Picking the Bones Page 15

  He should never have come here—he knows this now. Because chaos and the mob are indivisible.

  Abruptly, the weight slides from his shoulders. At first he thinks Gaspar must have slipped. Abraham turns, ready to lift him to his feet again. But there is no Gaspar, neither left nor right nor behind him. The truth is clear even before the crowd ripples with laughter: Someone has plucked Gaspar off his back.

  Abraham catches sight of him twenty-odd feet away, born high by hands that ignore his flailing arms, his kicking legs, and pass him over the barricade. In the ring, a laughing man grabs him by a wrist and an ankle, then turns toward the nearest bull.

  In the fever of the moment, he must seem to weigh little more than a cape.

  Abraham knows he’s shouting, can see Gaspar’s mouth, but cannot hear him over the crowd. Abraham is shouting too, and can scarcely hear himself. He struggles along the edge of the barricade, battered by elbows and shoulders, chins and spittle, until he can no longer move, nor even breathe, the suffocating weight of them all bearing down like an avalanche.

  With a crack like the splitting of an oak, the barricade gives way, and dozens of them go tumbling into the sand and onto the shards of wall. His senses are gone, crushed beneath a riot of feet and panic, but he struggles upright, getting as far as his knees before the smell of human sweat gives way before a thick animal odor that wafts in, enveloping as a fog.

  He lifts his gaze into another pair of eyes, just inches before him. From behind the broad snout, they stare back, black and full of will and, he swears, recognition.

  What a terrible thing it is for a man when the universe notices him.

  He thought he had been noticed before. But no.

  He has never felt so noticed in his life as now.

  “You took my son,” he whispers. “You took my wife’s mind. Is your greed so great as this?”

  He never knew that anything so quick could feel so slow, the horn punching into his side as if slipped in with care to find the perfect excruciating fit. The great black head shakes, then snorts a gust of breath so hot it’s scalding.

  It withdraws and lets him collapse backwards, to stare up at the long face and wet nostrils and the mad ecstatic eyes that first roll, then find him again and hold a level gaze, the snout straining toward his ear, shaping itself into a dark cavernous mouth that seems about to bellow with words that only he will understand…

  And might have, if not for the spear that the horseman drives down from above, shearing through the side of the thick muscled neck to release a cascade of blood that showers across him from face to belly.

  As it runs down his chin, he cannot help but think of his son, and all the failures that seem too great to ever find atonement.

  *

  Abraham, my dear friend,

  Forgive the tardiness of this letter, as it has only been in recent days that I have learned you have made great strides in your recovery, and so I wish your convalescence continued haste. They may have told you that I looked in upon you the week after your grievous wounding, although you may not remember this, for the fevers had rendered you quite insensible, and when you moved, you did so as a man encumbered by a great weight.

  I also wish to extend my deepest thanks for your contribution to my project at the House of the Deaf Man. I look forward to the day when you can enlighten me as to what you have done there, for we are plagued by no more maleficence. The removal and restoration have begun at an encouraging pace, and Mr. Salvador Cubells is a man of great abilities.

  He has shared with me a tale I must relay to you. It holds that a servant of Goya’s once asked him, “Why do you paint these barbarities that men commit?”, to which he replied, “To tell men forever that they should not be barbarians.” Whether true or not, I cannot say, but it is the spirit of this response that informs my intention to display the paintings, when ready, at the International Paris Exhibition, where I am convinced they will enjoy the long-overdue reception they deserve.

  It is not too soon, I think, to look ahead to the promise of the coming century, and rise to our obligations as men of reason and compassion to do our utmost to lift our civilization above the barbarities of this present century.

  It is my great hope that such works as we have rescued will play a part in such a golden age.

  Yours in greatest appreciation,

  Baron Frederic Emile d’Erlanger

  PULL

  It's like this: I guess we each grew up taking for granted that all we had to do was hang out on the corners and the stoops in our neighborhood, and day by day, year after year, the whole world would come to us a little at a time. Why shouldn't it, what with our twelve square blocks being the center of the universe and all.

  You know us. Not to imply you could point at us and call us by name, or that you've even laid eyes on us before. But you've still seen us, somewhere. And if you were to ever spot us in our element, well, then you'd just know.

  See, we're the guys who never had enough sense to know when to go inside, or anywhere else for that matter, and do something more with our lives. So we never did. We're the guys who laughed and bullshitted our way through school and came out with nothing but shit jobs to look forward to. But that's okay. Because we're the guys who grew up convinced there was no good reason why life had to be any more complicated than knowing how to get over on the next girl to bring a boner to our pants, and how to convince Davey why he should again be the one to run down to the liquor store for another six-pack while we were waiting.

  And waiting for what, you might ask? Enough with hard questions already. There's one I'm still working on: Twenty-seven years old and how did I get here? You wouldn't think an answer would be that hard to come up with. And really, it's not. There was never any here to get to because there was never any other there to come from. Meaning I just never budged. You'd think there should be more to it than that. But there isn't.

