And then I did it one night in the bedroom and she was wearing a little nightdress and I says to Lenora, It’s our little game, but it’s just around her armpits, that’s all it is, it’s just that I’m stroking around her armpits.
No.
No fucking way.
No.
I ain’t gonna tell you again.
It’s not that.
I ain’t crying.
It’s just that I’m cold, that’s all. Cold making my nose runny.
Listen up. Please.
This woman, see, she had made an appointment ’cause she said something was happening at school with Lenora. And I remember ’cause when she came in she looked at my hands and they was all scarred up and all. With cigarette burns and them paper clips. I went tucked my hands in under my ass and I was just sitting there waiting. I’m sitting at the table with Dancesca. The social worker, she came in and she seemed nice to Dancesca, but she wouldn’t say nothing to me; she just said, If you’d give us a moment, please, Mister Walker.
It’s the first time in years anyone called me that: Mister Walker. But, see, that name makes me feel like I got nothing in my body, like I been carved out, so I just leave the room. I was drinking pretty heavy then. I had this gin in the room. I’m just climbing into the bottle. Not even listening at the door or nothing. Then the door closes and I hear Dancesca in the kitchen. She’s rumbling in the cupboards. I’m looking at the aquarium. She has a knife when she comes into my room but she doesn’t use the knife, it’s just in case. She stands in front of me with the knife. And then she just slaps me and leaves my face in my shoulder, and then she moves away and the sting of her hand is in my face and I’m thinking, Slap me on the other side, slap me on the other side, but she’s gone. She’s in the other bedroom. Slap me on the other side, slap me on the other side. I went and stood in the doorway. I’m watching her. She reaches for the suitcases. She loads her clothes without folding them, stuffs two of the suitcases tight. She clamps down the locks. Then she moves past me as if I’m nothing but air. Lenora’s not around, she’s still at school. Dancesca, she opens Lenora’s cupboard and holds up a training bra. You recognize this? she says to me, and then she buries her head once more and goes to filling the suitcase. She loads all of Lenora’s clothes and then rips the sheet of blue plastic off the wall, gathers the photos from the ground, and throws the one of me at me. And she says to me, Pervert. You’re nothing but a pervert.
And I can’t say nothing.
I’m paralyzed, like I told you.
She ain’t a bitch.
She ain’t a bitch no way.
No, I didn’t touch her there.
No!
Yeah, just the armpits. Not anywhere else.
I never touched that. Not the nipple.
Just around there.
I didn’t—
She was just a child.
Just a child, Angie. Just a child.
I didn’t mean nothing by it.
I never even saw her once after that. Dancesca, she took her from school and went to her folks and she won’t listen to anything I got to say when I try to phone her and then she disappears altogether; they say she’s not around, both of them gone, they say she’s in New York, doesn’t want to talk to me, but I know where she is, I know she’s in Chicago.
I been thinking about goin’ up there, yeah. Sometime.
Angie.
Angie!
No. No way. I never touched her there, I swear, I never did, I swear on it, and that’s the truth, never there.
It wasn’t that, it wasn’t a hard-on, it was nothing like that.
I wasn’t touching her like you think.
No.
Listen!
I mean, it’s what I been trying to say. I’d be there in her room and I’d be touching her shoulders and my head’d be spinning and I’d be out of control and thinking something else. I mean, it wasn’t a hard-on, you don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to, it was something else, but Dancesca wouldn’t listen and nobody would listen; I guess I didn’t listen myself, I was pretty fucked up in the head it was going thump thump thump thump like I told you.
I been thinking on it more and more. I ain’t never told anybody this before. I mean, we all got a history in us, yeah? A man is what he loves and that’s the reason he loves it.
That ain’t shit.
No.
Ah, Angie, no.
No, Angie.
Don’t do that.
I mean, look.
Out there.
Can’t you see? See, I told you the sun’d come up. See. Now you can see it. It’s gray and all, but ain’t it nice? Hey. Angie.
Shit, I mean that’s what I meant. You said you hadn’t seen it before, Angie.
Angie.
You said you wanted to see the sea.
Fuck candy.
Yeah, that’s my goddamn candy. I ain’t got any goddamn candy. And I ain’t gonna get any either. Fuck candy.
Fuck candy!
Angie.
Hey, Angie. You can’t go there.
He’ll kill you. Angela!
You dropped my goddamn sock.
Angie.
Angela.
It wasn’t like you think.
Damn, Angie. Angela. An-ge-la!
I was lifting him out of her.
* * *
For weeks after Dancesca leaves, Clarence Nathan sleeps out in other parts of the city. His hair is short, and he can feel the cold bite at his ears. In Riverside Park he stuffs a red-haired man with his Swiss Army knife. He has seen the man before; he is homeless too. Clarence Nathan is sitting on the park bench by the Hudson, and Redhair taps him on the shoulder—“Spare a cigarette, bud?”—and Clarence Nathan asks him to tap him on the other shoulder for balance. Redhair laughs and reaches forward and steals the lit cigarette from his mouth. The blade is small and pathetic, but it slides in and slides out and Redhair stands there as a small patch of blood spreads on the stomach of his T-shirt. Clarence Nathan runs off and later stabs himself while on a bus. He sees Redhair a few weeks later and Redhair says he is going to kill him, but Clarence Nathan tosses him two packs of cigarettes and that is it; he never sees Redhair again. He wanders around the city in an ache. The sole of his construction boots undoes itself and he sticks it with glue that he steals from a drugstore. One afternoon he sees Cricket in the distance, walking through the park, and he hides in weeds down near the embankment. Junkies and male hookers are in abundance in the park, but they don’t ask him if he wants a blow job anymore; he is broken down and head-hung and dirty and covers his muscled torso with long shirts so he doesn’t have to stare at his scars.
Sometimes there is a mother and child in the park. He moves up quickly behind them and then covers his face and passes them, waits by a lamppost or a park bench, turns around, and sees that it isn’t them.
On an afternoon of torpor he sees a pigeon wing its way through the park; it swoops down toward the bottom of the hill and flies through the ironwork gate, and he wonders if the pigeon lives in the tunnel. He descends the embankment that leads to the gate. Some flowers are in bloom by the crab-apple trees. His feet slide in the muck. The gate is locked. Clarence Nathan gazes at the ironwork and at a bar that is bent backward. He waits a long time for his heart to quiet itself; then he bends his body and nudges his way through the gap. He stands for a long time on the metal platform, like he and his grandfather had once done. All is quiet. The tunnel is high and wide and gracious. Goose bumps on his skin when he descends the steps. He moves into the shadowy depths, across a heap of garbage. He opens a bottle and sips from it and looks up at the ceiling. He gazes along the tunnel and then he feels it: it rises right through him; it is primitive and necessary; and he knows now that he belongs here, that this is his place.
Shuffling along, he sees a dead tree planted in a mound of dirt and he sees murals lit from above. Further up the tunnel, he wonders about the world that is walking above him, all those solitary souls with their banalities and their own peculiar forms of shame. Dancesca is up there. And Lenora. Somewhere, he doesn’t know where. He has tried calling Chicago, but the phone gets slammed down. He has even thought of buying a bus ticket, but the ache is too tremendous within him; he can go nowhere except here; he likes it here, this darkness. He steps on a rail and can feel a slight rumble in his foot, and a few seconds later there is a train with its horn blasting and he steps aside to watch it pass and all the commuters are at their windows unaware and then the train is gone and all that is left is the imprint of its red lights on his eyes and he goes over to the wall and he lies beneath a mural of Salvador Dali’s Melting Clock and he has no idea what time it is.