’m chilled to my bones,” she said.

          “It’s chilly, all right.”

          “I mean a real chill, a deep chill.”

          Francis put his arm around her and walked her up the steps of Jack’s house. It stood on the east side of Ten Broeck Street, a three-block street in Arbor Hill named for a Revolutionary War hero and noted in the 1870s and 1880s as the place where a dozen of the city’s arriviste lumber barons lived, all in a row, in competitive luxury. For their homes the barons built handsome brownstones, most of them now cut into apartments like Jack’s, or into furnished rooms.

          The downstairs door to Jack’s opened without a key. Helen and Francis climbed the broad walnut staircase, still vaguely elegant despite the threadbare carpet, and Francis knocked. Jack opened the door and looked out with the expression of an ominous crustacean. With one hand he held the door ajar, with the other he gripped the jamb.

          “Hey Jack,” Francis said, “we come to see ya. How’s chances for a bum gettin’ a drink?”

          Jack opened the door wider to look beyond Francis and when he saw Helen he let his arm fall and backed into the apartment. Kate Smith came at them, piped out of a small phonograph through the speaker of the radio. The Carolina moon was shining on somebody waiting for Kate. Beside the phonograph sat Clara, balancing herself on a chamber pot, propped on all sides with purple throw pillows, giving her the look of being astride a great animal. A red bedspread covered her legs, but it had fallen away at one side, revealing the outside of her naked left thigh, visible to the buttocks. A bottle of white fluid sat on the table by the phonograph, and on a smaller table on her other side a swinging rack cradled a gallon of muscatel, tiltable for pouring. Helen walked over to Clara and stood by her.