  Thing is, it never occurs to you to ask yourself questions like that until you're forced to. Something comes along and gives you no choice, just comes along and slams you against the wall like a cop rousting you for whatever, gets up in your grill and won't let the issue die. When all you'd rather be doing is sitting there with the sun on your face and the bricks under your ass, with a can in your hand and another waiting in the ringer.

  For me, that something was Tommy coming back to the neighborhood.

  Which came as a surprise. Nobody was expecting it, or nobody except what was left of his family, but they had their hands full with his grandmother dying, the reason he came in the first place…to pitch in, take a turn sitting with her for a few hours, help feed her when she felt like eating or scrape out the dish after she didn't. You have to admire a family that sets a room aside for a thing like that instead of taking the old lady to a nursing home where dying is a way of everyday life. You get the idea it doesn't happen like this much anymore, that the neighborhood is one of the last holdouts where an old woman with a bad heart and bad lungs can die at home, with familiar wallpaper.

  Tommy had been back half a week before anybody knew it, and then here he comes down the sidewalk and it's like seeing a ghost, just about, someone you were halfway to forgetting had ever been alive. I was about to say like someone from a different life, but just look around…it's the same old life as it always was. How else would you think Tommy knew right where to find us?

  A shock to the system is what it was.

  Because it was a late afternoon and business as usual, with the summer sun beating down on us as we followed the shade, and Artie, he was telling us all about something that happened that morning at work. The both of us, we work in the warehouse for this giant furniture store, driving trucks and hauling people's new couches and dressers up sixteen flights of stairs for not much more than a thank-you, if that. Except Artie's telling us how this morning he delivered a bed, and the other guy he went on the run with ducked out soon as he could, to head for the coffee shop down the street, and according to Artie it
really worked out to his advantage because once the bed was in place the woman gives him a look and asks him to try it out with her. And she's a fine-looking thing too, he says, one of those squeaky clean, well-trimmed quiffs that just have to be a stockbroker, and Artie's big Dow Jones was on the rise. He actually said that.

  Not a word of which we believed. But so what. Because even if we had no choice but to hoot and call Artie a liar right to his face, deep down we wanted to believe it could happen just the way he said. And who knows, maybe it really had. Stranger things, you know.

  We were still debating it when here comes Tommy.

  At first you don't believe your eyes—here's this guy again after all these years. Ten or so, had to be. I don't remember as any of us had seen him since he moved a year before we graduated high school. Next thing you know, here he is again, and it's like no time at all has gone by, and a part of you is wondering did he ever leave, with another part wondering did we ever know him in the first place?

  We swarmed him, ganged him four on one, hugging him and slapping his back, and Davey went digging in the plastic bucket so he could pop Tommy a cold one, and we all cheered and toasted his return, because at the moment none of us knew the reason he'd come, and we wiped our mouths and then Angelo got a scowl on his face and whacked Tommy on the shoulder, halfway in fun but maybe more than halfway really meaning it, and he said, "Hey, you moved away owing me twenty dollars, you fuck."

  "Now I know I'm in the right place," Tommy said. "For a minute I wasn't sure," and he went for his wallet, flipping through the green when Angelo told him to stop it, stop, that he was only kidding. But I'm pretty sure everybody could tell that he hadn't been. Really, ten years and he remembers a thing like that right off, makes it the first thing out of his mouth, just about—it's a sore spot, all right.

  Tommy reached across and stuffed a folded twenty in the little dinky pocket of Angelo's tight knit shirt, then thought for a second and followed it with another ten, saying, "Interest."

  Angelo was arguing, not a bit happy about this, but then he was never what you could call happy about much of anything, it was just different degrees of calm, gloom, and annoyance: "Take the money back, you fuck. I was just joking."

  "No, you were right to remind me," Tommy was saying. "Just admit it meant something to you, you go bringing it up before I can even sit down."

  "You guys believe this?" Angelo was looking around for back-up but finding mostly uneasiness. "A joke. Fucking guy, he can't take a joke."

  "Maybe it's that you still don't know how to tell one," Tommy said.

  And he was just goofing, anybody could see that, but still, this went over with Angelo about as well as you would expect. Even though it was a hot day his face was redder than it should've been, and he ended up stomping off saying he had to go, that Sophie probably had dinner ready by now, and as he left he snatched the money from his pocket and threw it on the sidewalk. We watched his back until he turned a corner and was gone, then kept watching the empty corner…I guess because nobody much felt like meeting the other guys' eyes.

  "Sophie, is that his wife?" Tommy asked, finally.

  "No, it's his kid," I told him.

  "His wife, she's long gone," Davey said.

  "Forget about it," Artie said to Tommy. "You watch—tomorrow it'll be like nothing happened."

  "Tomorrow maybe. But what about ten years from now?" Tommy laughed, started imitating him: "'What's with that day you tried to force that money on me, you fuck, was that supposed to be funny?'" And it cracked us up; he had Angelo down cold. As the laughter died, Tommy looked down at the greenbacks, starting to scoot along the sidewalk, blown by a stuffy July breeze. "I'm not picking that up."

