The Shaft (32 page)

    Jonathan tied the female end of one extension cord through the feed pipe for the heater, which he knew was incapable of generating heat serious enough to damage the wire. Jamaica had her jeans and sweatshirt on and had wrapped herself in the unzipped sleeping bag like an Indian. He reopened the window and unreeled the cord. It did not quite reach to the first floor windows; the ceilings were high ones here at Kenilworth. With fisherman's patience he wound up the cord on his forearm, attached the second cord, and tried again, making the center binding knot strong. There wasn't enough cord to braid it along its entire length, as he had hoped.

    He crunched outside in his parka and found that he had about eight extra feet to play with. He doubled the wire around his wrist and did a deliberately slow pull-up. He felt the line tauten and he sank back to snow level. While Jamaica watched from the window, her face a white mask in a chrysalis of down nylon, he grabbed above the slack and repeated. The cord went arrow straight and he did a leisurely count-off to thirty as he hung, hitops braced against the snowmelt-slippery bricks. The cord would breathe, stretching, but not much, under his 155 pounds. He walked up the building to head height. He wiggled around. The insulation took a firmer bite and tightened his knots. He stopped before he could unmoor the heater from his floor, which would be no surprise tonight.

    He could trust this stuff to a two-way climb.

    Jamaica was in the bathroom immersing her hands. The cat was asleep, having licked and cleaned itself to its own satisfaction. The gooey crimson incision had condensed to a maroon hairline; the blood below it on the floor had dried to skim.

    'God! It must be thirty below out there. Colder, with the wind chill.'

    'Everybody says that. Like: 'It's not the heat.' '

    'It's the stupidity.' He traced the fine of the slit with his finger, something he would not permit Jamaica to do moments before. It was still moist, but receding by the second. It was only half its original length now.

    She caught him. 'Jonathan-'

    'It's like skin. Like a cut healing in fast motion.' Near the center it had the consistency of modeling clay; at its periphery the wall had resumed normal solidity. The paint now lay clean and uninterrupted. 'Did you see anything like this in Cruz's room?'

    'No!' Like she wouldn't have mentioned it if she had. 'Yuck. But I can't say it was something I was looking for. You just said the cat might've walked in here through that hole and you missed it.'

    He shook his head. 'It wasn't there before.' He was almost certain. 'And it's not gonna be here in another minute or two.'

    She folded her arms. 'You were going to say something like, you're not gonna believe this, but…'

    'Hm. But. But there is something decidedly bent going on in this building, and I'm not talking about the police raids, or the domestic punch-outs, or the occasional burglary-in-progress. Right now I'm beginning to think that maybe that Mexican lad got lost by crawling into a hole exactly like this one here.'

    'Oh yeah.' She rubbed her face slowly, as if topped off by the world of pain. 'Can't you just see us running down to the police station to give them the skinny on what really happened? Yo, Barnett, we figured it all out, man!'

    Their mutual laughter was rueful. Joanthan collected in the cord, shut the window and dropped the blind. The process had gotten him thoroughly wet.

    'Cruz thought there was some kind of ghost in the building. Said he could hear it moaning and groaning. I never heard a damned thing.'

    He decided to let her in on it. 'When we were sleeping together, I was thinking there was an airflow or vibration, something that sounds like a heartbeat, but only if you listen really close. A definate cadence, a repeating pattern.'
Boom-cha-boom-cha-cha
.

    'Can't hear it.' She held her hands toward the heater, flexing her long, elegant fingers.

    'No. It's never that easy. It's one of those vague noises, almost subliminal. The kind that makes you doubt your sanity, but only when you're alone.' He began tying large, pretzel-shaped climbing loops every four or five feet along the cord.

    'You weren't alone. You were with me.' She grew catty. 'Why, we've been alone together a lot.'

    'Tch. I was never more alone, I think now, than the last two years I spent with Amanda. Quite an opera, that.'

    He traded his Reebs for snowboots. Capra had lent him the cash to buy the footgear, and Jonathan was quick to appreciate their utility. Steel-toed and gum-soled, they laced firm up to the calf. The reinforced toes were not absolutely essential, but he had never owned such boots, and thought it cool to walk around with the same protection that miners and construction wildcats had.

