The Caveman's Valentine (2 page)

“Write it down.”

“Write what down?”

“The name of the murderer.”

“You mean ol’ Uncle North Wind? Hey, what’s the point of getting after
him
? I could book him, you know, but I’d never get an indictment. He’d blow down the frigging courthouse. You ever see the cheeks on that guy?”

“Write his name. What are you afraid of? Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant. Write it!”

Drumbeat of skull-blood, and a stirring of tiny wings inside his brain. Quickening toward a rage. But Lulu—only Lulu—kept it from boiling over. With a word.

“Daddy.”

Romulus let out a breath. Let his blood settle. He said:

“Well, tell him to write it, Lulu.”

“I can’t tell him anything, Daddy. This isn’t even my precinct. I’m just a nobody here, like you.”

But then the detective raised his clipboard again, and grinned a generous grin.

“Ah, what the hell, my friend. You got some help for me? Who am I to turn down help? So how do you spell ‘Cornelius’?”

L
ater, nearly dark, Romulus was making his rounds, just shuffling along through one of the rich enclaves off Riverside Drive. His low-energy sleepwalk shuffle. Build up some momentum with a gait like this, you could go on forever, like a steamship. But when he came abreast of a familiar and reliable row of garbage cans, he pulled up.

A doorman across the street gave him a baleful eye.

Romulus ignored him. Lifted a lid.

Well OK, here was the afternoon newspaper anyway, not bad. He stuck it under his elbow.

The rest was just miscellaneous desk trash. But he gave the mess a quick stir anyway, just in case—and uncovered a trove, a gleaming trove! Sheet music! Sugary white-bread tunes. “Gentle on My Mind.” “The Impossible Dream.” “On the Road Again.” Some spoiled brat in the tower above him, practicing with sodden fingers every Tuesday and Thursday, till she was old enough to bail out, to ditch this foolishness.

But sheet music no matter how corny was always a pleasure to Romulus.

He took a sheaf of it and put it in his outermost coat, slid it through the tear in the lining. Then moved on before the doorman could start something.

He went about a block and it was getting dark and he was tired, he’d lost that momentum now, and he stopped where he was and sat on the sidewalk, with his back to the blond brick.

When he dipped his head, he caught a whiff of his own stink. A bubble of deep rank sincere stink. Made him ashamed of himself. Usually he showered and washed his clothes at least once a month at the Franciscans’ down on Broadway and 112th. Cleanliness—that was a point of pride with him. After all, he had his daughter’s reputation to think of. He had his handsome rocky home—homeowner’s pride. Could such an upstanding prophet in the community go about ill-groomed? But these last few weeks—such cold! He kept putting off going down to the Franciscans, kept waiting for a break in the weather—and pride had gotten itself frozen out.

Just frozen out.

Frozen, iced-over, snowed in . . .

He woke with a start. Shook his head to clear it. The newspaper was on his lap. He took it up, and braced himself.

He was ready to confront the Ice Apollo again, in a big front-page spread.

But the front page was enthralled by the
VALENTINE GHOUL
, who’d been caught digging up Andy Warhol’s grave. She swore that he’d asked her to.
“He wants to be my love-zombie.”

Then pages two through six were communiqués from various
SPURIOUS AND TRUMPED-UP WARS
around the planet. The soldiers wore the same faces, just different uniforms. Of course. They were all extras.

Pages seven through twelve were taken up with the
TEARFUL CONFESSIONS
of pols who admitted to robbing the public blind but who promised to cut back just as soon as they could.

He was almost to the classifieds before he found what he was looking for.

HOMELESS MAN FOUND FROZEN TO DEATH

The lifeless body of Andrew Scott Gates, 20, was discovered early this morning in a remote section of Inwood Park on the northern tip of Manhattan. A preliminary autopsy report indicates that Mr. Gates was the victim of exposure to the sub-zero temperatures that have prevailed in the metropolitan area for more than a week.

Mr. Gates, an unemployed model, had been living since November at 144 East 4th Street, in a building owned by the city of New York but occupied by squatters.

Early this month, however, according to other tenants of the building, Mr. Gates had moved out onto the street. “He was depressed,” said Laurie Black, who lives with her husband in another room of the building. “He thought maybe he was dying of AIDS, and he kept talking about people out to get him.”

