Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (18 page)

She laughed, and wiped her eyes with a sleeve. “I’m glad they thought it was funny, anyway.”

Gnossos watching her carefully, listening for a hint, an echo of something insipid in the inflection, hoping in fact to find it, wanting the flaw. But there was nothing. Sow a seed of cynic, pocket full of lye. Her eyes were marble-brown and confounded his attempts at metaphor. Pictures instead, animated in gilded baroque frames. In bed, wearing a flowered muslin nightdress that buttoned to her throat, her loafers tumbled sideways on the floor. Satin sheets, a monster of a goosedown quilt for snuggling; her grandmother’s patches looking like the loamy fields out the window. Old pennies tossed under the pillow for luck, features rubbed smooth, good for finding in the morning, copper warm from her body. Mustn’t let them fall on the rug, luck would run out, perish in a vacuum cleaner.

“You like it here okay? No menace?”

“With you, no. I mean yes, no menace.”

“It’s all in front, man, they have a heart thing going for them, comes from having the Man around all the time, too many enemies. Heffalump’s the cat to talk to, not me. C’mon, let’s dance some more, I like the way you move around.”

“We fit,” she told him again.

And without unreasonable effort they slid into Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting, Spider playing it in lazy three-four time, Gnossos’ particular preference in tempos, keeping the blue chords under the whole while, letting Murtagh on cornet tease the melody into what sounded like the southeast end of Nashville and all the way home again. They danced throughout the entire trip, their heads describing syncopated arcs.

Drinks were waiting at the table, and recognizing them Gnossos said: “Man I don’t believe it. Rye and mother ginger, too splendid.” He sat down
satisfied, slapping his leg; Kristin not seeming to understand but seeing his pleasure, coming around to him, putting her arms over his shoulders, and appreciating the finger he dunked into one of the glasses. He tested the drink with his tongue, remembered the taste from his childhood in Brooklyn, shrugged away the memory, and took a sip. She flicked his hair back from over his ears, and Southside came over with a card that read Compliments of the House. He could see from her eyes where she’d been.

“Some powerful grass,” she told him.

“It’s a mixture, honey, you won’t believe it, they call it Mixture—”

“Sixty-nine,” she cackled, then repeated it, “Sixty-
nine
,” pointing at him with a long, bangled finger, shaking it, making them all laugh together. (At different things, he tried to remind Kristin with a glance, all at different things. Her hands were still on his neck and she squeezed, perhaps reading his meaning. Too good, it’s all too good.) “Southside,” he said, “you know who this is?”

“No, man,” she said, looking lazily at Kristin, who was still not sitting down.

“This is Piglet, honey, you know who Piglet is?”

“Piglet?” she asked. “What’s Piglet?”

“Right here,” using his thumb to show.

“That there?”

“That’s Piglet.”

“What’s happening, man?”

“You want to know?”

“Give me the word.”

“I’ll tell you true.”

“Lay it right down.”

“She turns me on.”

“Yeah?”

“She turns me
on
, man.”

“Yeah,” said Southside, “you know what’s happening, all right. This boy here,” talking to Kristin, “he lay it down, we pick it up. He got the mixture—”

“Sixty-nine,” said Kristin, still standing behind Gnossos at the table, pressing her stomach against his back through the slats in the chair.

It came up like a periscope. “Let’s dance again,” she said.

Jesus, impossible to stand, getting longer. “Have some highball, relax a little.” Southside, in a white linen dress, belted out a sudden, high-pitched laugh, the squeal soaring right over the threshold of hearing, then stood and pranced around them both. “Daynce?” she asked finally, “daynce?
Man, that Sophocles ain’ gonna be able to
walk
.” She pranced right back to her chair and sat down, sipping once from each of their glasses.

Change the subject, think of Santa Claus, baseball, someone will see. “Sixty-nine,” he began but as soon as he spoke the name, Southside shrieked again and fell over backward in her chair. She lay on the floor, giggling, her high-heeled shoes sticking up in the air, her hands on her stomach. Spider was playing Lonesome Avenue and couples were dancing. Gnossos picked her up with the assistance of Fat Fred, whose huge, oil-barrel belly was hanging over his belt. “No, honey,” he tried again, laughing with her, “I only wanted to know how you knew the name.”

“Name, man?”

“Of the mixture, baby.”

She fell over again, screaming with delight, and this time they all left her there because she looked as if she wanted it that way.

