Jesus at midnight, Mary in the morn.
I read it six times in disbelief.
I let the paper fall, walked on it, stood in the icebox draft to cool off. Then I went back to read the damn message for a seventh time.
What a piece of work it was, what a beaut, what a come-on, what a baited trap. What a Rorschach test, what a piece of palmistry, what a numbers game that anyone could sum and win with. Men, women, old, young, dark, light, tall, thin. Listen, look! This means YOU.
It applied to anyone who had ever loved and lost, meaning every single soul in the whole damned city, state, and universe.
Who, reading it, would not be tempted to lift a phone, dial, wait, and whisper at last, late at night:
Here I am. Please—come find me.
I stood in the middle of the linoleum floor of Fannie’s apartment and tried to imagine her here, the ship’s deck creaking underfoot as her weight shifted this way and that, as Tosca lamented from the phonograph, and the icebox door stood wide with its enshrined condiments, her eyes moving, her heart beating, like a hummingbird trapped in a vast aviary.
Christ. The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse had to be the editor of a paper like this.
I checked all the other advertisements. The telephone number was the same in each. You had to call one number to get referrals to all the ads. And that phone number belonged to the publishers of, damn them to hell forever, Janus, the Green Envy Weekly.
Fannie had never in her life bought a paper like this. Someone had given it to her or … I stopped and glanced at the door.
No!
Someone had left it for her to find with the red ink circling this one ad, so she would be sure to see.
SOMEONE WHO LOVED YOU, WITH A FULL HEART, LONG AGO.
“Fannie!” I cried in dismay. “Oh, you damn, damn fool.”
I waded through broken shards of La Bohème and Butterfly, then remembered and stumbled back to slam the icebox door.
Things were no better on the third floor.
Henry’s door was wide open. I had never seen it open before. Henry Believed in shut doors. He didn’t want anyone having a sighted advantage on him. But now …
“Henry?”
I stepped through, and the small apartment was neat, incredibly neat and clean and filed, everything in place, everything fresh—but empty.
“Henry?”
His cane lay in the middle of the floor, and by it a dark string, a black twine with knots in it.
It all looked scattered and impromptu, as if Henry had lost these in a fight, or left behind when he ran …
Where?
“Henry?”
I handled the twine, and looked at the knots. In a line, two knots, a space, three knots, a long space, then a series of three, six, four, and nine knots.
“Henry!” Louder.
I ran to knock on Mrs. Gutierrez’s door.
When she opened it and saw me, she welled over. Tears dropped from her eyes as she saw my face. She put her tortilla-scented hand out to touch my cheeks. “Aw, poor, poor. Come in, oh, poor, sit down. Sit. You wanta eat? I bring something. Sit, no, no, sit. Coffee, yes?” She brought me coffee and wiped her eyes. “Poor Fannie. Poor man. What?”
I unfolded the newspaper and held it out for her to see.
“No read inglés,” she said, backing off.
“Don’t have to read,” I said. “Did Fannie ever come up to phone and bring this paper with her?”
“No, no!” Her face changed color with memory. “Estúpido! Sí. She came. But I don’t know who she call.”
“Did she talk a long while, a long time?”
“Long time?’ She had to translate my words for a few seconds, then she nodded vigorously. “Sí. Long. Long she laugh. Oh, how she laugh and talk, talk and laugh.”
While she was inviting Mr. Night and Time and Eternity to come over, I thought.
“And she had this paper with her?”
Mrs. Gutierrez turned the paper over like it was a Chinese puzzle. “Maybe sí, maybe no. This one, some other. I dunno. Fannie is with God.”
I turned, weighing 380 pounds, and leaned toward the door, the folded newspaper in my hands.
“I wish I were,” I said. “Please, may I use your phone?”
On a hunch I did not dial the Green Envy number. Instead, counting the knots, I dialed the numbers of blind Henry’s twine.
“Janus Publications,” said a nasal voice. “Green Envy. Hold.”
The phone was dropped to the floor. I heard heavy feet shuffling through wintry mounds of crumpled paper.