    'Ah, but you still love her. I know that tone.' She watched him work. 'She still makes you mad.'

    'Like I think I said before, subdety doesn't seem to be my forte these days. Yeah. Losing her was like tearing tissue.'

    'Not Kleenex, but heartmuscle, eh? Sounds like love.' She was not trying to be cruel out of meanness. She just knew better, and sensed he might permit her to be a realist. He was not a little boy, and he'd better be able to handle someone knocking down that nobody hurts like hurt garbage.

    'If you define love the way Bierce did,' he said. 'When you don't have a lot of new input, I think you start recycling the memories, old emotions, until they spoil from overuse and begin growing mold. You hit the point at which the original emotion will no longer make legible copies.'

    'You're an idiot romantic,' she said. 'Either that or you're so goddamned possessive that you'll never let go. Equally unhealthy.'

    'My buddy Bash suggested I just find a new girlfriend. It's so easy for him to say that.' But Bash, Jonathan knew, had his own factory-fresh set of problems now. He might as well have Camela's engagement ring through his own nose.

    'I would've made the same suggestion. Let the old bitch go. When it's over, it's over. A lot of people never learn fundamentals like that. They hang on to all the memories because a few of them were good. That sounds suspiciously like letting one apple spoil the basket. I'm running out of cliches. The bitch is history. Move on.'

    Now that was a sublime concept.
Let her go. Move on. Try to get on with your life, dummy. He needed an outsider to put it so baldly, to say it in simple words he had been unwilling to aim and fire at Amanda. Bitch. Yeah, you've got your own petty agenda, bitch, and firebomb anybody who countermands it, even if they love you, right? There was no oblique way to deliver the message. No one had ever said, just let the BITCH go. Let her go on her bitchy way to toxify and cripple someone else's life instead of clinging to yours like a sourpuss ghost of recrimination and culpability. Jonathan had protected her more than anyone. He had done so overlooking the Core fact that Amanda was, you know, one of those. A bitch. That he ought to, well, just. Let her go. She wants to go, so let her. Don't ever try to love somebody against their will; that's how you make a wasteland where nobody wins a prize, ever. Let her go. Amanda had been a bitch
.

    And Jamaica - she was a whore. What the hell did she know about Amanda? Nada.

    
You're doing it again,
he realized. Why did he need Amanda to bonk him repeatedly on the head with the club of bad memories? He did it so well himself. And covered for his tormentor, to boot.

    Instead of snapping at Jamaica, defending some inviolate, rosy memory of Amanda, he tried to think of a better answer for her. This strategy was new but pleasant.

    'Uh… well, I didn't let her go. She kind of let me go. Sort of. Maybe that was it: Being the dumpee instead of the dumper.' In a rude flash slingshot by abrupt and intense anger, he saw Amanda get pasted by the toothy grille of a speeding Coca-Cola truck. From Waco. Yeah. Splat. A disfiguring traffic mishap might really be a windfall for her. A catch-all blame basket for everything bad that ever befell her. At least it would erase the smugness from her demeanor.

    'Male pride is an ugly thing sometimes,' Jamaica said. 'Makes you stupid. Makes you do stupid things.'

    'My fault.' He shrugged. He'd have to stop that. 'I didn't bother amassing new events to put in front of the memory of her. Growth doesn't really block out past pain but it can erect a scenic divider so you don't have to look at it. I just held at a constant pain level, like a computer refusing new data. When I finally overloaded, I took a chance on coming to Chicago.'

    'And look at you now!' She smiled and that made him feel better. Normally he hated being made fun of.

    'That's how I wound up in this palace.' He waggled an imaginary Groucho cigar. 'So, my dear, what's your story?'

    She was up now, and next to him.

    'Jonathan. I think you're basically a nice guy, I really do. Misguided, and over-reactionary, but at the core a nice guy. You let people fuck with your head too much. You dwell on bad shit too deeply. You think about feeling too much, instead of just feeling.' She frowned 'And I think you just asked me your own special variation on the dumbest question in the universe: What's a nice girl like you. Etcetera.'

    'Oops. Shit. Sorry.' He blushed. It was endearing.

