POE MUST DIE (5 page)

“Noticed that didja?” Tom Lowery sneered, then swallowed more oysters, which at six cents a dozen were among the cheapest of foods. He was a hulking, bearded man in a tattered derby, hobnail boots which he used effectively in fights and a filthy, food stained white shirt long minus its collar and studs. Poe found him to be the most stomach churning of the three ghouls. Lowery was said to have raped his own daughter, then sexually abused the small girl child who had resulted from that rape.

Even now, he looked up from his oysters and gin at the child whore who peered through the oil lamp lit darkness for customers. Sproul said, “None a that, Tom. To business first.”

Sylvester Pier said, “Paid to notice things, he is, ‘cause Mr. Poe here is a writer.” The respect in Pier’s voice was a mild shock to Poe.

“Read somethin’ once,” said Pier.

Once would seem the sum total of your attempts at reading, thought Poe.

“Somethin’ of yours, it was. ‘Bout a bird.”

“I hates fuckin’ birds.” Lowerv spoke with his mouth full.

“Mr. Poe writes good about birds,” continued Pier. “This was some sort of poem. ‘Bout a raven, I think. Yeah, a raven. Thought it was kinda nice.”

Poe pulled his black cloak tighter around him. Applause from a dullard, from a Hibernian vagabond to whom the picking of his very own nose must be ranked as a metaphysical achievement. Pier was nineteen, youngest of the three and wore the faded uniform of a commodore in the United States Navy—dark double-breasted frock coat, blue forage cap, dark blue trousers and a rusted, dull sword minus its scabbard. He was short, stocky, cheerful and reminded Poe of a hand puppet. Pier’s clean shaven and pleasant face appeared to possess what little decency existed in the three grave robbers.

Poe, observant, deductive, sensed that Sylvester Pier was a mental defective. How else to explain the youth’s choice of trade and companions. Or his eternal, idiotic smile or his wearing the uniform of an American naval officer and sitting with a gray mongrel dog in his lap. The dog’s ears had been sliced off; it was a fighter, to be pitted against other dogs with the owners betting on the outcome. The ears had been removed to prevent them from being chewed off in combat.

“Join us in a glass, Mr. Poe.” Sylvester Pier’s wide smile seemed nailed in place. It was ear to ear and indicated nothing.

“Thank you, no.” Poe’s mouth went suddenly dry and he averted his eyes from the bottle of gin in Pier’s hand.

“Come now, sir, you are no son of temperance. That’s for sure.”

Poe shook his head in emphatic refusal. Alcohol.
My cup of frenzy.
The smallest amount of liquor was enough to carry him into the arms of personal demons and such an embrace had always proven destructive. He always resisted, always fought the desire to rush to those devils that were his very own, but in the end he always succumbed. Alcohol had not pushed him into sorrow; sorrow had pushed him to drink, a bitter truth understood by few in Poe’s life.

He was thirty-nine, his health and creative powers waning after a life of unending poverty and personal hell and he drank because this was the only way to survive such an existence. He drank because he feared becoming as insane as his sister Rosalie, an adult whose mind had never gone beyond that of a twelve-year-old. He drank because publishers had cheated him during his entire writing career, because critics had insultingly found his work “learned and mystical,” because the American public was moronic and insensitive, a mass of idiots with tobacco juice for brains and the desire to read nothing more complicated than an Indian head penny.

He drank because it made him sick to his stomach to see fortune and praise heaped on talents inferior to his, talents which couldn’t draw a straight line in mud with a stick. He drank because he had never made more than $800 for a year’s work in his life.

Why did Poe “sip the juice”? Because his adored wife Virginia had died much too young, as had his beloved mother and his stepmother as well. He drank to forget and no man had more reason to.

But he could not forget that Rachel trusted him to settle this matter involving her dead husband. Rachel, who even now warmed his heart and gave him some small reason to hope that life held a little joy for him. Again Poe shook his head in refusal to Sylvester Pier’s offer of gin. The lower classes called the drink “Blue Ruin” or “Strip-and-go-naked.”

