Across the street, the only place of business that still had customers was Schwartz’s, as usual, and there was Ryan, his shoulders piled in snow, arguing with Cane Man. I had to hop over drifts of snow up to my knees to cross the street. When I got there, a guy from Schwartz’s had come out to join the shouting.
“There’s always a fight with you,” he complained to Cane Man. “Get lost and don’t come back. You’re not welcome here.”
“It’s a free country,” he replied. “It’s a public sidewalk. You can’t stop me standing here.”
“You can’t stop me from calling the cops, either!” the waiter shouted.
“What for?”
The waiter took his notebook from his back pocket. “Not paying for the smoked meat you ate.”
“That’s a lie. I didn’t eat any smoked meat.”
The waiter was writing in the notebook. “I got a tab right here says you ate smoked meat, fries, and a pickle. I got a restaurant full of witnesses. What have you got?”
Cane Man swore a little, then went silent. The waiter stared him down. Cane Man finally looked to Ryan, who turned his head away. Then he turned to me. “The fuck you want?”
I didn’t say anything.
Cane Man turned and shuffled away in the snow. The waiter went back in.
“You eat today?” I asked Ryan.
He thought about it. “Had a Mars bar at lunch.”
“C’mon,” I said, “you might as well pack it in and get some food while you can.” We went into Schwartz’s. My glasses fogged. For once there were plenty of seats. We sat way in the back. We ordered the usual, exactly what Cane Man hadn’t paid for.
The lights were bright, there was still a fair bit of noise even though it wasn’t crowded. Conversations were yelled from the patrons to the cooks, from the cooks to the waiters, from the waiters to the cashier high up on his stool in the front window beside the door. French, English, Portuguese, even a little Yiddish. Plates and cutlery, sizzling grill, the door opening and closing. Our sandwiches came.
I gobbled mine, but Ryan ate slowly and left half on his plate. “Something the matter?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I’m saving this for Billy. He’s across the street.” He meant in Max’s studio.
“I thought that was supposed to be just you.”
“Yeah, but I can’t turn Billy out. Besides, Max don’t mind.”
“Does he know?”
Ryan shrugged. “I guess so. Hey, why don’t you come on over, I got something I want to show you. Something I’ve been working on.”
We had the waiter bag the leftovers. Outside, the snow was still falling. Light from the streetlamps bounced around painfully. It was still night, but the street shone without shadows. Big plows were grumbling up the center of the street, smaller ones on the sidewalks. Trucks were being loaded with snow — they’d be at it for days, according to the weatherman.
We had to go down to Pine Avenue and up the lane, which hadn’t been plowed. At least the snow covered the garbage and mud, which was all I ever saw there in the summer. But it was a hard slog on the uneven ground for a quarter-mile back to the rear of Max’s. We cleared a path with our knees. Halfway there I was soaked from the upper thighs on down to my boots.
Ryan reached over the wooden fence, clicked something, and the framed door jerked open. He pushed it back, crushing away the snow behind it. I bent my head and followed him through, trying to step in the footprints he had left behind. I pushed the door shut behind us.
He started up the iron fire escape, waving his foot back and forth to clear each step. On the landing he reached around the corner of the building and into a light well affixed to the adjoining building. He hauled himself around the corner.
“What the fuck?” I said.
Ryan popped his head back. “It’s easy, there’s a one-foot drop to the bottom.”
I reached over and found the window frame easily. I swung myself around the corner and placed my foot exactly where I expected to find the sill. Ryan had the bottom half open already and was hopping in as I crouched and followed him. We were inside.
I waited in the dark while Ryan shuffled around bumping into things. The light came on with a loud click. He was standing beside a wall switch. I stamped the snow from my boots. Over on the couch, beyond the partially sculpted stone, was Billy, one foot on the floor, asleep or passed out.
Ryan called, “Hey, Billy, it’s us,” but he didn’t move. We went over to take a look. He was perfectly still, I couldn’t tell if he was breathing or see his eyes fluttering. His good eye was closed. The bad one was popping out of his face like a dick through foreskin, but it had still managed to turn up. At least I couldn’t see a pupil. On the coffee table beside him, his things were set out: an open bottle of Griffin, some change, a bus ticket.
The matches, the bent spoon, the plastic bag, the syringe — they were all there too.
“Jesus Christ, Billy.” Ryan jumped on him in a panic.
Billy woke fighting. “Cocksucker! What the fuck?”
Ryan leaped off him, gasping. “I thought you were fuckin’ dead.”
Billy was wide-eyed, crouched with his fists up, red-faced with tension and anger. “The fuck? You fucking idiot.” He relaxed, but he was still angry.
There was one shabby chair. I sat in it; Ryan took a pillow and sat at the short end of the coffee table. “What did you want to show me?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Ryan, who got up, shuffled through a pile of stuff tucked against the wall, and brought out some papers.
Despite Ryan’s habitual tremors, the lines of his drawings were elegant and fluid. The pictures were simple, almost outlines really, big loose suggestions of figures, objects, buildings. The people were all naked; their feet were never on the ground, and their limbs seemed to float away. They were like cartoons, the colors indicated by the thick strokes in different pens. I couldn’t see anything different about these, they were just like any others of his I’d seen — beautiful.
“What am I looking at?”
“You’re looking at the wrong side.”
I turned them over and saw charcoal sketches of the studio with Max’s stone in it, newly delivered through the process of sculpting, like a record of watching Max work. I glanced from the statue to the sketches, and back. Ryan’s drawings looked less finished but more natural, yet the face emerging from the stone was not a clean, young, hard face, it was a square grim face, with broad flat cheeks and dead eyes. On some of the sketches Ryan had scrawled odd birds or swirls in the air.
“Kind of grim,” I said.
“I got the idea from the letters outside on the sign and staring at that stupid statue. You ever see this old German movie about the golem? Old Jewish legend from the ghetto?”
“I know it — I read Meyrink and saw the movie at Concordia.” I peered at his drawings again and could now imagine the little swirls as Hebrew letters. I looked at Max’s stone, the figure was still only roughed out but you could already see the upturned face of an idealized man looking to the heavens, like a worker in a Soviet poster, and even more prominent, the rough mass of his up-thrusting phallus, like a prod, and I said, “You know, Ryan, Max is an asshole. But you made art.”
Billy opened his stamp and tapped the remaining few grains out onto a clean spot on the coffee table. He picked up the foil of Ryan’s crack, found a few tiny rocks, put them down with the dark powder, and crushed it all together with the back of his spoon. It was a tiny pile. I took my dime bag out, dropped the last few crumbs of bud into it. Billy mashed it all up. I gave him my papers and he deftly slid the powder into the crease of the Zig-Zag. He rolled, licked, lit. We smoked. I went to the fridge. Max had a few bottles of beer in there. I grabbed three and twisted off the caps.