“It fits!” I yelled, and scared Mrs. Gutierrez, who jumped back. “The number fits.” I yelled at the Green Envy paper in my hand. For some reason Henry had knotted the Janus publications number onto his remembrance twine.
“Hello, hello!” I shouted.
Far off in the Green Envy office I could hear some maniac shrieking because he was trapped and electrocuted by a bin of wildly berserk guitars. A rhinoceros and two hippos were dancing a fandango in the latrine to rebut the music. Someone typed during the cataclysm. Someone else was playing a harmonica to a different drummer.
I waited four minutes, then jammed the phone down and stormed out of Mrs. Gutierrez’s, raving.
“Mister,” said Mrs. Gutierrez, “why you so upset?”
“Upset, upset, who’s upset!” I cried. “Christ, people don’t come back to phones, I got no money to get out to that damn place, wherever it is in Hollywood, and there’s no use calling back, the damn phone’s off the hook, and time’s running out, and where the hell is Henry. He’s dead, damn it!”
Not dead, Mrs. Gutierrez should have said, merely sleeping.
But she didn’t say and I thanked her for her silence and stormed down the hallway, not knowing what to do. I didn’t even have money for the stupid red trolley car to Hollywood. I …
“Henry!” I shouted down the stairwell.
“Yes?” said a voice behind me.
I whirled around. I yelled. There was nothing but darkness there.
“Henry. Is that—?”
“Me,” said Henry, and stepped out into what little light there was. “When Henry decides to hide, he truly hides. Holy Moses Armpits was here. I think he knows that we know what he knows about this mess. I just skedaddled out my apartment door when I heard him prowl the porch outside my view window, I just dropped and jumped. Left stuff, I don’t care, on the floor. You find it?”
“Yes. Your cane. And the string with knots for numbers.”
“You want to know about them knots, that number?”
“Yes.”
“I heard crying in the hall, day before Fannie’s gone forever. There she is, at my door. I open it to let all that sadness in. Not often I see her upstairs, it kills her to climb. I shouldn’t’ve done it, no, shouldn’t have done it, she says, all my fault she says, over and over. Watch this junk, Henry, take this junk, here, what a fool I am she says, and she gave me some old phonograph records and some newspapers, special, she said, and I thanked her and thought what the hell and she went down the hall crying for herself being a fool and I just put the old newspapers by and the records and didn’t think a long while till after Fannie was tributed and sung after and gone, and then this morning I ran my hand over those fool papers and thought, what is this? And I called Mrs. Gutierrez and said, ‘What?’ and in Mexican and English she looked over the paper and saw the words, you see ’em, circled in ink, the same words in five different issues of the paper and the same number, and I got to thinking, why was Fannie crying so hard, and what’s this number, so I knotted the knots and called. You call?”
“Yes, Henry,” I said. “I found the same paper in Fannie’s place now. Why didn’t you tell me you had them?”
“What for? Sounded foolish. Woman stuff. I mean, did you read it? Mrs. Gutierrez read it, bad, but read it out loud. I laughed. God, I thought, that’s trash, real trash. Only now, I think different. Who would read and believe junk like that?
”
“Fannie,” I said, at last.
“Tell me this, now. When you called that number, some dumb son-of-a-bitch come on, talk, and not come back again ever?”
“Some son-of-a-bitch.”
Henry started steering me back toward the open door of his apartment. As if I were the blind one, I let him.
“How they run a business like that?” he wondered.
We were at his door. I said, “I guess when you don’t give a damn, people throw money at you.”
“Yeah, that was always my trouble. I cared too much. So nobody ever threw nothing. Hell, I got plenty cash anyway—uh.”
He stopped, for he had heard me suck my breath.
“That,” he said, with a quiet nod and smile, “is the sound of someone wants to borrow my life’s savings.”
“Only if you come with, Henry. To help me find the guy who hurt Fannie.”
“Armpits?”
“Armpits.”
“This nose is yours. Lead on.”
“We need money for a taxicab to save time, Henry.”
“I never been in a taxi in my life, why would I take one now?”
