Skinny Legs and All (34 page)

At first, Ellen Cherry surmised it to be a spillover from the earlier demonstration at the UN building down the street, but as she drew nearer, she saw that the crowd was gathered passively about two lone men lying on the sidewalk in separate echo circles of blood. One of the men, who was being covered with a sheet, was Sylvester, a security guard in the restaurant’s employ. The other, attended by medics, was Spike Cohen.

Ellen Cherry dropped the doggie bag on the pavement (within minutes, the bag—Spoon and all—was cordoned off by police, and the NYPD bomb squad was on its way to investigate it). She pushed her way to Spike and fell on her knees at his side. Blood was spurting from his head like rotgut from a wineskin. His eyes were wide, and he gasped as if trying to swallow all the air in the world.

Her stalled heart began to thump again when she realized that he was alive. But at that same hopeful moment, a voice of premonition rang in her ears. She didn’t know from where it came or whose voice it was. It startled her to the extent that she stood up halfway and looked around. The voice said, “Boomer Petway won’t be coming home from Jerusalem.”

Why not? And what did that have to do with what was going on here?

She felt Abu’s hand on her shoulder.

She overheard a snatch of song from an unseen boom box:

My heart is a Third World country

And your love is a tourist from Switzerland

She had never heard it before, yet it was eerily familiar. (A day would come when she would recognize it as Raoul Ritz’s first recording.)

When she returned her attention to Spike, she fully expected him to be dead. However, the medics had capped the spurt, and there was a kind of weak grin on his face. From his vantage point down on the blood-warmed cement, he could inspect at his leisure every shoe in the crowd.

THE COLD SPELL
snapped in mid-December. Christmas shoppers went about in their shirt-sleeves. Poinsettias could have grown along Fifth Avenue, the days were so balmy and grand. The waxing moon was a winter moon, typically high and pasty, but the nights in which it swelled were as mild as baby oil. By Christmas Eve, the moon was full. It rolled in the sky like a spook wheel, a hoop of grainy ghost cheese. Despite the fact that it was the brighter of the two, the Christmas star kept its distance from that moon.

Midnight mass at St. Patrick’s drew a capacity crowd. The archbishop spoke in a long-dead language about a long-dead carpenter. Nevertheless, an air of solemn gaiety prevailed. Down in the subbasement, the choir barely audible to them, the inanimates lounged in the moonlight that streamed through the grate.

“It’s a crying shame little Spoonzie ain’t here,” said Dirty Sock. “She’d enjoy the puddin’ outta these carols and hymns.”

“Indeed, she would,” Can o’ Beans agreed. “Indeed, she would. Personally, I prefer carols to rap tunes, but not by a wide margin. The carol radiates hope, the rap radiates aggression, but both are rooted in humanity’s overwhelming feeling of helplessness.”

“Stow it, perfesser. Give us a friggin’ break. It’s Christmas Eve!”

“And what might that occasion have to do with you, my polyester pal?”

In an attempt to head off a tiff, Conch Shell treated the can and the sock to a description of the winter festivals that had been held at that time of year on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Evidently, the service under way upstairs was rather pale in comparison, although even Painted Stick, taking time out from his contemplation of that point where the beam of the moon intersected light from the star, had to admit that the pipe organ provided musical possibilities unimagined by drum or tambourine.

“Music has changed,” said Painted Stick. “But the star in the East is the same.”

Outside, in the newspaper delivery trucks that were making their early rounds, the headlines read: “Troops Ring Bethlehem as Tense Pilgrims Flock.”

And in the men’s toilet at Isaac & Ishmael’s restaurant, over on United Nations Plaza, Verlin Charles stared through a tiny window at the Christmas star as he stood with his hand on his fly.

Verlin and Patsy had expected Ellen Cherry home for Thanksgiving, but she stood them up. At the last minute, she realized that she couldn’t face the prospect of looking down the long oak table at a roast turkey, what with Boomer not yet back from Jerusalem. Her parents were disappointed but accepted her promise to spend Christmas in Colonial Pines. When Boomer’s return was further delayed, she had backed out on Christmas as well.

“Fine and dandy,” said Patsy. “If she won’t come to us, we’ll go to her.”

“Hold your horses, woman,” said Verlin. “Are you talkin’ New York City? Christmas? Us?”

