Touchy and Feely (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (12 page)

‘I can show you. I’ve only ever shown it to one person, Father Arcimboldo, but I don’t think he comprehended my rationale.’

‘You thought a lot of this Father Arcimboldo, huh?’

‘Father Arcimboldo changed my life. Father Arcimboldo made me realize that I wasn’t a victim.’

Serenity backed out of her parking space and turned out of the station parking lot onto Railroad Street. She drove for only three-quarters of a mile before she took a right across a grade crossing into Orchard Street. Halfway along Orchard Street she stopped at a white-painted house surrounded by sugar maples. There was a Shogun SUV parked outside, covered with a blue waterproof sheet. Serenity parked close up behind it and climbed out.

‘Welcome to the house of fun,’ she said. ‘Or it is when my mom and dad are away.’

‘This is a really salubrious neighborhood,’ said Feely, looking around. He had seen streets like these in movies, but he had never actually visited one in real life. Serenity’s house reminded him of the house in which Jamie Lee Curtis was babysitting in
Halloween
.

Serenity went up the steps to the front verandah and opened the bottle-green door. Feely followed her, bemused. There was a brass knocker on the door with a face like a snarling wolf and he reached out and touched it on the nose.

‘That’s for protection,’ Serenity explained. ‘The front door faces east, which is where the Mohawks used to believe that all the evil spirits came from, so you put this wolf on the door to warn them off.’

‘Very sagacious,’ said Feely. He believed in the power of charms and talismans. His mother had lost her lucky pendant, the one that her mother had given her when she was dying of cancer, and a week after she lost it she met that
papayona
Bruno at a dance. If meeting Bruno wasn’t bad fortune, Feely didn’t know what was.

Serenity led the way into the house. It smelled of furniture polish and marijuana. It was only a modest four-bedroomed dwelling, with a living room and dining room combined, and a smallish kitchen, but it was the most spacious house that Feely had ever been in. It was so comfortably furnished, too, with a big gold-braided couch, and matching armchairs, and a huge TV in a polished oak cabinet. Above the fireplace hung a painting of a Spanish dancer in a crimson dress.

‘This is very opulent,’ said Feely, turning around and around. ‘This is very classy indeed.’

‘You think so? I think it looks like 1968. If I had my way, it would be all white leather and chrome.’

‘Yes, but it’s the comfort. The opulence.’

‘If you say so. You want a cup of coffee? No, I guess you don’t, after all that coffee you drank at the diner. How about a beer? Take your coat off, relax.’

Feely took off his thin brown windbreaker and Serenity hung it on a peg in the hallway. Underneath he was wearing a faded maroon sweatshirt with a picture of Compay Segundo on it, and baggy black track pants.

Serenity sniffed. ‘I hate to say this but you smell like a dead raccoon.’

‘I’m sorry. We had to sleep in the car. I didn’t even brush my teeth.’

‘Listen, why don’t you take a bath and I’ll wash your clothes for you?’

This was like a dream. Feely hesitated, but then he thought, this is where my destiny has brought me, all this way, and I shouldn’t refuse what my destiny is offering me. He felt as if he were being passed from hand to hand, like a runaway slave being smuggled to the north by the underground railroad.

Serenity disappeared upstairs for a few minutes, while Feely sat on the very edge of the couch watching Channel 24 news. On the coffee table next to him there was a red glass dish full of Hershey’s miniatures but he didn’t have the nerve to take one, especially since there was a framed photograph of Serenity’s parents right next to them, grinning at him. Serenity’s mother looked just like Serenity, only bleached-blonde, with a hairband. Serenity’s father looked like Beau Bridges, except he had less hair.

In the dining room stood a large lighted tank swarming with all kinds of tropical fish, tiny shiny blue ones, yellow-and-black striped ones, and big fat green ones with bulging eyes. Feely wondered how something could be so ugly and live. Then he thought of Mrs Castro who ran the corner store on 113th and Lex, with her squint and her mustache and her
famban barretoso
.

The TV reporter was saying, ‘. . . single shot from a .308 caliber bullet fired from a distance of one hundred thirty yards . . .’

