The Animal Hour (29 page)

“Bang! Bang!”

The train's lights beat down on her from the right. Her peripheral vision was wiped out by the glare. The deep, black bore of the gun swallowed the rest of her sight, and all her thoughts, every thought but of the instant death in there, the coming flash of fire. She breathed hoarsely. Stood frozen in that black thought. The man on the platform kept waving the gun. Nancy's mouth opened. She put her hands up.

“Put your hands up!” the man screamed.

She put her hands up higher. She felt the ground bouncing under her feet. The rail hot with vibrations against her heel. Her body had turned to liquid, her will was empty air. She couldn't move. She stared, her whole heart pleading.

“Bang!” The man waved the gun in her eyes. He leaned down at her so that his face caught the glare of the train. It was an intelligent, cultivated face. Sandy-haired, sad-eyed, full-lipped. Etched with a grin of inner agony. “I know who you are!” he shouted—and he really had to shout now. The roar of the train seemed to be expanding, filling the place. The light was blinding. The wind blew Nancy's hair across her wide eyes, her open mouth. “FBI!” the man screamed. “Extraterrestrial FBI! Trying to get into my brain, aren't you? Trying to take over my brain! EXTRATERRESTRIAL MOTHERFUCKERS EVERYWHERE! You can't fool me, you federal space fucker!”

Nancy stared.

He's experiencing an episode of schizophrenia
…

The madman took another step toward her. She whimpered and leaned away from that deep black bore. He jabbed it toward her nose, about a foot above her nose. She could see all the way into it, into the dark of it, and everything else was white and roaring. The train shrieked—its horn stabbed her ear—a wild animal shriek of warning.

“Please!” she screamed.

“I know who you are, you federal fucker!” She felt the barrel pressing down at her. She felt the heat of it. It was ready to explode.

“Die!” he shouted and the train's horn shrieked again.

Nancy's hand shot out—her right hand—slapping the man's gun arm away to the side. He pulled the trigger. Nancy screamed once more as the pistol snapped into the shivering thunder. Flame and smoke blew from the barrel into the white glare. But she had already dodged away from it. She did not know—could not think—what she was doing, but she had dodged to the right and toward the platform. She had seized the madman's wrist in her left hand. She was spinning in the small space with her right hand balled into a fist. The train was an avalanche of noise and light, filling everything, moments away.

She yanked hard at the madman's arm. Yanked him down with her left hand and slugged him in the jaw with her right. Too crazed for pain, she still felt the shock in her elbow and shoulder. Felt her knuckles popping against his gristly chin. The pull and the blow brought the madman over the platform's edge. Screaming, he fell, arms pinwheeling …

Daddy?

Down into the white light. Down onto the track. She gaped at him, horrified, as the massive silver front of the engine ramrodded toward them both. The crazy man lay pinned to the track in the icy white light. There was no time even for him to look afraid. He just stared up into the light in dull amazement. And Nancy had no time to help him. She had to get up on the platform, or under it. She had to get out of the way or she'd be crushed between steel and concrete.

The crazy man lifted his arm before his face as the train rushed at him.

Murderer! Murderer!
Nancy thought.

And she leapt onto the track. She straddled the madman. Grabbed his shirtfront and hauled up on him. He was too big, too heavy for her. He wouldn't budge. The train ploughed at them. She felt it at her back. She felt her ears would burst from the thunder, the insane harpie shrieking of the horn. The crazy man stared stupidly past her at the train. He still had his arm up for protection.

Nancy shouted. She hauled him up. She dragged him to one side, over the rail, off the tracks. She tossed him under the platform as if he were a doll. Threw herself after him, on top of him. Clung to him as the lights flashed past her, as the knife-sharp wheels of the train churned past her over the tracks at a distance of inches. She clung to the madman and sucked in his sour smell, the smell of his urine and filth, and the electric smoke of the train. The engine flashed by and then a car and then another and another, flash, flash, flash. The train howled once more, as if in triumph. And then it was rattling away, the thunder fading, the dark returning. It was past them. It was gone. The clatter retreated. Faded away.

In the sudden quiet, Nancy groaned. She leaned over the side of her crazy pal and vomited. A thin green gruel burned out over her teeth.

“Eagh,” the crazy man muttered. “How humiliating.” “Shut up,” said Nancy. She rolled off him onto the ground. Rolled over onto her back, her arm flung out over the ties. Her fingers brushed the handle of the gun, which lay discarded now at the center of the tracks. She stared up stupidly into the darkness above her. “Just shut the fuck up,” she whispered hoarsely.

T
wenty to five.

Perkins stood at the marble balustrade overlooking the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal. He felt harassed by the time.

He was at the café on the balcony. Hemmed in by suits at either shoulder, men and women drinking at the tables around him and the bar behind him. He leaned over the balustrade, gripping a mug of Sam Adams beer.

Below, on the floor of the huge concourse, streams of commuters flowed in all directions. They flowed into the concourse from the long hallways on every side, and out through the marble archways that led to the tracks. Under the vast cerulean vault above, where the zodiac was painted on assbackward with weak light bulbs twinkling here and there for stars, the people swirled and intertwisted. They eddied and turned around the information kiosk at the center of the place.

The kiosk was a brass gazebo with an archaic clock atop it. The hands on the clock read twenty to five. Perkins sipped the foam off his beer.

He should've gone home, he thought. He should've gone back to check on Zach. The dread was climbing into his throat, almost nausea now. It was getting harder and harder to think. He should've just headed the fuck on home.

