Hanging Time

9

Sometimes on very sunny afternoons spikes of light forced their way through the few clean patches in the cracked basement window. Today the light looked to Camille like white grass growing up through a cracked pavement. The floor was crunchy where fallen plaster from the ceiling and walls got walked on for many months before anybody bothered to sweep up. Bare bricks showed through everywhere, discolored and chipped.

It was very damp down there, even in summer, and the smell of urine was getting worse now that the puppy was older. Bouck said she had to do something about the smell.

Camille sat on the floor with her back pressed into a corner, waiting for the bright light to fade. She could hear Jamal on the other side of the wall, polishing crystal with the sonar machine. There was kind of a whine, or a hum, that she sometimes thought was human. As long as she could hear it, she felt safe.

Jamal wasn’t supposed to come on this side of the wall. The best chandeliers were in here, hanging from the low ceiling. On very bad days Camille stayed here, too, unable even to take the puppy out. The hum stopped, and she tensed.

He wasn’t supposed to come on this side of the wall. Jamal smoked some kind of dope—hash or cocaine or something. And he touched her if he could get away with it. After he found out there were times she couldn’t move, he came in and touched her hair and her breasts. Now he wasn’t ever supposed to come on this side of the door.

Bouck told Jamal he would kill him. Bouck had three guns. Camille thought he would do it. He would kill for her. No doubt about it. But Jamal didn’t care about the guns. He wanted to touch her fine hair, that pale, pale reddish gold that was so rare. It was a color and texture Jamal had never seen in Haiti, or Trinidad, or Jamaica, or wherever he came from. Camille didn’t like to talk to him. His hair was all matted and he smelled worse than the dog. Some religious thing. He listened to reggae through a Walkman that Camille knew was the devil singing in his ear.

The light moved just a little bit, and she turned her head. Upstairs in the shop she could hear the phone ring and someone answer. It wasn’t Bouck. Bouck was at an auction. No, no, somebody died. Bouck was looking at a dead person’s estate. Sometimes he went and took things out of dead people’s apartments before the IRS could get there to tax them. Sometimes he bought the whole estate. Bouck had a lot of money. He gave her money all the time and laughed when she forgot where she put it.

“Easy come, easy go,” he said.

A few weeks earlier Bouck shot somebody who was trying to get into the shop. It was Puppy that first heard the noise.

Then Camille heard it. Nights were sometimes good for her and Bouck let her move around. That night she was free.

“Bouck.”

“Huh.” He jerked awake as if lightning had struck him.

She stood outside his door because she didn’t like to go into his room at night no matter what.

“Somebody’s downstairs.”

He was up before the light was on, the .38 already palmed. He was down the two flights of stairs and in the basement within a few seconds, with Camille not far behind.

It turned out to be a kid trying to jimmy the window in the basement. He didn’t even get inside. Before the window was all the way open, Bouck shot him. The bullet knocked him flat even though it didn’t kill him. Bouck would probably have shot him again, but the guy got up.

Together Bouck and Camille ran up the stairs and watched out the window of the shop as the thief staggered down Second Avenue, bleeding all over the place. Bouck told her later the kid must have lived. There was nothing about it in the paper. He had Jamal wash down the sidewalk the next day, but no one ever came to ask any questions. Camille thought about the way Bouck had shot the boy. Even with Jamal around, Bouck always made Camille feel safe. Bouck could make war.

She listened for him.

Today wasn’t such a very bad day. The animal she called anguish was only a tightness in her chest, a weight holding her down, just above the level of hell. Today the animal was an almost manageable pain. She could think a little. By sundown the weight might lift enough to allow her to go upstairs. But then again, it might not lift for days. It all depended.

On good days it got better in the evenings. By six or seven her mind drifted back into focus and she started thinking she might be all right until the next day. Then it would start again with the dawn.

Madness seemed to come in the mornings, hitting her like a hurricane of wailing furies so loud and so ferociously violent, sometimes she shook all over. Sometimes she screamed and clawed at the wall. Bouck didn’t like her to do that.

When it was very bad like that she knew she would have to die to make it stop. Dying seemed like a good idea about eighty percent of the time. But Bouck kept pushing death back for her. She thought about dying every day. More than once she tried to get there. She just couldn’t find her way to the peace of death, though, where her parents were waiting to take her back. Whatever she did to end herself, Bouck kept pushing her back. Sometimes she knew death would come to her only if Bouck went first.

Camille knew where two of Bouck’s guns were. One was in his belt, and one was in his boot. On good days he let her play with his guns. The third gun, the automatic with the kind of bullets that exploded inside and could blow a man’s head off, was hidden somewhere else. She was pretty sure someday she’d find it.

The puppy lay across her lap, its head hanging over her knee. It could stay like that for hours, sprawled and boneless, just like Camille, almost as if the puppy, too, could die inside with the soul death of its mistress.

Then when Camille was finally able to stir herself after hours of inertia, the puppy would get up and race around. Round and round, up and down the stairs faster than any human could run. Camille knew if Puppy got away, no one could catch it. It was fast, very fast. She loved Puppy. More than Bouck. More than anything. She couldn’t live without Puppy. Upstairs the shop bell tinkled. The day was taking a long time to end.