The Bumblebee Flies Anyway (7 page)

Barney looked around the junkyard, at row upon row of abandoned vehicles in various states of ruin. No sound here but the wind moaning as it moved through the empty cars. Glancing at the mock automobile once more, he felt sad, as if he had lost something. Or had finally learned how a magician made the rabbit appear from the hat and it turned out to be not magic after all.

Let’s get out of here, he told himself. And he began running toward the fence, slipping and tripping, as if chased by ghosts or goblins. As he began to climb the fence, he realized that the Complex was almost cheerful—almost but not quite—compared to this terrible place where the only inhabitant was a gray rat lurking in the ruins.

Billy the Kidney wheeled into view at the door of Barney’s room.

“Mazzo,” Billy said, eyes flashing, but not with pain this time. Something else.

Mazzo’s dead, Barney thought, held suspended for a moment, breathless, emotionless. Emotionless? At someone’s death? Had his emotions gone the way of his sense of taste? He cringed, felt the horror of being without any feeling whatsoever. And then the emotion came: poor Mazzo, such beauty and promise, gone. All of this in a split second.

“Where’ve you been?” Billy asked. “I’ve been looking all over. Mazzo’s been screaming for you for an hour.”

“That sounds like Mazzo. Screaming.”

“You know Mazzo,” Billy said.

Barney raised himself from the bed. He’d been resting after his foray into the junkyard, thinking of the fake car and the merchandise waiting for him in two days. When he closed his eyes, the car gleamed beautifully in his mind.

“Did he say why he wants me?” Barney asked.

Billy shook his head.

Barney established himself on the floor. “Let’s go and see what he wants.”

Billy swiveled away. “He wants to see you alone. He told me: Send Barney in here and then take off. Like I’m a servant or something.” A wound in Billy’s voice.

Barney watched Billy wheel through the doorway, head down, arms working like mad, knowing Billy was angry and sulking but nothing he could do about it.

Bascam was leaving Mazzo’s room as Barney arrived. She avoided Barney’s eyes, looked sheepish, hurried away. As if she’d been caught doing something wrong. Maybe Bascam was like all the others, stealing into Mazzo’s room at all hours, basking in the glow of his beauty.

“Where the hell have you been?” Mazzo asked angrily as Barney approached his bed. But not going too close. He didn’t want to get too close to Mazzo.

“Out,” Barney said.

“Out where?” Unbelieving, of course. Figuring, Where could Barney Snow possibly have gone?

“Just out. What business is it of yours?” Not giving an inch.

Mazzo sighed, shaking his head, the violet eyes brooding, face blotchy, moist with perspiration but handsome all the same. Christ, I wish I looked like that, Barney thought. All that beauty wasted.

Mazzo remained silent, seemed to be contemplating something very mysterious and interesting on the bed
sheet. Barney waited. He was in no hurry. Glancing at the telephone on the wall, he wondered if Mazzo was waiting to hear it ring. Did Mazzo want him to go into his song and dance again? Why didn’t he just take the phone off the hook? Take everybody off the hook?

“A bargain,” Mazzo said finally, drawing his eyes away from the sheet and looking directly at Barney, turning the full force of those brilliant, fevered eyes on him.

“What kind of bargain?”

“Billy wants to use my telephone, right?”

There he goes again, Barney thought, putting his stamp on everything.
My
telephone.

“Right.”

“Okay. Every afternoon at two, they wheel me to the third floor for the chemicals. It takes about an hour. During that hour, from two to three, Billy can use the telephone.” Mazzo closed his eyes, grimacing a bit, as if the words had cost a huge effort. “But no long-distance calls. Strictly local.”

“Right,” Barney said, wary now, wondering what Mazzo required in return. Mazzo was not the kind of guy to do anybody favors, especially if they involved Barney Snow.

Silence deepened between them. A door opened and closed in the distance, followed by the whisper of footsteps. Mazzo’s machine alternately hummed and bleeped. The curtains were half drawn and Barney stepped away from the bed, receding into half shadow. Mazzo’s eyes strayed around the room, looking everywhere but at Barney. Barney waited, patient. It was Mazzo’s move. Let him move.

Finally Mazzo sighed again, perspiration dancing on his forehead and cheeks. The sigh carried all the tragedies of the world in it, as if he alone were burdened and nobody
else. Take it easy, Barney told himself, take it easy. Mazzo could be dead by this time tomorrow. Or even an hour from now. Let him sigh.

