End Time (13 page)

Back to the Second or Third Thought, right after the First Thought.

But he'd been walking the Earth so long he needed an artifact or an object to recall how it all had been. Give him the touch of a spear point and,
Ah yes, Golgotha.
And the stench of crucified men, their bowels finally opening in death, filled his nostrils from the mucky ground. Give him a shard of pottery:
Ah yes, the Hanging Gardens.
And the laughter of Nebuchadnezzar's handmaidens splashing water under the Babylonian sun as they frolicked in their bathing pool echoed in his ears. Give him a glass of water:
Ah yes, the Flood.
And he looked down from a dark corner in the creaking Ark safe in his spider's web and waited for the always promiscuous flies that rose from the sties and stalls, the rocking of the waves making him sway as his tiny pincers clung to the silvery threads.

Insect, animal, soldier, sailor, alchemist, scientist—he'd been so many things. Not to mention foremost rat-catcher in that German fortress town, while the plague lapped at the walls from a thousand pink rodent tongues and their heaven-sent fleas. Now in the Manhattan canyons the throngs scurried under the steel-and-concrete towers, reminding him of that old Kraut burg. But instead of rats hiding in the corners and only coming out to die, in this modern Hamelin, the people
were
the rats. Scuttling to and fro on every private errand, never knowing what lurked around the corner or in the shadows as they hurried along babbling into a cell phone or staring at the pavement.

Mr. P. left his walk-up on Sheridan Square and clattered down the steps, ignoring the open door to his apartment. Nah, he wasn't coming back. Things to do, people to see. First, straight across town in search of the lad.

He knew where to find him. Mama Ho' would be taking a break from her exertions on Avenue A. Time to have a little chat about sonny-boy's future. Dusk drew down on Greenwich Village, the lights in the restaurants and shops giving the streets a fairy tale feel; uptown the towers of mid-Manhattan were wreathed in a hanging mist of white light and sodium orange. The Piper liked to call the color Creamsicle, after the popular Popsicle. It started to rain again.

On the south end of Washington Square, umbrellas began to pop open as people clung to the edges and overhangs of buildings, craning their necks for empty taxis. Then a lucky salary man, pant cuffs soaked and clutching a briefcase, darted across the sidewalk under his umbrella. His wet shoes flapped on the damp pavement just as a yellow cab squealed to a halt. Ah, success!

Salary Man was halfway in the passenger door when Mr. Piper slid over out of nowhere and plucked the umbrella from the fellow's fingers. Shocked, the man stared at the gaunt figure towering over him in the rain. “Hey!”

“Don't worry, I'll return it,” the Piper told him. Half amazed, half confused, the man stared for a moment. Should he fight over an umbrella with this street creature, or make a getaway? Easy decision: clutching his briefcase, he slammed the door shut and slapped the door lock.

“Forget it!” came his muffled reply from inside the car. And in a blink of an eye the taxi rolled forward.

“You sure? I know your address,” Mr. Piper whispered to the vanishing cab. “Okay. Thanks.”

*   *   *

The squalid roach-infested walk-up on Avenue A wasn't that much different from Piper's place over on Sheridan Square. Maybe it smelled worse; a combination of neglect, leaky pipes, hanging plaster, and triple-locked doors with jimmy bars. A place where televisions ran 24/7 and people shouted at each other for no reason, or because the cable bill was overdue. The locked vestibule door showed the grime of a thousand calamitous entries and hasty exits, the doorknob plate once brass, now a kind of smeared black that only comes from constant human touch. Someone had wedged the door open with a sliver of metal, expecting to return at any moment from an urgent errand for cigarettes and wine coolers around the corner. The dented battery of mailboxes showed names but no apartment numbers. It didn't matter; Mr. P. knew where to go.

Piper casually pushed the vestibule door open and heard it click behind him as he mounted the stairs.
Tough luck, buddy, somebody will have to buzz you in.

A rat calmly looked at him from the top of the landing. Wrinkled its nose for a second, then flicked its whiskers. “No not yet, Herr Ratte,” the Piper told him. “Soon though, very soon. You run along now.” The rat pressed his little ears to his head and scuttled off to his hidey-hole.

