The Animal Hour Read online

  She was too exhausted now to jump the railings. She took the short path between plots of grass. She half ran, half stumbled on it. Her flats scraped the pavement. With her hat gone, her curls tumbled down around her face.

  She reached the elms that bordered the park. She tumbled through onto the broad sidewalk. She pulled up with a gasp at the edge of the breathless city. The wide highway. The distant towers of the Brooklyn Bridge. The huge winged Municipal Building, hanging over her. Pedestrians clacked past her oblivious. She turned. And there, to her left, against the backdrop of a Parisian courthouse, against its mansard roof, its columned facade: an opening into the ground. A vanishing stairway. An unobtrusive black sign.

  A subway station.

  The cops rounded the Hall behind her. She glanced back and saw them converge. Four uniforms, shoulder to shoulder. Four pairs of eyes—they surveyed the scene. Got her.

  “All right, lady …”

  She was already staggering away. Reaching for the banister to the subway stairs like a thirsty woman reaching for water. The Beaux-Arts courthouse tilted this way and that as she came near it. The pit into the subway grew bigger.

  And now, she heard the running footsteps behind her. Thap thap thap. Getting louder. Closer.

  Oh, turn around, she thought. For God’s sake, Nancy. Turn around and surrender. Explain it to them. “My name is Nancy Kincaid …”

  “Drop the gun, lady!”

  She pushed herself faster. Threaded through the people walking past the entranceway. She grabbed the banister. Pulled herself into the hole. Rapped down the stairs. Faster. Forcing herself to go faster, down into the tunnel. The darkness came up at her from below.

  There’ll be cops down there.

  She stuffed her gun back into her purse. Pulled out her wallet. Never stopped skipping quickly down. She snapped the wallet open, found a token as she hit the landing below. She broke for the turnstiles. Everything was darker here, quieter, close. Lots of glare from the fluorescents overhead. Bright yellow signs, bright silver stiles. Light-washed faces turning to her. The lizard stare of the woman in the glassed-in token booth. The travelers waiting on the token line looking up. People pushing through the turnstiles, glancing back.

  Nancy found an open stile, stuck her token in the slot, pushed through. Already, the cops were on the stairs, their footsteps echoing. Turn around. Stop. Explain. Damn it. She just wanted the black fear to stop. But she ran. Her vision blurred as her eyes filled with tears. She couldn’t stop running. What is happening to me?

  She ran down the long hall, under the low ceiling, the low fluorescents. She dodged through the sparse, fast-flowing crowd. Past the faces that swung around to see. A wake of cries went up behind her as the cops came into the station, as they took up the chase. A wake of shouts:

  “Stop!”

  “Watch out!”

  “Get down!”

  “Hold it!”

  There were the tracks, right up ahead. People waited on the platform. They turned at the shouts. A bald businessman lowered his newspaper, stared at her. A broad black in jeans squared, as if to stop her.

  She barreled toward them. “Watch out!” she cried. “I’ve got a gun.”

  The black guy hesitated and she was past him. Cornering onto the platform. Out of sight of the cops. Running along the platform’s edge, her flats skirting the yellow line at the brink of it. There were the tracks below—the empty tracks.

  No train.

  She was sobbing with exhaustion now. Stumbling on in despair.

  No train.

  There was no train coming. She could see up the tracks. And there was no place left to run. The concrete platform ended up ahead. She thrashed her way toward it. She wove out over the tracks, wove back toward the filthy yellow tiles of the wall. Ahead of her, frightened faces turned, whitened by the low fluorescents. Behind her, new cries: The cops had rounded the corner. They were coming after her. Their shouts were right at her shoulder.

  “Stop!”

  “You’re under arrest!”

  “I’m gonna shoot, sister, put ’em up!”

  And she was trapped. Out of room. The platform ended two steps ahead. A metal ladder led down from it onto the tracks and the tracks curved on and out of sight into the unknowable dark.

  She flailed toward the edge. Toward a white sign that hung askew where the station wall ended: “All persons forbidden to enter or cross tracks.” The red letters blended together as she started to cry, as the tears streamed down her cheeks.

  Turn around. Just tell them. Don’t shoot. I’m just scared. Just a scared little button.