“Our little poet musta taken the pledge. He’s got a nice big
T
beside his name, I bet.”
T
for total abstinence. Teetotaler. Tom Lowery didn’t like little Mr. Poe of the soft voice and precious manners and actin’ like a bloody aristocrat and him all in shabby clothes, too. Lowery could squash him like a bug if he had to. Wasn’t much to the man. No more than 5’8”, 130 pounds and pale as the snow fallin’ outside.

Lowery bit into a hardboiled egg without removing the shell. Poe was sickly looking, like somethin’ that belonged under the earth and away from decent people. The poet had brown hair, gray eyes, thin lips and a long nose, too long if you ask Lowery. Shouldn’t be puttin’ it in other people’s business. High, wide forehead you could paint a sign on and a mustache right beneath that long nose of his. Lowery blinked. Poe’s unblinking gray eyes were on his.

Lowery, annoyed, stopped chewing the boiled egg. Bits of white shell were caught in his beard. “’Ere now, what the hell you starin’ at? You keep on doin’ that and I’m comin’ across the table and bite yer goddam nose off.” Gloomy looking bastard, Lowery thought. Big head on him, too.

Poe’s gentle voice had traces of a southern accent. “You eat like a Hun, sir.” Playing with violence as always, aren’t you Eddy?

Lowery frowned, uncertain, then deciding
yes,
he had been insulted. He grinned. “Don’t know what a Hun is, but I know what a drunk is and that’s you, me little man. Seen you in a few rum palaces, drunk as a lord and ravin’ at the top of yer lungs and nobody able to understand a goddam word of what you is yellin’ about.”

Poe pointed across the table with his walking stick. “Guard the mongrel well, Mr. Pier. You egg-eating friend may well press his sexual attentions upon it before the evening has ended.”
He enjoyed the danger; even though it terrified him, he enjoyed it.

An angry Tom Lowery inhaled, his eyes almost closed. Hamlet Sproul placed a small hand against Lowery’s chest to keep him seated. “Stay, Tom. The poet’s talent for abuse is well known and far superior to yours, I’m afraid. Words are his cannon and he is well supplied. Don’t push Tom too far, Mr. Poe. He’s a violent man.”

Poe’s eyes went to Sproul. “I demand proof you have the body.”

Sproul petted Pier’s gray mongrel. “Thought you might.” He reached inside his long, green coat and took out the brooch. Opening it, he kept it in the palm of his hand, extending his arm across the table to Poe. “This here was buried with Mr. Lazarus. No you can’t have it, but you go back and tell the grievin’ widow you saw it. She’ll know what you are talkin’ about, since she was the one who laid it on his breast just before the earth covered him.”

The brooch was gold, trimmed in small white pearls and opened to show tiny black and white daguerreotypes of Rachel and her husband. “Nice little pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Lazarus.” A grinning Sproul snapped the brooch closed.

“Got more for you to look at, poet. Under the table. Go on. ‘Ere, Tom, take the lamp and hold it down there so’s the poet can see what’s what.”

Poe shifted on his hard, wooden chair. No gas light in this hell hole. Five Points had none of the modern conveniences enjoyed by the rest of New York. The grog shop was lit by sperm lamps—lamps filled with whale oil, one to a table and three on the bar. The darkness in here was like that of a mine shaft. The two windows had been whitewashed to prevent prying eyes from seeing inside and all liquor was served from a plank placed on two empty barrels. The sanded floor was wet from snow covered boots entering and leaving the grog shop and the small room smelled of musty dampness, cheap alcohol and smoke from the oil lamps.

Poe watched the child-prostitute leave with a burly man large enough to pick her up and carry the tiny whore under his arm.

“You wanted proof, poet, now goddam you,
look
!” Sproul’s liquored voice was as savage as a meat axe.

Poe leaned over and looked under the table. Light from the lamp stabbed his eyes and he felt its heat. He flinched at the sight of Lowery’supside-down and leering face, the man’s beard shiny with juice from his oysters. “ ’Ere Mr. Poet, you hold the lamp.” A gigantic muddy paw shoved the lamp at Poe, who took it. Poe’smouth was dry and the anxiety he’d always suffered from made it hard to breathe.

Lowery was on his knees, fingers fumbling with a stained, brown sack. “Feast yer eyes, Mr. Poet.”

