Six Stories (8 page)

Thinking this brings back his morning jitters, his feeling of being a snake between skins. The fear that he has been photographed taking a bribe will hold Wheelock for a while, but if he is angry enough, there is no predicting what he may do. And that is scary.

‘God love you, soldier,’ says a voice out of the darkness. ‘I wish I could do a few bucks more.’

‘Not necessary, sir,’ Blind Willie says, but his mind is still on Jasper Wheelock, who smells of cheap cologne and talked to a priest about the blind man with the sign, the blind man who is not, Wheelock thinks, blind at all. What had he said? You’re going to hell, see how many handouts you get down there. ‘Have a very merry Christmas, sir, thank you for helping me.’

And the day goes on.

4:25 P.M.

His sight has started to resurface - dim, distant, but there. It is his cue to pack up and go.

He kneels, back ramrod stiff, and lays his cane behind the case again. He bands the last of the bills, dumps them and the last coins into the bottom of the case one more time, then puts the tinsel-decorated sign inside. He latches the case and stands up, holding his cane in the other hand. Now the case is heavy, dragging at his arm with the dead-weight of well-meant metal. There is a heavy rattling crunch as the coins avalanche into a new position, and then they are as still as ore plugged deep in the ground..

He sets off down Fifth, dangling the case at the end of his left arm like an anchor (after all these years he’s used to the weight of it, could carry it much further than he’ll need to this afternoon, if circumstances demanded), holding the cane in his right hand and tapping it delicately on the paving in front of him. The cane is magic, opening a pocket of empty space before him on the crowded, jostling sidewalk in a teardrop shaped wave. By the time he gets to Fifth and Forty-third, he can actually see this space. He can also see the DON’T WALK sign at Forty-second stop flashing and hold solid, but he keeps walking anyway, letting a well-dressed man with long hair and gold chains reach out and grasp his shoulder to stop him.

‘Watch it, big fella,’ the longhair says. ‘Traffic in a sec.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Blind Willie says.

‘Don’t mention it - merry Christmas.’

Blind Willie crosses, goes down two more blocks, then turns toward Broadway. No one accosts him; no one has loitered, watching him collect all day long, and then followed, waiting for the opportunity to bag the case and run (not that many thieves could run with it, not this case). Once, back in the summer of ‘91, two or three young guys, maybe black (he couldn’t say for sure; they sounded black, but his vision had been slow coming back that day, it was always slower in warm weather, when the days stayed bright longer), had accosted him and began talking to him in a way he didn’t quite like. It wasn’t like the kids this afternoon, with their jokes about reading the waffle iron and what does a Playboy centerfold look like in braille. It was softer than that, and in some weird fashion almost kind - questions about how much he took in by St. Pat’s back there, and would he perchance be generous enough to make a contribution to something called the Polo Recreational League and did he want a little protection getting to his bus stop or train station or whatever. One, perhaps a budding sexologist, had asked if he liked a little young pussy once in a while. ‘It pep you up,’ the voice on his left said softly, almost longingly. ‘Yessir, you must believe that shit.’

He had felt the way he imagined a mouse must feel when the cat is still just pawing at it, claws not out yet, curious about what the mouse will do, and how fast it can run, and what sorts of noises it will make as its terror grows. Blind Willie had not been terrified, however. He is never terrified. That is his advantage, and it had been their mistake. He had simply raised his voice, speaking as a man might speak to a large room filled with old friends. ‘Say!’ he had exclaimed to the shadowy phantoms all around him on the sidewalk. ‘Say, does anyone see a policeman? I believe these young fellow here mean to take me off.’ And that did it, easy as pulling a segment off a peeled orange; the fellows who had been bracketing him were suddenly gone like a cool breeze.

He only wishes he could solve the problem of Officer Wheelock that easily.

4:40 P.M.

The Sheraton Gotham, at Fortieth and Broadway, is one of the largest first-class hotels in the world, and in the cave of its lobby thousands of people school back and forth beneath the gigantic chandelier. They chase their pleasures here, and dig their treasures there, oblivious of the Christmas music flowing from the speakers, of the chatter from three different restaurants and five bars, of the scenic elevators sliding up and down in their notched shafts like pistons powering some exotic glass engine … and of the blind man who taps among the, working his way toward a public men’s room almost the size of a subway station. He walks with the sticker on the case turned inward now, and he is as anonymous as a blind man can be. In this city, that’s very anonymous.

