Scar lover, p.8
Scar Lover, page 8
Pete had been so focused on Sarah’s front porch, and on the fact that he was probably out of work now, that he did not hear Mr. Winekoff come out. But when he finally did hear a rhythmic breathing, punctuated with grunts and groans, he knew Mr. Winekoff was on the porch with him. Maybe Mr. Winekoff was the diversion he needed. Maybe he would drop him down the stairs another time or two.
He turned to see Mr. Winekoff windmill his arms and then suddenly drop into his habitual bend, knees locked, hands flat on the floor. The old man was watching Pete intently. “Breakfast’s about over in there, son. Better git it while there’s something left to git.”
“My mind’s not on eating,” Pete said.
“It wouldn’t be on doing your suitcase trick on the stairs, would it?”
“That wasn’t a trick, it was an accident.”
“When my handle broke, I guess you’d say.”
“It felt like it broke.”
“How can something feel like it broke when it didn’t?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“No, I don’t imagine you would.”
Pete took a step toward Mr. Winekoff, and the old man—without straightening out of his bend—scuttled crabwise another six feet away in a startingly rapid move.
“I’m not going to tote you up the stairs again. You don’t have to worry.”
“I ain’t worried, because I’m not going to give you the chance.” He scuttled even farther away as he spoke. Mr. Winekoff twisted his neck and stared up at Pete. “Things look better from down here. Blood rushes to the brain, massages the arteries. Look at me. I’ve got the arteries of a baby.”
Pete only stared back at him.
“Well, then go inside and eat something, for God’s sake,” said Mr. Winekoff. “Don’t just set there and wait to die. Death’ll come soon enough.”
“I’m not hungry. The thought of putting food in my mouth makes me want to throw up.”
“Then it can’t be but one thing. Proper exercise. How about taking that walk you been meaning to take out to the zoo and look at them yaks?”
Pete had never told him he meant to take a walk to the zoo and he sure as hell did not want to look at any yaks. But on the other hand, he knew he wasn’t going to work, and he was afraid Sarah would appear again and he would not know what to say.
Pete said: “Seems as good a thing as any.”
“What?”
“Go to the zoo.”
“And see them yaks?”
“Might as well if we’re out there,” Pete said.
“That’s more like it. You want to try to get something to eat before we go?”
“I already told you.”
“You’ll sure as hell eat when we get back.”
“We’ll have to try it before we know.”
“Then let’s do it.” Mr. Winekoff straightened up and shook himself like some strange animal getting out of the water.
The old man was off the porch and into a hard-driving stride before Pete even moved from where he was standing. He had to break into a little jog to catch up. The old bastard could really walk too. Walking was a no-nonsense, focused, serious thing for him. They had covered a couple of blocks before Pete noticed that Mr. Winekoff’s breathing was synchronized with his stride, synchronized to inhale every second time his right foot hit the sidewalk and exhale every second time his left foot hit. And his breathing was not only regular, it was noisy. Pete thought of pistons and drive wheels on steam engines. It was stupid and silly and enormously gratifying. It blew away the Burnt Nigger and the foreman and Sarah and her ruined mother and her father who had a heart big as a watermelon. Pete was beginning to enjoy the day and what he was doing with it, when the old man started talking about how intimate he had become with Chicago. Pete had never heard of Mr. Winekoff’s intimacy with Chicago but he had heard similar stories. It wasn’t really the story anyway, only that Pete would have preferred silence.
“I am very intimate—in the rigorous sense of that word—with Chicago.” Mr. Winekoff read a great deal and would, from time to time, use a word like rigorous. They had stopped on the bridge going over to the zoo, stopped within twenty yards of where Sarah had collapsed. It was spooky and made Pete uneasy, seeming, as it did, prophetic.
“You and I are breathing Chicago,” said Mr. Winekoff, holding on to the bridge railing and looking straight up.
“We are?”