“We got to get out to that newspaper before it closes. The sooner we find out what we need to know, the safer it’ll be. I don’t want to spend one more night worrying about you here in this tenement, or me at the beach.”
“Armpits has teeth, huh?”
“You’d better believe it.”
“Come on.” He circled his room, smiling, “Let’s find where a blind man hides his money. All over the place. You want eighty bucks?”
“Hell, no.”
“Sixty, forty?”
“Twenty, thirty will do.”
“Well, hell then.” Henry snorted, stopped, laughed, and yanked a great wad of bills out of his hip pocket. He began to peel the lettuce. “Here’s forty.”
“It’ll take awhile to pay it back.”
“If we get whoever pushed Fannie over, you don’t owe nothing. Grab the money. Find my cane. Shut the door. C’mon! Let’s go find that dumb bunny who answers phones and goes off on vacation.”
In the taxicab, Henry beamed around at sources of scent and odor he could not see.
“This is dandy. I never smelled a cab before. This one’s new and going fast.”
I couldn’t resist. “Henry, how’d you save up so much?”
“I don’t see ’em, touch ’em, even smell ’em, but I play the horses. Got friends at the track. They listen, and lay on the lettuce. I bet more and lose less than most sighted fools. It mounts up. When it gets too big, I trot along to one of those ugly ladies, so they tell me, in the bungalows out front near the tenement. They say ugly but I don’t mind. Blind is blind, and— Well, now. Where are we?”
“Here,” I said.
We had pulled into an alley behind a building in a run-down block in Hollywood south of the boulevard. Henry snuffed a deep breath. “It ain’t Armpits. But it’s his first cousin. Watch out.”
“I’ll be right back.”
I got out. Henry stayed in the back seat, his cane in his lap, eyes restfully shut.
“I’ll just listen to the meter,” he said, “and make sure it don’t run fast.”
The dusk was long since gone and it was full night as I picked my way along the alley, looking up at a half-lit neon sign on the backstairs of a building, with the great god Janus painted facing two ways above it. Half of one face had flaked on in the rains. The rest would be soon gone.
Even the gods, I thought, are having a bad year.
I dodged upstairs among various young men and women with old faces, hunched like beaten dogs, smoking, begging their pardon, excusing myself, but nobody seemed to mind. I stepped in at the top.
The offices looked as if they hadn’t been cleaned since the Civil War. There was paper balled, wadded, tossed over every inch, foot, and yard of the floor. There were hundreds of old newspapers, crumpled and yellowing, in the windows, on the desktops. Three wastebaskets stood empty. Whoever had thrown the paper wads had missed ten thousand times. I waded in through a tide that reached my ankles. I walked on dried cigars, cigarette stubs, and, by the crackling sound of their small thoraxes, cockroaches. I found the abandoned phone under a snow-piled desk, picked it up, listened.
I thought I could hear the traffic going by under Mrs. Gutierrez’s window. Crazy. She must have hung up, long ago.
“Thanks for waiting,” I said.
“Hey, man, what gives?” said someone.
I hung up and turned.
A tall, skinny man, with a clear drop of water on the end of his thin nose, came wading through the paper tide. He sized me up with nicotine-stained eyes.
“I called about half an hour ago.” I nodded at the phone. “I just hung up on me.”
He gazed at the phone, scratched his head, and finally got it. He managed a feeble smile and said, “Shee-it.”
“Those are my very thoughts.”
I had a feeling he was proud of never coming back to the phone; it was better to make up your own news.
“Hey, man,” he said, getting another idea to replace the first. He was the sort of thinker who has to move out the furniture before he can bring in the cows. “You, you wouldn’t happen to be the fuzz.”
“No, just the Goofer Feathers.”
“Unh?”
Remember the Two Black Crows?”
“Huh?”
“Nineteen twenty-six. Two white men in blackface talked about Goofer Feathers. The fuzz. From peaches. Forget it. Did you write this?” I held out the Janus, Green Envy page with the terribly sad advertisement at the bottom.
He blinked at it. “Hell, no. It’s legit. It was sent in.”