    'Don't apologize. Jesus, that's another bylaw you're going to have to learn. Stop sorrying.' She rubbed his neck muscles, standing behind him. She had sincerely tried to cheer him without compromising. Or lying. What the hell did she think she was doing?

    'Time's wasting,' she said. 'What's next?'

    'Humph.' He gave his head a courtly shake. 'That, madame, must wait until after I have completed my climb for the record books.'

    He was so… Jamaica hunted for a word. Mannered, around her. Good god, did getting laid open him up that much? He was considerate, attentive, and once she had given him a goal, determined and goal-oriented. Or, as the illiterates would have it, goal-orientated. This near-stranger was about to descend into an icky cold dark shaft to salvage all their lives, merely because she had told him their lives needed salvaging.

    He exchanged his parka for two sweatshirts atop a T-shirt - more maneuverability - and tucked his pantlegs into the boots before lacing up. From one of the kitchen boxes he grabbed a pair of utility candles and a matchbook from the coffeeshop he frequented over on Weedwine Street. He wanted a backup light source in case something moronic befell the nine-volter he'd borrowed from Capra's. Jamaica knew the coffeeshop; it was called the Bottomless Cup and it was just across Broadhurst Avenue, the eastern borderline of Oakwood. Jonathan told her that the waitress and all the locals referred to the place as Weedwine Eats, for obvious ho-ho reasons.

    Jonathan yanked out a yard of filament tape and twisted it into a sturdy lanyard which he threaded through the flashlight grip, then around his belt.

    'Just call me Tensing Norkhay.'

    He still had the trucker's gloves from Bash's, and slipped them on before attempting to pound his bathroom window open again. It remained as jammed and cantankerous as every other window in Kenilworth. Knocking out his cardboard patch would not suffice; he needed the leeway used up by the windowframe. After a bit of violence it surrendered.

    He saw more of the fecal residue on the outside of the sill, caked there as though someone had scraped their bootsoles.

    The eagle claw feet of the bathtub had settled not on top of the floor tiles but through them, actually penetrating them. The tub was heavy and immobile enough to provide a solid and reliable tie-off. Jonathan's confusion of electrical cord resembled alien macrame. He choke-knotted the anchor end around the claw foot nearest the window and paid out the line a few feet at a time, so as not to tangle it. A cockroach, irate at this intrusion upon its under-the-tub domain, decided to make a run for it. Jamaica pulped it as soon as it was into the light.

    Standing in the tub, he clicked on the lantern and wormed his head and shoulders through. This was the first time he had gone so far into the mysterious adjunct to his apartment. Darkness gulped his breath vapor a foot from his nose. A loamy odor hit his sense of smell in a definite updraft. Rigor gone over into dry rot, as much spicy or neutral as fetid. He thought of the preserved redolence of opened tombs. After the initial olfactory shock it wasn't as bad as the spoiled hamburger effluence of the blood that had spilled from the wall in the next room.

    He cleared off the sill, already married to the idea of getting filthy during this incursion.

    The light exposed the corrugated metal as glistening with gravid moisture. Sagging, arrested droplets glinted the gemlike green of corruption, the color of botulin or nuclear waste. The vertical face of the sill was greased. Going would be dicey.

    'I guess you don't have a folding fire escape ladder in your saddlebag?'

    'Sorry, babe. I could go camp out in front of the Oakwood hardware store till opening time and charm the hired help into a loaner. But it's five to three in die morning, and by four o'clock I'd really like to kiss this place adios forever - you know what I mean?'

    The fantasy jackhammered Jonathan. A few thousand bucks in-pocket, and hit the happy trail with Jamaica. Thrills and adventure. California, maybe.

    'It's more than twenty feet.' The end of his line did not quite graze the surface of the pool in the bottom of the shaft. 'I see water and what looks like a floating Glad bag. Other junk down there. Smells like a dead squirrel. A whole family of dead squirrels. Several generations.'

    That made him think again of the missing Velasquez kid. Jonathan's nose did not wish to process the aroma of dead baby marinated in slime.

    Jamaica had read his mind. 'Jesus, Jonathan, you don't suppose that kid is…?'