“Look at that sky up there. Look at the air in front of your nose. We don’t have enough industry here to cause that. No, that’s coming from Chicago, all the way down here just to lie up there over our houses and sift down into our lungs. You could cut up this air and make cardboard boxes out of it. Yessir.” He seemed now to be speaking with some satisfaction. “We’re breathing Chicago, wearing it on our skins. Way down here on the Georgia-Florida border, we’re more intimate with Chicago than lovers.”
“I never thought about it,” said Pete.
“Of course not. You nor nobody else, it seems like, or it wouldn’t be like this. I wouldn’t mind it if I was in Chicago, but I don’t see why I have to be intimate with something a thousand miles away.”
“It’s something in what you say,” Pete said. Maybe the old man was not a complete fool after all.
“From blue sky to blue air to blue lungs,” Mr. Winekoff said happily, breathing deeply.
“I want to see the yaks,” said Pete, although he did not, he only wanted to leave Chicago alone, because the way the old man had gotten him started thinking about it was rubbing him the wrong way.
“Ah, yes, the yaks.” Mr. Winekoff started off down the bridge at a brisk pace.
He had told Pete a good deal about the yaks, starting up on them and never entirely leaving off. Turned out, though, they didn’t look like camels at all. The old man straightened him out on that while they were still walking on the bridge.
“Like a camel?” said Mr. Winekoff. “Not hardly. More like an ox. In fact, a yak is the largest member of the ox family. What got you started thinking they might look like a camel?”
“Largest member of the ox family, you say?”
“Right. You got it all straight now.”
But Pete had no idea what an ox family might look like. From what his brother had written him about Korea (this was before he put the twin indentations of a claw jammer between his little brother’s eyes, lost his mother and father, and was slowly cut off from all of his blood kin), from his brother’s letters, it put him in mind of a large bull pulling a plow through shallow water, out of which rose the effluvium of human shit, and followed by a very small, yellow Oriental.
Mr. Winekoff said yaks stood six feet high at the shoulder and they had long silky hair, beautiful hair unlike anything he’d ever seen. Oh, he was in for a treat, Pete was, besides the unspeakably wonderful benefits of a hike of two—four if you counted the return trip—miles over oven-hot streets that heat waves made undulate miragelike in the distance. Working a shift five days a week in a boxcar with George did not put you in shape for a walk like this.
“Is walking everything I said it was or what, you young puppy?” cackled Mr. Winekoff, dancing a little jig up ahead of Pete and never looking back.
He’d never called Pete a young puppy before. Nobody had that Pete recalled. He was a little startled that he did not take exception to it. Maybe it was the heat, but for whatever reason, he did not answer and kept plodding on slightly behind Mr. Winekoff. He did however, in that moment, realize that he was staggering along in the heat just behind the old man the way Sarah had staggered behind him. He kept his eyes fastened to Mr. Winekoff’s back and said nothing.
“That’s all right, you don’t have to say a thing.” Mr. Winekoff said. “I’m an old car with a lot of mileage but my carburetor is good. So I’ve been walking as hard and as fast as I can ever since I retired. You don’t tell me a thing about walking day in and day out and I’ll keep doing it till I get there.”
Get where? Pete’s benumbed brain struggled with the thought while Mr. Winekoff got back onto the subject of yaks. They came, he said, from the high desolate mountains of Tibet. That was the best thing, the old man thought, coming here all the way from Tibet thought that exotic, enough to make anybody wonder.
“What do you suppose they eat?” demanded Mr. Winekoff.
Pete had not thought about it. But now he did. It was something to do to try to keep his mind off the heat. The furnace blast of the sun seemed all the stronger now because they were off the bridge, and in the near distance he could distinctly see the green forest of trees that held the zoo.
“Hay, I guess.” His tongue was thick with thirst and his lips felt wooden.
“What?” said Mr. Winekoff, still not looking back. “Speak up, you sound like you got a mouthful of grits.”
“I said I thought a yak might eat hay,” Pete said, still having trouble with his thick tongue and unmanageable lips.