Mazzo reached over to the cluttered table beside his bed, his hand prying among the bottles and tubes and basins. His hand was slender, long fingers bestowing grace on whatever they touched. Those fingers lifted an envelope from the table and extended it toward Barney.

Barney reached for the letter, but Mazzo snatched it back. “Wait a minute,” he said. “You don’t have to read what’s in here. I’ll tell you what it says.”

Barney caught a glimpse of handwriting on the envelope. Blue ink, delicate and spidery.

“It’s from my sister,” Mazzo said. “She’s coming here to visit me. This afternoon.” He held the envelope between thumb and index finger at one corner, as if it were a specimen to be slipped into a plastic folder and used later as evidence. “She’s a witch, my sister,” he said, a hint of a smile on his face. Not quite a smile, but a softening, a gentling of his features. “She’s not really a witch, of course, but she can, like, cast spells over people. Charm them, soften them up. Then come in for the kill.” His features hardened again, the ghost of a smile gone. “That’s why she’s coming here. To soften me up.”

“Why does she have to soften you up?” Barney asked.

Mazzo looked annoyed at the question. Then decided to answer.

“She wants to talk me into allowing my mother to visit me here and hold my hand while I check out. That’s what she wants.” He held the letter toward Barney again. “Smell that?”

Barney sniffed, twitching his nostrils, faking it, not wanting Mazzo to know that his sense of smell was gone.

“See?” Mazzo asked. “Nothing. If it smells of anything, it’s soap. Good strong soap. No perfume, no cologne. She doesn’t use the stuff, doesn’t need it.”

Mazzo dropped the letter onto his chest, silent again, brooding.

“She sounds spooky,” Barney said.

“She is spooky,” Mazzo said, but the gentleness was in his face again and his voice caressed the word, turning
spooky
into something beautiful. “She’s my twin. Which makes me spooky too, I guess. She’s got this one thing she could always do. Twist me around her finger, make me do anything she wants. I thought I was safe from her. She’s been away. But now she’s out and coming here.”

That was the longest speech Barney had ever heard from Mazzo’s lips, although he didn’t seem to be speaking to Barney at all.

“You say she’s out now,” Barney said. “Where’s she been?”

“Let her tell you if she wants,” Mazzo said, turning to Barney as if just discovering his presence here. “The point is that she’s coming here. To soften me up for my mother. And that’s where you come in, Barney. Where you keep your end of the bargain.”

“What do you want me to do?” Barney asked, genuinely puzzled.

“I want you to be here. I don’t want to be alone with her. I don’t want to give her a chance to work me over, give me the business. I want you here, standing right where you’re standing now.”

“What good will that do?”

“Let me worry about that.”

“What if she doesn’t want me here?”

“It’s what I want that counts,” Mazzo said, the old Mazzo once more, all gentleness gone. “This is my place, not hers. Okay, I have to let her in here. She’s my twin sister. I owe her that much. One visit. One shot at me. And then no more.” He sank down on the bed, shriveling himself into the sheets, as if trying to make himself disappear. “But I’ve got to get through that one visit.”

“And what do I do?” Barney asked, reluctant to get involved. Especially in a family thing. He wanted to stay in his own compartment and stay out of other people’s compartments.

“Just be here. Be here and follow my lead. When she starts getting to me with the old magic, I’ll start talking to you. Answer me back. Agree with anything I say. Pretend she’s not here.”

“This is crazy. I’ll feel like a nut.”

“It doesn’t matter how you feel,” Mazzo snapped. “And it isn’t crazy.” Then slowly, craftily, tauntingly: “Don’t you want Billy to use the phone, make his phone calls?” Talking as if Barney were seven or eight years old.

The telephone rang and Mazzo leaped in the bed, as if someone had applied an electric shock. He placed his hand on the phone and held up his other hand to Barney in a traffic-stopping gesture. His lips moved and Barney could see him counting silently: one, two, three … Finally he lifted the receiver, pressed it to his ear. Listened grimly, eyes half closed, lips tight, cheeks taut. Then he slowly took the receiver away from his ear and replaced it on the hook. Sank back down on the bed, tugged the sheet up to his neck.

“What was that all about?” Barney asked.

“You ask too many questions.”

