Second Skin (19 page)

There was the regulation .45 caliber Navy automatic, for instance, stuck like a four-pound T-bone steak point down on my hip. And a web belt—too small, they were always too small for me—buckled around the girth of my white tunic and squeezing me, puckering the skirt of the tunic with deep awkward pleats. And the dark bright blue brassard on my arm—white letters SP a mile high—and then the gaiters. Little canvas things with laces and hooks and eyes and canvas straps to go under the instep, little canvas sleeves to bind the ends of the white trousers to the fat ankles, and it must have been two o’clock in the morning, Eastern War Time, when I sat on the floor in our shabby room in the cheap hotel trying to fasten on the gaiters, puffing, struggling, moving my lips in silence because Cassandra and Pixie too were both sleeping in the single bed. And finally the cap, my old white garrison cap—eagle going to seed on the front, golden threads of the eagle turning black—the old cap pulled square on my head to simulate, if possible, the policeman’s style, the policeman’s look of authority. My rig, my poor rig. Thank God she never saw me in that rig.

It was raining. Once more we were across the street from a Greyhound terminal, though it was an eastern rather than a Pacific terminal and though we were in a hotel instead of a Chinese restaurant, and it was raining. A vaguely familiar terminal, the return to a hardly altered darkness, the city-wide relentless song of the rain, and in a wet envelope in my pocket, my orders. A final shore patrol for Skipper. More shore patrol, more drunks in a dream, more faces inside the cage. Didn’t they know I had had enough, that I was done with the sea? At least I with
held this information from Cassandra, kept her from knowing that she would be alone that night while I, her father, was off exposing himself to God knows what harm. So we crossed the street in the rain at half-past one in the morning—no more 0130 hours for me, no more—and ran for the nearest doorway and in the red-eyed pain of interrupted uneasy slumber we shook ourselves like dogs in front of the desk clerk and piled into the dingy, self-service elevator.

Even from across the street and through the rain I spotted that hotel for what it was: a place for suicide.

“Where are we, Skipper?” she asked once, but I shook my head. I needed time, I needed silence, I had to think. The elevator had a tic in its ratchets and one of the push buttons had fallen out, it banged from side to side in its dismal shaft and smelled like the flooded lavatory of the bus we had just escaped from. There was a crumpled six-inch black headline in the corner. We groaned and banged our way up the shaft.

A place for suicide obviously, and my orders were in my pocket and Sonny was three or four thousand miles away that moment in Southern Cal. Surely I couldn’t seek help from the clerk who had sent us up with malice, oh, with what obvious malice to the fourteenth floor which was really the thirteenth floor, I knew. Never have I been taken in by the number fourteen in a cheap water front hotel but have always known beforehand that other number it concealed. The light went out when we reached the fourteenth—thirteenth—floor and, knowing I could not trust Cassandra alone, I gasped, fumbled for the door lever in the darkness, caught my fingers in a joint that was packed with grease.

So we disembarked quickly into the bare corridor, and as I was turning the key in the lock I saw the figure down on its knees with scrubbing brush and pail at the far end of the corridor and I knew that for the moment at least Cassandra was safe. A lucky break on our unlucky floor.

The single bed, the broken radio, the cigarette burns on the chiffonier, the stains on the toilet seat, the broken window shade which came down in my arms. A room in the wartime
metropolis of the world for Cassandra, a cut above a flophouse for Cassandra, just the place for her, with its hairs on the pillows and old disreputable impressions on the gray sheets. How little I knew.

“Are you trying to look like Mussolini, Skipper? You look like Mussolini, Skipper, you really do when you hold your chin out that way.”

I smiled. “You’re tired, Cassandra,” I said, “you better hop right on in. Big day coming up, Cassandra.”

So it was 2 A.M. and mother and infant were sleeping together in the narrow bed with the loose springs which on many another night gave quick unconcealed clamor to the hidden desires of young servicemen, and I was lacing my gaiters in the middle of the floor and staring at the rain-refracted puddle of neon light that my feet were in. It always rained hardest between midnight and early dawn, I thought.

And then hat, gun, gaiters and envelope of orders and I was ready, paused for a last look at the two of them in the lonely bed. “Grandpa’s going on shore patrol,” I whispered, “be a good girl.” I carried a straight-backed chair with me and left the door ajar when I stepped into the hall.

