Ether (5 page)

From the bottom of the leftmost bag, he fished out a small dust broom and on his knees began to brush away the refuse of other people's pleasures — broken bottles, broken lighters, yellowed cigarette filters, tiny empty ziplock baggies, small glass tubes with colored plastic stoppers — until he had cleared an even quadrangle of pavement about eight feet wide and four feet long.

A mouse scampered by across the far end of this clearing, and despite his age and girth, the bagman leapt two nimble yards through the air and landed with acrobatic grace and one outstretched toe on the squeaking mouse's tail. He lifted the toe. The mouse ran, bulge-eyed and blind, and collided with the bagman's other foot, with which he stomped the creature dead. It barely crunched. He tossed it by its tail into the scrub, splashing the concrete with a trail of small red droplets.

The stranger grinned. “Bravo,” he said, and clapped three times.

The bagman grunted and went on sweeping, striating the mouse's clotting blood along the pavement, mixing it with the mineral dust of the earth, the fine black ash spat from the exhaust pipes of the cars above, the flecks of paint and rust and grease that automobiles shed just as animals shed hairs and breath and skin and dirt, and plants shed pollen and their own dead bodies, dried leaves and stems and stamens. The bagman swept it all into the brush without discrimination and pointed to the spot he'd cleared.

“You can rest here,” he told the stranger. The stranger ignored him and lowered himself onto an unswept patch of ground. He leaned his back against a pillar, his package on his lap.

The bagman eyed the parcel, but kept sweeping until he had cleared another space a few feet away, this one somewhat larger to accommodate the bags. One by one, he carried them into this clearing. He laid them down with more ceremony than usual, making sure they stood straight, plumping each one like an overstuffed pillow. He stole a glance at the stranger, who was not looking at him at all, but was gazing upward at the glinting lens of the security camera mounted high in the groin of the overpass's concrete buttresses.

The bagman methodically emptied each bag, filling the space he'd swept with tidy piles. When he had removed everything, he began to rearrange his goods, shifting a sweater or a shredded spiral notebook or a plastic pirate's eye-patch from one stack to another, gazing each time at the brown parcel in the stranger's lap as if it were the pole star by which he oriented the entire operation, and at the stranger's eyes, to see if he was observing this display. He was not. This was hardly the tribunal the bagman had hoped for, but he continued nonetheless.

Some piles dwindled as others towered and finally tottered over and had to be built once more on firmer foundations. His classification schemes shifted by the minute. Sometimes he sorted by color or by size or material, plastics in one corner, paper goods in another, textiles in a third, but more often the criteria governing his decisions could not be immediately divined, and perhaps could not be communicated at all, or understood by anyone but him. After many rearrangings — his eyes all the while swiveling metronomically between the package on the stranger's lap and the stranger's absent gaze — he at last settled, brow knit with dissatisfaction, on an order that would temporarily suffice, that though it reached not even a base approximation of the desired ideal, would have to do for now. Forgoing any sign of approval or disapproval from his audience, the bagman carefully restuffed his bags according to this final esoteric taxonomy.

He left out only three objects: a blue plastic cigarette lighter, a package of frankfurters, and a green army blanket, more hole than wool, folded into a tight right triangle, like the flags that drape soldiers' caskets. The bagman tore through the plastic packaging with a fingernail and squeezed out a single wiggling frank, which he submitted for his guest's consideration with twofold intent: as an offering of food but also as a final display of evidence, as if to say, “Look. Look at this awful wagging thing. Look how wrong it is.” The stranger acknowledged neither aspect of the bagman's oblation. He stared past the proffered frank, right through the bagman at the high grass swaying and crackling in the field behind him, so the bagman ate the thing himself.

The cough and the hum of rush-hour traffic began to fade, and with it the strength of the sun. A hummingbird darted from pillar to pillar, seeking nectar, but finding none. Its tiny green body shimmered pink, then blue, then a brilliant glowing gold before it hastened off into the weeds. In what remained of the light, the bagman gathered sticks and yellowed newspaper and the dry cardboard spine of a puddle-bloated roll of paper towels. He paced behind the stranger and gazed over his shoulder at the thing in his lap, its brown paper wrapping stained almost to translucence.

