V. Page 4

  Outside the galley again he started throwing them in all directions. “Ha, ha,” said the night watchman. “Go ahead, make noise. I’m drinking your coffee.”

  So he was. Profane absently hefted his one remaining mousetrap. It went off, catching three fingers between the first and second knuckles.

  What do I do, he wondered, scream? No. The night watchman was laughing hard enough as it was. Setting his teeth Profane unpried the trap from his hand, reset it, tossed it through a porthole to the galley and fled. He reached the pier and got a snowball in the back of the head, which knocked off the cowboy hat. He stopped to get the hat and thought about returning the shot. No. He kept running.

  Paola was at the ferry, waiting. She took his arm as they went on board. All he said was: “We ever going to get off this ferry?”

  “You have snow on you.” She reached up to brush it off and he almost kissed her. Cold was turning the mousetrap injury numb. Wind had started up, coming in from Norfolk. This crossing they stayed inside.

  Rachel caught up with him in the bus station in Norfolk. He sat slouched next to Paola on a wooden bench worn pallid and greasy with a generation of random duffs, two one-way tickets for New York, New York tucked inside the cowboy hat. He had his eyes closed, he was trying to sleep. He had just begun to drift off when the paging system called his name.

  He knew immediately, even before he was fully awake, who it must be. Just a hunch. He had been thinking about her.

  “Dear Benny,” Rachel said, “I’ve called every bus station in the country.” He could hear a party on in the background. New Year’s night. Where he was there was only an old clock to tell the time. And a dozen homeless, slouched on the wooden bench, trying to sleep. Waiting for a long-haul bus run neither by Greyhound nor Trailways. He watched them and let her talk. She was saying, “Come home.” The only one he would allow to tell him this except for an internal voice he would rather disown as prodigal than listen to.

  “You know—” he tried to say.

  “I’ll send you bus fare.”

  She would.

  A hollow, twanging sound dragged across the floor toward him. Dewey Gland, morose and all bones, trailed his guitar behind him. Profane interrupted her gently. “Here is my friend Dewey Gland,” he said, almost whispering. “He would like to sing you a little song.”

  Dewey sang her the old Depression song, “Wanderin.’” Eels in the ocean, eels in the sea, a redheaded woman made a fool of me. . . .

  Rachel’s hair was red, veined with premature gray, so long she could take it in back with one hand, lift it above her head and let it fall forward over her long eyes. Which for a girl four foot nine in stocking feet is a ridiculous gesture; or should be.

  He felt that invisible, umbilical string tug at his midsection. He thought of long fingers, through which, maybe, he might catch sight of the blue sky, once in a while.

  And it looks like I’m never going to cease.

  “She wants you,” Dewey said. The girl at the Information desk was frowning. Big-boned, motley complexion: girl from out of town somewhere, whose eyes dreamed of grinning Buick grilles, Friday night shuffleboard at some roadhouse.

  “I want you,” Rachel said. He moved his chin across the mouthpiece, making grating sounds with a three-day growth. He thought that all the way up north, along a five-hundred-mile length of underground phone cable, there must be earthworms, blind trollfolk, listening in. Trolls know a lot of magic: could they change words, do vocal imitations? “Will you just drift, then,” she said. Behind her he heard somebody barfing and those who watched laughing, hysterically. Jazz on the record player.

  He wanted to say, God, the things we want. He said: “How is the party.”

  “It’s over at Raoul’s,” she said. Raoul, Slab, and Melvin being part of a crowd of disaffected which someone had labeled the Whole Sick Crew. They lived half their time in a bar on the lower West Side called the Rusty Spoon. He thought of the Sailor’s Grave and could not see much difference.

  “Benny.” She had never cried, never that he could remember. It worried him. But she might be faking. “Ciao,” she said. That phony, Greenwich Village way to avoid saying good-bye. He hung up.

  “There’s a nice fight on,” Dewey Gland said, sullen and red-eyed. “Old Ploy is so juiced he went and bit a Marine on the ass.”