Still, he thinks as he enters one of the stalls and takes off his jacket turning it inside-out as he does so, how is it that in all these years no one has ever followed me? No one has ever noticed that the blind man who goes in and the sighted man who comes out are the same size, and carrying the same case?

Well, in New York, hardly anyone notices anything that isn’t his or her own business - in their own way, they are all as blind as Blind Willie. Out of their offices, flooding down the sidewalks, thronging in the subway stations and cheap restaurants, there is something both repulsive and sad about them; they are like nests of moles turned up by a farmer’s harrow. He has seen this blindness over and over again, and he knows that this is one reason for his success … but surely not the only reason. They are not all moles, and he has been rolling the dice for a long time now. He takes precautions, of course he does, many of them, but there are still those moments (like now, sitting here with his pants down, unscrewing the white cane and stowing it back in his case) when he would be easy to catch, easy to rob … easy to expose. Wheelock is right about the Post; they would love him. The News would too. They would hang him higher than Haman, higher than O.J. Simpson. They would never understand, never even want to understand, or hear his side of it. What side?

He leaves the stall, leaves the bathroom, leaves the echoing confusion of the Sheraton Gotham, and no one walks up to him and says, ‘Excuse me, sir, but weren’t you just blind?’ No one looks at him twice as he walks out into the street, carrying the bulky case as if it weighed twenty pounds instead of a hundred. It has started to snow.

He walks slowly, Willie Teale again now, switching the case frequently from hand to hand, just one more tired guy at the end of the day. He continues to think about his inexplicable success as he goes. There’s a verse from the Book of Matthew which he has committed to memory. They be blind leaders of the blind, it goes. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch. Then there’s the old saw that says that in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Is he the one-eyed man? Has that been the secret of his success all these years?

He doesn’t think so. In his heart of hearts he believes he has been protected. Not by God, exactly (he doesn’t think he quite believes in God, certainly not the one advertised by the church in front of which he stands most days), but maybe by some half-sentient force that has always seen him as Blind Willie. Fate, you could call it that if you liked, or you could call it a higher power - Generic Brand God - as the alkies do. Or maybe it’s only blind justice, balancing her scales. Most likely it doesn’t matter. All he knows for sure is that he has never been caught or taken off.

Of course, there has never been a Jasper Wheelock in his life, either..

Maybe I ought to follow you some night, Officer Wheelock whispers in his ear as Willie shifts the increasingly heavy case from one hand to the other. Both arms ache now; he will be glad to reach his building. See what you do. See who you turn into.

What, exactly, was he going to do about Officer Wheelock? What could he do?

He doesn’t know.

5:15 P.M.

The young panhandler in the dirty red sweatshirt is long gone. His place taken by yet another streetcorner Santa. Willie has no trouble recognizing the tubby young fellow currently dropping a dollar into Santa’s pot.

‘Hey, Ralphie!’ he cries.

Ralph Williamson turns, and his face lights up when he sees Willie, and he raises one gloved hand. It’s snowing harder now; with the bright lights around him and Santa Claus beside him, Ralph looks suspiciously like the central figure in a holiday greeting card. Or maybe a modern-day Bob Cratchet.

‘Hey, Willie! How’s it goin?’

‘Goin like a house afire,’ he says, approaching the other man with an easy grin on his face. He sets his case down with a grunt, feels in his pants pocket, and finds a buck for Santa’s pot. Probably just another crook, and he looks like shit, but what the hell.

‘What you got in there?’ Ralph asks, looking down at Willie’s case as he fiddles with his scarf. ‘Sounds like you busted open some little kid’s piggy bank.’

‘Nah, just heating coils,’ Willie says. ”Bout a damn thousand of ‘em.’

‘You working right up until Christmas?’

‘Yeah,’ he says, and suddenly knows what he is going to do about Wheelock. Not how, not yet, but that’s okay; how is just a technicality. What is where the creative work is done. There’s no burst of revelation, no feeling of eureka; it is as if part of him knew all along. He supposes part of him did. ‘Yeah, right up until Christmas. No rest for the wicked, you know.’

Ralph’s wide and pleasant face creases in a smile. ‘I doubt if you’re very wicked, though.’