“All of the above. It’ll be family. And it’ll be romantic.”

“It’ll be a blessed nightmare. Of all the places to have Christmas . . .”

“Bud’ll be there.”

“I don’t care.”

“And I’ll be there.”

Verlin sputtered. He could tell that she was serious. Dad blast it! She had him over a barrel. He could celebrate the holiday alone—alone!—in Colonial Pines, or celebrate it with conniving wife and errant daughter in a hellish heathen cesspool where their lives wouldn’t be worth two cents, not even on Jesus’ birthday. And no telling how much postseason football he’d miss.

Now, on Christmas Eve, his bladder falling all over itself in its eagerness to expel the glass of Jewish wine that he had consumed just to be polite, Verlin stood at the urinal in a restaurant that could be blown sky-high at any second, afraid to pull the zipper and expose his tremulous member to the diseases that common sense told him would be lying in wait, grinning like skulls, smirking like queers, in a squalid place such as this.

When he glimpsed the star through the dirty little window above his head, he took momentary heart. Reminding himself that the love and protection of the Christ Child was everywhere, even in this sitting target on this terrible night, he grabbed hold of Baby Jesus’ coattails and rode them to a calmer state of mind. Standing as far back from the urinal as the trajectory of his stream would allow, he went cautiously about his business, convinced that within the hour the worst Christmas Eve of his life would be over and he and Patsy would be nestled all snug in their bed in the comparative safety of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

No sense acting sissy about this
, he thought. He sighed and permitted his sphincter to uncoil. At that instant, however, the star disappeared, obscured by a strange face pressed suddenly against the windowpane, a dark Semitic face that glowered maliciously beneath a tattered white headdress. Verlin stepped backward, spraying a bamboo wall with his water. “Terrorist!” he screamed, and then fainted dead away.

Nobody heard Verlin’s cry. Roland Abu Hadee and his wife, Nabila, were in the kitchen, the one washing dinner dishes, the other preparing coffee and dessert. At a dining room table, Patsy and Ellen Cherry were lost in conversation, this being their first opportunity to speak in private. Their day had been given over to shopping, Verlin and his credit cards in tow, and after baths and naps in their respective quarters, the long dinner party had begun.

The dinner celebration had more excuses than Buddy Winkler had boils. For openers, Christmas and Hanukkah were upon the land. Then, there was the occasion of it being Verlin and Patsy’s first visit to New York. Next, there was the recently received letter from the chief of police that granted the I & I the right to reopen for business; it had been ordered closed following the drive-by shootings in November. Last but not least, Spike Cohen had been released from the hospital on the previous day. It was expected, in fact, that Spike would join them at some point during dinner. He had been scheduled to spend the early half of the evening at a Hanukkah observance with his son, then catch a taxi to the I & I. However, midnight had arrived, and Spike had not. The consensus was that the Hanukkah fete must have worn him out and he’d been put to bed. They hoped he hadn’t hurt himself.

Spike’s shooting, in particular, and violence, in general, had dominated dinner conversation—Verlin was full of paranoid questions, to which Abu supplied philosophical replies—but now that mother and daughter were alone, the subject shifted quickly to romance.

“Okay,” said Ellen Cherry, “this is Boomer’s first letter.” She removed a page or two of childish pencil scrawls from a flimsy air-mail envelope. “He’s talking mostly about Jerusalem. He says here, ’It’s a city built upon cities, with one yet to come, the final one, as Buddy claims, the New Jerusalem. Jerusalem throws you from one culture into another and back again. You’ve got throbbing cultures bumping into each other on every corner. Israel has got the best people and the worst people in the world. Tough cowboy lunatics toting Uzis, wall-to-wall fanatics of many persuasions. Folks so sweet and compassionate they make you want to cry, and folks that’s got that mean streak that seems to always run through those with a narrow focus.’

“He goes on to say, ’At first glance, you’d swear folks here are living very close to the earth, which I like, but somehow they aren’t really attached to the earth, even when they work it. In their minds and hearts, they’re up in the sky somewheres. Buddy claims that one day soon Jerusalem is going to rise into the heavens. If you ask me, the whole damn city lives up in the clouds already.’