  If you look from the side at a planet swinging around in its orbit, split the sun with a mirror and imagine a string, it all looks like a yo-yo. The point furthest from the sun is called aphelion. The point furthest from the yo-yo hand is called, by analogy, apocheir.

  Profane and Paola left for New York that night. Dewey Gland went back to the ship and Profane never saw him again. Pig had taken off on the Harley, destination unknown. On the Greyhound were one young couple who would, come sleep for the other passengers, make it in a rear seat; one pencil-sharpener salesman who had seen every territory in the country and could give you interesting information on any city, no matter which one you happened to be heading for; and four infants, each with an incompetent mother, scattered at strategic locations throughout the bus, who babbled, cooed, vomited, practiced self-asphyxia, drooled. At least one managed to be screaming all through the twelve-hour trip.

  About the time they hit Maryland, Profane decided to get it over with. “Not that I’m trying to get rid of you,” handing her a ticket envelope with Rachel’s address on it in pencil, “but I don’t know how long I’ll be in the city.” He didn’t.

  She nodded. “Are you in love, then.”

  “She’s a good woman. She’ll put you on to a job, find you a place to stay. Don’t ask me if we’re in love. The word doesn’t mean anything. Here’s her address. You can take the West Side IRT right up there.”

  “What are you afraid of.”

  “Go to sleep.” She did, on Profane’s shoulder.

  At the Thirty-fourth Street station, in New York, he gave her a brief salute. “I may be around. But I hope not. It’s complicated.”

  “Shall I tell her . . .”

  “She’ll know. That’s the trouble. There’s nothing you—I—can tell her she doesn’t know.”

  “Call me, Ben. Please. Maybe.”

  “Right,” he told her, “maybe.”

  V

  So in January 1956 Benny Profane showed up again in New York. He came into town at the tag-end of a spell of false spring, found a mattress at a downtown flophouse called Our Home, and a newspaper at an uptown kiosk; roamed around the streets late that night studying the classified by streetlight. As usual nobody wanted him in particular.

  If anybody had been around to remember him they would have noticed right off that Profane hadn’t changed. Still a great amoebalike boy, soft and fat, hair cropped close and growing in patches, eyes small like a pig’s and set too far apart. Road work had done nothing to improve the outward Profane, or the inward one either. Though the street had claimed a big fraction of Profane’s age, it and he remained strangers in every way. Streets (roads, circles, squares, places, prospects) had taught him nothing: he couldn’t work a transit, crane, payloader, couldn’t lay bricks, stretch a tape right, hold an elevation rod still, hadn’t even learned to drive a car. He walked; walked, he thought sometimes, the aisles of a bright, gigantic supermarket, his only function to want.

  One morning Profane woke up early, couldn’t get back to sleep and decided on a whim to spend the day like a yo-yo, shuttling on the subway back and forth underneath Forty-second Street, from Times Square to Grand Central and vice versa. He made his way to the washroom of Our Home, tripping over two empty mattresses on route. Cut himself shaving, had trouble extracting the blade and gashed a finger. He took a shower to get rid of the blood. The handles wouldn’t turn. When he finally found a shower that worked, the water came out hot and cold in random patterns. He danced around, yowling and shivering, slip
ped on a bar of soap and nearly broke his neck. Drying off, he ripped a frayed towel in half, rendering it useless. He put on his skivvy shirt backwards, took ten minutes getting his fly zipped and another fifteen repairing a shoelace which had broken as he was tying it. All the rests of his morning songs were silent cuss words. It wasn’t that he was tired or even notably uncoordinated. Only something that, being a schlemihl, he’d known for years: inanimate objects and he could not live in peace.

  Profane took a Lexington Avenue local up to Grand Central. As it happened, the subway car he got into was filled with all manner of ravishingly gorgeous knockouts: secretaries on route to work and jailbait to school. It was too much, too much. Profane hung on the handgrip, weak. He was visited on a lunar basis by these great unspecific waves of horniness, whereby all women within a certain age group and figure envelope became immediately and impossibly desirable. He emerged from these spells with eyeballs still oscillating and a wish that his neck could rotate through the full 360 degrees.