At the peephole, when they were putting on their coats to leave, Fat Fred wrapped his heavy arms around them and asked, “Gnossos man, this is some powerful shit you got goin’ here. You mean to tell me,” lowering his voice, pulling them closer, “that this here’s the article?” His little maroon hat was pushed over on his eyebrows.

“Like I said, Fred.”

“Man, you’re the lily of the valley.”

“Amen,” said Kristin, surprising both of them.

“You’ve had it before?” from Gnossos, fishing.

“Man, ain’t nobody round here ever got none of this since Spider’s baby brother made it in Cuba. They got a cat, man, you wouldn’t believe, call him the Buddha, somethin’ like that.”

“That right?”

“Ain’t nobody ever seen that one. He got the opal in his forehead. He wear the robes, he has the gold chain on his neck from the Masai, man. An’ he big. Come on like King Kong, they talk about him. But ain’t nobody seen him is the thing. He cruises in the night, man, he got secrets, he never out of the shadows. Some say that what he does, he meditates.”

“He’s the rosebud,” said Gnossos.

“That’s right,” said Fat Fred, “maybe the last one of the bunch too. An’ this here’s his shit you laid on us tonight, don’t tell me no different. All’s I know is who’s the lily of the valley. Little skin, man.”

They shook hands again, Gnossos holding a flap of the parka in front of him with an elbow, the erection having only slightly wilted. Fred checked the peephole and opened the door, everyone waving a lazy so-long
except for Southside, whose feet were still sticking straight up into the neon-colored air. Once again they stepped through the night, feeling their way.

The only light in the burnished room came from a damp, sizzling fire. It shone just brightly enough to throw their shadows over the Navajo rug, across the floor, past the plywood table, and up against the door. But still he hadn’t touched her. Now and again a coal hissed out of the fire with a crackling pop, arched through the air, and bounced on the rug. Whenever it happened, they took turns scooping it up with spoons and tossing it back. Their faces flickered in the warm coral, yellow, white, violet, blue, and black. Gnossos lay on his spine for temptation, hands folded under his head, nose not eight inches from Kristin’s knees. She sat on her heels, and the length of firm, nearly hairless skin between the top of her socks and the hem of her skirt drove him to quiet distraction. He bent a leg to cool the old scope. Ambivalent ploy, he’d never hidden it before. The Radcliffe muse bringing his coffee to the magenta motel room the morning after the bomb, wearing her flowered muu-muu, padding in barefoot, long black hair brushing the tray. Zoom, up it had gone, propping the sheet like a mizzenmast: Ship ahoy, she had said, what’s that? her guess entirely correct.

“What are you thinking?” asked Kristin.

“Who, me?”

He looked at the fire just as a coal popped onto the rug. Kristin leaned over his chest to get it. He could have held her there but he hesitated. Then she was out of reach and it was too late. “That wolf I mentioned once, that’s all.”

“The fantasy kind?”

“No, baby, the Adirondacks.”

She smiled. “Judy mentioned something about that. All your friends thought you were dead.”

“Who’s Judy?”

Kristin making a sign of huge breasts, blanking her face to look like the Lumpers girl.

“Oh yeah. Trying to will me out of the picture.” Maniac Greek safer as a legend.

“Will you?”

“They all want me down, dig? Give them something to talk about at Guido’s.”

“But you sound bitter. You’re supposed to like taking chances.”

“That’s right. Makes the nights better. Like when nothing else is happening, you court the doom-beasties, you know?”

“Not exactly. How could I?” she asked. Three fingers of her right hand went to his shoulder, then back to the rug. “How could anyone really, when you love talking in ciphers? Couldn’t you just
tell
me?”

“Show you, maybe. Pooh leading Piglet through the Hundred Acre Wood, and all like that.”

Her eyes reading the implication, letting only part of it in. “But tell me anyway, can’t you?”

Gnossos looking down, being silent for a long while, what the hell, no time for anything else. Old teller of tales. He traced the pattern of the rug with his spoon. One direction, then the other. “There was a lake, for one. That’s where it’s really at, the lake. But you’ve got to have it out in front. You’re sure you want to get all involved?”

“Probably. A little at a time.”

“Yeah, okay. Close your eyes.”

“My eyes?”

“That’s right.” He checked and she had. “Now, it’s winter to start with, like Christmas cards, pine trees, everything gray-white and hazy-looking.”

“Is it snowing?”

“No, man, it’s too cold. Everything is quiet, kind of gloomy, nothing moving at all. You don’t even suspect motion, it’s so still. You know about still?”