“You ever stop to think what you’re doing with an ad like that?”
“Hey, man, like we don’t read, we just print ’em. It’s a free country, right? Lemme see that!” He grabbed the ad and peered at it, moving his lips. “Oh, sure. That one. Funny, huh?”
“You realize someone just might look up that geek and believe in him?”
“Them’s the breaks. Hey, look, why don’t you fall downstairs outa my life?” He thrust the paper back at me.
“I don’t leave without the home phone number of this weirdo.”
He blinked at me, stunned, then laughed. “That’s Q.T. information, like no one knows. You want to write him, sure. We pass mail on. Or he comes, picks it up.”
“This is an emergency. Someone’s dead. Someone—.” I ran out of gas and looked around at the ocean of paper on the floor and, without thinking about it, took out a box of small stick matches.
“Looks like a fire hazard here,” I said.
“What fire hazard?”
He glanced around at the year’s growth of paper wadding, empty beer cans, dropped paper cups, and old hamburger wrappings. A look of immense pride overcame him. His eyes almost danced when he saw the five-or-six-quart wax milk cartons busy manufacturing penicillin on the window sills, next to some tossed men’s jockey shorts that gave the place its real touch of class.
I struck a match to get his attention.
“Hey,” he said.
I blew out the first match, to show what a good sport I was, and when he made no further offer of help, lit a second.
“What if I dropped this on the floor?”
He gave the floor a second look around. The paper junk seethed and lapped at his ankles. If I had dropped the match the flames would have reached him in about five seconds.
“You ain’t going to drop that,” he said.
“No?” I blew it out and lit a third.
“You got the goddamnedest sense of humor, don’t you?”
I dropped the match.
He yelled and jumped.
I stepped on the flame before it could spread.
He took a deep breath and let it blast.
“Now you get the hell outa here! You—”
“Wait.” I lit a final match and crouched, guarding the flame, close
down to a half-ton of wadded rewrites, old calling cards, torn envelopes.
I touched the flame here and there and the paper started burning.
“What in hell you want?”
“Just a phone number. That’s all. I still won’t have an address, so I can’t get at the guy, trace him. But I do, damn it to hell, want that phone, or the whole place burns.”
I realized my own voice had gone up about ten decibels, to maniac. Fannie was fighting in my blood. A lot of other dead people were screaming in my breath, wanting out.
“Give it here!” I shouted.
The flames were spreading.
“Shit, man, stomp out the fire, you’ll get the goddamn dumb number. Shit, hold on, jump!”
I jumped on the fire, dancing around. Smoke rose and the fire was out by the time Mr. Janus, the editor who faced two ways at once, found the number on his Rolodex.
“Here, goddamn it, here’s the crapping number. Vermont four-five-five-five. Got that? Four-five-five-five!”
I struck a final final match until he shoved the Rolodex card under my nose.
“Someone who loved you,” it read, and the telephone.
“Okay!” shrieked the editor.
I blew out the match. My shoulders sank with sudden relief.
Fannie, I thought, we’ll get him now.
I must have said it out loud, for the editor, his face purple, sprayed me with his saliva. “What you going to get?”
“Myself killed,” I said, going downstairs.
“I hope so!” I heard him yell.
I opened the door of the taxicab).
“Meter’s ticking like crazy,” said Henry, in the back seat. “Thank God I’m rich.”
“Be right with you.”
I beckoned the taxi driver to follow me out to a corner where there was an outdoor phone booth.
I hesitated for a long while, afraid to call the number, afraid someone might really answer.
What, I wondered, do you say to a murderer during suppertime?
I dialed the number.
Someone who loved you, long ago.
Who would answer a dumb ad like that?
All of us, on the right night. The voice from the past, making you remember a familiar touch, a warm breath in the ear, a seizure of passion like a strike of lightning. Which of us is not vulnerable, I thought, when it comes to that three-in-the-morning voice. Or when you wake after midnight to find someone crying, and it’s you, and tears on the chin and you didn’t even know that during the night you had had a bad dream.