Want Not (2 page)

Whether dread or meteorology was to blame, Talmadge didn’t know, but he felt suddenly colder, as if a polar gust had just turned left on East 4th as it was nipping its way southward down Avenue A. The snow had been coming down in layers—a blast of chowdery snow followed by fifteen minutes of clear gelid air followed by another white blast—but now it was swirling, snow globe–style, and showing zero signs of another leisurely break. New York City hadn’t seen this much pre-Thanksgiving snow in twenty years, he’d read earlier that day while checking Facebook at an internet café on St. Mark’s Place. Busiest travel day of the year, and flights were running four hours late at LaGuardia blah blah click. The temperature must have been in the teens, he figured, with the wind so blowy that he had seen two people go by shielding their faces with folded newspapers. None of this bothered him, however—he had a boffo parka, cadged from a dormitory dumpster at Richard Varick College, and Matty was coming in on Greyhound. Plus, Talmadge loved it when the earth fought back, when it jostled and jerked like a horse shaking flies off its back. He’d muttered words to this effect after Hurricane Katrina leveled his parents’ beachfront home in Gulfport, and only his stepmother leaping in front of him, screaming
no,
had stayed his father from committing second-degree murder or at minimum aggravated assault.

Crabtree was in front of him now, those wild eyebrows converged into an indignant, frowning
V.
But as he was sizing up Talmadge, his eyes bouncing from the trash bag between his feet to the
FUCK HATE
and
HOLY GOOF
buttons on his satchel to the black titanium barbell skewered through his right eyebrow to the tasseled, earflapped wool cap of vaguely Incan design atop his head, the anger in his eyes was getting nudged out by something like confusion. Talmadge was tall, yet so lanky and slim as to seem wispy—a “long tall drink of water,” as his Uncle Lenord said, though Lenord had modified that to “long tall drink of bullshit” after Talmadge dropped out of college to, as Lenord put it, “let people draw shit all over his face.” Slouchy and gawky, he seemed uncomfortable in his body, as if he were a victim of shoddy biological tailoring who’d been fitted with a frame one size too large. Or as if, at twenty-three, he still had some growing left to do, an impression bolstered by the palefaced splotches in his downy, flaxen beard and the boyish or possibly girlish softness of his big pacifist eyes. Even the tattoo on his left temple—a purplish star, which the tattoo artist in Hattiesburg told him signified celestial longing, a yearning for new (or possibly Renewed) horizons, new maps, new ways of being, a pure shine of light in the polluted darkness—reinforced the delicacy of his features, evoking, in its coloring and placement, something midway between mascara and an earring. Micah called him “angelheaded,” which was only credible if you specified which angel—gentle Jophiel, perhaps, but not sword-swinging Michael. Yet the sentiment was fair: With his velvet-painted-Jesus visage, his spare, reedy chassis, and his timorous bearing, Talmadge Bertrand had the look of someone too sensitive for the scraggy existence of a mammal, with a face that wouldn’t appear inappropriate above a golden harp. He could see Crabtree puzzling now at the sight of him, that freewheeling anger curving back on itself as the old man struggled to decipher the context of this angelheaded manchild rooting through the Key Food garbage. “The fuck you
doing?
” he finally said.

“Getting dinner,” Talmadge said, which he sensed wasn’t the ideal answer, given the situation, but it was the truthful answer, and really the only explainable one.

Quick and incredulous, Crabtree said, “You eating from the trash?”

“Yeah,” Talmadge said. “Look at all they throw away. It’s criminal, man, it’s everywhere. Here, look here”—from the bag he pulled out a bunch of carrots, ferny green leaves attached, and bent a limp one to demonstrate—“there’s nothing wrong with these, they’re just soft. No difference if you cook them. And look”—now he fetched a fat tomato, blighted with a dark moldy blotch—“see, that just needs cutting out.”

“Boy, what’s wrong with you?” Crabtree said, the anger frothing back up. Five dollars, he thought, and now here he was messing around with a talking sewer rat. There wasn’t no end to it.

“What’s wrong with
them?
” said Talmadge. “There’s hungry people in the world. There’s people starving. And look at all this. They’re
burying
all this food.” At this point Micah’s voice took over, as it always did, not just in the script but in Talmadge’s inflections and intonations too, with even her zonked-hillbilly accent creeping in, as if he were wholly channeling her, or flipping the switch on some prerecorded message of hers: “It’s a bankrupt system, man. Waste doesn’t matter as long as it doesn’t affect profits. They’ve built it into the system. Everything just gets rolled downhill. Check it out, man. Fifty percent of the edible food in this country never gets
eaten.
Half of it, seriously. Never makes it into a mouth. And no one cares, man. Because we’ve been
conditioned
not to care. We’ve been taught to dispose. And not just food, but—”

“What the hell, ratboy,” Crabtree cut in. “Whoa, let me tell you something. You don’t know your dick from your ass.”