  She was finished. She stopped, her chest heaving painfully. She turned and stumbled backward a few steps toward the brink. Her shoulders sagged. Her breath honked in and out of her. She peered through her tears. It was all a blur. Dragon-toothed lights. Featureless faces. And the four cops like shadowy blue goblins. Big, unfocused blue creatures pulsing toward her. They moved more cautiously now—now that she was cornered. They walked—quickly—their free hands raised, their guns leveled at her.

  Jesus Christ. They are going to put me away, she thought. It was true. They would think she was nuts. They would put her in a hospital, in a room, in a white room. Just her and the walls. And the voice inside her head …

  The Animal Hour. That’s when he dies. You have to be there.

  They would call her mother. Her mother would come to visit her. She would sit beside her and call her name and cry. But Nancy would only hear …

  Eight o’clock.

  The voices. She would be alone in a padded room with voices.

  You have to be there.

  The cops were only a few steps away from her now. Two of them were coming on ahead of the others, a man cop and a woman. They had their guns leveled at her. They had their hands raised toward her to keep her steady.

  “Easy now, Miss, easy,” the woman cop said.

  She gazed at them wearily, panting and crying. They were going to put her away and …

  You have to be there! The Animal Hour! He’s going to die!

  “I have to,” she whispered. “I have to be there.”

  She swung around suddenly. The shouts flared behind her. She crouched down …

  “Hey!”

  “Wait!”

  “Stop!”

  She grabbed hold of the top of the ladder. With a single motion, she swung herself over the platform’s edge. Out, into the darkness. Down, onto the tracks.

  She stumbled. Straightened. Ran.

  A blonde came toward him from the corner of Sixth. He had just left Nana’s to head for the mews. The blonde was beautiful, a student with books propped against her middle. The sight of her broke Perkins’s chain of thought.

  He watched her as she approached, as he approached her. She was tall and broad. Athletic-looking in a red down vest and jeans. Her skin was white but her cheeks were pink with sun. She glanced at Perkins as she passed. He glanced after her to watch her backside move.

  By the time he reached the avenue, he was imagining having sex with her. Not just sex—a whole way of life together—the way of life he figured would go with a girl who looked that way. He pictured them in an A-frame cabin in the Colorado Rockies. She was on her back on a bed of bearskins. Naked, she was spread wide: a naturalist, abandoned. He had dropped a load of freshly hewn wood just inside the door and stripped off his own jeans fast. He was still wearing his sweater as he ploughed into her. There was frost on the windowpanes. Snow on the misty mountains outside.

  He was walking down Sixth now, approaching the library on his right. His hands were in his pockets, his shoulders hunched. His chin was on his chest and his straight black hair was bouncing on his brow. He raised his eyes from his sneakers as he thought about the blonde’s lusty cries. Before him, the low buildings of stone and glass faded away toward a crisp blue sky. The bright day made him squint. The hangover had made his eyes feel raw.

  He riffled his lips as he humped down the aven
ue. The taste of solitude was in his mouth again, the weight of it was in his belly.

  … desolate and sick of an old passion.

  Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head.

  Shit, he thought, with a heavy sigh. Julia had been blonde too. She had been big and athletic too with that way of flinging herself open to him. Flinging her head back, letting loose with those abandoned howls. He thought about how he had finally lost her: because he had made it with a boy in the river near their house. The kid was no more than eighteen, nineteen. Frail bodied and white skinned. With faraway, dreamy black eyes. Yea, I was a moron and shot my wad. The kid had been sitting on a rock near Perkins’s swimming hole. He had been sitting there naked and dripping. He had been reading Leaves of Grass, holding it open on the rock. When Julia came down the forest path and found them, they had been locked together in the deep water, turning and turning in the current. Perkins’s arm was wrapped around the boy’s chest, the boy’s head was thrown back on Perkins’s shoulder.

  “I thought you were trying to save his life!” Julia cried out to him later.

  “He was sitting naked on a rock, Jule,” Perkins said. “He was reading Whitman, for Christ’s sake! What was I supposed to do?”