“I didn’t ask to come in here,” Barney said. “Talk about spooky. That was spooky what you just did. Answer a phone and not say anything.”

“My mother, that’s who it was,” Mazzo said. Pausing, then: “I told her she could call me once in a while. Only if she didn’t say anything. No conversation. She can listen to me breathe. That’s all she wants to know, anyway, that I’m still alive.”

Mazzo, you bastard.

“Answer me something, Mazzo,” Barney said. “How come you get all this special treatment? A telephone in your room. Your mother calling. Your sister coming to visit. Nobody is supposed to have visitors here. What’s going on, anyway?”

“Haven’t you heard, Barney?” Mazzo asked, the old nastiness back in his voice. “Money talks. And my mother has the money. This place exists on grants, bequests, stuff like that. When she knew I wanted to get in here, she bought my way in. Sat down and wrote a check. Money buys everything.”

Barney didn’t say anything.

“Well, almost everything,” Mazzo amended.

For a moment there Mazzo had seemed like a nice guy, someone you could like.

“Why the hell did you want to buy your way into this place?” Barney asked. “It’s not exactly the Ritz.”

Barney remembered the Handyman’s explanation about why patients came to the Complex. To help mankind, he said. To serve a useful purpose. He had never questioned Billy the Kidney or Allie Roon about their reasons for coming here, not wanting to invade their private compartments, but he sensed a kind of nobility about them, even though they seemed helpless and pathetic most of the
time. At least they didn’t gripe or complain or bitch the way Mazzo did. What was Mazzo doing here?

“Look, Barney,” Mazzo was saying. “Don’t worry about me. All you have to worry about is being here when my sister comes. You do that and I’ll let Billy use my phone for a week. Every day.”

Barney squirmed. Damn it, he had his own problems.

“A week, that’s a long time in a place like this,” Mazzo said. “A lifetime, maybe.”

He knew he couldn’t disappoint Billy.

“What time is your sister coming?” Barney asked, giving in.

“At three thirty. After my trip upstairs.”

Barney blew air out of the corner of his mouth. “Okay,” he said. And wanted to get out of there. He realized that he had a tendency lately to flee from places, from the Handyman’s office and the junkyard and his own room and now Mazzo’s room.

“What’s her name?” Barney asked from the doorway, over his shoulder.

“Cassie,” Mazzo said, lifting his head with effort. “We’re not identical twins. She’s not at all like me.”

“Good,” Barney said. “That’s the best news I’ve heard all day.”

Barney chewed the pencil, frowning, looking down at the pad of paper on the table before him, one of those blue-lined paper schoolroom pads. He wrote his name carefully on the paper, printing the letters, using capitals. BARNEY SNOW. He studied his name for a while and then looked up, contemplating this room that was his home in the Complex.

Not much of a home. Dull green walls, bare of decorations.
Venetian blinds admitting slashes of light in an uncurtained window. Steel bed with a gray blanket turned down to reveal part of a once-white sheet. The table at which he sat, a sort of improvised desk, was unadorned, and the single drawer was empty. The brown tile floor had no carpet.

The bureau standing beside the window had been painted a lackluster gray and contained his few possessions—a couple of shirts, socks, underwear, a striped tie, a few paperback books whose titles he couldn’t remember, a wristwatch that didn’t work anymore. Two jackets—one zippered, the other a sports type of jacket—hung in the closet along with two pairs of trousers. He had arrived here traveling light, bringing very little from that other place. That other place. He didn’t want to think about it. Tempo, rhythm. Think of here and now.

There’s so little of me here, he thought, and realized how easily his entire existence could be obliterated along with his memory.

He fumbled in his trousers for his wallet and didn’t find it, remembering now that he had turned the wallet and his money—four one-dollar bills and some change—over to the Handyman for safekeeping on his arrival. No need for money here, the Handyman had said.

A wallet, however, would provide proof of identity. He remembered filling in the identity card that came with the wallet. But without it he had nothing to prove who he was. Suppose he woke up somewhere upstairs, his memory wiped away, not knowing his name, not knowing who he was?

Chewing the pencil again, imprinting his toothmarks on the yellow surface, he thought: Maybe I’d better write
down my age, too. If they wiped away his name, they’d probably wipe away other things as well. Barney printed his age: 17. Well, not really his age. He wouldn’t be seventeen until July, but this was close enough.