Beyond the Station Lies the Sea (2 page)

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Authors: Jutta Richter

BOOK: Beyond the Station Lies the Sea
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“What do you mean, and then?”
“What happened next, when you were little?”
“Nothing happened next,” says Cosmos. “Old Sadie died, and with her went the raspberry suckers. Anyway . . . forget about it! I was never little!”
With that a shadow falls over his sunny face. And he pulls the red baseball cap down and becomes the old Cosmos again.
A flock of crows flies over the river. It looks like a black cloud. The crows shriek and clamor and flutter up again before settling to sleep over in the trees. The driftwood fires have burned down.
“Come on,” says Cosmos, “it's getting cold. We gotta go!”
He stands up, grabs his two plastic bags, and climbs up the embankment. Niner follows behind him. Past the others.
Red Elsa lies rolled up in a torn sleeping bag. Bald Pete mutters to himself, and the harmonica has dropped out of Harmonica Johnny's hand.
A silver crescent moon hangs in the sky above the riverbank. The white houses look dead. Only the lights of the
alarm systems glow like red eyes above the terraces. A blanket of darkness has fallen over the city.
Cosmos takes long steps. Away from the houses, up into the city proper.
But it takes a while before they come to a neighborhood with any life to it. There, mothers are setting tables behind bright windowpanes, and children sit in clean pajamas, fresh from their baths, drinking warm milk.
As Niner stares in, he thinks of Mama, which makes him really sad.
“Don't you go looking in there,” says Cosmos. “They're on the other side. If you turned their power off they'd die of hunger. They don't know nothin'. Nothin' at all! Hey, old pal!” Cosmos nudges Niner in the ribs. “We own the street! We own the night! We own the sea!” And then he wiggles his ears and makes faces until Niner has no choice but to laugh.
“Well, there you go! And now we'll be wanting that five-star hotel!”
 
AND COSMOS AND NINER head off looking for a condemned building with a ripped-up mattress, perhaps even a bed frame.
“You never can tell beforehand,” explains Cosmos. “A condemned house like that can be a treasure trove, full of old
blankets and coats and hats and pants and shirts and mattresses with bed frames.”
“Maybe even a featherbed. With real down,” says Niner.
“Real down!” laughs Cosmos. “Well, what did I say: a five-star hotel!”
And their footsteps on the pavement sound like they're saying:
We own the street! We own the sea!
And again:
We own the street! We own the sea!
Yeah, thinks Niner, if Cosmos could conquer the dogs he'll be able to find a five-star hotel, too.
And Cosmos does find a condemned house, for he knows where to look: right where the city is at its ugliest. Perhaps behind the slaughterhouse, where it stinks of blood and piss. Or next to the garbage dump.
And sure enough, there really is a condemned house there. It doesn't look anything like a five-star hotel, though. It looks rather creepy, actually. A horror house with dead window-eyes.
I never would have gone in there, thinks Niner. If I were alone, I never would have gone in there.
The front door is nailed shut with planks. But Cosmos knows what to do.
“Come with me!” he says, glancing quickly down the street. Not a soul in sight.
“This way,” says Cosmos, and disappears behind a big lilac bush left over from an earlier time, when there was still a garden here, and a warm light in the windows.
“We'll take the service entrance,” says Cosmos, laughing.
The back door isn't locked. Cosmos pulls Niner into a dark corridor. Three steps lead upward.
“Wait!” says Cosmos, and digs into one of his two plastic bags.
Niner hears the rustling. In the dark, everything is amplified. The rustling in the plastic bag, Cosmos's voice, and also Niner's fear.
 
“WHEN YOU'RE SCARED, YOU'VE just got to sing out loud, Little Hobbin!” Mama used to say.
And it really did help. At least until Mama's new boyfriend moved in.
“Quit your yelping!” the new guy said. “That'll make a man's hair stand on end!”
“Oh, let the boy sing, Hubert!” Mama answered.
“You stay out of it! That howling's giving me a headache!”
So Mama stayed out of it. And Niner resumed with his singing.
“You bastard!” the new guy hollered. “You rotten bastard!” And then he started hitting, too. First with his hands,
then with his belt, and then with a clothes hanger. And with every blow he only seemed to get angrier.
And still, Mama stayed out of it.
That's when Niner learned to make himself invisible, and to cry without making any sound.
And in the evenings, in the dark, when Niner lay in bed, the fear grew stronger and stronger. Until finally, he got to the point where no amount of singing could have helped.
 