The stairs moaned and groaned at each step the Piper took. Sagging steps, threadbare carpet on them, the granules and rocks of last winter's ice-melt salt still visible in the corners. The smell of boot-dirt and rancid pork squeezed from the stairs as if from a bellows,
squish-squish-squish
. With each step on the rotten stairs a little picture came to him about what had happened.

Squish
: years ago as the stairway looked slightly brighter, shouts from above, a domestic disturbance.
Squish
: a woman flung a pan of hot bacon grease at her husband as he clattered down the stairs.
Squish
: spatter went on the walls and soaked into the stairs, her mouth a rictus of rage.
Squish
: a thread of hot grease caught the back of lover boy's neck and he yelped.

“Ah,
l'amour métropolitain,
” Mr. P. remarked.

He stopped at the first landing. Inside the locked door he could feel the boy. And the boy's mind and recent past came to him like a scent under the door. Inhaling deeply, he paused on the landing, dragging the vision deep into his brain.

*   *   *

Mom and Dimples had been going high for three days. The boy called Mom's boyfriend Dimples, a kid's name because he had cracks in his cheeks that moved every time he talked. Dimple's meth head had shrunken his cheeks, had turned his face gray, giving him a sucked-in, ravenous look, like a hungry hyena. Missing an eyetooth, the black gap flashed you every time he spoke.

When Dimples wasn't making Mom work outside they were on what Dimples called “vacation”—time in the house with the crack pipe going and the powder on the mirror, sometimes crank, sometimes coke. The TV always on and take-out trays everywhere. When they were through gorging, or forgot that there were still stinky Styrofoam plates on the kitchen table, the boy could go from one box to another picking out leftover bits with a plastic fork. The rest of the time he could hide in the cramped cabinet under the kitchen sink.

Or sneak into the bathroom and back again when they were busy on Mama's bed. And sometimes they even forgot he was there. Coming in to the kitchen during a break in the festivities, Dimples laughing, “He still under there? What's with that kid? Like it better under the sink with the roaches instead of his room? What's up with that?”

The boy thought it was a three-day vacation, hard to tell, because the windows were so dirty. Night and day almost the same. The clock on the wall showed six o'clock. Somewhere he remembered it was called a Kit-Cat clock: a black electric thing with the clock face on the body; below, a tail that swung back and forth as it tick-tocked; the head of a cat with white eyes that shifted from side to side as the tail wagged and the hands moved around the dial. The cat wore a white bow tie and smiled at him across the kitchen; the thing was already hanging on the wall when they first came to this apartment, and it died sometime in the first year. Now the Kit-Cat clock always showed six o'clock.

Weird thing was, the Kit-Cat clock would warn him when Dimples was about to pounce. It was better when they were doing coke. Coke flattened them out after a few hours. But when Dimples and Mom were blowing crank in the pookie pipe it was always worse. Crank made you want to hump. And hump. And hump. And—

So when Dimples was tired of Mom and she lay recovering on the sweaty bed, he came looking. Sometimes Dimples would pace around like some hungry hyena, but then suddenly give up and go back to Mom, forgetting where the boy was hiding at.

But sometimes he remembered. He'd remembered twice in the last couple of days, dragging him out from under the sink for some room time. “C'mon boy,” Dimples would say. “Time for a lesson. We're getting some room time.”

And it seemed that each time Dimples would come looking the Kit-Cat clock clicked to life, eyes snapping back and forth, tail wagging.
Room Time!
And the kid would hear it, and scrunch farther and farther back into the black corner of the counter cabinet under the sink. Until the cabinet door banged open, the light from the kitchen shot onto his face, and Dimples grabbed his ankle.

The clock started ticking again.
Tick-tock-tick-tock
 … Room Time!

Which is when somebody knocked on the door. The feet outside the cabinet paused; Dimples' head was framed in the light of the kitchen, and the boy could see the clock ticking over his shoulder. The knock came again.

“Dammit!” Dimples' head vanished, and his feet padded across the linoleum. The boy heard the front door open, the chain lock clank. So Dimples' face would be in the crack, staring out into the hall.

“Who the 'uk are you?”

The wind whistled through the gap in Dimples' teeth.

“What the 'uk you want?”

A smooth voice in the hall asked a question, but it was indistinct and muffled. Dimples' reaction was clear enough.

