John Hawkes - Second Skin

He was naked. Covered with blood. Yes, Fernandez lay on his back on the floor and his neck was fastened to the iron leg of the day bed with one of the strings of the smashed guitar. The murderers had jumped on the belly of his new guitar and smashed it. There was a white mountain-goat rug flung across the day bed but they had killed Fernandez on the hard bare floor. Stabbed, beaten, poked and prodded, but he was finally choked to death with the guitar string.

And the fingers. Yes, all five fingers of the left hand. All five. The clasp knife, the wine-dark pool, the fingers themselves, it was clear, too clear, what they had done and that the severed fingers were responsible for the spidery red lines scattered over everything. The wild tracings, the scene of blood — I touched him on the shoulder once and then I managed to reach the corridor and, while the blonde held me under the arm and cupped her wet hand on my forehead, I doubled over and let everything in my hot stomach boil up and out.

When I returned to the room I pried open the window and let the rain beat in. I remained standing on my feet and staring at the second body until the job was done. The other belonged to a sailor and was fully clothed in white bell-bottomed pants, crumpled white middy blouse. A big man face down. Hands buried beneath the face. Legs kicked far apart. Killed by the single driving blow of another clasp knife which they had left in his back.

“His name’s Harry,” the blonde said.

“Harry,” I said. “Poor Harry.”

And then all of her weight was on my arm, her voice suddenly tremulous, she was crying. She said she knew what had happened and wanted to tell me. So I righted the hatcheted straw chair and made her sit down, held her cold hard hand and looked at Harry while the hand squeezed and the elbow shook and the voice talked on. She said that she had heard the noise upstairs and that there was nothing unusual about the noise, but that when the man came down and banged on her door, another sailor, she said, and as big as Harry, very much like Harry in fact, she told him she didn’t want to with anyone who had just been fighting, that she wasn’t going to give herself to anybody with a swelling eye and the blood still on his knuckles and running out of his nose. But she couldn’t help herself, she said, and it wasn’t bad, all things considered. So he waited until it was over and then while she was trying to do something with her hair and he, the sailor, was still breathing hard on her bed, why then he caught her eye and kept looking at her and told her all about it. He and a couple of others had killed a little fairy spic upstairs, that it was a game they had to let some fairy pick them up and then, when they were in the flophouse room, to pull out the knives….

“He waited, you see? Waited until he was done to tell me. So now for ten bucks the blood’s on my hands too, and all over I’m dying, I can feel it. That guy there, that Harry,” pointing down, drawing the robe tight between her knees, “he came in too soon, you see, and tried to save his buddy, so they killed him. … I wish it was me.”

I let go of her hand, I helped to turn up the bathrobe collar, I wrapped the white mountain-goat rug around her lap. Her head was down. I touched the thin blonde hair on the back of that small ageless skull and spoke to the chief, made it clear to him that I didn’t want to see the sailor’s face.

And then the chief gave orders: “Get the basket stretcher out of the truck. You two, wrap him in the sheet. But leave the little one alone, he’s not ours…

Was Tremlow’s first name Harry? Was it Tremlow lying now at the bare feet of the streetwalker sitting in the shiny partially chopped-up straw chair? Tremlow killed at last while defending my little lost son-in-law? Or was it Tremlow who had swung the sacrificial hatchet, destroyed the hideaway, lopped off the fingers? This, I thought, was more like Tremlow, but I could not be sure and was careful that I would never know.

I looked again and saw the little white calfskin book lying near the left hand of Fernandez. It was a book from the past, a soft white unread book just out of reach where I left it.

“Don’t worry,” I called softly to the bowed figure on the straw chair, “there’s no blood on your hands.”

And web belt, meaty automatic and gaiters, these I dropped into the back of the pickup truck with Harry’s body, stared at the sheeted form bound into the mesh of the basket, and stepped away, flagged down a taxi, returned as quickly as I could to the predawn silhouette of my own cheap hotel.

She was sitting in the straight-backed chair, poor Sissy, and wide awake, clear providential eyes fixed on the elevator. I held the door so it wouldn’t bang and took off my cap and smiled. Then wrinkled and bloodstained and more haggard than Sissy herself, I approached her slowly and helped her out of the chair and took her into my arms and kissed her. Her mouth tasted like old wax paper but it was the kiss of my life.

And we were wrong about him, Cassandra, weren’t we? Just a little wrong, Cassandra?

“Papa,” I cried, “no, Papa. Please….”

“I shall do it, Edward, I tell you. See if I don’t….”

“But please, please, what about Mamma, Papa? What about me?”

“Some things, Edward, can’t be helped….”

And crouching at the keyhole of the lavatory door, soft little hands cupped on soft fat knees and hot, desperate, hopeful, suddenly inspired: “Wait, Papa, wait, I will play for you, poor Papa.”

“No, no, Edward, never mind…it will do no good…”

But I raised one of my hands then, clapped it over my lips, waited. And when I failed to answer him there was only silence behind the lavatory door. Was he caught off guard? Uncertain? Or stricken even more deeply with despair, sitting on the old brown wooden toilet seat with vacant eyes and pure white bone less mortician’s hands clasped vacantly between his knees? I knew by the peculiar intensity of that prolonged silence that I was safe for awhile, that he could do nothing at least until I had played him my Brahms. It was the dripping faucet that gave the silence its peculiar tight suspended ring, the dripping faucet that convinced me: it would hold his attention until I could play my Brahms.

“Are you there, Edward?”

But as small and fat and ungainly as I was, and as much as I wanted to talk with him, plead with him, I had just been inspired and knew enough, suddenly, not to answer. One sound, I understood, and he might well blow his head off then and there.

“Edward?”

But his voice was weaker while the monstrous dripping was louder, more dominant, more demanding. And my cheeks were fatter than ever with my held breath, my ears throbbed, my eyes throbbed, I stole away into the bright noon sun of that hapless Friday in midsummer. I flew to my room, as much as any inspired and terrified fat boy can fly, and for those few moments — mere sunlit suspended moments saved by a rotten washer in the right-hand faucet in the lavatory sink — for those extra moments of life he was none the wiser.

I ran to my room though I was not a quick child, ran with my short plump bare arms flung out in front of me and not a sob in my throat, not a snuffle in my little pink naked rosebud of a nose, so bent was I on staying his hand with my cello. And the sunlight, bright sunlight coming through every window in planes as broad as each sill and filled with motes and little stationary rainbows that warmed leg, knee, pudgy arm, home full of light and silence and suspended warmth. And only the two of us to share my Brahms.

The cello was under my bed and without thinking I flopped to my hands and knees and hauled it out, and then tumbled it onto my bed, turned back the corners of the old worn-out patchwork quilt in which my mother always wrapped that precious instrument. Cello in the sunlight, tiny shadows beneath the strings, wood that was only a shell, a thin wooden skin, but dark and brown and burnished. The sunlight brought out the sheen of my cello — tiny concentric circles of crimson moons — brought out the glow of the thick cat strings. I stood there, put my palm on its thin hard belly, and already it was warm and rich and filled with my slow awkward song.