  The shuttle after morning rush hour is near empty, like a littered beach after tourists have all gone home. In the hours between nine and noon the permanent residents come creeping back up their strand, shy and tentative. Since sunup all manner of affluent have filled the limits of that world with a sense of summer and life; now sleeping bums and old ladies on relief, who have been there all along unnoticed, re-establish a kind of property right, and the coming on of a falling season.

  On his eleventh or twelfth transit Profane fell asleep and dreamed. He was awakened close to noon by three Puerto Rican kids named Tolito, José and Kook, short for Cucarachito. They had this act, which was for money even though they knew that the subway on weekday mornings, no es bueno for dancing and bongos. José carried around a coffee can which upside down served to rattle off their raving merengues or baións on, and hollow side up to receive from an appreciative audience pennies, transit tokens, chewing gum, spit.

  Profane blinked awake and watched them, jazzing around, doing handsprings, aping courtship. They swung from the handle-grips, shimmied up the poles; Tolito tossing Kook the seven-year-old about the car like a beanbag and behind it all, clobbering polyrhythmic to the racketing of the shuttle, José on his tin drum, forearms and hands vibrating out beyond the persistence of vision, and a tireless smile across his teeth wide as the West Side.

  They passed the can as the train was pulling into Times Square. Profane closed his eyes before they got to him. They sat on the seat opposite, counting the take, feet dangling. Kook was in the middle, the other two were trying to push him on the floor. Two teen-age boys from their neighborhood entered the car: black chinos, black shirts, black gang jackets with PLAYBOYS lettered in dripping red on the back. Abruptly all motion among the three on the seat stopped. They held each other, staring wide-eyed.

  Kook, the baby, could hold nothing in. “Maricón!” he yelled gleefully. Profane’s eyes came open. Heel-taps of the older boys moved past, aloof and staccato to the next car. Tolito put his hand on Kook’s head, trying to squash him down through the floor, out of sight. Kook slipped away. The doors closed, the shuttle started off again for Grand Central. The three turned their attention to Profane.

  “Hey, man,” Kook said. Profane watched him, half-cautious.

  “How come,” José said. He put the coffee can absently on his head, where it slipped down over his ears. “How come you didn’t get off at Times Square.”

  “He was asleep,” Tolito said.

  “He’s a yo-yo,” José said. “Wait and see.” They forgot Profane for the moment, moved forward a car and did their routine. They came back as the train was starting off again from Grand Central.

  “See,” José said.

  “Hey man,” Kook said, “how come.”

  “You out of a job,” Tolito said.

  “Why don’t you hunt alligators, like my brother,” Kook said.

  “Kook’s brother shoots them with a shotgun,” Tolito said.

  “If you need a job, you should hunt alligators,” José said.

  Profane scratched his stomach. He looked at the floor.

  “Is it steady,” he said.

  The subway pulled in to Times Square, disgorged passengers, took more on, shut up its doors and shrieked away down the tunnel. Another shuttle came in, on a different track. Bodies milled in the brown light, a loudspeaker announced shuttles. It was lunch hour. The subway station began to buzz, fill with human noise and motion. Tourists were coming back in droves. Another train arrived, opened, closed, was gone. The press on the wooden platforms grew, along with an air of discomfort, hunger, uneasy bladders, suffocation. The first shuttle returned.

  Among the crowd that squeezed inside this time was a young girl wearing a black coat, her hair hanging long outside it. She searched four cars before she found Kook, sitting next to Profane, watching him.

  “He wants to help Angel kill the alligators,” Kook told her. Profane was asleep, lying diagonal on the seat.

  In this dream, he was all alone, as usual. Walking on a street at night where there was nothing but his own field of vision alive. It had to be night on that street. The lights gleamed unflickering on hydrants; manhole covers which lay around in the street. There were neon signs scattered here and there, spelling out words he wouldn’t remember when he woke.