THE PLASTIC BAG RUSTLES loudly. The house smells damp and musty. Then a match flares up, and Niner sees that Cosmos is lighting a candle.
Their shadows flicker on the walls as they climb the creaky stairs.
And there, at the top, is a room with two beds. There are even pillows and blankets, and a rug on the floor.
“Well, now. Five stars?” asks Cosmos.
“At least!” says Niner.
“Lucky night?” asks Cosmos.
“Lucky night,” says Niner.
“Oughtta take advantage. Might just be a lucky streak. D'you still want to go to the sea?”
“For sure!”
“Hungry?”
“Always!”
“Can you look hungry?”
Niner nods.
“Let's see!”
The candle flickers and Niner puts on his saddest face. Trembling lower lip. Eyes big and wide. He only has to think of Mama, and it happens all by itself.
“Fantastic!” says Cosmos. “I'd give you my last bit of fried chicken, and the biscuit on top.”
“Tell me all about it,” says Niner. “What's your plan?”
“I know this bar,” says Cosmos. “It's called Caracas. Some pretty shady characters hang out there. But people with money, too, if you're lucky. A lot of money, if you get my drift. The kind that are bored, 'cause they're so rich. The kind that pay for everything, just to keep from bein' alone.”
“Like those dumbasses with the mansions and fancy cars?”
“Like those dumbasses with the mansions and fancy cars. Fisher and Frost Jr. and such. They have money, we need money, and you know how to look hungry. Tonight's our lucky night!”
“Well then, let's go!” says Niner. “What're we waiting for?”
IT'S A LONG WAY to the Caracas. First an overgrown dirt path, then a gravel path that runs past the neon signs. “Your jeweler” flickers in red from a wall. “Your jeweler.”
And right next to it are ads for an insurance company. Three guardian angels in a row. Wasp-waisted women in chic clothes with transparent wings, holding their hands over deeply tanned men and their expensive cars. “Always here, always near,” it says in green letters beneath the guardian angels.
Suddenly, it seems to Niner as if the entire city had been papered with these ads. Overnight. Always here, always near. A path lined by guardian angels.
“Cosmos? Do you believe in that?” asks Niner after the fifth ad.
“In what?”
“That,” says Niner, and points to a guardian angel with transparent wings.
“Do I believe in guardian angels?” Cosmos laughs, “You sure do ask some funny questions.”
“So tell me. Do you or don't you?”
“Fairy tales,” says Cosmos. “Guardian angels are fairy tales. It's a buncha crap, if you really wanna know!”
Cosmos shakes his head.
“But if you didn't have a guardian angel, then . . .”
“Then what? Then you fall out the window? Break a leg
getting up? Get run over by a car? Think about it, man. I ain't got no guardian angel! And? Have I got a broken leg? Been run over by a car? Fallen out a window? Of course not. So there you have it!”
Niner hangs his head and thinks it over, but somehow he doesn't believe Cosmos. Maybe Cosmos does have a guardian angel. Maybe there's an invisible woman standing right behind him, but Cosmos doesn't know it. After all, you can't see guardian angels. And you definitely can't touch them.
“I do,” says Niner, “I've got a guardian angel.”
After the seventh guardian angel ad, they come to the Caracas. Or at least that's what it says on a big sign over the door:
CARACAS
Niner had expected the bar to be bigger and much more attractive.
But Caracas is actually one of those dark, smoke-filled dives where drunks line the bar next to women with bright red lipstick who are always laughing too loudly. Where the wheels of the slot machines spin around endlessly and no one ever looks up, except when the bell above the door rings.
This is the place where Cosmos wants to rustle up some cash?
“You go on ahead,” says Cosmos. “They already know me here. And you got your guardian angel anyway. But look good and hungry. And come get me if someone offers to help.”
 