  "I'm not proud," Davey said, and clomped off after them like a guy chasing his hat in a high winter wind.

  You could see on Tommy's face, how his eyes followed Davey and the way the poor guy moved now, that it was the first clue he had that something must have happened to Davey since we'd all been running the streets together, back when.

  Davey chased the cash into the shadows of a row-house halfway up the block, then lurched back out into the sun and the glare, back to us with that one leg that was now stiffer and shorter than the other. He came back grinning and proud, shook those thirty dollars, then stuffed them into his pants pocket.

  "I'll just hold it for Angelo, is what," Davey said. "In case he changes his mind. You know…for Sophie."

  "Yeah. For Sophie," we all said, and nodded like we might've even believed him.

  *

  I had to admit, looking Tommy over and matching up the guy that came back to the neighborhood with the guy who'd left, the years had been good to him. See a guy every day—starting with the one in the mirror—and you don't think he's ever any different. Because one day's never going to make that much of a change in you. Well, unless you're Davey, but that's not the same thing.

  Let a guy show up again after ten years' worth of days, though, and you start seeing things through his eyes instead of your own. Take one look at Artie and you want to ask, "Hey, how and when did you get such a gut on you? You never were what anyone would call a skinny guy, but didn't most of it at least used to be up around your shoulders?" And if it was a few months later instead of July maybe you'd be asking him, "So what's with the high school letterman jacket, still?" But that was Artie, could hardly ever wait for fall so he could start wearing that jacket again, a sight I was so used to it didn't even register that maybe the time was long overdue for him to leave the thing in the closet.

  With Tommy, though, it was like seeing a guy jump forward from ten calendars ago and realizing that what he must've done was become the guy he'd always been meant to be. No more, no less. Same guy in the skin, but a little more carved in the bones and clearer in the eyes and confident in the walk…even if he wasn't quite the same in name, since before long he admitted that it had been years since he'd heard so many people call him Tommy, from his dying grandmother to his old friends. He went by Thomas now, but you can imagine how much trouble any of us went to to accommodate that. We'd known him as Tommy, so he'd always be Tommy. Anything else aroused suspicion.

  "Fucking guy, he's got airs now," Angelo said when he heard that. "Airs, and short memory for where he came from."

  And I said yeah, and left it at that, but really, Thomas just fit the guy better now, somehow. He'd left the neighborhood at, what, age seventeen, or maybe even sixteen, when his parents split and he went with his mom. Not just out of the neighborhood, but clear out of the country. I wouldn't have remembered this if he hadn't come back to remind, but it was Montreal that they went to. French Canada. Which, at the time, probably seemed to me and everyone else like he was going to be falling off the edge of the planet.

  So maybe that was the reason Artie decided he didn't much like the guy now either—because there was something kind of foreign about him now, and the girls in the neighborhood responded to that.

  Girls, well, you'd have to call them women now, I guess, but a lot of them we'd known since they really were girls, way before they'd had anything resembling a chest, or hips, so it's hard to get out of that mindset. Some of them had never left the neighborhood either, and some of them, they had once but were back again, on familiar turf and maybe staying with their parents after their marriages had fallen apart, and maybe with a kid or three of their own now. Some of them you got used to seeing in the bars at night, and yeah, nature takes its course sometimes, but come in a night or two with Tommy, when he's rotating an evening off from helping with his grandmother, and it's a whole new equation: "Oh, who's this…? No, not Tommy, Tommy, that's you?"

  And next they'd be wanting a refresher course in what had become of him, everything he'd been doing since. How he'd gotten a business degree and now had a couple of stores selling health foods, herbs, natural remedies, like that…the kind of thing that totally wouldn't fly here in the old neighborhood. And for some of the girls, when they got caught up with him, it was just
a nice little moment, two old friends running into each other, then they go on their way and that's all there is to it.

  But a few of the others, when he'd go through his story, their reaction was just the saddest thing I'd ever seen. Even Tommy told it like he knew it wasn't the most thrilling story in the world, but they'd be hanging on his every word, and maybe by now they'd downed a drink or two too many, and if you looked close enough there were moments you could see them thinking about every wrong decision they'd ever made, like getting pregnant too soon or taking up with guys they wished they'd never met, and you could see the desperate fear in their eyes over how they knew they were paying for it now and maybe always would be, the weight of it pulling them down toward the tabletop—

  —and then they'd blink back to the present moment and smile at Tommy and suddenly confess how they used to have a crush on him in high school—did he know that?—and it was like they were one more drink from saying, "Take me with you when you go back, please, please, just take me away from this life."

  He could've had any of them he wanted, any night of his choosing. But his partner on those two stores he owned was his fiancée. So he didn't go home with anybody.

  Artie didn't understand that at all when he heard about it.

  "Must be a fag now," he said. "Sometimes they don't figure it out right away, it takes them awhile."

  Angelo agreed. "Fucking guy, I always knew there was something wrong with him."

  And I said yeah, and just left it at that. Because, like always, it was easier than arguing with them.

  *