Barking Man (11 page)

Azazael was usually hostile to Medusa.
You don’t know what you’re getting into
, he said.
You’re not sure yourself just what you’re calling up, or why
.

“The one sure thing is you’re a gloomy devil,” Mackie Loudon said. But she said it with affection, being so much in control this morning that the demonic bickering was as pleasant to her as a choir. “You’ve always got the wrong idea,” she said to Azazael. “You’re my unnecessary demon.” She moved the chisel and another pale peel of the outer wood came falling away from its dark core.

Mackie Loudon was headed home from a foraging expedition, her shoulders pulled down by the two plastic shopping bags that swung low from the end of her arms. Her head was lowered also and she scanned the pavement ahead of her for anything of interest that might be likely to appear. A couple of feet above the nape of her neck, Eliel and Azazael invisibly whirled around each other, swooping and darting like barn swallows at evening. They were having one of the witless arguments to which immaterial beings are prone, about whether or not it was really raining. It was plain enough to Mackie Loudon that it
was
raining, but not hard enough for her to bother stopping to take out the extra plastic bag she carried to tie around her head when it was raining hard. There were only a few fat raindrops splattering down, spaced far apart on the sidewalk.

She had almost come to the line of people shuffling into the matinee at the President Theater when she halted and sank to one knee to reach for a cloudy blue glass marble wedged in a triangular chip in the pavement. Just then there was some commotion in the movie crowd, and she looked up as a little black girl not more than five ran out into the street weeping and screaming, with a fat black woman chasing her and flogging her across the shoulders with a chain dog leash, or so Azazael began to maintain.

Did you
see
that?
Hissed Azazael, his voice turning sibilant as it lowered. On the street a car squealed to a sudden halt, blasted its horn once and then drove on. The line had reformed itself and the tail of it dragged slowly into the theater’s lobby.

See what?
said Eliel.
None of these people look like they saw anything …

They never see
, said Azazael.
That’s the way of the world, you know
.

Mackie Loudon grasped the marble with her thumb and forefinger and held it near her stable eye, but it had lost its luster. The cloud in it looked no longer like a whirlwind, but a cataract. She flipped the marble over the curb and watched it roll through a drain’s grating.

Are you deaf and dumb and blind?
Azazael was carping.
Don’t you know what happens to children nowadays?

“SHUT UP!!” Mackie Loudon cried as she arose and caught up her bags. “Both of you, now, you just
shut up
.” On the other side of the street an ancient man who’d been dozing in a porch swing snapped his head up to stare at her.

In the bedroom was a low bed with a saggily soft mattress, and whenever Mackie Loudon retired she felt it pressing in on all the sides of her like clay. But if she woke in the middle of the night, she’d find herself sucked out through a rip in the sky, floating in an inky universal darkness, the stars immeasurably distant from herself and one another, and a long, long way below, the blue and green Earth reduced to the size of a teardrop. Somewhere down there her husband, son and a pair of grandchildren (that she knew of) continued to exist, and she felt wistful for them, or sometimes felt an even deeper pang.

You chose us
, sang Eliel and Azazael. Out here, they always joined in a chorus. Out here, she sometimes thought she almost saw them, bright flickerings at the edges of her eyes.
And look, it’s even more beautiful than you ever hoped it would be
.

“Yes, but it’s lonely too,” Mackie Loudon said.

You chose us
, the demons droned, which was the truth, or near it.

Medusa wasn’t going well; Azazael’s objections were gaining ground, or somehow something else was wrong. Mackie Loudon couldn’t quite make out what was the matter. She wandered away from the unfinished carving and her mind wandered with her, or sometimes strayed. As she passed along the dairy aisle at the A & P, small hands no bigger than insect limbs reached from the milk cartons to pluck at the hairs of her forearm. She wasn’t sure just where or why but she suspected it had happened before, similar little tactile intimations grasping at her from brown paper sacks or withered posters stapled to the phone poles.

Oh, you remember
, Azazael was teasing her.
You can remember any time you want
.

“No, I
can’t
,” Mackie Loudon said petulantly. Across the aisle, a matron gave her a curt look and pushed her cart along a little faster.