“I think so.”

“Okay, the lake is frozen about four inches, maybe more, strong enough for a horse and cutter, if you dug that. You could make a run three miles, easy, to the north, and a mile, oh, three quarters of a mile, across. Now, right in the middle, very erect, like a natural fortress of some kind, there’s this pine island. The trees are really spectacular, they go up ninety feet, and all the branches are on top, sagging from the weight of the snow.”

“Yes, it’s getting easier.”

“Only, don’t let the island idea throw you. You can walk out to it, right? The lake is frozen, you can step up on one shore and down off the other. In the mornings, this is providing you get up, you can watch the mink, sometimes ermine, run out and disappear. You have to keep your eyes closed now, no peeking, it’s all in the palpebral vision if you want a buzz.”

“I promise.”

“Think of the snow on the lake then. Powdery, light, high, good for snowshoes. Sometimes the wind dips in and spins it off in these giant swirls, like the runners on an alpine sleigh. Can you make the lake at all? There’s
a cabin with wood smoke coming out of it, just on the shore there, smoked-up windows, tracks around it, a woodpile, and like that.”

“Umm,” she answered, grinning, her hands holding her elbows. “What kind of sky is there?”

“Gray, very low. If you have a nose for this kind of thing, you know there’s snow in the clouds. But it can’t come down because of all the cold out in front. You make the lake, for instance, to chop through the ice for drinking water, and the snow under your boots is squeaky. That’s where the cold is at. Below zero, but you don’t know how much. All right, for a long time you’re into rabbits, sometimes birds, partridge, they’re all in the trees, the partridge I mean, from the cold, it’s too frozen to find food on the ground and they have to eat buds, mostly spruce buds. When you cook them, unless you use a lot of salt, they taste like trees. And the deer are moving around, but they’re all still young, and anyway there’s plenty with the birds and rabbits, and you’ve got a pantry: creamed corn, hash, zucchini, codfish cakes. A lot of the time you read, or watch things out the window, or walk on top of the drifts with snowshoes.”

“I can see it a little better now.”

“Okay, you’re bundled up cozy one night, good fire, little bit of lush, Coltrane on the machine, and it’s getting darker, no twilight or sunset, because of the low overcast. But darker just the same, and something’s happening on the other side of the lake, a big dog poking around maybe. Then he’s gone, just as you take notice. So you forget it and have a little more lush and eat dinner and later mention how you saw this thing going on. Now, the person you’re with says it sounds unlikely. Unlikely, right? I mean, a dog would know about people staying in the cabin from the smell, and come to sniff around. There’s nobody else living in that part of the country, and he’d be hungry or lonely or something. So the next morning you check it all out and the tracks are way too big for a dog’s. But just the same, you don’t come out and say what you’re thinking because it would be too soap-opera and who knows, maybe it was a Saint Bernard. One other thing you notice though, and that’s the deer beds. Where the snow is pawed away and they lie down on the moss after nibbling for a while. It’s the only warm-looking place in the woods.”

“I like that part.”

“It’s pretty groovy. It’s because of the weather. Otherwise they’d never fall by the lake, where it’s all so exposed. But look at the connection. The reason you notice the deer beds is because the dog tracks, or whatever, are into the same thing.

“There’s this feeling you get every evening, extrasensory goosebumps, and all. At first it’s only a mild distraction but it begins to drive you up the wall,
so you finally pick a time when you’re having trouble reading, and you go after it, even though there’s not much light left. But the person you’re with—”

“A girl?”

“Oh yeah, from Radcliffe. It’s her place, see? Second cousin.”

“Oh.”

“She says to be careful because she’s got the same feeling you have. Spooking at the shadows, like that. Anyway, you make it, and the snow under your boots almost shrieks. It hasn’t sounded quite that way before, and it really doesn’t do very much for your head. The ice starts cracking too, not splitting open or anything, just little cracks, needle-thin, from all the contraction going on. They zip all over the place, like out-of-control buzz saws, and they make this weird roaring sound, like a huge gurgle. Then something happens that’s really astounding. This deer, this young buck, breaks cover and takes off over the lake right at you. It’s as if he’s been doing it all along, like he’s running on an arc that somebody’s plotted for him, and you’re walking on your own, and that’s where they’re meant to intersect. It’s as if the whole time, you’d already been thinking that when he did it you’d take him, then and there. So you do. You bring him down, I mean.”