I set down the chair, cleared my throat, beckoned slowly with my finger. From far down the hall she peered at me, dropped the brush into the pail. She swept away the wings of hair with her wet hands and gasped, rolled her eyes at me, climbed to her feet and bundled up the rags of her skirt and came to me as if I were pulling her in steadily on a golden string. She was plucking herself into a vague new shape, her eyes were white and fixed on mine, to those young eyes I must have looked like General Douglas MacArthur in the bare corridor of that disreputable hotel.

Sixteen years old and haggard, dismayed by the faint lingering sensation of her missing youth, confused by her age, already a sallow and lonely legend of the late-night elevated trains. Scrub woman and still a child. And staring at the phantom officer high in that vulgar building while the rain fell.

“Late for you, Sissy,” I said. “Pretty late for you, isn’t it?”

Something crossed her face then and she wiped her nose and tried to conceal what must have been a pain in her side. I drew her close to me—fragile jaw, transparent flesh, a certain color in the hair, human being despite the rags, the tin pail, endless vigil on the fourteenth floor. I glanced at the crack in the door, the chair, and back to the girl with her eyes, bright nose, lame spirit, carfare rolled up in the top of her stocking.

“Now, Sissy,” I said, “can you sit in the chair? Do you think you can do that?”

She looked inward for some obscure source of moral vision, then measured the distance to the chair, then looked long and hard at me, then, “That’s it, that’s it,” I said, and then she sat down.

“Now, Sissy, listen to me. I must go down in the elevator now, and I will be gone until the light comes through the window over your bucket and brush. You see it, Sissy? Now you must stay in the chair until I return. Don’t let anyone go into the room, don’t let the lady come out. And if you hear the lady moving about in the room, you go to her and stay with her. Do you understand me. Sissy? You must keep awake and take care of the lady. Take good care of the lady.”

And stinking elevator, empty desk, rain in the street. And at the curb and occupied, I knew, there was the small gray windowless pickup truck with its official number and spotlight on the driver’s side. It had the unmistakable look of all penal vans, the rain was a thin film over its dents and bruises. Each dent, each chip in the official gray paint meant a thrown brick or a struggle in the street, a punchy body smashed against the side of the gray truck and beaten up, carried away. I sighed, craned up for a final sight of the fourteenth floor and straightened the big blue brassard on my arm and climbed into the truck. The engine kicked over and we pulled out into the deserted thoroughfare of glistening worn trolley track and black girders of the elevated overhead, began to cruise, to weave rhythmically between the girders.

Twenty blocks of girders, fruit carts shrouded for the night, occasional strip-tease theaters—light bulbs, ticket booth, bright
naked posters in the rain—while armed merchant ships waited on both the rivers and GI’s drank their late glasses of beer or Ne-dick’s orange juice. Cruising down Second Avenue through the rain, killing a last official night toward the end of the war, fat and uncomfortable and fatigued—gaiters too tight, poor circulation— until, as luck would have it, we saw the crowd and the chief who was driving popped on the light, the little spotlight, and speared the crowd.

“Got your hackles up, Chief?” I asked, “the boys ought to be able to do a little bloodsucking right here, don’t you think?”

So we hit the curb, drove over the curb, cut a swath through the rain, and just in time I braced myself against the battered tin dashboard and saved my head.

“Why, look,” I said, “they’re mostly women,” and all the gray tin doors flew open at once and we were accosting the women on Second Avenue and looking for trouble.

“Blew your buttons already, Chief?” I said, but he didn’t hear me.

And from deep in the crowd and choking herself with the bathrobe collar and shaking the bright rain in her long blonde hair and pulling the robe tight in the middle: “Hey, girls, the Navy’s here!” she said. But the bare throats were still—no laughter—and the robes and negligees were wet, the lips were wet, the eyes were full of something they had seen upstairs. No love. Mere sheep huddling away from death. Though the blonde pushed forward then and gave a tug on her bathrobe cord.

“What about you, Happiness?” she said. “What about you, Honey? ” But her eyes were full of another face, not mine, and something, I could tell, was wrong.

“All right,” I said. “Now tell me. Any sailors in trouble around here?”

And watching me, letting the rain run down her cheeks: “Upstairs,” she said.

“Thought so,” I said. “Well, Chief, lead the way.”