The ghoul held up the head of Rachel’s husband with bits of ice gleaming in its long black hair and on its pale skin. The opened eyes glittered like polished glass and stared at Poe who used every ounce of willpower not to scream.

He sat up in his chair, forcing himself to breathe deeply, to forget the
smell
of the head, the
smell
that the ice could not mask.

Sproul stroked his deringer. “Gets what you pay for, providin’ you pays for it.”

Poe closed his eyes, then opened them and tried to concentrate on colored prints of George Washington and an American eagle hanging on the grimy wall in semi-darkness behind Tom Lowery.
It had been at his feet all the time.
He wanted to leap from his chair and lay his cane across Sproul’s grinning face.

Sproul said, “Pour a glass for the poet, Mr. Pier. I think he needs it.”

Tom Lowery laughed.

Poe had tried, God he had tried. He hadn’t had a drink in four days, not since Rachel had contacted him and asked his help. He owed her his best effort and that meant staying sober, staying healthy, staying sane.
But it had been at his feet all the time!

Poe’s trembling hands brought the glass of gin to his lips.

FOUR

A D
ISGUSTED
P
IERCE
James Figg wanted to kick Mr. E. A. Poe in the head and be done with it.

Deep in drunken sleep, Poe lay curled on top of old newspapers in a dark corner of a cold, damp cellar, his slight body just inches from Figg’s feet. The boxer was seeing him for the fírst time, and the man was nothing but a gin-soaked pile of rags; Figg would not piss on Mr. Poe if each and every rag was in flames. Figg, squinting in the meager candlelight, was angry and disappointed. Travelling across an ocean to talk to, God help us,
a lushington with a billy in his hole,
a drunkard with a handkerchief in his mouth, his skinny little body wrapped in black clothing that had seen better days.

Hungry and exhausted, on edge because of the man he was stalking, Figg had come directly from the steamer
Britannia
in New York harbor to the
New York Evening Mirror,
the newspaper which currently employed Mr. Poe. In Figg’s humble opinion, anyone dumb enough to employ Mr. Poe had a pudding for a brain.

It was dawn, still snowing and in a twenty-five cent cab ride from the docks, Figg had seen and smelled enough of New York to last him a lifetime. A filthy city of wooden houses and muddy streets, with garbage, dead animals and ashes from fireplaces in the streets and rats and pigs feasting on it all. Gaslight threw beautiful long shadows on the snow, but you forgot that when you passed a slaughterhouse and heard cows and sheep crying out for their lives and you smelled their blood and dried guts, a stench which even the winter cold could not hide. Damn New York.
Find Jonathan quickly, kill him, then leave this city of dirt and ice.

“What the ‘ell was he mutterin’ about when I come down them stairs?” Figg spoke to Josiah Rusher, an
Evening Mirror
copyboy and the only other person in the cellar.

“Oh that, sir. ‘Bird and bug, bird and bug’.”

Figg’s soft voice took on a sudden harshness. “I ‘eard it. I just wants to know what the ‘ell he means by it.” He snapped the words at the boy like a whip, wiping the smile from his face.

“He is speaking of his creative works, sir. Bird is ‘The Raven,’ a poem of some magnificence and bug is ‘The Gold Bug,’ a highly unusual work of detection. Public response to both has been most favorable, but I have heard him say that he would rather roast eternally on the devil’s spit than be remembered merely for these two achievements.”

Like to see him stand up, I would. I likes to remember ‘im for that.” Poe was
a glock,
a half-wit, and that’s all there was to it. Mr. Dickens ought to be more particular about choosing his friends.

“Mr. Poe is a good man, sir.” Josiah Rusher, 17, lean and stoop-shouldered in ink-stained overalls, red flannel shirt and mud spattered boots, held a candle in one long, bony hand, shielding its flame with the other. Figg was frightening, an ominous looking bull of a man with a scarred face and limping right leg and he stood between Josiah and the only staircase leading from the newspaper’s storeroom. Upstairs, only a handful of people were in the paper at this early hour. But Eddy was his friend, the one person on the newspaper who treated him with kindness.

Josiah used the palm of his right hand to rub candle wax from the back of his left hand. “Mr. Poe is courteous, decisive, with much grace and enthusiasm.”