Winekoff did not miss a step, nor did he look at Pete. “Wrong. Your basic yak eats coarse, dry mountain grass.”
“Oh,” Pete said, his voice barely audible.
“You damn right,” Mr. Winekoff said.
They were into the trees now, and the shade was almost unbearably wonderful and it revived Pete so much that he realized he had just been told a lie. Or maybe not a lie, but something was wrong. Jacksonville was a town full of itinerant sharecroppers and sons of sharecroppers who had drifted down out of Georgia when the crops failed, to sell their hands and backs to anybody or any business that had use for them. Consequently, everything about the sprawling place was poor. Pete knew he wasn’t the only Georgia boy doing time in a suffocating boxcar with a Burnt Nigger. Coarse, dry mountain grass? Not in this lifetime. Not in this city.
He had read in the paper that the zoo had to sell its lion because it could not afford to buy horsemeat anymore, so Pete knew they weren’t shipping in dry mountain grass from hundreds of miles away for something that looked like an ox.
As it turned out when they got it to the zoo—admission free if you were afoot or a dollar for a car, no matter how many were in it—the yaks did not look like oxen or even a member of the ox family, whatever that would look like (Pete found it impossible to even think about an ox family). Rather they looked like very tired milk cows without udders. There were three of them, so emaciated you could have hung your hat on their hipbones, and they were missing patches of hair—not long and certainly not silky—from their scabby hides and they were breathing heavily, their purplish tongues hanging from frothing mouths, as they leaned against one another in the sparse shade of a single tiny tree that was almost naked of leaves. They were enclosed in a wire fence about shoulder high, and in front of the fence was a sign that said all the things Mr. Winekoff had said, about how they were from the high, snowy country of Tibet, how their long hair could be woven into clothing, and all manner of other things that were obviously not true.
A number of small children stood about throwing stones at the yaks and eating cotton candy. The yaks did not move or seem to mind an occasional rock bouncing off their dusty hides, nor did the parents of the children object as they stood sweating in the oppressive heat. Pete leaned against the wire, his hands caught in it, stood there stunned, feeling little trails of sweat coursing down his body and an unhealthy anger building behind his eyes.
“Do these goddam things look any better in the wintertime?” he asked.
“They are fine animals and a long way from home,” said Mr. Winekoff.
They are fine animals and a long way from home. So say we all, thought Pete, but it hardly answered the question he’d asked.
There was a number 3 washtub just inside the little enclosure.
There was something in the washtub. Pete leaned harder against the fence to get a better look. Corncobs. The fucking tub had corncobs in it. Old cobs naked of corn, and it was obvious to Pete there had not been any kernels of corn on the cobs in a very long time. They were desiccated and dusty and shriveled in the sun.
Pete was enraged. He wanted to bite the fence wire he was holding. “They’re feeding these dying beasts corncobs.”
And as if to prove what he had just said, the smallest of the three yaks staggered over to the tub, took up a cob, and chewed it. And chewed it. Slowly, regular as a clock ticking, its jaws worked over the cob. The animal’s glazed eyes slowly closed and a small bubble of yellowish froth no bigger than the end of a man’s little finger appeared at the corners of its mouth. And still it chewed.
Rage and hopelessness now building in him, Pete turned and walked away. Mr. Winekoff stood still as sleep, his hands in his pockets, nodding his old head in what seemed some satisfaction.
A short walk away—it could not have been more than fifty paces—Pete stood in front of an empty cage with a cement floor. It smelled strongly of piss. And a thought occurred to him that after the last red flash made the last dark mushroom cloud in the burning sky, it would still smell of piss. Lion piss. On a stake driven into the ground there was a sign—freshly painted, it seemed—that said LION. He stared at the empty lion’s cage and at the track the lion had left in the cement pacing over the years, pacing and pissing and going quietly insane just there behind the bars, and he could feel the yaks over there behind him dreaming of Tibet and snow and long fine hair and useful yak lives.
