The Night Marchers and Other Strange Tales (23 page)

Without the noise of the city, without my ringing phone and the bombardment of ideas from billboards and TV I notice that the world is a quiet place. I sense their absence. The open road has opened someplace in my mind. 

Dworkin’s chords echo off the mesa. I wonder if I could ever convince Jamie to come here with me. I wonder what my grandmother would have looked like had she lived till a ripe old age. Would my family still be in Europe if it weren’t for the war? If so, what would have become of me? 

Someone is sitting on a big rock at the foot of the mesa. I close the distance and realize it is a thick cactus—its spiky arms emulating a rag-doll human shape in the shadows and moon-glow.  

Then I see her. The German Girl. She’s on a plateau just up the slope. She’s wearing the same white shirt and shorts. Not a speck of red dust anywhere. Her legs are crossed and she’s leaning back on her arms. She’s as motionless as the cactus. 

I feel myself get excited. Then I stumble. My vision wavers and threatens to go black. I should have brought more water. 

I climb the slope and park myself next to her on the rock. With the change of vantage I can see the maze of cactus and rock. The nighttime city. 

The moon-glow has smoothed over her scar. The tiny lines around her eyes are gone. I want to hear her talk. Hear her accent. 

“What are you thinking,” I say, to get her talking.  

She shakes her head no and places her finger over her lips. The movement is meticulous and as fluid as an ant cleaning its mandibles. Her breasts are fuller than I remembered this afternoon. Her legs longer. Smoother. There’s not a drop of sand on her. 

That sense of proximity to primal-oldness fills me and like that I realize she’s not the German girl. I try to scoot away but I am frozen. It looks just like her, whatever the fuck it is. It’s pretty blond-haired head slowly turns, fluidly, not a drop of movement from the rest of her. 

Am I talking to myself? Am I like my grandmother? Mad and talking to things no one else can see? 

Green numbers appear on her moon-white skin. The arm becomes Jamie’s and now it is Jamie sitting next to me. She’s caressing her gun as if it were a lover’s hand. 

“No, you’re not crazy,” the Jamie-thing says. “What’s crazy about wanting to make them suffer? Don’t you want to kill them all?” 

Dworkin’s chords erupt into an obscene grinding riff. The moon is just above the mesa top. A perfect round companion to its unyielding square-topped form. 

Now I see my grandmother. The smell of her is too real. Mothballs and bleach and stale fish and sweat and drool. 

“I’m tired of this,” I say. “I want to stop fighting.”  

“So stop,” it says. It doesn’t sound like my grandmother at all. It sounds like some bird from the zoo that has learned how to talk. Her mouth is black and inside something glows like a far away star. Thorny spines poke from her flesh. 

Her skin shines like a scorpion’s in the moonlight. She takes my hand. Her grip is stronger than I expect. She pulls me to her kiss and tastes bitter, like fried cactus. My heart races and I think I am going to be swallowed and die, my bones left to be covered by the sand. But I can’t stop kissing it and as I do I’m filled with the oddest notion that a scorpion isn’t evil. It just is. It stings and kills because it is its nature. I wonder if what Jamie does is
her
nature. And if what she wants me to do, and why I have come here tonight is mine. No it’s just a justification. It’s all wrong. Nothing changes that. Then I remember Mr. Yiskil and I break away.  

“I’m here with Mr. Yiskil,” I say. “I have his permission.” 

It smiles. Then I am sitting alone. Just the thorny rag-doll cactus next to me. 

I look away and see a woman climbing the slope. The German girl. She’s in cut-off jeans and a purple Mexican poncho. 

“Here with who?” the German girl says, climbing up the rocks. Yiskil knew it would boil down to her and me. This is why I am here. Alone, I feel like I am the scorpion now. But I get the sense I’m still being watched by the cactus-thing, the looming mass of the mesa its eyes. 

“Guess you’ve been waiting long? You look like you need a fuck even more than me.” 

I start to ramble. She tells me to shut up. She takes my hand. Hers is solid but surprisingly tender, her skin slightly damp with sweat, welcomingly cool on my burnt skin. 

Somehow I know whatever it is that is watching cares about nothing that has or will happen here. The drama of my life meaningless as another lizard succumbing to a poison sting. 

I sing along with Dworkin’s chords in the distance. 