  Somehow it was all tied up with a story he’d heard once, about a boy born with a golden screw where his navel should have been. For twenty years he consults doctors and specialists all over the world, trying to get rid of this screw, and having no success. Finally, in Haiti, he runs into a voodoo doctor who gives him a foul-smelling potion. He drinks it, goes to sleep and has a dream. In this dream he finds himself on a street, lit by green lamps. Following the witch-man’s instructions, he takes two rights and a left from his point of origin, finds a tree growing by the seventh street light, hung all over with colored balloons. On the fourth limb from the top there is a red balloon; he breaks it and inside is a screwdriver with a yellow plastic handle. With the screwdriver he removes the screw from his stomach, and as soon as this happens he wakes from the dream. It is morning. He looks down toward his navel, the screw is gone. That twenty years’ curse is lifted at last. Delirious with joy, he leaps up out of bed, and his ass falls off.

  To Profane, alone in the street, it would always seem maybe he was looking for something too to make the fact of his own disassembly plausible as that of any machine. It was always at this point that the fear started: here that it would turn into a nightmare. Because now, if he kept going down that street, not only his ass but also his arms, legs, sponge brain and clock of a heart must be left behind to litter the pavement, be scattered among manhole covers.

  Was it home, the mercury-lit street? Was he returning like the elephant to his graveyard, to lie down and soon become ivory in whose bulk slept, latent, exquisite shapes of chessmen, backscratchers, hollow open-work Chinese spheres nested one inside the other?

  This was all there was to dream; all there ever was: the Street. Soon he woke, having found no screwdriver, no key. Woke to a girl’s face, near his own. Kook stood in the background, feet braced apart, head hanging. From two cars away, riding above the racketing of the subway over its points, came the metallic rattle of Tolito on the coffee can.

  Her face was young, soft. She had a brown mole on one cheek. She’d been talking to him before his eyes were open. She wanted him to come home with her. Her name was Josefina Mendoza, she was Kook’s sister, she lived uptown. She must help him. He had no idea what was happening.

  “Wha, lady,” he said, “wha.”

  “Do you like it here,” she cried.

  “I do not like it, lady, no,” said Profane. The train was heading toward Times Square, crowded. Two old ladies who had been shopping at Bloomingdale’s stood glaring hostile at them from up the car. Fina started to cry. The other kids came charging back i
n, singing. “Help,” Profane said. He didn’t know who he was asking. He’d awakened loving every woman in the city, wanting them all: here was one who wanted to take him home. The shuttle pulled into Times Square, the doors flew open. In a swoop, only half aware of what he was doing, he gathered Kook in one arm and ran out the door: Fina, with tropical birds peeking from her green dress whenever the black coat flew open, followed, hands joined with Tolito and José in a line. They ran through the station, beneath a chain of green lights, Profane loping unathletic into trash cans and Coke machines. Kook broke away and tore broken-field through the noon crowd. “Luis Aparicio,” he screamed, sliding for some private home plate: “Luis Aparicio,” wreaking havoc through a troop of Girl Scouts. Down the stairs, over to the uptown local, a train was waiting, Fina and the kids got in; as Profane started through the doors closed on him, squeezing him in the middle. Fina’s eyes went wide like her brother’s. With a frightened little cry she took Profane’s hand and tugged, and a miracle happened. The doors opened again. She gathered him inside, into her quiet field of force. He knew all at once: here, for the time being, Profane the schlemihl can move nimble and sure. All the way home Kook sang “Tienes Mi Corazón,” a love song he had heard once in a movie.

  They lived uptown in the eighties, between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway. Fina, Kook, mother, father, and another brother named Angel. Sometimes Angel’s friend Geronimo would come over and sleep on the kitchen floor. The old man was on relief. The mother fell in love with Profane immediately. They gave him the bathtub.

  Next day Kook found him sleeping there and turned on the cold water. “Jesus God,” Profane yelled, spluttering awake.

  “Man, you go find a job,” Kook said. “Fina says so.” Profane jumped up and went chasing Kook through the little apartment, trailing water behind him. In the front room he tripped over Angel and Geronimo, who were lying there drinking wine and talking about the girls they would watch that day in Riverside Park. Kook escaped, laughing and screaming “Luis Aparicio.” Profane lay there with his nose pressed against the floor. “Have some wine,” Angel said.