The bagman found a heavy log and dragged it through the bushes to their camp. He snapped it in two with a kick, arranged his kindling and with it lit a fire, fanning the smoke to keep it from the eyes of the stranger, who leaned against the pillar still, his jaw clenched, his knuckles white around his parcel. The bagman squeezed out another frank and roasted it over the fire, not even flinching when the flames licked at his fingertips, blackening his already blackened hands. The flesh of the frank charred and peeled and emitted little gusts of steam. The bagman offered it to the stranger, but the stranger again ignored him, so the bagman ate that one too.

When the sun had hidden itself entirely behind the pillars of the overpass where the freeway stretched off to the west, and the last of its light had fled from the gathering wind, the bagman unfolded his blanket and hung it over the stranger's shoulders. The stranger did not thank him, but spread the wormy thing over his lap to cover himself and the package that he held there. The bagman laid several sheets of newspaper on the ground, and laid himself atop them before they blew away. He shoved more newspapers into his sleeves and his pant legs, and laid out one final layer to pull over his shoulders before he curled himself into a ball on the ground, his face to the fire. He tried not to move at all, to mute the hysteric crinkling that accompanied his every tiny shift. He gazed off at the stranger behind the flames, still seated erect against his column, as if it were only through his efforts that it stayed standing and kept the freeway from tumbling to the earth. The bagman watched his new companion's eyes glow bright and orange in the firelight until at last he fell asleep.

Pigeon woke before his sisters. The eldest lay curled beside him, humming in her sleep with her thumb in her mouth though she was three years older than Pigeon and Pigeon was almost nine already. Her shoulder blade jutted over her back like the joint of a folded wing. Pigeon had to unravel the littlest one's arm from his waist before he could rise to his knees and crawl out from beneath the sheet of tin under which they'd laid their mattress.

The dark had not yet lifted, but Pigeon had not slept well. For the first half of the night, he had been so excited about what he'd found that afternoon that he hadn't been able to sleep. The night seemed an unbearable imposition. Pigeon wondered if he should share his discovery with his sisters or keep it to himself. He worried that he might not be able to find it again. He knew that was absurd, that he could find it even in the moonless, unstarred night, but as he lay there on his skinny side between his sisters, to be extra sure that he did not forget, he traced the path again and again in his imagination, hoping to carve it into his brain, feeling right there on the mattress the sharp corners of the jumbled bricks through the thin soles of his shoes.

Sleep won out eventually. Pigeon dreamed of his mother. He was walking alone through a parking lot and saw his sisters in a car. They called to him. They were laughing. When he got close they rolled the window down and he saw that his mother was there behind the wheel. But when she saw him coming she pulled away. His sisters continued to laugh as she drove off. Pigeon woke in tears. He lay in the dark between his sisters, trying not to resent them for their behavior in his dream, trying also to remind himself of what the next day held. But the anguish of his dream stained everything. Insomniac Pigeon could imagine no acceptable escape, no possible distraction from this quivering abandonment, his solitary smallness on a planet much too large.

Sleep must have claimed him once again and spared him dreams, because the eastern sky was with apparent trepidation allowing itself to pinken at the rim, and Pigeon had no memory of the hours having passed. He rubbed his thin brown arms and stretched. The night was not cold, but his shirt was worn almost to translucence and standing now, without his sisters' bodies to warm him, he couldn't help but shiver. He caught his breath in his hands, hoping he would see it. But it was not cold enough for that. It was just breath. He walked out around behind the concrete slab and splashed urine on the dusty roots of an oleander. His pee didn't steam either. He tried to write his name, but he had started too late and he ran out before he finished dotting the
i
.

When Pigeon walked, and when he was nervous but standing still, his head bobbed back and forth, chin first. Pigeon was almost always nervous. Hence the name. But Pigeon's myriad fears had not stopped him before, and would not stop him now, in the thin, drooping light of the morning. He decided not to wake his sisters and not to share his discovery with them. Not today at least. He scampered off, chin abob, through the bushes and down along the trail to the edge of the lot.

