Vanishing Ladies

Chapter fourteen

I’m a city boy.

I was born and raised in the city, and that means a lot of things. It means you don’t see grass or trees unless you go to a park. That sounds like a banality, but many banal things happen to be true nonetheless. It means the sky is always etched with concrete. It means that sometimes, on some streets, you feel you can’t even see the sky. It means dirt, and garbage, and noise, and violence. A city is a lot of small towns clustered together. And so you get all the bad things of any small town, but you get the good things, too.

If you weren’t raised in a city, you won’t understand the good things.

You won’t understand the joy of playing marbles alongside a curb after a summer rainstorm. You won’t understand the deep pleasure of sticking your hand into a black puddle of water to span your marble and your competitor’s. You won’t savor the unparalleled thrill of riding a pusho which was made out of a two-by-four, an orange crate, and an old ball-bearing skate. You can hear the ball bearings rattle around in the wheels, because you purposely used a skate which had wheels with worn rims. You can feel the black asphalt skimming under the pusho, and you bounce on the two-by-four and skirt along with the other pushos, and in that moment you’re Lawrence of Arabia on a white steed.

In the summer heat, you turn on the fire hydrant, and you bend a coffee tin and put it over the nozzle, and the water sprays up in a force-packed shower, and the kids dance under it, the black pavement slick and wet. When the cop comes, you run like hell, and you watch solemnly while he turns off the pump with a Stillson wrench until the water becomes only a trickle, and then only a memory.

In the summer, too, you sit on the front stoop with the other kids, and the city has its own song at night, especially on a summer night when the heat has baked into the street and the sidewalk and the brick walls of the tenements and a cool breeze blows in over the river. You can hear the city’s song very clearly on a summer night. You can hear the horns, and the tugs, and the voices, and the people. You can hear the sound around you like the sound of mingled voices at a public beach, hovering on the air, indistinct, unintelligible, and beneath that the whisper of your friends beside you on the stoop, and the cool comfort of a cup of ices clenched in your fist, and the vast exchange of sex and religion and philosophy.

In the fall, the city doesn’t have turning leaves. In the fall, the city has a bite on the air, a bite as sharp as a dragon’s tooth. You put the summer to rest, and you buckle down, and if you’re a kid you shop the five-and-dime for your new looseleaf folder, and your new pencils, and you can smell school in the air, and the smell is a good one. The tempo is picked up. You can’t feel tempo anywhere but in the city. In the city the footsteps are magnified by a million, and you can feel the quicker beat, and there’s suddenly purpose to the city — the summer is gone, the loafing is over, the city is tightening its belt for the cold winter ahead.

You didn’t ice skate in the city. Ice-skating was something you learned later, when you were older, something you would never be really good at because you learned so late. But the snowplows rushed through the streets like giant tanks, pushing the snow to the curb, making tall fortresses. You climbed the fortresses, and the city became a mountainland of cold and ice and you felt for a moment a part of the people all around you, and you longed for the greater intimacy of a really snowbound community.

In the spring, you had Saint Paddy’s day. You weren’t Irish, but your blood sang on that day anyway, and you made sure you had a green tie, and there was an Irish girl in your class you kissed, and you sang ‘Did Your Mother Come from Ireland?’ and you cut classes to watch the parade downtown. You saw cops then. Lines and lines of cops. Marching in precision, lines of blue. You became a cop later for different reasons, but you’d never forget the marching blue uniforms, or the sudden mild breeze, mild for March, the sudden warm sun, so warm for March, that heralded the day of the Irish and the beginning of spring.

You loved the city because the city had been part of you since the day you looked up from your carriage and saw the buildings reaching for the sky. You could go to the country for picnics, but the city always called you back, and you heard her keening song in the strangest places — on gangway watch in the yards at Boston, on the fantail of a destroyer on a quiet moonlit night with the Pacific as still as a sleeping babe, behind the heaving smoking barrels of a 40 mm. gun trained on an enemy plane, the pom-pom, pom-pom bursting your ear-drums, the acrid stench of cordite powerful in your nostrils. You didn’t forget the song of the city. You couldn’t forget it because you helped write it.

I’m a city boy.

The country doesn’t gas me.

I don’t like lonely roads without lights, and I don’t like the hum of insects, the incessant goddamn chirruping and croaking and cccsssking, and chipock-chipocking. I don’t like getting out of a car and being hit in the face with the eerie strand of a spider’s web. I don’t like stepping in soft mud, and I don’t like the feeling that the next time I put down my foot it might be on a wasp’s nest, or in a bed of quicksand, or on a snake.

I’m chicken that way.

I’m a coward.

I got out of the police sedan on the night of June 4th, and there was nothing I’d rather have done less. I brushed the spider’s web from my face, feeling crawly, wondering if the spider were entangled in my hair, and then I started through the woods. I was about as absolutely quiet as Davy Crockett with his leg in a plaster cast. A deaf Parisian sitting in the shade of the Eiffel Tower could have heard me. A dead Indian buried under the Taj Mahal would have perked up his ears at my coming. Martians paddling down their canals undoubtedly wondered what all the racket was about.

There was only one thing I wanted.

Mike Barter had driven somewhere with Hezekiah on business. I didn’t know what the business had been, but they’d driven in the truck. I wanted a look at that truck.