  Somehow this argument had carried exactly no weight with her. She had stood and glared at him, her arms crossed on her breasts. Tears streamed steadily down her sunburnt cheeks. He had never seen her cry before and it razed him inside, turned him to ashes.

  “It’s just the desperate things you do to keep from loving me, Oliver,” she said finally. “I can’t stand it, all right? I really can’t stand it anymore.”

  Just now, just as he remembered this, he was passing under the Jefferson Market Library. It was a storybook castle of a place. All red brick towers and battlements rising out of the low-flung Village mini-malls. Stone spires and gray-metal roofs. Turrets and Gothic tracery around stained glass. A peaked clocktower with four faces rising over all. It was an appropriate reproach to him, and he thought: Look on thy workspace, ye dickhead, and despair.

  He was supposed to write his poems here. It was part of a grant he’d won with The Animal Hour. Along with giving him some seven thousand dollars, the state rented him a small workroom in the rear of the library. He even got a key so he could go in after hours. He did go in: every day; and at night, too, sometimes, when he wasn’t tending bar in the café He sat alone at a small metal desk hemmed in by metal bookshelves. Barely a foot of free floor space to pace in. He sat hunched over his notebooks, with his loneliness perched on his shoulder like the Raven. He wrote bad lines of poetry and threw them away. Day after day. Night after night.

  He averted his eyes from the building as he passed it. He had been meaning to go in there tonight, but not to write. Just to get a good view of the Halloween parade. The marchers would go right past the place. Transvestites and monsters and Dixieland bands under the windows. The sidewalks below jammed with spectators. The music bouncing off the Village sky …

  It made him think of Zach again. Zach was going to be in the parade. He had been all geared up for it the last time Oliver had seen him. That was Friday. Ollie had gone over to Zach’s place to return his copy of Schillebeckxx, a philosophical enquiry into Jesus Christ that Zach had forced on him. He’d lugged the 800-page doorstop all the way up the brownstone’s narrow stairway. Pounded at Zach’s peeling door with his fist. The door had just swung in. Pure Zach: it was unlocked—just open in that crackhead-infested hellhole. Anyway, in the door swung and there they were. Sitting opposite each other on the bed by the window. Tiffany was at the foot. Venus-faced but rail-thin. Black T-shirt, black jeans. Long black hair streaked with shiny silver. Her back was propped against the bedrail, her legs stretched out before her. She was smiling with her rich lips and absently shuffling a deck of Tarot cards. And, at the head of the bed: It was like her reflection. Black T-shirt, black jeans, and just as rail-thin because of that stupid macro-whatever vegetarian diet she had them on. Except the face on him was the face of Death. It was Zachie in a pullover latex skull mask.

  “Jesus, Zach,” Oliver said. “You look like Death.”

  Zach’s happy, boyish laughter sounded hollow inside the mask. He was practically bubbling over with the news. “I’m gonna be in the parade, Ollie. Downtowner’s gonna have a contingent and I get to play King Death. Isn’t it great?”

  Oliver had to smile. Even through the skull’s eyeholes, he could see Zach’s bright, black eyes. The awestruck excitement in them. Isn’t it great? The same as when he was seven years old. Shaking his head, Oliver tossed the Schillebeckxx down on the bed between the two of them. Thunk.

  “Here’s your book back, kid. There’s still no God.”

  Zach let fly with that boy’s laugh again. “Oh, Ollie!” The death’s head tilted back.

  Tiffany, though, smiled her voluptuous smile, cast her eyes heavenward. Launched into her sweet contralto. “Oh, Ollie. If you just kept a more open mind, you wouldn’t be so stuck with your poetry in those retro paternalistic modes of yours.”

  Oliver gave her a long look. Retro paternalistic modes. God, he disliked the woman. A simpering Scarsdale debutante gone mystical fem. He hated the lot of them: mystics; fems. Debutantes. He wasn’t too fond of Scarsdale either. Or maybe it was just Tiffany.

