CHAPTER 27
Larry Underwood sat on a bench in Central Park on the morning of June 27, looking into the menagerie. Behind him, Fifth Avenue was crazily jammed with cars, all of them silent now, their owners dead or fled. Farther down Fifth, many of the posh shops were smoking rubble. From where Larry sat he could see a lion, an antelope, a zebra, and some sort of monkey. All but the monkey were dead. They had not died of the flu, Larry judged; they had gotten no food or water for God knew how long, and that had killed them. All but the monkey, and in the three hours that Larry had been sitting here, the monkey had moved only four or five times. The monkey had been smart enough to outwit starvation or death by thirst-so far-but it surely had a good case of superflu. That was one monkey who was hurtin for certain. It was a hard old world. To his right, the clock with all the animals chimed the hour of eleven. The clockwork figures which had once delighted all children now played to an empty house. The bear tooted his horn, a clockwork monkey who would never get sick (but who might eventually run down) played a tambourine, the elephant beat his drum with his trunk. Heavy tunes, baby, heavy fucking tunes. End of the World Suite Arranged for Clockwork Figures. After a bit the clock fell silent and he could hear the hoarse shouting again, now mercifully faint with distance. The monster-shouter was somewhere off to Larry's left this fine forenoon, perhaps in the Heckscher Playground. Maybe he would fall into the wading pool there and drown. "Monsters coming!" the faint, hoarse voice cried. The overcast had broken this morning, and the day was bright and hot. A bee cruised past Larry's nose, circled one of the nearby flowerbeds, and made a three-point landing on a peony. From the menagerie came the soothing, soporific drone of the flies as they landed on the dead animals. "Monsters coming now!" The monster-shouter was a tall man who looked to be in his middle sixties. Larry had first heard him the night before, which he had spent in the Sherry-Netherland. With night lying over the unnaturally quiet city, the faint, howling voice had seemed sonorous and dark, the voice of a lunatic Jeremiah floating through the streets of Manhattan, echoing, rebounding, distorting. Larry, lying sleepless in a queen-sized double with every light in the suite blazing, had become irrationally convinced that the monster-shouter was coming for him, seeking him out, the way the creatures of his frequent bad dreams sometimes did. For a long time it had seemed that the voice was drawing ever closer-Monsters coming! Monsters on the way! They're in the suburbs! and Larry became convinced that the suite's door, which he had triple-locked, would burst inward and that the monster-shouter would be there... not a human being at all but a gigantic troll-thing with the head of a dog and saucer-sized fly eyes and champing teeth. But earlier this morning Larry had seen him in the park and he was only a crazy old man wearing corduroy pants and zoris and horn-rimmed glasses with one bow taped. Larry had tried to speak to him and the monster-shouter had run in terror, crying back over his shoulder that the monsters would be in the streets at any moment. He had tripped over an ankle-high wire fence and went sprawling on one of the bikepaths with a loud comic thwap! sound, his glasses flying off but not shattering. Larry had gone to him, but before he could get there, the monster-shouter had scooped up his glasses and was gone toward the mall, crying his endless warning. So Larry's opinion of him had swung from extreme terror to utter boredom and mild annoyance in the space of twelve hours. There were other people in the park; Larry had spoken to a few of them. They were all pretty much the same, and Larry supposed that he himself wasn't much different. They were dazed, their speech disjointed, and they seemed helpless to stop reaching for your sleeve with their hands as they talked. They had stories to tell. All the stories were the same. Their friends and relatives were dead or dying. There had been shooting in the streets, there had been an inferno on Fifth Avenue, was it true that Tiffany's was gone, could that be true? Who was going to clean up? Who was going to collect the garbage? Should they get out of New York? They had heard that troops were guarding all the places where one could hope to do this. One woman was terrified that the rats were going to rise up out of the subways and inherit the earth, reminding Larry uneasily of his own thoughts on the day he had first returned to New York. A young man munching Fritos from a gigantic bag told Larry conversationally that he was going to fulfill a lifetime ambition. He was going to Yankee Stadium, run around the outfield naked, and then masturbate on home plate. "Chance of a lifetime, man," he told Larry, winked with both eyes, and then wandered off, eating Fritos. Many of the people in the park were sick, but not many had died there. Perhaps they had uneasy thoughts of being munched for dinner by the animals, and they had crawled indoors when they felt the end was near. Larry had had only one confrontation with death this morning, and one was all he wanted. He had walked up Transverse Number One to the comfort station there. He had opened the