“
What?
” A pause of total disbelief. “What the 'uk you talkin' about?” A word came into the boy's head—a single word describing Dimples' disbelief thing.
Incredulity.
The boy had never heard the word before, never spelled it. Never said it. And nobody'd ever said it to him.
Incredulity.

Now it popped into his mind like a flashbulb. Like the page out of a dictionary. Incredulity. Dimples was incredulous. And the boy even understood what the word meant. But more important—that something was happening that was gonna get him out of vacation and Room Time. Somebody like a cop or a teacher was disrespecting Dimples and making him small. Incredulity would soon turn to doubt. He'd never heard or spelled that word either. Doubt.

But he'd felt it. Every time he heard the smooth voice in the hall; it seemed to make the cat clock's tail wag.
Tick-tock-tick-tock
. The voice going to his ear, the thought going to his brain.
Tick-tock
. Simple as that.

Then fear. Fear would come next to Dimples. The boy knew fear.

Now it was Dimples' turn.

The boy crawled from under the kitchen sink, past the clicking Kit-Cat clock, and clung to the wall where grimy hand marks met his fingers. That's when he recognized Mr. P.'s voice. The whack-a-doo from Washington Square: “Are
you
the old woman who lived in the shoe?” the Piper demanded of Dimples. “Of course not. I want to talk to her.”

Dimples was about to slam the door shut in the stranger's face when Mom struggled from her place on the bed, pulling a T-shirt over her shoulders. A skinny woman of thirty, Mama looked nearly fifty; skinny as Dimples but twice as frail. Too much of everything and too little of what she needed had twisted her into a burnt breadstick; the lines in her face were creases, her teeth banana yellow.

The T-shirt was a little too small, and you could still see her pussy. She tugged at the shirt, pulling it lower, covering it up a little. She showed it off enough, she hardly ever thought about it. “What this 'hole want? Open the 'uckin' door. Lemme see him.”

The door opened, and for the second time the boy saw that strange guy from the park again, Daddy Long Legs. The gaunt man looked directly over Dimples' shoulder and talked to Mom. “Are you the old woman who lived in the shoe?”

Mom shivered and tugged at her T-shirt like she didn't hear him right.

“The one who had so many children, she didn't know what to do?” The man in the hall paused. “In your case that one over there by the wall is more than enough.”

Mom was opening her mouth and closing it, sort of like fish did when you took them out of water. You see, what she saw was Michael Jackson: the Gloved One, the King of Pop standing in the hall talking into the apartment. Angelic Michael with the fluffed out 'fro, from the good years. Not the icko sicko Wacko Jacko with the balding head, the mask, no nose, and white skin. Angelic Jackson, voice sweet as honey.

“Let me put it another way.” The figure in the hall spoke again. “I'm from the government and I'm here to help.”

Dimples gulped. He saw Jacko too. “Whatchit you want?”

The figure in the hall nodded to the boy clutching the wall.

“Him.”

The boy by the wall saw the figure in the hall too, first as that oddball Daddy Long Legs guy then morphing into Angelic Jacko. The kid shook his head and rubbed his eyes. It didn't help.

Dimples looked a little doubtful, but the thought of getting rid of the boy had its possibilities. The fear slowly ebbed away. Jacko dead, but he didn't mind talking to him in the hall either.

“Whatchyah you gonna give us for him? Where you going?”

Mom still stared at the figure of Michael Jackson in the dingy apartment hallway, pressed her shoulders to the wall, and began to slide toward the floor. “That's really good stuff, Dimp. I think I gotta sit down.” Her bottom reached the floor; tucking her knees to her chest, she put her head in her hands. “Let Michael have him for vacation. We'll get a lawyer later if we need to.” Maybe she'd forgotten Jacko was dead. Or maybe it hadn't made much of an impression.

But Dimples wasn't so satisfied. “I want sumpin' for him.”

A baggie appeared in the figure's hand. Not white coke or crystal rock, but something that shimmered in a thousand rainbow colors. “What's that, X?”

“Oh yes,” the man in the hall said. “It's new. We call it Dalekto. Because it's delectable. And you're gonna dig it big. Coke without the burnout, crank without the breakdown. Delectable Dalekto. Double D for you, Mr. Dimples.”