“Okay.”

“Serious, man.”

“Okay,” Talmadge said again.

“Not if you think what you’re doing can change
nothing.
”

With a meek shrug, Talmadge said, “I’m just changing me.”

“Then don’t be preaching at everybody.”

“I wasn’t preaching. You asked me—”

“Know what you are, man? Do you know?”

This was clearly a rhetorical question though Crabtree granted Talmadge a few unappreciated moments for response.

“You a
provocateur,
” he said. “That’s right. A
pro-voc-a-teur.
And that’s bullshit, you know what I’m saying. Bullshit. That’s
nothing.
”

“Due respect, man, I’m just minding my—”

“Let me tell you something. Provocateur, man. That’s what you are. I was with Bobby Seale in New Haven, you understand? The Black Panthers, man, you know what I’m talking about? New Haven. That was
war,
man. But this shit”—he waved an ungloved hand at the trash bags on the sidewalk, at the satchel ’round Talmadge’s shoulder—“this shit is worthless, man. You ain’t—you ain’t even got a right.”

“We all have a right,” Talmadge mumbled.

“Shit,” said Crabtree, then puffed his cheeks before unloading an aggrieved exhalation. Too cold for this shit, he thought. Too cold for anything. Weather like this, even a polar bear’d be crying for its mama, asking to crawl back in that warm mama-bear coochie to hide. The wind was spinning all those invisible arrows poking from his back, whirling them around in his flesh. He had pills back at the shelter but the pills didn’t work. Reefer worked. Rock worked better. Junk worked best. But all his old nursing aids had been forcibly retired by The People of the State of New York v. Houston Crabtree. “Five dollars, man,” he said blurrily, half to himself, a quarter to God, the rest to the dumbass kid. “I got fines to pay. No job. I don’t pay the fines, I gotta go back to doing a bid.”

The sudden shift in tone came as a relief to Talmadge, as though a knife had been lowered.

“I’m on a payment plan, you understand?” he went on. “Got behind six months. Parole officer say, shit, Houston, you can make that payment collecting cans. Cans! But I’m out here all day for five dollars. Shit is right. Ain’t no way to make that payment. Make better money digging graves in Georgia and that’s nothing, man, I did that.”

Talmadge relaxed his face into a blank expression meant to show empathy. “You hungry?”

“Fuck you, man. I ain’t eating that shit.”

“Just asking.”

“What you need to do—know what you need to do?” Crabtree’s energy spiked again, and he wagged a long brown finger at Talmadge. “Incorporate. That’s how you change shit, man. Not like this. This is just
provocatization.
You got to twist it from the inside. You gotta get up inside it to where you can cut the wires, you know what I’m saying? You need the initials, man. That’s how you get inside. You got to be a corporation. Nothing happen in this country without the I-N-C-period, you understand?”

Talmadge didn’t, but he nodded anyway.

“That’s what I’m gonna do, one of these days,” he went on. “Get myself incorporated. Nobody touches no corporation. Need a lawyer for that, though. Special-type lawyer.”

“Sounds like a plan,” said Talmadge.

“Lookit these boots, man,” Crabtree said, kicking out a leg. The boots, made of thin green rubber, appeared to have been designed for a ten-year-old child in an equatorial nation. And when Talmadge looked closer he noticed two yellow dots at the toes of each boot: eyes. Dude was wearing children’s frog boots. “I must’ve walked ten miles in these today. Sticking my hand into every goddamn trash can. Make me sick, man. Got cream cheese all up my arm. Ten miles for five fucking dollars. Ain’t doing that again. My redeeming days is over. I’m done, baby. This motherfucker cooked.”

“Jesus,” Talmadge said, still marveling at the frog boots.

“That’s right. You don’t see no corporations walking ’round in boots like this.”

“There’s a nursing home or something on Henry Street. I can’t remember the name, but I found some totally decent shoes there a few months back—in the trash. You just got to poke around.”

“Fuck that,” Crabtree said. “I had me some good boots, you know what I’m saying? Fucking
soldier
boots, man, I could’ve circus-walked that third rail in them, not felt nothing. Some motherfucker stole one of them at the Broadway Mission. That’s why I don’t stay there no more.”

“Who steals one boot?”