“Your friend sucks,” she says. A mechanical crackle disrupts the riff and one final guitar chord rings out and fades into the canopy of sound that is the desert night. 

An owl lifts silently from its perch on a cactus at the foot of the mesa, a squirming mouse in its talons. 

This is where Jamie would turn it around. This is where Jamie would take her down. This is where we kiss. 

I roll on top of her, press her shoulders into the ground. Her hands dig into my back. We shed our clothes, two more creatures of the desert naked in the sand. Our sounds drown in the crackles of Dworkin unplugging his guitars. 

**** 

Last call went out and the last of the patrons slipped out the exit. It’s just Larry and me and
him
. Larry’s good and drunk. So am I. 

“So you fucked her right and let her go? Right?” 

The bartender looks over at us and walks over cradling three beers. 

I shoot Larry a look that says get ready.  

“David. Larry. Thought it was you two. We’re closed but I can stay open for one more, that is if I can join you.” 

Larry’s face is red but not from the alcohol. He’s remembering. School. His grandfather. The fucked up world. Me a part of it. The biggest part of right now. He’d rather be anywhere but here. I know. Yet here we are.  

A text pops up on my phone. It’s from Jamie. “Did you do it yet? Tell me. xoxo—J.” 

“How long has it been?” he asks. “Heard you went off to college and the city.” 

He swigs a beer. 

Jamie’s gun feels horrible against my skin. I want that feeling to go away. I’m tired of it. 

“I’m sorry, you know. I’m really sorry,” he says, ingenuously. “I was such a stupid kid.” 

I believe him. 

“I’m sorry too,” I say. And he’s saying something. Talking with Larry but I’m back at the mesa, looking into the blackness of that thing’s mouth, watching the German girl trudge away from the mesa back towards her lodge. I remember how I stifled one last urge to follow, one last urge to surrender to the scorpion’s nature, but then let her disappear into the alien, moon-lit landscape of the desert night. 

THE SPHINX 

OF 

CROPSEY AVENUE 

Nathan is about to hit Exit 13 on the Belt Parkway when the Sphinx of Cropsey Avenue lumbers onto the westbound lanes. She’s at least as tall as the house in Canarsie he grew up in. That would put her three stories high at her shoulder. A story equals a floor, right? He can never keep that straight. He’s heading to the house now. He doesn’t want you to know the address. His mom still lives there and he thinks his line of work can be dangerous. 

The Sphinx’s lion body is twice as long as she is high. Her golden hair, straight and even, hangs just past her round, feminine shoulders. Her back is bare. Patches of dirty snow and ice that accumulated from sitting motionless on Cropsey Avenue for the last few weeks still remain on it. She’s walking diagonally across the lanes heading for the swampy beach on the other side of the Belt so he can’t see her face. 

Nathan hits the brakes to avoid the stopped cars. With his right hand he instinctively reaches for Kirk. Kirk is Yael’s six-year-old son. The reason Kirk is even in the car at all, is because Yael didn’t come home last night. Again. Nathan’s late to meet the broker at his mom’s house. He couldn’t leave Kirk so he took him along. Nathan and Yael are lovers. For now. 

“You okay?” Nathan says. 

“Yeah, of course,” Kirk says. 

Nathan looks over to make sure.  

“She’s so big. I’ve never seen one up close.” 

“Me neither,” Nathan says. 

“What are they?” Kirk asks. 

“No one knows,” Nathan says. 

“A mystery?” Kirk asks. 

“Yeah, very good,” Nathan says. “A mystery. Something like that.” 

“If you ask it a question it’s supposed to tell you the truth, right?” 

“Where’d you hear that?” 

“TV,” Kirk says. 

“I think it’s supposed to be if you answer a Sphinx’s riddle it’s supposed to tell you the truth,” Nathan says. 

But he knows the way it goes is that if you correctly answer the riddle you are allowed to pass, and live. 

“Is it true?” Kirk asks. “Can they talk?” 

“No,” Nathan says. 

He meant to say no one knows. Because no one does. 

What in the world are you, he wonders. And why the hell are you here? 

