Charles Baxter - The Soul Thief

With her light dimmed, Catherine came home. She took up her life, almost, where it had been left off.

Around that time, Nathaniel began to notice ghost-women watching him from street corners, alleyways, from behind jewelry displays, ash-women, silent, mute, and unmoving, women trying on hats, women before mirrors, women deep in shadows, called forth in some manner by his sister’s silence, called forth by the song of her injury to surround him and stare at him and accompany him everywhere. What did they want of him? They seemed ready to ask him a crucial question, these familiars, but they never got around to it. All through his college years, they kept up their surveillance. They stayed on their street corners with their hooded beautiful eyes, women-beggars made of mist and fog. They had moved into his world for good, it seemed, but they could not be spoken to — they always disappeared when he approached them. Often they opened their mouths to sing to him, though nothing audible ever came out. They were frequently bent over, human question marks, first in Milwaukee and then in New York, after his mother remarried.

NATHANIEL LOOKS UP.There’s one of them, right out in front, in broad sunlight. A woman wearing a blue denim cap, and a hideous pink cardigan sweater over a blouse with a printed pattern of marsh grass and bamboo, and purple slacks with threads of string for a belt — this apparition is staring in through the front window at him, her accusing eyes crazily fixed. She reaches up and takes out her teeth. She waves the dental plate at him. Hi! Hi hi hi hi hi. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. She flashes a startling bedlamite grin through the glass. She screams a fun-house laugh. Sometimes they do these stunts just to scare him, to watch the hair on the back of his neck stand up, to give him goose bumps. They like that. But they also have some other, undiscovered, agenda. He looks down at the table, where he has been chopping onions. Another pair of hands has joined his, another member of the Allentown Artists’ & Culinary Alliance here in the People’s Kitchen, one of his favorites, Jamie the Catholic — apparently she snuck in while he was hypnotized by that ghoul out there on the sidewalk. Having tied her apron on over a t-shirt and jeans, Jamie has set to work on shelling peas. Gold dangles from her earlobes. She is a lesbian and a sculptor and a dancer who lives in the neighborhood, and she drives a taxi for Queen City Cab at night to pay the bills, and Nathaniel loves her strong tanned forearms and blond flyaway frizzy hair poking out from under the contrivance of her head scarf (he also loves her soul), and he says in a formally affectionate tone, “Sweet Jamie. Good morning. How you doing?”

“How I doing? I doing all right. It’s almost afternoon, dummy,” she tells him, knocking her hip gently against Nathaniel’s. “You should buy a watch. I slept late. I’m so bad. I’m a bad bad girl. Where’s the rosemary?”

“Up on the shelf.” He nods. “Close to the garlic. You know where it is.” She reaches up to a shelf underneath a sign that says ANARCHISTS, PLEASE WASH YOUR HANDS! Tears squeeze out of his eyes. “Fucking onions. Always do this to me.”

“Fucking onions,” she agrees, shaking her head so that her earrings glitter. “You know what causes all that crying, don’t you? Sulfur. Sulfur in the onion’s oil. The devil’s molecule. Aren’t you going to ask me why I slept late?”

“Okay. Jamie, why’d you sleep late?”

“None of your damn business, Nathaniel.” She grins. “I got lucky. So how come you didn’t sleep late?”

“I didn’t get lucky.” He’s about to tell her about the burglar but decides not to; she’d be alarmed on his behalf.

“You poor child. Why didn’t you get lucky?”

He stops slicing for a moment. “Is there accounting for luck? Anyway, this girl said that if she was ever going to go to bed with me, she wanted to be sober.”

“Sober! To sleep with a man, you’d have to be drunk. What a crock. Sober! Don’t believe her. Girls are such liars. Well, maybe she wants to know you better. Maybe she wants to know your sign. Your horoscope. If you love cats. If you can commit. Hey, aren’t you going to ask me,” she asks, “about who made me late?”

“So, Jamie,” he says, “who made you late?”

“None of your business.” She laughs loudly. “Check the society pages. Jesus, I wonder if we have mice in here. I saw rodent leavings when I came in. Back there near the door, while you were staring at the front window? Somebody should clean up the rear entryway. You, probably. It’s your assignment today, isn’t it? Man, I think this is serious, the mice problem, I mean.”

“Of course we have mice.” He glances at the front window, where the toothless woman has dissolved into the noontime air of Buffalo. “And, yeah, I ought to put out some traps before the city shuts us down.”

“They’ll shut us down anyway. Any day now. Pronto. They hate us. Free food is a thumb in the eye of free enterprise, is what they think. People hate charity; they really do. It insults the worker. The city will come in with inspectors and cops and tear gas, and it’ll be curtains for us.” Jamie looks down at his crotch, hidden by his own apron. “You know, babycakes, you’re kinda cute, for a guy,” she says. “Listen. Don’t take this wrong. I’m serious. If you’re lonely and need a sleepmate,” she says quietly, almost in a whisper, “give me a call. I’m not kidding. I wouldn’t mind holding you all night. You have virtues, and virtues,” she says, slicing into another carrot, “should be rewarded, occasionally, with kindness.”

“You’re so romantic,” Nathaniel says.

“Romance is in my nature.” After a pause of chopping and seasoning, Jamie asks, “What was her name? Is her name?”

“Theresa. We were at a party.”

Jamie nods twice, frowning, and seems ready to speak up when the phone rings. Nathaniel wipes his hands before answering it. “Thank you,” the voice says without benefit of a greeting, “for taking me home.” For a moment, Nathaniel can’t place the voice as young or old, male or female, or even human, can’t place it at all until he realizes that it belongs, if that’s the word, to Coolberg.

“Ah. Jerome,” Nathaniel says, as the Vaughan Williams on the radio behind him embarks on its finale, a very British passacaglia with brave launching-into-the-void sentiments. “How’d you know I was here?”

“Don’t you remember last night?” Coolberg asks. “I told you: I know everything about you. You were a little drunk and got…I don’t know, confessional. You said you worked at the People’s Kitchen on Saturday mornings, preparing meals for the poor. Very admirable. That’s what you said. So I called. Don’t you remember? That was right after you told me about your sister and your father…”

“I did? I talked about them? I don’t think I said anything about them.”

“Well, I certainly thought you did.” A pause. “Your father’s death? From a stroke? Your sister’s muteness? How she slept on the floor beside your bed after your dad died? Your mother’s brief spell of unreason?”

Nathaniel waits. Someone in the world claims, on very little evidence, to know everything about him. Despite his doubts, he feels flattered. He notices that Jamie has turned around and is watching him, studying him as if he needs protection from something scratching through the wall.

“It’s just that I was thinking,” says Coolberg, “that we should do something together. I mentioned this to you. Possibly you forgot. We should go see the gods come out. At night. At Niagara Falls. Have you ever done that? Ever seen the gods come out? You should. They’re quite a sight, the gods.”