112 door and a grinning dead man with maggots crawling briskly hither and yon on his face had been seated inside, his hands settled on his bare thighs, his sunken eyes staring into Larry's own. A sickening sweet smell bloated out at Larry as if the man sitting there was a rancid bonbon, a sweet treat which, in all the confusion, had been left for the flies. Larry slammed the door shut, but belatedly: he lost the cornflakes he had eaten for breakfast and then dry-heaved until he was afraid he might rupture some of his inner workings. God; if You're there, he had prayed as he stumbled back toward the menagerie, if You're taking requests today, Big Fella, mine is not to have to look at anything else like that today. The kooks are bad enough, something like that is more than I can take. Thank You so much. Now, sitting on this bench (the monster-shouter had moved out of earshot, at least temporarily), Larry found himself thinking about the World Series five years ago. It was good to remember that because, it now seemed to him, that was the last time he had been completely happy, his physical condition tiptop, his mind resting easily and not working against itself. That had been just after he and Rudy split up. That had been a damn piss-poor thing, that split- up, and if he ever saw Rudy again (never happen, his mind told him with a sigh), Larry was going to apologize. He would get down and kiss Rudy's shoetops, if that was what Rudy needed to make it okay again. They had started off across the country in a wheezy old 1968 Mercury that had shat its transmission in Omaha. From there on they would work for a couple of weeks, hitchhike west for a while, work another couple of weeks, then hitchhike some more. For a while they worked on a farm in western Nebraska, just below the panhandle, and one night Larry had lost sixty dollars in a poker game. The next day he'd had to ask Rudy for a loan to tide him over. They had arrived in L. A. a month later, and Larry had been the first to land a job-if you wanted to call washing dishes for the minimum wage working. One night about three weeks later, Rudy had broached the subject of the loan. He said he'd met a guy who'd recommended a really good employment agency, never miss, but the fee was twentyfive bucks. Which happened to be the amount of the loan he had made to Larry after the poker game. Ordinarily, Rudy said, he never would have asked, but— Larry had protested that he'd paid the loan back. They were square. If Rudy wanted the twenty- five, okay, but he just hoped Rudy wasn't trying to get him to pay off the same loan twice. Rudy said he didn't want a gift; he wanted the money he was owed, and he wasn't interested in a lot of Larry Underwood bullshit, either. Jesus Christ, Larry said, trying a goodhumored laugh. I never thought I'd need a receipt from you, Rudy. Guess I was wrong. It had escalated into a full-scale argument, almost to the point of blows. At the end Rudy's face had been flushed. That's you, Larry, he'd shouted. That's you all over. That's how you are. I used to think I'd never learn my lesson, but I think I finally did. Fuck off, Larry. Rudy left, and Larry followed him to the stairs of the cheap rooming house, digging his wallet out of his back pocket. There were three tens neatly folded into the secret compartment behind the photos and he had heaved them after Rudy. Go on, you cheap little lying fuck! Take it! Take the goddam money! Rudy had slammed the outer door open with a bang and had gone out into the night, toward whatever tin destiny the Rudys of this world can expect. He didn't look back. Larry had stood at the top of the stairs, breathing hard, and after a minute or so he had looked around for his three ten- dollar bills, gathered them up, and put them away again. Thinking of the incident now and then over the years, he had become more and more sure that Rudy had been right. Actually, he was positive. Even if he had paid Rudy back, the two of them had been friends since grade school, and it seemed (looking back) that Larry had always been a dime short for the Saturday matinee because he'd bought some licorice whips or a couple of candy bars on the way over to Rudy's, or borrowing a nickel to round out his school lunch money or getting seven cents to make up carfare. Over the years he must have bummed fifty dollars in change from Rudy, maybe a hundred. When Rudy had braced him for that twenty-five, Larry could remember the way he had tightened up. His brain had subtracted twenty-five dollars from the three tens, and had said to him: That only leaves five bucks. Therefore, you already paid him back. I'm not sure just when, but you did. Let's have no more discussion of the matter. And no more there had been. But after that he had been alone in the city. He had no friends, hadn't even attempted to make any at the cafe on Encino where he worked. The fact was, he'd believed everyone who worked there, from the evil-tempered head cook to the asswiggling, gum-chewing waitresses, had been a dipstick. Yes, he had really believed everyone at Tony's Feed Bag was a dipstick but him, the sainted, soonto-succeed (and you better believe it) Larry Underwood. Alone in a world of dipsticks, he felt as achy as a whipped dog and as homesick as a man marooned on a desert island. He began to think more and more of buying a Greyhound AmeriPass and dragging himself back to New York. In another month, maybe even another two weeks, he would have done it, too... except for Yvonne.