For some time after leaving the East 4th Street address, Mr. Gates had been noticed in and around the tent village at Tompkins Square Park. He had not been seen, however, for nearly a week.

Mr. Gates’s body may have lain undiscovered for several days, said Lieutenant Detective John Cork of the 34th Precinct. “It’s a little-trafficked area of the park. He might still be lying there if another homeless man hadn’t run across him.”

When found, the body was dressed in light summer clothes and an open coat. There were no indications of violence. Lieutenant Cork speculated that Mr. Gates may have been seeking shelter in one of the park’s shallow caves.

The police will conduct a thorough investigation, said Lieutenant Cork.

Mr. Gates is the third homeless man whose death has been attributed to the recent wave of arctic air. On Tuesday, an elderly Brooklyn man was found dead near a heating vent in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Yesterday an unemployed construction worker died of burn injuries he received when sparks from a cooking fire set ablaze his crude cardboard dwelling on West Street.

O farrago of lies! Lies and distortions.

The ol’ North Wind, sure. AKA
Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant.

Mr. Gates’s body will be transferred to the Museum of Classical Ice Sculpture in SoHo, where it will be attended by seven vestal virgins from the Fashion Institute of Technology. If there’s ever a power failure, the remains will melt into a puddle and Stuyvesant’s minions will mop up that puddle and rinse it away and it will burble down the drain and into the sewers and the rivers and into the Atlantic Ocean and you can rest in peace
then,
Andrew Scott Gates, there’s not much more the bastards can do to you.

Easy,
Romulus. Back off on the rage. Easy on the bitter visions. Remember that iniquity and injustice such as this are all in a day’s commerce here. Detach. Smile. Get out that sheet music and play.

T
he bankruptcy lawyer was one of the best in New York, a man to whom even the grimmest of grim tidings brought enrichment. And as the tidings from all points of the compass were very grim indeed these days, he whistled cheerfully as he walked up from the corner, where the car had left him, to his apartment house.

Then he saw the bum. The bum was sitting on the sidewalk with his knees drawn up, and he was reading something and his head was rocking from side to side. He was in some kind of bum’s rapture. He was a big black man. He wore a pot for a hat, and several coats, one on top of the other, and out of the pocket of the topmost coat stuck the ends of a bunch of bananas—coal-black, oozing at the seams.

The bankruptcy lawyer was not dismayed by the sight of bums and beggars. As symbols of abysmal failure they also stood, of course, for his own prosperity. But more than that, he thought they represented—in the constancy, the intractability, of their numbers, despite every attempt in every age of humankind to eradicate them—some stubborn and gloriously perverse willfulness in the human spirit.

Something to draw a kind of courage from.

Not that he ever gave them a penny.

But tonight was such a cold night. Tonight he saw this poor vagabond and felt, despite the firmness of his principles, a twinge of guilt. He veered to the edge of the sidewalk, to give the man a wide berth. He strode quickly and purposefully, hoping the crazy wouldn’t surface from his trance in time to badger him.

But not quickly or purposefully enough. The bum raised his eyes, fixed him, and said:

“Hey mister. You got a pencil?”

The bankruptcy lawyer waved him off. And was halfway down the block before he realized the man had asked him not for money but of all things for a
pencil.

He turned around and came back.

“Did I hear you right? You asked for a pencil?”

“You got one?”

“This isn’t just to get me in conversation so you can hit me up for a dollar?”

The bum stared at him. The bankruptcy lawyer said:

“What do you want a pencil for?”

“I want to balance it on the end of my nose.”

“I mean—OK, you just want to write something, huh?”

“Right.”

“Well, I don’t have a pencil. I’ve got a pen.”

“That would do.”

“I don’t have a cheap pen.”

“No?”

“But here. What the hey.”

The bankruptcy lawyer handed over a gold Parker Executive. Foolish gesture. But one that triggered a little warmth in his breast.
What the hey.
It was just such foolish gestures that kept the Ghost of Christmas Future at bay.

Even in late February, a bankruptcy lawyer was wise to keep one eye out for the Ghost of Christmas Future.

He said to the bum, “Maybe if I ever see you again, you’ll give it back, OK?”

