Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

“What’s his problem?” the man asked.

“Had a stroke.”

“He shouldn’t be looking like that at me. Crabby old motherfuck.”

“He don’t mean nothing.”

“Empty the purse, gimme the old man’s wallet. Gimme the watch.”

“No wallet,” Mattie said. “I carry the money in my purse.”

“Where you get that accent, girl?” the man said, falling into a mocking accent.

“Tortola,” she said.

“What you do for this nasty old piece of white cheese, Tortola, besides wheel him around like a baby?”

Mattie said nothing.

“You play with his old pud?”

She said nothing.

“A fucking Timex! And there’s only twenty fucking dollars in here,” he said, throwing down the purse.

“That’s all we ever carry.”

“Who’s in his apartment besides you two?”

“His son, Val,” Mattie lied. “Home from college.”

“Pull your dress up.”

“Please,” she said.

“Don’t argue with a knife, stupid Tortola.” He slipped a thick black-handled jackknife out of his pocket and opened it up. The blade looked tarnished and dull, dirty like the hand that held it. “See, you didn’t believe me.”

“I believed you.”

“Nice skinny legs. Shaving them, I see. They don’t shave their legs down in Tortola, do they? You come here to New York and get trendy, girl?”

Mattie was crying, silently. She glanced at Mr. Kronner, who sat with his usual impassively fierce expression but his left eye roving and gleaming as if out of control.

“Pull down the panties. Maybe you be shaving your pussy, too.”

She stared at him.

“Listen, Tortola, I’m taking a chance taking extra time to fuck with you, so don’t mess around or I’m gonna have to be mean. What I tell you to do you fucking do, crybaby. It’s Mr. Crabby Cheapass’s lucky day. He’s gonna get a little show for his money.”

* * *

Two weeks later, when Mattie was wheeling Mr. Kronner across Eighty-sixth Street at Second Avenue, the old man suddenly stuck his cane into the spokes of a delivery bike and sent the Asian kid riding it flying headlong over the handlebars into the back of a cab. The kid lay dazed on the street, his arms flailing in a mess of crushed white cartons spilling soup, noodles, and sauce. He was trying to get up, swearing or pleading for help in a language Mattie didn’t understand a word of, while the cabbie, a Hindu in a turban, stood by his open door on the driver’s side waving traffic by and shouting after his passenger, who was fleeing the cab through the other door, apparently without paying his fare.

“Not my fault, not my fault!” the cabbie repeated.

A homeless man who’d been waiting by the light, the only person besides her, as far as Mattie could see, who’d witnessed what Mr. Kronner had done, stared at Mr. Kronner, who sat in his chair looking impassively fierce, but his left eye roving and gleaming in a way that Mattie had seen only once before — on the elevator that day they’d been assaulted. She thought the roving of his eye had been a symptom of panic then, but now it somehow suggested a crazed mirth. The homeless man had retrieved Mr. Kronner’s cane from the street, handed it back to him, and was now staring Mattie in the eyes. She recognized him from among the other homeless men she passed each day. He was the man who had tried to sell her the parakeet he’d caught. He nodded hello, then stretched out his hand, and Mattie opened her purse and gently laid a crisp twenty-dollar bill onto his dirty, trembling palm.

A strawberry blonde slams out of the conch-shell-pink Paradise taxi and, strappy white heels dangling from one hand and a sisal purse from the other, walks barefoot across the hot sand, her eyes fixed on the sea.

Not so much as a glance at the goats munching sea grapes, at the guinea fowl shrieking among shorebirds, at Itchy Mon, the brindled mongrel sniffing after her perfume, which is perhaps what prompts him to lift a leg against an ylang-ylang tree. Not a glance even at the mounds of faded pink conch shells that mark the graves of the fishermen buried where they once fished shark from the beach — Shark Beach — and don’t be telling the tourists it’s called that, me son — night fishing that by the blaze of driftwood bonfires looked like a tug-of-war with the ocean. Anchor chain for leader, a rotted goat head for bait, Rest in Peace.

The living attract no more notice from her than the dead. She passes the Coco Mon, his machete whittling green coconuts down to their water; and a Charles Atlas with skin the color of squid ink, who’s walking on his hands; and Itchy Mon’s master, whose face beneath a disheveled straw hat is shadow and a smile as he clonks from a steel drum the only song he seems to know; and the dancer with a gray, dreadlocked beard, Neptune wearing a hula skirt of dying octopus and conducting with a trident spear.

Near the water’s sloshing edge she stakes out a towel-sized patch of sand — not that she has a towel — drops her bag and high heels, then kneels, unbuttons her white cotton blouse, and slips it off.

Her lacy white bra exposes less than a bikini top. Still, Basinio Davis, tall for his age, a junior high kid who wants to go to the States and play for the Chicago Bulls, has witnessed a legend: I was there, me son, the day this blanc lady comes to the Shark and takes off her clothes.

There’s a constellation of freckles under her bra straps. She squirms out of her black skirt. Her white panties reflect the sunlight. She folds the blouse on top of the skirt, weights them with her flimsy shoes, and, sisal bag for a pillow, stretches out on the bare hot sand. Me son, only the little kids run around this beach in their undies. Once some French showed up and went topless, but that’s different.

It’s how she’s stripped off her clothes. Not like some exhibitionist, but like a woman who no longer feels there’s time to be conventional. Despite the streets in town lined with free-port shops, there apparently wasn’t time enough to buy a swimsuit or a souvenir towel or even a tube of lotion to keep her pale skin from burning. Maybe she came to this island for a quickie divorce and has a plane to catch back to someplace buried in snow. Maybe she’s dumping some cheat she once worshipped in the way she just knelt before the sea. Or maybe a man who loved her too much is letting her go, maybe it has become unbearable for him when business associates learn how casually her clothes are discarded.

If it were you, would you hail a pink Paradise taxi and find your way to where you could be a total stranger for an afternoon, on a nameless beach on the native side of the island? Would the sound in your mind be the scream of a guinea fowl, the lap of the sea, or the lilting notes from an old man playing a perpetual-motion “Here Comes the Sun” on the pans?

Her eyes are closed. No one asks, What is it you hear? She wouldn’t answer anyway.

But oblivious though she’s seemed, she must feel the stares because she raises her head suddenly as if determined to confront the gaze of whatever creep can’t summon the courtesy to give a woman alone on a beach she’ll never have the chance to see again a moment’s peace, and her eyes meet the eyestalks of a dozen ghost crabs waltzing sideways around her body.

And I say it’s all right.

A coat from another life comes up behind him and like an old flame slips its limp arms around his shoulders. He watches as they dance in the mirror — he and his coat. He slides his arms into its sleeves. His hands fill up its pockets.

Look at the street, that avenue of wind we used to flare, my coat and I. He knows that one can’t step into the same street twice, and yet he’s returned to this city looking not for the eternal, but for whatever has survived.