113 He met Yvonne Wetterlen at a movie theater two blocks from the club where she worked as a topless dancer. When the second show let out, she had been weeping and searching around her seat on the aisle for her purse. It had her driver's license in it, also her checkbook, her union card, her one credit card, a photostat of her birth certificate, and her Social Security card. Although he was positive it had been stolen, Larry did not say so and helped her look for it. And sometimes it seemed they really must live in a world of wonders, because he had found it three rows down just as they were about to give up. He guessed it had probably migrated down there as a result of people shuffling their feet as they watched the picture, which had really been pretty boring. She had hugged him and wept as she thanked him. Larry, feeling like Captain America, told her he wished he could take her out for burgers or something to celebrate, only he was really strapped for cash. Yvonne said she'd treat. Larry, that great prince, had been pretty sure she would. They started to see each other; in less than two weeks they had a regular thing going. Larry found a better job, clerking in a bookstore, and had gotten a gig singing with a group called The Hotshot Rhythm Rangers & All-Time Boogie Band. The name was the best thing about the group, actually, but the rhythm guitarist had been Johnny McCall, who later went on to form the Tattered Remnants, and that was actually a pretty good band. Larry and Yvonne moved in together, and for Larry everything changed. Part of it was just having a place, his own place, that he was paying half the rent for. Yvonne put up some curtains, they got some cheap thrift-shop furniture and refinished it together, other members of the band and some of Yvonne's friends started to drop around. The place was bright in the daytime, and at night a fragrant California breeze, which seemed redolent with oranges even when the only thing it was really redolent with was smog, would drift in through the windows. Sometimes no one would come and he and Yvonne would just watch television, and sometimes she would bring him a can of beer and sit on the arm of his chair and rub his neck. It was his own place, a home, goddammit, and sometimes he'd lie awake in bed at night with Yvonne sleeping beside him, and marvel at how good he felt. Then he would slip smoothly into sleep, and it was the sleep of the just, and he never did think of Rudy Marks at all. At least, not much. They lived together for fourteen months, all of it fine until the last six weeks or so, when Yvonne got to be kind of a bitch, and the part of it that summed it all up for Larry was that World Series. He would put in his day at the bookstore, then go over to Johnny McCall's house and the two of them- the whole group only practiced on weekends, because the other two guys had night jobswould work on some new stuff or maybe just hack away at the great oldies, the ones Johnny called "real bar- rippers," tunes like "Nobody but Me" and "Double Shot of My Baby's Love." Then he'd go home, to his home, and Yvonne would have dinner all ready. Not just TV dinners, shit like that, either. Real home cooking. Girl was well trained. And afterward they would go into the living room and turn on the tube and watch the Series. Later, love. It had seemed all right, it had all seemed his. There hadn't been one single thing hassling his mind. Nothing had been so good since then. Nothing. He realized he was crying a little bit, and he felt a momentary disgust that he should be sitting here on a bench in Central Park, crying in the sun like some wretched old man on a pension. Then it occurred to him that he had a right to cry for the things he had lost, that he had a right to be in shock if that was what this was. His mother had died three days ago. She had been lying on a cot in the hallway of Mercy Hospital when she died, crammed in with thousands of others who were also busy dying. Larry had been kneeling beside her when she went, and he had thought he might go mad, watching his mother die while all around him rose the stench of urine and feces, the hell's babble of the delirious, the choking, the insane, the screams of the bereaved. She hadn't known him at the end; there had been no final moment of recognition. Her chest had finally just stopped in midheave and had settled very slowly, like the weight of an automobile settling down on a flat tire. He had crouched beside her for ten minutes or so, not knowing what to do, thinking in a confused way that he ought to wait until a death certificate was signed or someone asked him what had happened. But it was obvious what had happened, it was happening everywhere. It was just as obvious that the place was a madhouse. No sober young doctor was going to come along, express sympathy, and then start the machinery of death. Sooner or later his mother would just be carried away like a sack of oats, and he didn't want to watch that. Her purse was under the cut. He found a pen and a bobby pin and her checkbook. He tore a deposit slip from the back of her book and wrote on it her name, her address, and after a moment's calculation, her age. He clipped it to her blouse pocket with the bobby pin and began to cry. He kissed her cheek and fled, crying. He felt like a deserter. Being on the street had been a little better, although at that time the streets had been full of crazy people, sick people, and circling army patrols. And now he could sit on this bench and grieve for more general things: his mother's loss of her retirement, the loss of his own career, for that time in L. A. when he had sat watching the World Series with Yvonne, knowing there would be bed and love later, and for Rudy. Most of all
114 he grieved for Rudy and wished he had paid Rudy his twenty-five dollars with a grin and a shrug, saving the six years that had been lost.