“OK.”

The bankruptcy lawyer started off again. Looked back again. The bum was writing furiously. What he had open on his knees was sheet music, and he was sitting there in the insane cold making emendations in the music—filling in notes where there were none, X-ing out whole measures, changing the key, block-printing commands beneath the bars. His head bobbing and bouncing, his eyes rolling, the Parker Executive dancing. The bankruptcy lawyer came a few steps closer, so he could read the title on the sheet.

Lord. “Gentle on My Mind”?

B
assoons and a banshee siren! Bass clarinets! Derail this rinky-dink choo-choo music! Two dozen harmonicas, wheezing destruction! And Romulus, scribbling away, dreamed of himself, none other, at the piano, bedazzling the ivories. Send this freight hurtling into the depot building! Cymbols, mayhem, and fiddles! Crash through that row of parked cars on Main Street, plough through the antique shops and the country boutiques.
Smoke and rubble!
Despair—

“Could I ask you what you’re writing there?”

Pinstripes was back. Big guy, woof-woof voice. Probably had played fullback in the Ivy League. But what threads! Romulus blinked at him and said:

“You want your pen back?”

“No, that’s OK. You a musician?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What do you play?”

“My skull.”

And then—the cold and the approaching dark making him sleepy and softheaded again—Romulus relented a little, opened his past just a crack for this stranger.

“I used to play other things.”

“Like—?”

“Like everything I could get my hands on. Mostly piano.”

“You had a piano?”

“Not of my own, no. But there were a good many where I went to school.”

“Where’d you go to school?”

“Juilliard.”

“
Juilliard?
Lord, then how the hell did you wind up here?”

Romulus roused himself. He tucked the sheet music into the lining of his innermost coat. He clicked back the point on the Parker Executive and dropped it in the pocket of his outermost coat, with the bananas. With a prodigious effort, mind over matter, he rose. He bent over and coughed. He wiped his nose on his sleeve. Adjusted his Teflon-saucepan hat, and said:

“You want to know how the
hell
did I wind up here?”

He shuffled away, down the block, and he beckoned Pinstripes to follow. At the corner he gestured toward the dusky view of lower Manhattan.

“I wound up
here
because that bastard
wants
me here.”

Romulus could feel them now—they were astir inside his skull. The Seraphs of Divinity and Vengeance. He felt them fluttering their little wings like moths against the soft walls of his brain. He felt their fury rising.

Said Pinstripes, “What bastard?”

“Don’t play stupid, Pinstripes. You know the bastard that lives in that tower.”

“What tower?”

“
Don’t,
Jack. Just don’t even bother, right? That tower right there. All right, use your pretty euphemism. Call it the Chrysler Building.”

“You can’t see the Chrysler Building from here.”

“Yeah? Yeah, but who gives a shit?—he can see
me.
He sees me at all times, you think I don’t know that? He sits up there in his tower and he watches, and what he sees he doesn’t like. I mean it curdles his stinking rancid
blood
what he sees, ’cause what he sees is a
free
man. Free man busting through to his own divinity, right?—you getting this? Ghetto kid making it in Juilliard? Making a name for himself? Young composer? Hot, jumping? Getting his notes straight from God hisself, am I right, you know this story? Getting an angle on what the
truth
sounds like, what
love
sounds like—and old Stuyvesant, you know what he says to
that.
He says, We’re going to crush
that
nigger. Oh yes, send some Y-rays that nigger’s way. We’re going to CRUSH THAT NIGGER! Right? Oh, don’t you back off, Pinstripes. Don’t give me that shit, you
know
what I’m talking about. YOU SIGN THE PAPERS, DON’T YOU? Send another load of darkies into the mine—you’ll sign off on that, won’t you, Mr. Overseer? Never going to see them poor suckers again. GET BACK HERE! YOU FUCKING COWARD! Stuyvesant’s gone and laced your mind with Y-rays, YOU’RE LIVING LIKE A JACKRABBIT! Oh, yes, RUN, Stuyvesant! Run like a fucking jackrabbit—but you sign the papers! Right? You say CRUSH THAT NIGGER! I hear you! STUYVESANT! I SEE YOU! You see me? I SEE YOU RIGHT FUCKING BACK!”