Never mind
, Eliel said soothingly.
I’ll remember for you. I’ll keep it for you till you need it, that’s all right
. And it was true that Eliel did remember everything and had forgiven Mackie Loudon for it long ago.

There was a boy standing in the alley when Mackie Loudon set her garbage down, just a little old boy with a brush of pale hair and slate-colored eyes and a small brown scab on his jaw line. He wore shorts and a T-shirt with holes and he stood still as a concrete jockey; only his eyes moved slightly, tracking her. Mackie Loudon straightened up and put her hands on her hips.

“Are you real?” she said to him.

The boy shifted his weight to his other leg. “Why wouldn’t I be?” he said.

“Hmmph,” Mackie Loudon said, and put her head to one side to change her angle on him.

“Lady, your yard sho is a mess,” the boy said. “The front yard and the back yard both.”

“You’re too little to cut grass yet a while,” she said. “Lawnmower’d chew you up and spit you out.”

“Who’s that?” the boy said, and raised his arm to point at the house. Mackie Loudon’s heart clutched up and she whipped around. It was a long time since anyone other than she had looked out of those windows. But all he was pointing at was a plaster bust she’d set on a sill and forgotten so well it was invisible to her now.

“Oh, that’s just Paris,” she said.

“Funny name,” the boy said. “
Real
good-looking feller, though.”

“He was a fool and don’t you forget it,” Mackie Loudon said in a sharper tone.

“Well, who was he, then?”

“Question is, who are
you
?”

“Gil mostly just calls me Monkey.”

“That’s not much name for a person,” Mackie Loudon said. “What’s your real name, boy?”

The child’s face clouded over and he looked at the gravel between his feet.

“Won’t tell, hey?” Mackie Loudon said. “All right, I’ll just call you Preston. You answer to that?”

The boy raised his eyes back to her.

“All right, Preston, you drink milk?”

“Sometime, not all the time,” Preston said.

“You eat cookies, I expect?”

“
All
the time,” Preston said, and followed her up the steps into the house. She blew a small dried spider from a water-spotted glass and gave him milk and a lotus seed cake from a white waxed bag of them. Preston looked strangely at the cake’s embossed and egg-white polished surface before he took a bite.

“What do you think?” Mackie Loudon said. She had poured an inch of cold coffee into her mug and was eating a lotus seed cake herself.

“I don’t know, but it ain’t a cookie,” Preston said, and continued to eat.

“It’s sweet, though, right? And just one will keep you on your feet all day. And do you know the secret?”

“Secret?”

“Got
thousand-year-old egg yolk
in it,” Mackie Loudon said. “That’s what puts the kick in it for you.”

Preston bugged his eyes at her and slid down from his seat. He laid a trail of crumbs into the parlor, where she found him crouched on the desiccated carpet, lifting a corner of the sheet she used to veil Medusa.

“Oooooo,
snakes
,” said Preston, delighted. Mackie Loudon pulled his hand away so that the sheet fell back.

“Let that alone, it’s not done yet,” she said. “It’s got something wrong with it, I can’t tell what.”

Preston turned a circle in the middle of the room, pointing at heads on the mantel and the bookcases.

“Who’s that?” he said. “And that? And that?”

“Just some folks I used to know,” Mackie Loudon told him. “But didn’t you want me to tell you about Paris?” When Preston nodded, she took a lump of plasticine from an end table drawer and gave it to him to occupy his hands, which otherwise seemed to wander. Half consciously, he kneaded the clay from one crude shape to another, and his eyes kept roving around the room, but she could tell that he was listening closely. She started with the judgment of Paris and went on and on and on. Preston came back the next morning, and within a couple of weeks she’d started them into the Trojan War. By first frost they were on their way with the
Odyssey
.

The demons kept silent while Preston was there, and were quieter than usual even after he’d left. Azazael did a little griping about how the boy was wasting her time, but he had nothing to say with any real bite to it. Eliel was rather withdrawn, since he was much occupied with the task of observing Gil through Mackie Loudon’s eyes and storing up in memory all he saw.

Preston lived with Gil in a house right next to Mackie Loudon’s. The paint was peeling off the clapboards in long curly strips, and on the front door was a red and blue decal of a skull cloven by a zigzag lightning bolt. The windows, painted shut for a decade, were blacked out day and night with dirty sheets, behind which strange bluish lights were sometimes seen to flash in one room or another. There was no woman living there, though every so often one would visit, and sometimes little gangs of other scroungy children would appear and remain for a day or several, though the only one there permanently was Preston.