The monkey died at quarter of twelve. It was on its perch, just sitting there apathetically with its hands drawn up under its chin, and then its eyelids fluttered and it fell forward and hit the cement with a final horrid smack. Larry didn't want to sit there anymore. He got up and began to walk aimlessly down toward the mall with its large bandshell. He had heard the monster-shouter some fifteen minutes ago, very far away, but now the only sound in the park seemed to be his own heels clicking on the cement and the twitter of the birds. Birds apparently didn't catch the flu. Good for them. When he neared the bandshell, he saw that a woman was sitting on one of the benches in front of it. She was maybe fifty, but had taken great pains to look younger. She was dressed in expensive- looking gray-green slacks and a silk offthe-shoulder peasant blouse... except, Larry thought, as far as he knew, peasants can't afford silk. She looked around at the sound of. Larry's footsteps. She had a pill in one hand and tossed it casually into her mouth like a peanut. "Hi," Larry said. Her face was calm, her eyes blue. Sharp intelligence gleamed in them. She was wearing gold-rimmed glasses, and her pocketbook was trimmed with something that certainly looked like mink. There were four rings on her fingers: a wedding band, two diamonds, and a cat's- eye emerald: "Uh, I'm not dangerous," he said. It was a ridiculous thing to say, he supposed, but she looked like she might be wearing about $20,000 on her fingers. Of course, they might be fakes, but she didn't look like a woman who would have much use for paste and zircons. "No," she said, "you don't look dangerous. You're not sick, either." Her voice rose a little on the last word, making her statement into a polite halfquestion. She wasn't as calm as she looked at first glance; there was a little tic working on the side of her neck, and behind the lively intelligence in the blue eyes was the same dull shock that Larry had seen in his own eyes this morning as he shaved. "No, I don't think I am. Are you?" "Not at all. Did you know you have an ice cream wrapper on your shoe?" He looked down and saw that he did. It made him blush because he suspected that she would have informed him that his fly was open in that same tone. He stood on one leg and tried to pull it off. "You look like a stork," she said. "Sit down and try it. My name is Rita Blakemoor." "Pleased to know you. I'm Larry Underwood." He sat down. She offered her hand and he shook it lightly, his fingers pressing against her rings. Then he gingerly removed the ice cream wrapper from his shoe and dropped it primly into a can beside the bench that said IT'S YOUR PARK SO KEEP IT CLEAN! It struck him funny, the whole operation. He threw his head back and laughed. It was the first real laugh since the day he had come home to find his mother lying on the floor of her apartment, and he was enormously relieved to find that the good feel of laughing hadn't changed. It rose from your belly and escaped from between your teeth in the same jolly goto-hell way. Rita Blakemoor was smiling both at him and with him, and he was struck again by her casual yet elegant handsomeness. She looked like a woman from an Irwin Shaw novel. Nightwork, maybe, or the one they had made for TV when he was just a kid. "When I heard you coming, I almost hid," she said. "I thought you were probably the man with the broken glasses and the queer philosophy." "The monster-shouter?" "Is that what you call him or what he calls himself?" "What I call him." "Very apt," she said, opening her mink-trimmed (maybe) bag and taking out a package of menthol cigarettes. "He reminds me of an insane Diogenes." "Yeah, just lookin for an honest monster," Larry said, and laughed again. She lit her cigarette and chuffed out smoke. "He's not sick, either," Larry said. "But most of the others are." "The doorman at my building seems very well," Rita said. "He's still on duty. I tipped him five dollars when I came out this morning. I don't know if I tipped him for being very well or for being on duty. What do you think?" "I really don't know you well enough to say." "No, of course you don't." She put her cigarettes back in her bag and he saw that there was a revolver in there. She followed his gaze. "It was my husband's. He was a career executive with a major New York bank. That's just how he put it when anyone asked what he did to keep himself in cocktail onions. I-am-a-careerexecutive-with-a-major-NewYork-bank. He died two years ago. He was at a luncheon with one of those Arabs who always look as if they have rubbed all the visible areas of their skin with Brylcreem. He had a massive stroke. He died with his tie on. Do you think