NINER GOES. HE TAKES a deep breath, opens the door to the bar, and can't look hungry at all, for the air is blue with smoke and his eyes fill with tears. He blinks, standing there like a lump.
Then someone yells at him:
“Hey, you. This ain't no kindergarten!”
“Get lost, sonny!” calls another. And up front, at the bar, a lipsticked woman cackles loudly into the blue haze.
Niner hesitates. He feels like turning around and running back out into the night to Cosmos.
The one who yelled out that this is “no kindergarten” slides off his bar stool and approaches Niner slowly. He's just like Mama's new guy. Niner knows the type. He can smell it. He's the kind that hits.
Niner looks around. It's only a few steps to the door, but suddenly the other one is there. The one who yelled “get lost!” Both of them are approaching him now. One from behind and one from the front.
Niner is trapped. He quickly plans to wait them out,
then duck away, under and through their arms. And then take to his heels and run.
Out of the corner of his eye he sees a woman in a fancy suit with a string of pearls around her neck sitting at a nearby table. Suddenly she stands up and says: “That's enough!”
The two men stand still and the place goes dead quiet.
“Sit back down,” says the woman, “and leave the boy alone!”
“No harm done, Queen. No harm done,” says the one who yelled “get lost,” and shoves the other back toward the bar.
“You heard what the Queen said. Leave the boy alone.”
“Come here, sweetie, sit by me,” says the woman.
She doesn't look like the other women at the bar. Her suit is light blue and shimmers a bit. The string of pearls is light blue too, and on her finger sparkles a ring with a big, dark-blue stone.
“Would you like something to drink?”
Niner nods and tries to look hungry.
She sees it and laughs and says, “What do you want to eat, then?”
“Doesn't matter. I eat everything,” answers Niner.
“Then pick something out,” says the Queen, handing him the menu. “Are you out alone?”
Niner shakes his head. “My friend's outside.”
“Then bring him in! It's my treat!”
Niner runs outside.
“Come on in, Cosmos. There's a queen in there, and she said she'd treat! It's our lucky night, for sure! The Queen, she's got money, I swear!”
“A queen, huh?” Cosmos shakes his head. “Well aren't you special.”
“It's nothing to do with me,” says Niner. “They call her the Queen in there, and they do what she says!”
“Oh, man!” says Cosmos. Suddenly he's all excited. “Could it really be the Queen? Do they snap to it when she waves her hand? Does she have a light-blue suit on? Is she wearing a light-blue pearl necklace?”
“Yeah,” says Niner. “That's right.”
“Then it must be her. It's the Queen of Caracas! I've never met her myself, but Bald Pete and Buddy Sloop have told me all about her. C'mon, you lucky dog. Can't keep the Queen of Caracas waiting!”
Niner has never seen Cosmos like this. So excited and unsure of himself. He keeps trying to hide his dirty hands, and he's even taken off his red baseball cap. And he's at a complete loss for words. All he can do is nod his head. At least at first.
Cosmos stares at the menu the Queen slides over to him and has to keep swallowing, because on top of everything, he's hungry.
Cosmos reads the menu quietly to himself for a long while. But then he starts reading aloud.
“Hawaiian toast,” reads Cosmos. “Caracas pork and onion special,” and “curried chicken with rice.” And then “vanilla ice cream in warm cherry sauce, cinnamon parfait over wine-poached plums.”
And now Niner swallows too.
The Queen smiles, then signals to a waiter—a guy in a black dinner jacket who seems oddly out of place.
“Joseph, please bring one of everything! The gentlemen are very hungry. But one at a time, please. All right?”
“Very good, madam!” says the waiter, and bows lightly without batting an eyelash. He acts as though he takes orders like that five times a day.
A little later, Cosmos and Niner are sitting in the land of plenty.
They eat the Hawaiian toast, then the pork and onion special, and then the curried chicken with rice. Next comes the vanilla ice cream in warm cherry sauce, and then the cinnamon parfait over wine-poached plums.

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