How much lion piss would it take to saturate solid cement? How long could a yak stay alive on desiccated corncobs? How long could he, Pete, stand this? It would be a fine thing, he knew, to come out late some night and shoot the yaks, or maybe better, poison them. Shoot them for what? Poison them for what? There the thought got a little muddled in his head and he turned to see Mr. Winekoff still standing where he had left him, the two yaks still leaning against each other under the stunted tree, and the single small yak still chewing-—doubtless on the same corncob, with froth at the corners of its mouth hanging in gummy strings, moving to the rhythm of its jaws. Mr. Winekoff’s head, with its cap of clipped gray hair, moved almost imperceptibly too, nodding—Pete knew—keeping time with the yak chewing, and still chewing.
Pete started back over to Mr. Winekoff and saw for the first time, off to the left and not far away, another pen, with a wire fence not more than waist high. There were alligators in it. Huge alligators, lying totally motionless in the water as though they had been dead for years and were now preserved there under the shallow, slightly green water. They had come, no doubt, from the Okefenokee Swamp, along the borders of which Pete had been raised to manhood. He knew alligators. And he remembered them as great, black, shiny beasts, fast as cats in the cool, mossy water of the swamp. And faster still—over short distances—on dry land. Lying utterly quiet like some ugly monstrous plant rooted in the earth, an alligator could take a deer from twenty yards away. Did these here in the green water dream of cypress and moss and black water and bloody deer meat while a group of church school children pelted them with marshmallows? Pete hoped not. He hoped they thought and dreamed of nothing. And he realized in a flash of ugly recognition that such a state was what he hoped for—had hoped for since making an idiot of his kid brother—for himself. But that was impossible. No, not impossible. But possible only under the conditions of death.
He had moved up behind Mr. Winekoff. And quietly over Mr. Winekoff’s shoulder, he said: “You worthless piece of walking shit, you brought me all the way out here to look at three dying animals.”
Mr. Winekoff did not move or turn his head and his voice was dreamy. “High ranges of snow in the desolate mountains of Tibet. Plenty of mountain grass and long silky hair. Much beloved by the Tibetan people.”
“We are not Tibetan people, you old fart.”
Mr. Winekoff moved abruptly, as though yanked suddenly and rudely from deep sleep. He turned and looked at Pete. His eyes startled Pete. They were very red. His cheeks, a fine web of wrinkles, were wet. Could he have been crying? Pete could not remember ever having looked at Mr. Winekoff’s eyes, and his cheeks were probably damp with sweat.
“And you come out here every day to do this?” said Pete.
“Every day. Every day for a long time now.”
“How do you stand this goddam place?”
“Don’t curse here. This is not a place for cursing.”
“What is it a place for?”
“It’s a place for … for … I don’t know how to tell you.”
“I don’t have that problem myself,” Pete said.
“Say what?” Mr. Winekoff cupped an ear with bent, arthritic fingers. “I don’t hear well in the zoo. Sometimes I don’t. Actually, most times I don’t.”
“Another problem I don’t have. I hear good out here.”
“That’s why you ask dumb questions. That’s why I can’t tell you.”
“What?”
Mr. Winekoff showed his deeply stained teeth in what might have been a smile. “Thought you heard good in the zoo.”
“I do. My hearing’s good everywhere.”
“You say.”
“Come over here. Little something I want to show you.”
He took Mr. Winekoff by his thin shoulder and almost tenderly turned him, and Mr. Winekoff followed as Pete led him over to the enclosed alligators. He was not so tender with the church school children, who were still throwing marshmallows and screaming at the alligators. He jerked and pushed and actually kicked one of them, a pretty little girl with a mouthful of silver braces, incredibly thick and wired in every conceivable direction.
“You cocksucker,” said the golden-haired girl he’d kicked. Her enunciation was clipped and perfect despite the braces.
When Pete had slammed his way through the children, making a little aisle for Mr. Winekoff to follow, he turned and said: “Them I know something about.” He pointed to the alligators.