115 that could be our generation's equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on? Harry Blakemoor died with his tie on. I like it, Larry." A finch landed in front of them and pecked the ground. "He was insanely afraid of burglars, so he had this gun. Do guns really kick and make a loud noise when they go off, Larry?" Larry, who had never fired a gun in his life, said, "I don't think one that size would kick much. Is it a . 38?" "I believe it's a . 32." She took it out of her bag and he saw there were also a good many small pill-bottles in there. This time she didn't follow his gaze; she was looking at a small chinaberry tree about fifteen paces away. "I believe I'll try it. Do you think I can hit that tree?" "I don't know," he said apprehensively. "I don't really think—" She pulled the trigger and the gun went off with a fairly impressive bang. A small hole appeared in the chinaberry tree. "Bull's-eye," she said, and blew smoke from the pistol barrel like a gunfighter. "Real good," Larry said, and when she put the gun back in her purse, his heart resumed something like its normal rhythm. "I couldn't shoot a person with it. I'm quite sure of that. And soon there won't be anyone to shoot, will there?" "Oh, I don't know about that." "You were looking at my rings. Would you like one?" "Huh? No!" He began to blush again. "As a banker, my husband believed in diamonds. He believed in them the way the Baptists believe in Revelations. I have a great many diamonds, and they are all insured. We not only owned a piece of the rock, my Harry and I, I sometimes believed we held a lien on the whole goddam thing. But if someone should want my diamonds, I would hand them over. After all, they're only rocks again, aren't they?" "I guess that's right." "Of course," she said, and the tic on the side of her neck jumped again. "And if a stick-up man wanted them, I'd not only hand them over, I would give him the address of Cartier's. Their selection of rocks is much better than my own." "What are you going to do now?" Larry asked her. "What would you suggest?" "I just don't know," Larry said, and sighed. "My answer exactly." "You know something? I saw a guy this morning who said he was going out to Yankee Stadium and je... and masturbate on home plate." He could feel himself blushing again. "What an awful walk for him," she said. "Why didn't you suggest something closer?" She sighed, and the sigh turned into a shudder. She opened her purse, took out a bottle of pills, and popped a gel capsule into her mouth. "What's that?" Larry asked. "Vitamin E," she said with a glittering, false smile. The tic in her neck jumped once or twice and then stopped. She became serene again. "There's nobody in the bars," Larry said suddenly. "I went into Pat's on Forty-third and it was totally empty. They have that great big mahogany bar and I went behind it and poured myself a water glass full of Johnnie Walker. Then I didn't even want to be there. So I left it sitting on the bar and got out." They sighed together, like a chorus. "You're very pleasant to be with," she said. "I like you very much. And it's wonderful that you're not crazy." "Thank you, Mrs. Blakemoor." He was surprised and pleased. "Rita. I'm Rita." "Okay." "Are you hungry, Larry?" "As a matter of fact, I am." "Perhaps you'd take the lady to lunch." "That would be a pleasure." She stood up and offered him her arm with a slightly deprecatory smile. As he linked his through it, he caught a whiff of her sachet, a smell that was at once comforting and disquietingly adult in its associations for him, almost old. His mother had worn sachet on their many trips to the movies together. Then he forgot about it as they walked out of the park and up Fifth Avenue, away from the dead monkey, the monstershouter, and the dark sweet treat sitting endlessly inside the comfort station on Transverse Number One. She chattered incessantly, and later he could remember no one thing
116 she had chattered about (yes, just one: she had always dreamed, she said, of strolling up Fifth Avenue on the arm of a handsome young man, a man who was young enough to have been her own son but who wasn't), but he recalled the walk often just the same, especially after she began to jitter apart like some indifferently made toy. Her beautiful smile, her light, cynical, casual chatter, the whisper of her slacks. They went into a steak house and Larry cooked, a trifle clumsily, but she applauded each course: the steak, the french fries, the instant coffee, the strawberry-rhubarb pie.