There were sounds in the woods. I didn’t like the sounds. They scared me. That’s the absolute truth. I pulled the .38 from the holster on my belt, and edged my way through the woods listening to the sounds. Branches snapped. Animals seemed to lurk behind every tree. Birds screeched every now and then. The insects buzzed and hummed. There wasn’t a light showing anywhere. A country boy would have made a beeline for the motel. I’m a city boy. I didn’t know where the hell I was going. I hoped I was going in a straight line. I hoped I was heading for the motel. I hoped I could find my way back to the car if it turned out I wasn’t heading for the motel.

Hope is a poor subsitute for woodsmanship. I should have been a Boy Scout. I should have been a pioneer. I should have stood in bed.

I don’t believe in stacking the deck. It gets comical after a while. It gets like a soap opera.

‘When we left Nellie May yesterday, her mother was dying of frostbite and the phone was out of order. Nellie couldn’t send her brother Tom to the village for the doctor because Tom had a broken leg. The lion who’d escaped from the circus was clawing at the kitchen screen door, and the oil burner had just exploded setting the basement on fire. As we all know, Nellie is a drug addict, and her last fix had been three days ago...’

So I don’t believe in stacking the deck. I figured Phil was in enough trouble as it was. I figured DeMorra was sticking his neck out by sending me to help. I figured Ann might be in serious danger, and I figured I was a horse’s ass for traipsing through the woods without a compass.

I needed what happened next. I needed it like Nellie May needed the circus lion at her kitchen door.

I felt myself falling.

The fall came suddenly, the ground abruptly sloping off so that I lost my footing. I stumbled forward, groping for support where there was none. Something cold touched my ankle, and panic roared up into my brain until I realized the something cold was water. I was too far gone by that time. I fell flat on my face, covered with slime, covered with water that surely had come out of an ice-cube tray. I’d clung tightly to the .38, but it was submerged with me, and it probably wouldn’t fire for the next ten years. I sat up. The water was up to my waist. I wanted to laugh. Until I heard — or rather sensed — movement in the water.

I thought it was a trick of my eyes at first, a gag my eyes were playing.

I’d heard about snakes swimming, but I’d never seen one before.

I couldn’t even see this one too clearly, except that he was about three feet away from me in the water and coming on an apparent collision course. If you’re going to be shocked, go ahead. I didn’t ask for the snake. I didn’t even ask for a caterpillar. I’m no different from you, unless you’re a snake trainer. I don’t like them. I pulled the .38 up, and I fired. The gun misfired, and I squeezed the trigger again, and again there was nothing, and then the snake hit.

I screamed.

I don’t give a damn what you think about men screaming. I screamed. I screamed as loud as I know how to scream, and then I felt a needle-like pain in my leg, and I screamed again, and I lashed out at the snake with the butt of the .38, and I kept lashing, striking up the water, hitting at the snake, and yelling and screaming and cursing all the while. He left.

As suddenly as he’d come, he was gone.

I couldn’t move.

I sat with the black waters swirling around my waist. I was trembling, and I suppose my eyes were shut tight, and then the shocking idea came that there might be more snakes in the water, and I leaped to my feet and clawed my way up the bank of the pond, and I fell flat on my face again, but this time I got up and shoved my way through the bushes, feeling the bushes clawing at me like live things, hearing the insects, and hearing the animal noises, but pushing through, and then becoming aware of the awful pain in my leg, and suddenly cognizant of the fact that the snake may have been a poisonous one.

It occurred to me that the most idiotic thing I could do at the moment would be to get lost in the woods and die of snake bite. I could not, right then, think of a more moronic way of dying. I didn’t have a pocket knife, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have known the first thing about lancing a snake bite and drawing off the poison. I didn’t know where I was, and I didn’t know how to find out where I was, and I longed for the feel of asphalt under my feet, longed for the screech of the elevated trains, longed for the blare of a traffic signal.

I came close to panic again.

It’s very easy to panic. Panic is the easiest thing in the world to do. You don’t panic when you’re up against a situation you know you can control. You can face another man with a revolver, and he can be firing at you, and you won’t panic because you’ve faced men with revolvers before. You can face a broken bottle being thrust at your jugular vein and you won’t panic because this is old hat. But it’s easy to panic when you don’t know the score. You can feel the panic bubbling inside your stomach, and it’s so easy to let it go, so easy to let it erupt into your mind and your body, so easy to let it propel your legs, let it control the wild flailing of your arms, let it put fright in your eyes and fear in your heart.

I didn’t.

I wouldn’t.

I kept shoving my way through the woods, dragging my leg behind me, dragging my backside, dragging every ounce of will power I could muster. I kept on what I hoped was a line paralleling the road. And finally I saw a light.

I still had the .38 in my fist. I clung to it, as if it were a howitzer instead of a gun which wouldn’t fire.

I came out of the woods behind the motel, and I staggered down to the gravel court, and I shouted, ‘Help!’

I wasn’t thinking of detective work at the moment. I was thinking I’d been bitten by a poisonous snake, and I needed a doctor. The office door opened. Barter and Hezekiah stepped into the light.

‘Help!’ I said again, and I limped toward them. Hezekiah came out of the doorway. Something big and ugly was in his hands.

‘I’ve been bitten by a snake,’ I said, and Hezekiah, son of a bitch that he was, hit me on the head.