Tours of the Black Clock (10 page)

Kronehelm’s almost a little taken aback by my zeal. “Not that I would presume, please understand,” he interjects, “not that I would presume how to tell an artist.” He winces again like he did at the chair when I sat in it. “My English.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I assure him, “everything’s understood.” All that’s left are the details. We even arrange an advance of a hundred dollars, just for the sake of inspiration. Herr Kronehelm suggests we share a drink to seal the deal, but I beg off insisting that inspiration is rising to the boiling point at this very moment and I’ve got to be home when it spills over. I’m not halfway down the stairs before I’m splitting a gut over it. Molly and Herr Kronehelm, Amanda and Herr Kronehelm, Molly and Amanda and Herr Kronehelm. We’ll dress him up in a little uniform, with a little sword and some medals; he’ll be ecstatic. He’ll come all over himself just from the feel of the black leather boots on his feet and the little pointed hat on his fetus-dumpling head. There won’t be anything left of him for Molly and Amanda, he’ll be so spent with excitement. They’ll have to work him over just to get a little blurt of him. Don’t worry Molly, don’t worry Amanda; I’ll make it up to you. We’ll leave him passed out on the floor and it’ll be just the three of us.

1935–36. I LAUGH A
year and a half. I rise in New York to just below the eyelevel of the city; I believe my past is past. I move amidst the present at large and at liberty. Moans of murder from the Spanish prairies, sobs of love from the King of England: I ford these sounds like a river. I’m building obsessions for my Austrian mentor, word by word, specialized and customized, blond and strawberry-nippled and voluptuous; I laugh so hard people in the streets stop to stare at my window. After a couple of months Herr Kronehelm presses into my hand six hundred dollars and disappears for months. I keep working and laughing. He reappears suddenly one day with no explanation, accepting his specialized obsessions in silence. I walk the streets with my hand over my mouth: everyone who sees me wants to know what’s so damned
funny
. In his room where the curtains never part Kronehelm withers gratefully before cruel delicious Molly. Two more months pass and he advances me more money and disappears another four months, reappearing to take from me more of my comedies. Leona and I have a final irrevocable fight, she cries outside my door and splatters abuse across the air like vandalism. Molly and Amanda come and go like they’re told. It’s not as though they’re slaves, they just have better things to do. They’re professionals.

On his second return some things about Herr Kronehelm’s secret trips come to reveal themselves. It seems he’s established a market for my work in Austria and Germany. He takes the work with him, has it translated and then copied, so that he may keep one and sell the other. It’s not any sort of mass production, part of the appeal is the work’s rare exclusivity. No doubt I’m portrayed to his European clients as one of America’s most sensational authors. I have long flowing black hair and wear a cape, I am the secret passion of Claudette Colbert. I’m tubercular and perhaps an opium addict. Anyway I’m sure not a six-foot-four farmboy with a big goofy face. Kronehelm now wants me to feed the pages to him five at a time, which has me crossing town to Gramercy Park every other day. My rate, however, rises to four dollars, almost unheard of in this business.

Keep it so wonderfully American, he advises me. Molly in the company of gangsters and cowboys and tycoons.

It’s the end of 1936. It’s the end of many things. I don’t quite know it yet, but my head has just begun to bob above the watermark after all. If only I were a foot shorter. It coincides with recent discussions between me and the Austrian over our general residency. He wearies of shipping little bundles of five or six pages to the translator in Vienna, more than that he just wearies of New York. He proposes we relocate the business to homesoil. I don’t even know where Austria is: in Switzerland or some place. “Austria is in nothing,” Kronehelm explains with frustration, “it is only in Austria.” He’s resolute about returning. I suggest that nothing has to change, I can continue to work here and ship it on to him in Vienna, from where he can wire back our agreed-upon sum. He doesn’t think this is very satisfactory. I shrug and leave him with his dissatisfaction.

Truth be told, it’s the laughing that I weary of. I’m retelling the old stories, I’m retelling other people’s stories with the things they left out. The girls are beginning to bitch at me in my sleep, we’ve lost the yearning for each other. We’re too familiar with forbidden things. But I haven’t any idea what to do instead of laugh. The laughing’s a habit by which I clear my throat. I’m tired as well of the dread of the pulp stories, and I do less and less of them. Months pass since the last one, and finally one day I go into the magazine not to deliver anything but to get some money owed me from a previous piece. The editor has some news for me.

“Couple of guys were here looking for you,” he says. He seems agitated.

“What couple guys?” I say.

He shrugs, disingenuously. After a moment he says, “It was yesterday.” The twenty-four hours since haven’t calmed him down. “They saw your name in one of the old issues. Or someone else saw it, they didn’t look like big readers.” He laughs nervously.