  He finally simpered back at her. Held his tongue. Zach hated it when the two of them argued. He wanted them to like each other. Zach wanted everyone to like each other under the tender eyes of a loving God. Too bad he lived on Earth …

  With these thoughts, Perkins was carried away from the library. Down Sixth to the corner of West Eighth Street. He turned there. A broad street lined with shoe stores, T-shirt shops, poster stores. Lots of heavy metal pictures of death in the windows: flaming Death on a motorcycle, drooling Death playing the guitar … It was only about 10:35 now, and most of the stores were still closed. The sidewalks were quiet. A line of children in costumes—devils, turtles, ballerinas—trooped toward Sixth, their teacher leading. Perkins went past them, chin down, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets. His mouth was working angrily.

  Tiffany. She shouldn’t have called Nana. Face of a Botticelli, brain of a midge. She shouldn’t have called Nana about Zach. It was stupid. The old woman was sick, for Christ’s sake. She wasn’t supposed to worry. It was bad for her, bad for her heart. Just because his own phone was temporarily disconnected. Just because he’d tried to steal a few moments of human tenderness and communion with Mindy or Milly or whatever the hell her name was. That was no reason to get all panicked, to get Nana all panicked. Maybe Zach was working. Maybe he’d gone for a walk. Maybe he just wanted to get away from her. It was no reason to murder his grandmother.

  Perkins crossed to the far sidewalk. Went down MacDougal Street. His thoughts had come full circle now. He was thinking about Nana, about how frail she was. He was thinking about Nana dying—and then about his mother dying and how he had found her. That’s just what he’d been thinking about when he left Nana’s. When he walked past the blonde: that day when he found his mother, when he was fourteen years old. He remembered how he had come in from playing baseball. They had been in the house on Long Island then. He had strode through the kitchen, his bat on his shoulder. The minute he stepped through the door into the living room, he’d seen his mother on the floor. She was stretched out on her side between the sofa and the coffee table. Her short hair spilled over her cheek. Her thin arm was flung out over her head. The saucer was upside down on the rug and the cup was on its side. There was a small spurt-stain of tea on the white shag.

  He remembered how that had bothered him: that stain of tea. His mother had been such a meticulous housewife. Fluttering around with her nervous hands, her frightened smile. Setting everything straight all the time. Flitting from room to room like a household spirit. Oliver had run to her where she lay. After that, after he saw she was dead, he must have gone into shock. He had simply stood up and wandered away, back into the kitchen. He had brought a sponge i
n from the sink. He had knelt down on the rug and washed that tea stain right out. He had rubbed it away thoroughly, his hand braced against the floor, his mother’s soft hair brushing his forearm. Then, very carefully, he had sponged off the coffee table too. He had carried the teacup and saucer in to the sink. He had rinsed them out and put them in the dishwasher. He did not snap out of it until he returned to the living room. Then, he saw his little brother standing in the doorway. That brought him around. The skinny ten-year-old was staring down at their mother with his big, dark eyes. After a while, he lifted those eyes up to Ollie.

  “Don’t worry, Zach-man,” Oliver had said. His voice was toneless. “Go upstairs now, buddy. Don’t worry.”

  Zach had turned away. He had gone upstairs to his room. Oliver had knelt down next to his mother. She was a small woman, but he was only fourteen: he did not think he could lift her onto the sofa in a dignified manner. He turned her onto her back instead, right there on the rug. He arranged her arms by her side. He brushed the hair off her cheeks and forehead. Her mousy little face was turned up to him now, the eyes closed, the lips parted.

  “Don’t worry, Mom,” he told her softly. He stroked her cheek with the back of his fingers. “Don’t worry anymore.”

  And then he had returned to the kitchen to phone for his father and the ambulance …

  That was what he had been thinking about when he came out of Nana’s place, when he saw the blonde come toward him from Sixth Avenue. And he was thinking about it now again as he reached MacDougal Alley.

  He paused for a moment there, at the black iron gate that barred the way. He saw the little lane stretched beyond the bars. It was a queer, quaint private alley, sealed at the far end by a high-rise wall. Cottages faced one another over the pavement, ruffled with rose ivy, shaded with red maples and yellowing ash. The sun came through the trees in patches, dappling the cottage walls.

  Perkins pulled the black gate open and went in. Nana’s mews was on the left. A small one, two low stories. It was brick, painted white, but there were chips in the paint where the red brick showed through. Black shutters and doors. Reddening ivy climbing up one side to the flat roof.