The entrance hall was dark and crooked and full of rotten vegetables, stray cats, one of the dark doorways off lower Second
Avenue and lean, improvident, brushed here and there with scum. And there were five flights of stairs. Five long flights. Already the chief and the other gray members of our shore patrol—three more pairs of gaiters, three hickory sticks—and even the women had passed me on the second landing when I stopped for breath. Already the chief and armed sailors and women sounded like dark dray horses in an abandoned warehouse overhead, and I was puffing up the stairs with my hand ready on the T-bone steak and my full heart beating slow time to the climb.

The top. Rain on a little window, rain among broken aerials, another dark corridor in one more house of crumbling skin and I waited—a foot on the last step, foot on the landing, forearm across the upraised thigh—and took a few slow breaths to quiet everything.

“What is it, Chief?” I called, and tried to loosen my tight gaiters.

Then I walked down the corridor, pushed through the women, and looked for myself. I pushed through, blood or no blood, and fell to my knees beside his body while my face began to tingle and my stomach started to boil up like the radiator of an overheated car. I looked at the body and I swayed, glanced once about the room. And at least Fernandez had found his hideaway, his true hideaway, at last. Peruvian face mask, a pair of black castanets, long white tasseled shawl like the one he had once given to his bride, these he had hung at interesting artistic angles on that sagging wall of skeletal white lath and flaking plaster. Another rain-refracted neon light flicked on and off through the window, lit up a portion of the wall and fell across me where I was kneeling close enough to touch him and to memorize forever each shattered line of that little corpse. There was a woven straw chair with an enormous high rounded back and gently curving arms and a solid basket bottom, and the assailants, murderers, whoever they were, had knocked it over, hacked away at it with some kind of sacrificial hatchet. And they had found his collection of old silver coins, had flung the old bright coins all about the room where they glowed like
blood money, old silver coins of honor, in the flickering cheap neon light. But no matter how destroyed, it was still his hideaway, I could see that: here on the top floor of the building of condemned lives, here he had gathered together his bric-a-brac—earthen jugs, horsehair switch, dried poppies in a little Chinese vase—here feathered the poor wrecked nest which I had found, stumbled into, invaded with my gaping shore patrol.

He was naked. Covered with blood. Yes, Fernandez lay on his back on the floor and his neck was fastened to the iron leg of the day bed with one of the strings of the smashed guitar. The murderers had jumped on the belly of his new guitar and smashed it. There was a white mountain-goat rug flung across the day bed but they had killed Fernandez on the hard bare floor. Stabbed, beaten, poked and prodded, but he was finally choked to death with the guitar string.

And the fingers. Yes, all five fingers of the left hand. All five. The clasp knife, the wine-dark pool, the fingers themselves, it was clear, too clear, what they had done and that the severed fingers were responsible for the spidery red lines scattered over everything. The wild tracings, the scene of blood—I touched him on the shoulder once and then I managed to reach the corridor and, while the blonde held me under the arm and cupped her wet hand on my forehead, I doubled over and let everything in my hot stomach boil up and out.

When I returned to the room I pried open the window and let the rain beat in. I remained standing on my feet and staring at the second body until the job was done. The other belonged to a sailor and was fully clothed in white bell-bottomed pants, crumpled white middy blouse. A big man face down. Hands buried beneath the face. Legs kicked far apart. Killed by the single driving blow of another clasp knife which they had left in his back.

“His name’s Harry,” the blonde said.

“Harry,” I said. “Poor Harry.”

And then all of her weight was on my arm, her voice suddenly tremulous, she was crying. She said she knew what had happened and wanted to tell me. So I righted the hatcheted straw
chair and made her sit down, held her cold hard hand and looked at Harry while the hand squeezed and the elbow shook and the voice talked on. She said that she had heard the noise upstairs and that there was nothing unusual about the noise, but that when the man came down and banged on her door, another sailor, she said, and as big as Harry, very much like Harry in fact, she told him she didn’t want to with anyone who had just been fighting, that she wasn’t going to give herself to anybody with a swelling eye and the blood still on his knuckles and running out of his nose. But she couldn’t help herself, she said, and it wasn’t bad, all things considered. So he waited until it was over and then while she was trying to do something with her hair and he, the sailor, was still breathing hard on her bed, why then he caught her eye and kept looking at her and told her all about it. He and a couple of others had killed a little fairy spic upstairs, that it was a game they had to let some fairy pick them up and then, when they were in the flophouse room, to pull out the knives….