The hot-water system in the house was making a deep rumbling noise, like an approaching avalanche. Serenity appeared and said, ‘Your bath awaits, my lord!’

She had taken off her khaki hat and her thick khaki sweater and she was wearing a blue-and-white striped T-shirt and navy-blue ski pants. Even though nobody could have called her skinny she had a surprisingly good figure, big-breasted and wide-hipped, but her stomach didn’t bulge too much and her ass was ample without being enormous and her ankles were very trim. Her hair was cut in a long black bob, and she had back-brushed it so that it was shaped like a bell. She looked even prettier than she had in the diner, in a big-sisterly way.

Feely followed her upstairs. On the landing there was a stained-glass window with a picture of fields, and a river, and skies piled high with cumulus clouds. A flock of ravens had gathered at the far corner of one of the fields, as if they were picking over a dead body.

‘That’s a really mesmerizing window,’ said Feely, his face lit up yellow and blue, but all Serenity did was smile.

‘Go on,’ she told him. ‘The bathroom’s through there.’

The bathroom was tiled in white and green, with a polished wooden floor. In the center stood an old-fashioned tub with brass faucets and shower attachments and claw feet. It was brimming with bubbles, so strongly scented that they made Feely sneeze.

‘Wild Hyacinth,’ said Serenity. ‘My grandmother gave it to me last Christmas. I know it’s kind of overwhelming, but it should get rid of the smell of dead raccoon.’

‘Thanks,’ said Feely. He stood in the steamy sunlight and looked at the bath with a mixture of awe and unreality.

‘There’s a nice big towel here. If you want to shave, you can use my razor.’

‘Thanks.’

Serenity waited. ‘I’ll need your clothes.’

‘Oh.’

Feely struggled out of his sweatshirt. Then he sat down on the little cork-topped seat beside the bath and took off his damp-stained shoes and his rancid gray socks. Serenity took his socks between delicately pinched fingers and said, ‘Ew. If Saddam had had
these
—’

Feely hesitated.

‘Shorts?’ said Serenity.

‘I’m embarrassed.’

‘Oh, you think I’ve never seen dirty shorts before?’

‘I’m not wearing any shorts.’

‘OK then, I’ll just take your pants.’

Feely stood up, turned his back to her, and stepped out of his pants, leaning on the side of the bathtub to stop himself from overbalancing. He handed his pants to her, awkwardly, with one hand, but as he did so she grabbed hold of his wrist and swung him around, and then grabbed hold of his other wrist so that he couldn’t escape.

‘Why so
shy
?’ she teased him. She looked him up and down, at his skinny flat chest with his nipples like flattened sultanas and his bony hips. She nodded down at the tarnished silver spider that hung on a chain around his neck.

‘What’s this? This is kind of creepy.’

‘My grandfather gave it to me. He said that spiders spin the web of destiny, up into the sky. If you climb up the web of destiny, you get to heaven.’

‘The web of destiny,’ she repeated. Then she looked at him intently and said, ‘Feely?’

‘I’ll, uh—I’d better get washed,’ he said, trying to twist his hands free.

‘First—’ she began, and Feely thought,
What’s she going to say?
Don’t tell me that she
wants me to
chingar her. I can’t believe my luck. I’m scared
.
Don’t say that she wants me to chingar her. I’m terrified.

She let go of his wrists. ‘First, I think you should take off your hat.’

‘My what? Oh, sure. Sorry.’ He took off his Peruvian peasant’s hat and handed it to her.

‘OK if I wash this, too?’ she asked him. ‘It won’t shrink or anything?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘All right, then. Enjoy your bath. Don’t drown, will you? I don’t know what I’d tell my parents, if you drowned.’

Feely washed himself all over, twice, scrubbing his fingers with the nailbrush, and then he washed his hair. Afterward he lay back in the tub and allowed himself to float. He had never felt as clean as this, ever. He felt as if he washed off his past life completely—El Barrio, and his family, and all the dirty streets of New York City. Here beginneth my new existence. Simple, saintly, and truthful, and every sentiment expressed in words of the utmost limpidity. He almost felt as if he should step out of the bath and dress in a seamless woolen robe of softest white, like Christ.

Sola vaya, El Barrio
. Goodbye and good riddance.