Willie smiles back. ‘You don’t know what evil lurks in the heart of the heatin-n-coolin man, that’s all. I’ll probably take a few days off after Christmas, though. I’m thinking that might be a really good idea.’

‘Go south?’

‘South?’ Willie looks startled, then laughs. ‘Oh, no,’ he says. ‘Not this kid. Plenty to do around my house, you know. A person’s got to keep their house in order, Ralphie. Else it might just come down around their ears some day.’

‘I suppose.’ Ralph bundles the scarf higher around his ears. ‘See you tomorrow?’

‘You bet,’ Willie says and holds out his gloved hand. ‘Gimme five.’

Ralphie gives him five, then turns his hand over. His smile is shy but eager. ‘Give me ten, Willie.’

Willie gives him ten. ‘How good is that, Ralphie-baby?’

The man’s shy smile becomes a gleeful boy’s grin. ‘So goddamn good I gotta do it again!’ he cries, and slaps Willie’s hand with real authority.

Willie laughs. ‘You the man, Ralph.’

‘You the man, too, Willie,’ Ralph replies, speaking with a prissy earnestness that’s really sort of funny. ‘Merry Christmas.’

‘Right back atcha.’

He stands where he is for a moment, watching Ralph trudge off into the snow. Beside him, the streetcorner Santa rings his bell monotonously. Willie picks up his case and starts for the door of his building. Then something catches his eye, and he pauses.

‘Your beard’s on crooked,’ he says to the Santa. ‘If you want people to believe in you, fix your goddamn beard.’

He goes inside.

5:25 P.M.

There’s a big carton in the storage annex of Midtown Heating and Cooling. It is full of the cloth bags, the sort banks use to hold loose coins. Such bags usually have various banks’ names printed on them, but these don’t - Willie orders them direct from the company in Moundsville, West Virginia, that makes them.

He opens the case, quickly sets aside the rolls of bills (these he will carry home in his Mark Cross briefcase), then fills four bags with coins. In a far corner of the storage room is a battered old metal cabinet simply marked PARTS. Willie swings it open - there is no lock to contend with - and reveals another two or three hundred coin-stuffed bags. A dozen times a year he and Sharon tour the midtown churches, pushing these bags through the contribution slots where they will fit, simply leaving them by the door where they won’t. The lion’s share always goes to St. Pat’s, the vast church in front of which Blind Willie can be found most days, wearing his dark glasses and his sign.

But not every day, he thinks, I don’t have to be there every day, and he thinks again that maybe both Blind Willie and Willie Teale will take the week after Christmas off. There might be work for Bill, though, and why not? Bill has it easy, as a rule. He wakes up to the clock radio, shaves, dresses, goes into the city … and then disappears until it’s time to go home. Maybe it’s time for Bill to do a little work, pitch in and do his share. There is stuff he could do in the week or so before New Year’s Ever, when he and Sharon will once more tour the churches, leaving off the coins that are too bulky and troublesome to deal with.

I ought to follow you some night … see what you do. Who you turn into.

But maybe, he thinks, taking off Willie and putting on Bill (Paul Stuart, J. Press, Mark Cross, Sulka, Bally), maybe it’s I who ought to follow you Officer Wheelock. The part of me you’d never recognize in a million years, any more than Ralph Williamson would recognize Bill … or Blind Willie, for that matter. Maybe Bill needs to follow you, see what you do, who you turn into when you go home and take off your day along with your uniform.

Yes, I could do that, Bill thinks. He’s used cold cream to remove his makeup and now steps carefully through the trap door and finds his footing on top of the stepladder. He takes the handle of his briefcase and pulls it through. He descends to the third step, then lowers the trap door into place and slides the ceiling panel back where it belongs. Yes, I could to that very easily. And …

Well, accidents sometimes happen. Sad but true. Even to big, brave fellows like Jasper the Police-Smurf, accidents sometimes happen.

‘Do you hear what I hear,’ he sings softly as he folds the stepladder and puts it back, ‘do you smell what I smell, do you taste what I taste?’

Five minutes later he closes the door of Western States Land Analysts firmly behind him and triple locks it. Then he goes down the hallway. When the elevator comes and he steps in, he thinks, Eggnog. Don’t forget. The Allens and the Dubrays.