“Did they say what they wanted?”

“I don’t think,” he answers slowly, “it was a family visit,” which is a little funny, I guess, because it turns out in a way that’s exactly what it is.

“What did you tell them?”

“I had to tell them something,” he says, “so I did the best—”

“What did you tell them?”

“That you worked at John Hanks’ Top Dog.” He pauses to see how I take it, to see if I’m going to break his neck. When I don’t react he seizes the opportunity to spit out a rationale. “Well I figured you weren’t working there anymore and it was better than giving them your address and if I didn’t tell them something or if I tried to tell them something untrue they would have found out and come back and—”

“And broken your neck,” I nod. But he’s right, after all. It’s my situation and he isn’t responsible for it. “You owe me some money on the last piece,” I say, “we agreed on fifty and your accounting office coughed up forty.” He’s happy to pay me the ten, he’d probably pay me a hundred right now if I asked for it. “If they come back,” I say on my way out, “you don’t know anything else. Remember? And you sure haven’t seen me recently.”

“Goodbye, Banning,” he says, almost inaudibly.

I
’M WALKING ACROSS TOWN.
I think about taking the train or a cab but the fact is, well, there’s this havoc in my feet, this havoc’s back in my heart again. All in the course of twenty-four, forty-eight, seventy-two hours everything’s begun to change, in the way things do: Kronehelm’s leaving, and someone’s looking for me; and I have to adjust to the havoc of the times. But I haven’t figured yet if the havoc of the times and the havoc in me are the same.

I’m thinking as fast as I can, as I make my way across town.

It’s dark by the time I get to my street. The streetlights are on and from the windows I smell food, I hear the radios and people talking around their kitchen tables. Nobody’s out on the street except two guys hanging around the front of my building.

Little man, big man.

I barely register them at first, but as I come down the long street I realize they’re not moving, they’re waiting, and I start to slow down. I start to slow down and then they’re looking at me, and I’ve almost come to a stop in the middle of the street, with no sound but the sloshing of the gutters, the radios and voices seeming to die away, and then their steps coming back to me out of the night. They stop where they are and wait for me to make a move, and it’s when I don’t that the small one says, “You know someone named Jainlight?”

All my life. We’re inseparable.

And as fast as I’m thinking, it can barely keep up with as fast as I’m moving. I’m running wildly, and they’re right behind my wildness, for one block after another. I’m frantically trying to think of somewhere I can lose them, maybe the park, if I can run that far and fast. It’s hard to measure how far and fast they’ll stay behind me, dogging me to the end. And then this makes me think of something else, and I don’t especially like the idea but it’s the only thing that comes to mind, and I need a favor now.

Seven blocks away from my place I reach the brownstone and head for the top, taking the stairs instead of the lift. Little man big man have no choice but to follow, if they take the lift I’ll lose them. I get up to the club and the doorman who got my job actually isn’t sure he remembers me or not; Doggie doesn’t brag to the customers about how smart this one is. The two men show up right behind me and I just bull my way in. The doorman yells something and then he’s got the other two to deal with. The bigger of them is almost my size.

The commotion attracts a lot of attention. I don’t like this ruckus because I know Hanks won’t like it, I don’t like it that I’ve run straight to him like a kid who got into trouble the first time he left home, when he thought he was so smart and on top of everything. At first I don’t see Hanks, only Billy and I’m not interested in smart repartee with Billy right now. Then Doggie comes to us out of the smoke from the ivory and silver cigarette holder of the blonde next to him. Other people standing around the club are wondering what it’s all about, and as I figured the boss isn’t happy. “What’s up kid,” he says. He’s looking at me and at the two guys over my shoulder. “I was on my way over,” I pant, “then these two get on my tail and won’t step off.” I point to the little man and the big man, all three of us breathing hard. It’s obvious we’ve been running.

“So you thought you’d bring them here with you,” Hanks says. He’s annoyed. “You used to dress better when you worked for me, kid,” he says, fingering my shirt; in the light of the bar big circles of sweat underline my arms. The little man’s pouring it off his face while the bigger one makes sounds through his nose. “You can’t,” asks Hanks, “take care of a couple of jackasses like these?” Billy’s going through their jackets now, and I get lucky: he comes up with a gun on the smaller one. This immediately makes my situation look more legitimately desperate. Still, it never occurred to me they had guns. I don’t know why I ran. Hanks is right, I dealt with characters before when I was riding the rails from Pittsburgh, but this time I ran without giving it a second thought.

It was that no stranger has ever called me by my name before.