He was still floating when Serenity came into the bathroom. He sat up, and hurriedly scooped foam between his legs to cover himself. Serenity said nothing but held out a cold can of Miller Lite.

‘What?’

‘Take it. I can make you something to eat in a minute, if you like.’

She herself was smoking a very anorexic joint. She sat down beside the bath and sucked at it two or three times, flicking it occasionally to keep it alight.

‘Do you have a girlfriend, Feely?’ she asked him.

‘A girlfriend? No.’ He had used so much soap that the bubbles were rapidly crackling into oblivion and he had to keep his knees tight together to preserve his modesty.

‘Have you
ever
had a girlfriend?’

‘Oh, for sure! So many I couldn’t count. Girls, they were all over me like flies. But before I left New York City, I broke it off with all of my girlfriends. They were upset, yes, some of them were crying, but I wanted to think about my destiny with total perspicuity, do you know what I mean?’

‘You wanted to see things clearly,’ said Serenity, nodding and sniffing up smoke.

‘That’s right. Like—deciding to go north, that was a highly spiritual decision. You can’t be spiritual and have a girlfriend, not coevally. You never heard of any saint with a girlfriend, did you? You don’t think, there was Saint Sebastian tied to the top of a tree and they were shooting all of the arrows into him, he had some girlfriend screaming and crying leave him alone, that’s my boyfriend, leave him alone!’

‘But now?’

‘Now?’

‘Now that you’ve made up your mind to travel north. Are you going to start going out with girls again or are you going to stay celibate?’

Feely didn’t know how to answer that. The truth was that he had only ever had one girlfriend, his cousin Antonia, who was nice-looking but slow. All of those flashy girls on 111th Street in their bouncy halter-tops and their sequin micro-skirts, they used to mock him because he didn’t have a car and they couldn’t understand a word he was talking about. It was no use trying to explain to these girls that there was more to life than yuca dancing and screwing and having babies at the age of seventeen. Couldn’t they see their own mothers, beaten and degraded and worn out before their time, and only sixteen years older than they were? Didn’t they
get
it?

Two weeks ago, after a great deal of maneuvering on the couch, Feely had tried to put his hand in Antonia’s sweater, the red fluffy one. Antonia had immediately taken his hand away and told him that she had been screwed by almost every boy in her class at school, as well as three of her uncles, and most of her father’s friends, and that she didn’t want to screw Feely because screwing was boring, nobody said anything interesting while they were screwing and you couldn’t even read a magazine, while Feely always made her feel clever and special and pretty.

Afterward he had stood on the corner of 111th Street with his hands in his pockets, oblivious to people who bumped into him. Greasy old men with no teeth could get to screw his girlfriend, but he couldn’t. There must be a word for that.
Cabrón
was probably the nearest you could get, in Spanish. What was the English word for
cabrón
?

Serenity said, ‘What do you want to eat? Do you like melon?’

 

S
erenity sat watching him as he ate his second bowl of Cap’n Crunch, biting one of her fingernails.

She said, airily, ‘I have this kind of an on-and-off thing with my boyfriend. I miss him, you know, when he’s away, but whenever he comes back, he really gets on my nerves. His name’s Carl Roedebaker, and he’s something to do with golf resorts. I mean, he’s so
handsome
, but I don’t know—’ She pulled a face, as if she couldn’t make up her mind which sweater to wear.

‘I don’t know anything at all about golf,’ Feely admitted. ‘To me, you know, golf is like a gulf.’

‘Golf is the opiate of the people.’

‘So you don’t think you’ll marry him, this guy?’

Serenity shook her head. ‘I don’t want to marry anybody, not yet. I want to be a great writer first. I want to write a tragic novel that makes people actually weep while they’re reading it and even consider suicide. Carl thinks that a tragedy is twenty-five last-minute cancellations from the Enuresis Association of Twin Forks, Minnesota.’

‘But he’s handsome.’

‘Sure. But so are you, in a different way.’

Feely was dressed in a dark-blue Lacoste polo shirt with a snowy white collar, and a pair of stone-colored chinos that were three waist sizes too large for him. His wet hair was combed straight back from his forehead, although it was beginning to get curly again, as it dried.