But what then? What could he do then besides stand by and watch while Zach turned himself in? While Mulligan and the feds tore him limb from limb?

The lacy black hands on the clock atop the gazebo swept around slowly. Four forty-five. A whirr of wordless voices rose up steadily toward the backward stars. He thought about Tiffany. He thought about finding her, questioning her about the body in the mews, about the photograph of her with Fernando Woodlawn. He had phoned her mother's house in Scarsdale, but there was no answer. He had decided to come here to wait for the 5:02, the train she had marked on the schedule. He had come reluctantly. He kept telling himself that he ought to go home.

The man in the information kiosk had told him that the train would come in on track 28. Perkins could see the number painted over one of the marble archways below. He watched the arch and sipped his beer. He hoped the beer would cut through the gel of dread that clogged him now from belly to brain. But no, it was going to take a lot more beers than one to do that. He drank more deeply. He thought about Tiffany. He shuddered. Grimaced on the streaming rush below.

He remembered the first time he had seen her. She was already living with Zach by then. Oliver had never even heard of her and then one day he went to visit Zach at home and she was just there, just living with him. They had met at the Pennsylvania retreat apparently. The Christian place Ollie had yanked Zach out of after his second crack-up. She had stayed on there alone for a while after Zach left. But apparently she missed her snookum's mystic brilliance. She had to be with him.

“He was operating about three astro-levels above everyone else there,” she explained to Ollie, when he met her. “That's why his aura got so clouded over. It was the effort of trying to shine through their misunderstandings.”

“Yeah,” Oliver said. “Yeah, that must've been it.”

Zach and Tiff had looped their arms over each other and beamed at him. Two cosmic goofballs in love.

Perkins shook his head as he remembered. Even the thought of her made his tongue go sour. The thought of her treacherous, deep, doe eyes. He glanced up a moment at the stars painted on the ceiling. The April constellations rolling eastward into winter. She believed in astrology. She believed that dreams were messages from God. She believed that Jesus had a white aura because Mary had conceived from the divine energy radiated by the star of Bethlehem. “You know,” she told him once, “it's just so hard for me to get it into my head that you're actually Zach's brother.” She had that Venus face, that voice like music. She tilted her head at him when she spoke. “I mean, his astro-level is so high, you know, his aura is so pure and he understands so much and, I mean, you …”

Perkins snorted. He tilted back his mug and let the beer ripple into him. The suit standing on his right had moved off toward the bar. Now, when he set his mug down on the balustrade, he saw a woman in a green dress seated at one of the café tables nearby. She had one leg crossed over her knee, the black shoe swinging out and back, out and back. She was sipping a soda water and lime. She looked up at Perkins and he looked away. He scanned the concourse grimly. Leaned against the flat cold stone and gazed down at the steadily rising flood of rushing people under the man-made heavens. The hands on the kiosk clock had moved closer to five.

You don't understand anything, Oliver, not anything.
That's what Tiffany had said to him. That night. That night a year ago. It made his guts curdle to remember it, and he detested her and he detested himself and he was sick of it. Full of dread and sick of it.
You don't understand anything.

This time, when he glanced down, the woman in the green dress held his gaze. She considered him; she let her lips soften. Perkins had the almost overwhelming urge to hurl himself onto his knees before her. Wrap his arms around her, bury his nose in her groin. Nuzzle her like a puppy dog, sniffing for sex and comfort and a little respite from his loneliness.

Probably unwise, he thought, all in all. He offered her a sad smile, then turned back to the balustrade, back to the view below.

The hands on the kiosk clock touched five.

That night, he thought. That night when he had found Zachie drugged out of his mind. Lying on the floor of the mews bedroom, mumbling about the goddamned teacup and brotherly love. Where was Tiffany then with her fucking astro-levels? She should have taken care of him a little bit. She should have opened her eyes and seen what was happening to him. No. She showed herself that night. She showed herself in her true colors …

He grimaced again, an expression of pain. His stomach was sour and his heart was lead. He thought of this afternoon: finding Zach at his apartment; Zach and him together. When they'd been kidding around, laughing like that—it was the first time since he could remember that his loneliness had lifted a little. That pall of loneliness.

Jesus Christ
, he thought.
Jesus Christ, what have we done?

Just then, out of the corner of his eye, he caught the movement at track 28. He turned and saw the staggered flow of commuters break through the marble archway, spread out across the grand concourse. He straightened. His eyes picked over each person who stepped under the arch, followed each figure as it entered the surrounding currents. The flow through the archway stalled a second, then began again in a fresh gout.

And Perkins reared up at the balustrade, stunned for a second by what he saw.

Out through the arch, there had come a small, slim figure. Its head was bowed, its face obscured by the brim of an oversized baseball cap. But he recognized the outfit right away. That crazy quilt shirt, the coat of many colors: How could he miss it? The jeans, torn at the knees. The red canvas bag the figure was carrying …

“What the hell?” he said. “Zachie?”

The figure moved across the concourse toward a corridor of lighted food concessions. There was a subway entrance there, just across from a magazine stand. As the figure moved to the center of the concourse, it turned. Looked up at the information kiosk, at the antique clock that now read 5:09.

Perkins saw the profile in that moment, and said nothing. His lips parted and the air came out of him silently.

The figure hurried on across the concourse toward the subways. And it was not Zach. It was Tiffany.