“That’s what I’m saying. Some one-legged motherfucker, that’s who. Don’t think I won’t find him.” To prove his intent, Crabtree squinted up and down East 4th Street. By now the snow was blowing sideways, strafing Talmadge’s pinkening cheeks, and sensing himself loosed from whatever threat he’d feared, he asked Crabtree if he’d mind him finishing up his “shopping.”

“Suit yourself, ratboy,” he said. This kid was hopeless, Crabtree concluded. Hopeless and stupid like the whole motherfucking world was hopeless and stupid. He remembered, back in the ’90s, stopping at a crackhouse up the Hudson in Newburgh which the police had raided half a day earlier. Outside, on the stoop, broken yellow police tape flapped in the river breeze. Inside he found tweakers on all fours, a dozen or more of them, all of them scratching the floors like yardbirds, crawling from room to room, sniffing for any grit left behind in the commotion. He saw one skinny henpicker, barefooted, in a paisley housedress, licking the carpet. She’d comb it with her fingers, upturning the dust, then lick whatever grains she found. Kitty litter, mostly. Kitty litter was everywhere. For a moment he thought that was who the kid reminded him of, but then he panned out: That’s what
everyone
reminded him of, himself included. Just a big mess of hopeless fools—or holy goofs, like the kid’s button said—licking the carpet, hoping for that bitter buzz on the tonguetip, the promise of a fix. Money, pussy, cock, fame, the warm and righteous embracing arms of Jesus, a world scraped of all its scabs and scars: the fix didn’t matter. Because most of the time it was kitty litter anyway. There was victory in knowing this, Crabtree knew, because once you figured out that nothing mattered, nothing mattered. Not even five dollars. Not even the cold. He rubbed his palms together, then seared his cheeks with their quick, passing heat. “You got a smoke?” he asked Talmadge.

“Not the tobacco kind,” Talmadge said, immediately regretting it.
Idiot,
he scolded himself. It was always like this. He had this insuperable need to distinguish himself, at every flitting opportunity, from
normality:
from his father’s sprawling, polished Ford dealership and Saints season tickets and rarely used inboard cruiser docked at the Gulfport Yacht Club, his relentless Rotarian striving; from his younger sister’s BFD internship with Senator Thad Cochran, and her scotch-drinking, Phi Delt twit of a boyfriend; from Sherilyn, the forty-three-year-old, Clairol-blonde, hyper-Botoxed funeral-home heiress for whom Dick Bertrand had left Talmadge’s mother midway through Talmadge’s sophomore year at Ole Miss (as if Dick Bertrand had concluded his life wasn’t clichéd enough); from the Joel Osteen/Rick Warren brand of styrofoam Christianity in which his mother had taken refuge after the divorce, which daily sustained her until five o’clock when she shifted to sauvignon blanc; and from the way everyone shunned Uncle Lenord as if he was some sort of anomalous black sheep, some unaccountably redneck outlier, when in truth he was just a mirror image of Talmadge’s father, his baby-boy brother, minus the good fortune of two profitable marriages (Talmadge shunned Lenord, too, but for different reasons). Boneheaded comments like this—“not the tobacco kind,”
Jesus
—were the frequent result.

“Baby!” Crabtree yelped, the arrows in his back going
boing
with excitement. Why not? Nothing mattered, he reminded himself. Except for Friday’s urinalysis: that might matter. “Uh-uh,” he said wistfully. “They got me nailed down so hard I can’t piss anywhere
besides
a cup. Put my ass in the supermax.”

Talmadge, who hadn’t been kidding, said, “I was just kidding.”

“Would do me right, though,” said Crabtree. Unsteady now, thinking about it: “Take that chill off, you know what I’m saying?”

“Sorry.”

“Can’t spare a joint?”

“I was just kidding.”

“That’s cold, man. That’s cold.”

“Sorry,” Talmadge said again.

Did
matter, Crabtree decided, surrendering the point. That the prison thermostat never dipped below 70 degrees was an attractive detail Crabtree didn’t presently want to consider. “Look like you got some decent greens there,” he said, pointing at the grid of produce Talmadge was carefully laying out on the snow: spinach so wilted it appeared half cooked; three bananas, their skins tinged with umber; loads of bagged salad mixes, the plastic smeary in spots; a massive eggplant so soft that Talmadge’s thumb punctured it; strawberries in their plastic compartments, the bottom ones fuzzed with ashy-looking mold; broken knobs of ginger root; a sizable mess of collard or mustard greens—despite his Southern rearing, Talmadge could never tell them apart—with crisp brown leaf edges, like singe marks; and six cantaloupes, so wet and spongy that they resembled fresh brains scattered on the snowy sidewalk.