I find myself studying the big guy. Meanwhile the little one’s talking. He introduces himself as Johnson and the big one as Blaine. Johnson has a red bushy mustache and a pocketwatch that hangs from a chain. They’re local investigators hired by an out-of-state client to find and take me back. “What’s the matter with you,” Hanks says to them, “can’t you see this is just a kid? ‘Take him back.’ Where’s there to take him back to?” And Johnson says home. “You got the wrong guy,” says Doggie, “I’ve known this kid forever.”

“The fact is,” Johnson says, shifting his feet, “the fact is this man is Banning Jainlight from outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he left three years ago.”

Hanks slaps his hands together. “Well there’s your error,” he says, almost jubilantly. “This kid isn’t Banning Jainlight, Banning Jainlight is only his
alias
.” Now he slaps me on the back at the joke. “It’s a common mistake though,” he reassures Johnson. I’m still studying the big guy Blaine, and behind him I catch a glimpse of Leona, who disappears back into the coats. I feel badly for her, because I know now that this Johnson and Blaine must have come after talking to my editor at the magazine, and Leona tipped them. At first I assumed it was Billy, he’s standing by the bar with another toothpick in his mouth. But it takes all of three seconds to see Leona lost in her hate for me and for herself; for the first time, at this moment, she understands we’ll never be together again, and for the first time I understand what it means to her. And now the big guy Blaine happens to turn his head and look over his shoulder to see what I’m looking at, and when he turns back there’s no expression on his face at all. The mere sight of him and his blank face makes the havoc in me go all crazy, moving around to every part of me until it settles somewhere in my mouth.

Johnson’s steady and composed, given the hostile circumstances. “We’re not here to share a moment of humor with you, Mr. Hanks,” he says, “one way or another Mr. Jainlight will be going back to his father in Pennsylvania. We can take him back privately or we can go to the police and have him arrested and extradited.”

“Maybe his father should come get him himself,” Hanks says.

“Mr. Philip Jainlight doesn’t move around a great deal these days,” Johnson answers, his eyes on mine. Next to him Blaine never speaks. His face never moves, a big passionless lug, his feet planted squarely and his arms hanging at his sides. In his midthirties or so, his hair’s already thinning and his face has little patches of broken blood; he might have had his last drink a week ago and the smell of Jim Beam still rises from him like heat. “Look,” Johnson is still talking, and he moves his eyes from mine to Hanks’, “folks have been looking for this boy three years now. He’s a big boy. Pretty hard not to notice a boy this big for three years. For a boy this big to get along three years he’d have to have a lot of luck, a very big city to get lost in, and some big help keeping under wraps. I’d say anyone giving him that kind of help, well, in the eyes of the law, that kind of person’s called an accessory.” His eyes are steady on Hanks’.

“Is that right,” Hanks snarls back. He’s lost patience with the entire episode. “Go get your extradition papers,” he snaps, “you’re out of your territory here,” and Johnson snaps back, “Out of our territory? Where do you think this is,” looking at the club around him, “Mexico?” Hanks then turns to the big one standing behind Johnson and says, “You. Why don’t you talk to your partner here.
Clarify
things.”

“No use talking to him,” I start saying, and everyone turns to me as though to say, Who are you and what business of this is yours? But the havoc’s running down my chin: “No use talking to him at all. It’s obvious who’s the brains of this operation and
he’s
not it.” Blaine just stands motionless and expressionless with his arms dangling at his sides; not a spasm of tension runs through him. “He’s the muscle of the operation and that’s all he is. He’s one of those characters who can’t take two steps in life without tumbling into it and knocking it the fuck over. Look at him. Does he even understand what the fuck I’m saying?” Hanks and Johnson are watching me like I’ve gone crazy, they look at the havoc like it’s the flow of a strange black fluid from some crack in my head. I’ve now crossed the space between me and this Blaine and I’m standing toe to toe with him; he may be an inch shorter than I but no more, he’s the only person I’ve ever known who measures up to me. I loathe the bigness of him, the big brainlessness of him; I loathe the grotesque outsizedness of him. “You fucking stupid jackass,” I hiss in his face, “big man, big man. Why don’t you say anything? No use talking to you, anyone can see that.” Hanks is grabbing at my arm and I shake him off, and everyone around us is stunned. “Use it,” I say to the big man, and who knows if anyone understands what I mean, let alone him; but I mean the violence: Big is
the violence in you
, “use it.” He doesn’t even quiver, his eyes dead and dull. Hanks grips me by the arm and literally pulls me back from Blaine’s face, and he has a look that’s alarmed and shaken. Johnson has the same look. Billy’s dumbfounded, and all the rest of them: well fuck all the rest of them. You too Leona, I want to scream across the room. I’m all havoc now.