Gil himself was tall and stooped, with thinning black hair and not much chin. He affected motorcycle garb, though it didn’t suit him. He was thin as from some wasting disease, and the boots and black leather and studded arm bands hung slackly from him like the plumage of some mangy kind of buzzard. He drove a newly customized black van with its rear windows cut in the shape of card-deck spades. He never seemed to go out to work, but he dealt in prodigious quantities of mail, getting and sending rafts of big brown cartons. Mackie Loudon would have thought he trafficked in drugs or other, bulkier contraband if she cared to think about it at all, but all these notions had been assumed by Eliel ever since the first time Gil had come to her door to fetch Preston. “Come out, Monk,” he’d said through the mail slot, his voice whiny and insinuating. “Time to come along with Gil …” And she and the demons had seen the thousand tiny gates behind Preston’s lips and eyes slide shut.

Preston loved the
Iliad
, the
Odyssey
, he loved the story of Perseus and the Gorgon, though he flinched a little at Diana and Acteon, but he didn’t want to hear one word of Jason and the Argonauts. Indeed, at the first mention of the name a wracking change came over him, as if he’d been … possessed. He paled, he shook, he formed a fist of sharp white knuckles and smashed the little plasticine figure Mackie Loudon had made to represent the hero. Then he was out the back door and running pell-mell down the alley.

Azazael was back in a flash.
What did I tell you?
he suggested.
There’s something in this setup that is really, really queer.

“Children take these fits sometimes,” Mackie Loudon said, for Azazael’s remark was only typical of the weak and cloudy innuendos he’d been uttering through that fall. She turned to Eliel for confirmation, but for some reason Eliel didn’t seem to be around.

Preston didn’t come back for a week or more, but on the fifth day Gil came by to fetch him just the same. Mackie Loudon surprised herself by opening the door. Gil stood on the lower step, fidgeting with a dog’s training collar, the links purling from hand to hand in a way that obscurely put her in mind of something disagreeable.

“The Monkey with you?” Gil said.

“That’s no name for a human child,” Mackie Loudon said. “And no, I hadn’t seen him in a long time.”

Gil nodded but didn’t shift himself. He stretched the chain taut, its end rings strung on his middle fingers, then shut it between the palms of his hands.

“Didn’t know you had a dog,” Mackie Loudon said.

“Hee hee,” said Gil. The front of his yellowing teeth was graven in black.

“Does that boy belong to you?”

Gil smiled again with his rotten teeth. “Yes, I believe you could say that,” he said. “His skinny little butt is mine.” He tossed the clump of chain and caught it with a jingle. “Old woman, I wouldn’t suggest you meddle,” he said, and turned to look back toward the street. “Nobody cares what goes on around here.” He withdrew down the weedy walk, his feet slipping loosely in his outsize boots. Reluctantly, she followed him a little way, and when she stopped to look about her she saw that what he said was true. The houses on the block were held by knaves or madmen, or by no one. The lawns were dead, the trees were dying, a frigid wind blew garbage down the center of the street. From half the houses, broken windows overlooked her like sockets in a row of hollowed skulls.

On a cold blue morning Preston came to stand in the alley below the house again. For the first time Mackie Loudon noticed he didn’t have a winter coat. She had to go and take his hand and lead him, to get him to come in. Though he seemed glad to see her, he wouldn’t say a word. He sat in his usual wooden chair in the kitchen and stared at the pendulum swing of his feet.

“Cat got your tongue, has it?” Mackie Loudon said, and placed a yellow bean cake on the table near his hand. She went to the refrigerator for the milk she’d bought the day before, in some demonic premonition of his return, poured a glass and set it by him, took the carton back. In the light of the refrigerator’s yellowed bulb she saw the faint blue photograph smeared on the carton’s wall, and looked at it, and looked at Preston, and looked at the carton again. A line of blue letters crawled under the picture:
Jason Sturges of Birmingham, eight years old and missing since …
She shut the door and leaned on it and breathed before she turned to him.