Pigeon crawled through the brambles to the dirt road below and hurried along past the cedars and the strange pit behind them, past the chain-linked junkyard and under the bridge. His chin like a pendulum. He tried not to run and miss something important. You never knew where you'd find a portal, or what you'd have to do to open one. Kick a rock maybe, or circle three times, or maybe seven. It was best to try this with everything, to assume a certain esoteric structure to the cosmos, some hidden architectural order, and hence to always kick and circle and knock, to push anything that might be a button and pull any twig or protuberance that might be a lever in disguise, but right now Pigeon didn't have time.

Once he thought he had found one, when the three of them first explored the roofless concrete shed out where the chickens used to be. With fingers interwoven, his sister boosted Pigeon up to scramble over the edge of the cinderblock wall. The floor inside was strewn with mouse pellets, feathers, thousands of rusted nails, glass from the one high window. In a far corner he found a wide aluminum baking pan. Pigeon glanced inside it and saw a dark, concrete-walled passageway shimmering down beneath. His heart skipped. The other strata of the universe that Pigeon hoped to scale were always, in his imagination, better and more interesting than this one. If they proved frightening at times it was only to provide opportunities for heroism. Awash in awe, Pigeon leaned over the portal. A face blinked up at him. It was his own. He lowered a finger into the tin and saw a finger rise to meet him. His finger came back slick with a thick brown liquid. It was no passageway at all, just a tub of motor oil or some other viscous goo.

Pigeon cut through yards and shinnied over chain-link fences. He bobbed down an alley, counted his steps across an empty parking lot. And there it was, set in the middle of a yard heaped in wild disarray with broken red bricks, a strange gift for him and him alone. A trampoline. The frame and springs had only just begun to rust. The fabric was unfrayed. The sky was almost light now, the clouds pink and gold and gray. The sharp edges of the bricks dug through his thin-soled shoes. Pigeon hoisted himself aboard, tumbled towards the trampoline's center, pushed himself up on his elbows and stood. He jumped, let himself fall to his haunches, bounced to his feet. The frame creaked. He bounced higher and lifted his knees to his chest. With each jump, he bounced still higher. Pigeon stretched his skinny arms, reached for the low clouds above him, and jumped as high as gravity allowed.

When the bagman awoke, tossed from his slumbers by the vibrations of a truck towing cattle on the overpass above, or by a rodent rustling in the bushes, or by the stranger's mumbled cries, it was the stranger he saw first, eyes closed tight, thin ribs aquiver beneath his tattered suit, fragmentary syllables tumbling from his lips. The fire had gone out. The bagman stood, his legs stiff from the cold and the hard ground and the paper stuffed inside his pants. He rearranged the blanket, which had fallen from the stranger's shoulders, peeking intently at the parcel beneath it as he did so. Crouching beside the stranger, he leaned his own broad back against the concrete pillar and wrapped a heavy arm around his comrade's shoulders.

“Don't you fret,” the bagman whispered, and the stranger's proud head fell into the bagman's lap. A spasm shook the stranger's chest. Words the bagman could not comprehend spilled forth from sleep, the stranger's lips pulled white and thin over his perfect teeth. The bagman stroked the stranger's temples, smoothed his greasy hair against his soiled brow. “It don't matter,” the bagman said. And while he comforted the stranger, he forgot for a while to covet the mysterious thing wrapped in brown paper that rested between the stranger's knees. With the backs of his filth-encrusted fingers, the bagman caressed the stranger's beard and hollow cheeks until the stranger's lips were still and his jaw unclenched and he slept peacefully there on the ground beneath the freeway, his head warm on the bagman's thigh.

Shortly before dawn, the stranger woke. The air was cold. His breath clouded out around him. Beside him lay the bagman. He shoved the bagman's meaty arm from his chest and let it fall to the dirt. The bagman shifted and mumbled but did not awaken. The stranger rose, brushed the dust from his trousers and retrieved his package from the ground. He glanced down at the bagman wheezing in his grubby reindeer sweater, at the thread of drool hanging from his dark lips into the off-white thicket of his beard, at the three fat bags sitting dumb beside the ashes of the fire and at the flattened newspaper of the bagman's bed, now gray and wet with dew.