For a second he thinks the Sphinx of Cropsey Avenue has stopped in response to his musing. But no. It is only that her left front paw is caught on a car, her first step into the eastbound lanes. Her hair does not move in the breeze as she crosses. Stopped cars in her path are crushed underfoot. She lumbers onto the shoulder, then onto the marsh and stops on the sand at the water’s edge facing east. She settles down on her rear legs and tucks her front legs in front of her. Like a cat. In that sphinx pose. Her face is beautiful. Chiseled cheek bones. Small eyes. Thin brows. Symmetrical thin lips with only a hint of pinkish red. Her eyes, all the parts of her eyes, are different shades of white. Her breasts are smooth half globes without nipples, centered in her chest. All her human parts are perfectly white. Perfect alabaster white only covered with the grimy patina of Canarsie. Sandy brown lion fur covers her to her mid-navel.  

Scars and matted patches mar her fur. In the fall, he and Yael took Kirk to the zoo. The big lion’s fur wasn’t perfectly uniform like a cartoon and Kirk had asked what’s wrong with him. Nathan didn’t know how to explain that the cuts and skin irritations and scars, like our skin, bore the telltale signs of the lion’s daily struggles. “It’s real,” was all that he could think to say. 

Only when he’s watching the Sphinx later on the news, with his mom, will she seem unreal to Nathan. Right now she seems the most natural thing in the world to him, just sitting there in sphinx pose on the shore on the side of the Belt Parkway. The gray and black patches of dirty snow on her back and on the sides of the road contrast with the cleaner white snow of the beach.  

A news helicopter circles overhead. Sirens in the distance grow louder. One lane of eastbound traffic is crawling forward. Nathan hopes Kirk doesn’t ask if the people in the crushed cars are okay. He sees that some have gotten out unscathed but he’s not sure about all of them. His heart slows in relief that Kirk is unharmed. 

Later, after Nathan’s mom’s pain subsides and they are just talking, she will say “I don’t understand how it moves,” in the same perplexed tone she uses when she says she doesn’t understand how a fax sends a piece of paper from one telephone to another. Nathan does not understand the sphinx but somehow it feels right sitting on the side of the parkway he has traveled countless times before. 

Kirk rolls down the window and barks at the Sphinx. The air smells of ocean salt and car fumes. It is the first non-freezing day since the big January storm and all the ice has begun to melt. Spring is two weeks away. Nathan hopes when it comes things will feel lighter. His mom has finally agreed to move but he won’t believe it till it’s done. Kirk likes to pretend he is a puppy more and more these days and that worries Nathan even more. 

**** 

Nathan parks behind the house where he grew up, in the alley between East Eighty Fifth Street and East Eighty Fourth Street. The “alley” is wide enough for two lanes of traffic and to park cars, the long way, on each side. So it’s more like a road. An unnamed, unnumbered road. He always thought that was cool. And that the house number was lucky. He trusts you a little more now, enough to know the streets but not the house number. Nathan’s boss confirmed the number was lucky when he ran checks on him when he first started work. Numerology. Astrology. Past lives. Susceptibility to suggestion. Those sorts of things. 

Nathan opens the car trunk to get the video cassette he has brought for his mom. She still uses a VCR and has trouble programming it. Nathan grabs the tape labeled “Ruthie’s shows”. 

“Cool, what’s that?” Kirk says and reaches for the black rectangular case among the small cardboard packages in the trunk. 

Nathan gently moves Kirk’s hand away. He wants to say don’t touch that. Don’t touch any of it, it’s dangerous. But he knows that will only pique Kirk’s interest. 

“It’s just junk,” Nathan says. “Boring.” 

In the case is a rifle. His boss gave it to him. So far it has never been used but his boss wants it there just in case. The packages are from his boss too. He thinks the packages are even more dangerous than the gun. Two of the packages have been in his trunk for weeks without instruction where to drop them. One of them vibrates and rattles of its own volition from time to time even though he knows nothing can be alive in there. The other one makes him feel cold when he touches it and once he thought he heard the most unearthly whisper coming from it. He hopes these packages aren’t just in case also.  

Nathan closes the trunk and he and Kirk walk through the alley to wide concrete stairs filling the space between the house he grew up in and the neighboring houses. All are three stories high and attached. This is the only break. Besides the driveways on either side, this is the spot where you get out of the alley. A pack of teens are tromping down the stairs. They stop and fan out, blocking the way. 

“Hey mister. Can I get a few bucks?” the tallest one says. 

“Sorry. No,” Nathan says. 

“I don’t think you heard me,” the teen says. “Gimme what you got.”