“Let’s see. . . . Well, he goes on like that for a while. Then he talks about how good the museum project is going. And right here he throws me a crumb about how much he’s looking forward to us getting together. Although now, he says, it might not be until after Thanksgiving. That’s it. That’s the first letter.” Ellen Cherry looked to her mother for a reaction, but Patsy just smiled and shrugged.

“All right, then. This is the next one.” She opened a second envelope. “Mama, wouldn’t you like another quick glass of wine? Daddy won’t know.”

“Lord, no, honey. I’m not used to alcohol. It’d make me plumb silly.”

“Suit yourself. Anyway, this one begins, ’Dear Sugar Booger.’ Have you ever? I mean, who else but Boomer Petway? ’Dear Sugar Booger. The craziness of this place has put me under a spell. At times it fascinates me, and at times it makes me want to puke. One minute you’re feeling inspired and pure and the next you’re feeling like you laid down in shit. And it’s all because Jerusalem is so all-fired
holy
. Looks to me like living in a sacred town can make folks extra ugly and hateful just as easy as making them extra nice. Some of the religious types here are downright scary. There’s something scary about Jerusalem, on the whole, as beautiful as it is, and you remember how I react to things that scare me. I have to deal with them.’

“Yeah, well, I’ll comment on that later. I’m going to skip some stuff here because Daddy’ll be back in a second, and besides, Boomer’s handwriting is a trial. He goes on to say that he met an Israeli sculptor whose work is included in the museum show, the same show that Boomer’s in, and that this sculptor lives on a kibbutz right outside Jerusalem, a kind of kibbutz for artists, where there’s a foundry and a metal fabrication shop, and that they’re really hurting for an expert welder, because the one they had got called back into the army. Naturally, ol’ Boomer volunteered to lend a hand.”

“Well, that was right charitable of him.”

“Maybe. In case you didn’t notice, he neglected to mention whether his sculptor friend was male or female.”

“Oh, honey!”

“Okay, so I’m being silly. But listen to this. ’Helping out on the kibbutz’—he spells it
k-e-b-o-o-t-s
—’will delay my getting back to New York for a month or two, but it was fixing to get delayed anyhow. Buddy wired me a considerable amount of money a couple of days ago and asked me to do him a favor and stay on in Jerusalem for a bit as he had a secret mission he wanted to assign me to.’”

Ellen Cherry slammed down the letter on her bamboo place mat. “Now what do you suppose that’s all about?”

“I wouldn’t have a notion in this world,” Patsy said. “Bud’s always jawing about how him and his Jews are gonna get Armageddon rolling, but, Lord, I don’t know. I’ll certainly ask him when we see him tomorrow.”

“Uncle Buddy is manipulating Boomer. He knows just how to do it. ’Secret mission’! Boomer’s a sucker for that ’secret mission’ baloney.”

“Yes, he likes his spy stories.”

“Anyhow, mama, what do you think? He indicates he wants to stay and ’deal’ with Jerusalem because he has to come to terms with the things in life that frighten him; which, I admit, are precious few. But he’s deceiving himself if that’s his reason, because, I assure you, coming back to New York and dealing with me and Ultima Sommervell and his new big art career is what he’s really afraid of. It’s scaring his britches off.”

With her Miami-pink nails—Verlin had fumed and called her “Jezebel” when she painted them prior to dinner—Patsy scratched at the yellow stains that
tahini
had left on the tablecloth. “If you ask me, and you did ask me, please remember, Boomer’s problem is mainly this: he loves you but he doesn’t like you. He likes that Ultima woman but he doesn’t love her. And he feels like a fake as an artist. The boy’s so blessed confused he probably fits right in in the Middle East.”

“All artists feel like imposters, except maybe the ones who really are. Even I used to, sometimes. Nowadays, I feel like I’m posing as a waitress, which is less of an offense. Anyway . . . mama, do you really think Boomer doesn’t like me?”

Before Patsy could respond, the kitchen door was flung violently open, and out rushed Roland Abu Hadee, followed by an agitated man in a white headdress.

“Cherry!” shouted Abu. “Do you know the location of your father? Spike saw a man collapse on the toilet floor.”

“Mr. Cohen?! What?!”

The whole party rushed to the men’s room. They found Verlin on his feet again, although ashen and dazed; his fly open to the four winds, the seven seas, the twelve apostles, and ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall.