Wild Child and Other Stories Page 27

  There were four walls in the can, a ceiling and a floor. He locked the door behind him, slapped some water on his face and tried to look at himself long enough in the mirror to smooth his hair down—and what he wouldn’t have given to have been blessed with hair that would just stay in place for ten minutes instead of this kinky, nappy mess he was forever trying to paste to the side of his head. Christ, he hated himself. Hated the look in his eyes and the sunken cheeks and the white-hot fire of ambition that drove him, that had driven him, to this, to make this drivel and call it art. He was shit, that was what he was. He was washed up. He was through.

  Without thinking twice he pulled the slim tube of a reefer from the pack of Old Golds in his jacket pocket and lit up, right there in the can, and he wouldn’t have been the first to do it, God knew. He took a deep drag and let the smoke massage his lungs, and he felt the pall lift. Another drag, a glance up at the ceiling and a single roach there, making its feelers twitch. He blew smoke at it—“Get your kicks, Mr. Bug,” he said aloud, “because there’s precious few of them in this life”—and then, without realizing just when he’d slipped into it, he found he was humming a Cab Calloway tune, biggest joke in the world, “Reefer Man.”

  She must have looked like the maternal type—maybe it was the dress, or more specifically, the way it showed off her breasts—because Harvey prevailed upon her to go down the hall to the restroom and mother the star of the proceedings a little bit because the ticker was ticking and everybody, frankly, was starting to get a little hot under the collar, if she knew what he meant. “Like pissed off? Like royally?” Darlene took a moment, lowered her head and peeped over the sunglasses to let her eyes rove over the room. “Poor man,” she said in her sweetest little-girl-lost voice, “he seemed a bit confused—maybe he can’t find his zipper.” Everybody—she knew them all, except the strings—burst out in unison, and they should have recorded that. George Withers, the trombonist, laughed so hard he dropped his mouthpiece on the floor with a thud that sounded like a gunshot, and that got them all laughing even harder.

  There was a dim clutter of refuse in the hallway—broken music stands, half a smashed guitar, a big waist-high ashtray lifted from the Waldorf with the hotel’s name etched in the chrome and a thousand extinguished butts spilling over onto the floor—and a lingering smell of stopped-up toilets. She nearly tripped over something, she didn’t stop to see what, and then she was outside the restroom and a new smell came to her: he was smoking reefer in there, the moron. She’d dragged herself all the way out here in the cold to do a job, hoping for the best—hoping for a hit—and here he was, the great Johnny Bandon, the tea head, getting himself loaded in the can. Suddenly she was angry. Before she knew what she was doing she was pounding on the door like a whole van full of narcs. “Johnny!” she shouted. “Johnny, people are waiting.” She tried the doorknob. “Open up, will you?”

  Nothing. But she knew that smell. There was the sound of water running, then the toilet flushed. “Shit,” she hissed. “Damn you, open up. I don’t know about you, but I need this, you hear me? Huh?” She felt something rise in her, exactly like that geyser she’d seen in Life magazine, red-hot, white-hot. She rattled the knob.

  There was the metallic click of the bolt sliding back and then he pulled open the door and told her in an even voice to keep her shirt on, only he was smiling at her, giving her the reckless grin of abandon that ten years ago had charmed half the women in the country. She was conscious of the fact that in her heels they were the same height and the crazy idea that he’d be the perfect dance partner flitted through her head as he stood there at the door and the marijuana fumes boiled round him. What he said next totally disarmed her, his voice pitched to the familiar key of seduction: “What’s with the glasses? Somebody slug you, or what?”

  The world leapt out at her when she slipped the sunglasses from her eyes, three shades brighter, though the hallway was still dim as a tomb. “It’s my eye,” she said, touching a finger to her cheekbone at the right orbit. “I woke up with it all bloodshot.”

  From down the hall came the muted sound of the band working their way through the arrangement without them, a sweeping glide of strings, the corny cluck-cluck-knock of a glockenspiel and the tinkling of a triangle, and then the horns, bright and peppy, Christmas manufactured like a canned ham. “You’re nuts,” he said. “Your eye’s no more bloodshot than mine is—”

  She couldn’t help smiling. “Oh, yeah? Have you looked in the mirror?”

  They were both laughing suddenly, and then he took her by the arm and pulled her into the restroom with him. “You want some of this?” he said.

  There was something about the moment—the complicit look she gave him, the way she showed her teeth when she laughed, the sense he had of getting away with something, as if they were two kids ducking out of school to have a smoke under the fire escape—that just lit him up, just like that, like a firecracker. Neff could wait. They could all wait. He passed her the reefer and watched her eyes go wide with greed as she inhaled and held it in, green eyes, glassy and green as the bottom of a Chianti bottle. After a moment the smoke began to escape her nostrils in a sporadic way, as if there was something burning inside of her, and he thought first of the incinerator in the basement of the tenement he’d grown up in, and the smell of it, of cardboard and wet newspaper and everything scraped off a plate, cat litter, dead pets, fingernail parings, and then, as if that sponge had wiped his brain clean, of church. Of votary candles. Of incense. Jesus, he was high as a kite.

  “What?” she said, expelling the smoke through her mouth. “What’s that grin for?”

  He let out a laugh—or no, a giggle. “I just had this image,” he said. “Very strange. Like you were on fire inside—”

  Her eyes were on him, green and unblinking. She was smiling. “Me? Little old me? On fire?”

  “Listen,” he said, serious suddenly, and he was so far out there he couldn’t follow his own chain of thought, “did you go to church when you were a kid? I want to know. You’re Catholic, right?”

  Her eyes went away from him then, up to where one very stewed roach clung to the ceiling, and they came back again. “Yeah,” she said, ducking her head. “If you can believe it, I was in the choir.”

  “You were? Wow. Me too. I mean, that was how I—”

  She put a hand on his arm as if to emphasize the connection. “I know exactly what you mean—it’s probably how ninety percent of the singers out there got started. At least the ones I met, anyway.”

  “Church.”

  “Church, yeah.” She was grinning at him, and when she grinned her dimples showed and her face opened up for him till he had to back up a step for fear of falling right into it.

  He wanted to banter with her, say something clever, charming, keep it going, but instead he said, “You ever go anymore?”

  She shook her head. “Not me. Uh-uh. It’s been years.” Her lips were pursed now, the dimples gone. “You?”

  “Nah,” he said. “All that was a long time ago. When I was a kid, you know?”

  An achingly slow moment revealed itself in silence. She passed him the reefer, he took a drag, passed it back. “I guess we’re both about halfway to hell by now,” she said.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, and everything seemed to let go of him to make way for that rush of exhilaration he’d been feeling ever since she’d stepped into the can with him, “I’d say it’s more like three quarters,” and they were laughing all over again, in two-part harmony.

  It was Harvey himself who finally came to fetch them and when Johnny opened the door on him and the smoke flowed out into the hallway she felt shamed—this wasn’t what she’d come for, this wasn’t professional or even sensible. Of course, Harvey had seen it all in his day, but still he gave her a sour look and it made her feel like some runaway or delinquent caught in the act. For a moment she flashed on the one time she’d been arrested—in a hotel room in Kansas City, after a night when she’d felt the m
usic right down in her cells, when she’d felt unbeatable—but she stopped right there amidst the clutter and shook out her hair to compose herself. Harvey was white-faced. He was furious and why wouldn’t he be? But Johnny chose to ignore it, still riding the exhilaration they’d felt in the bathroom—and it wasn’t the reefer, that wasn’t it at all, or not all of it—and he said, “Hey, Harvey, come on, man, don’t sweat it. We’re ready to slay ’em, aren’t we, babe?”

  “Sure,” she said, “sure,” and then they were back in the studio, dirty looks all around, Harvey settling into the control booth with Fred Silver, and the opening strains of “Little Suzy Snowflake,” replete with glockenspiel and tinkling triangle, enveloping the room.

  “No, no, no, no,” Johnny shouted, waving his arms through the intro, “cut, cut, cut!”

  Neff’s face hung suspended behind the window of the control booth. “What’s the matter now?” his voice boomed, gigantic, disproportionate, sliced three ways with exasperation.

  Johnny was conscious of his body, of his shoulders slipping against the pads of his jacket and the slick material of his pants grabbing at his crotch as he turned and gestured to the booth with both palms held out in offering. “It’s just that Darlene and me were working something out back there—warming up, you know? I just think we need to cut the B-side first. What do you think?”

  Nobody said a word. He looked at Darlene. Her eyes were blank.

  There was a rumble from the control booth, Harvey with his hand over the mike conferring with Fred Silver, the session men studying the cuffs of their trousers, something, somewhere, making a dull slippery hissing sound—they were running tape, and the apprehension of it brought him back to himself.

  “I think”—the voice of God from the booth, Domine, dirige nos—“we should just get on with it like we planned or we’re going to be here all night. Know what I’m saying, Johnny?” And then Silver, a thinner voice, the Holy Ghost manifesting Himself in everything: “Keep it up, Johnny, and you’re going to make me pick up the telephone.” Neff’s hand went back to the mike, a sound like rubbing your sleeve over a trumpet mute, and there was more conferring, the two heads hanging there behind the glass like transparencies.

  He felt scared suddenly, scared and alone and vulnerable. “Okay,” he said to the room, “okay, I hear you.” And he heard himself shift into another mode altogether, counting off the beat, and there were the strings pouring like syrup out of the corners and the whisper of the brushes and the high hat and he was singing in the unshakable pure tenor that was Johnny Bandon’s trademark, and forget Harvey, forget the asinine lyrics, he was singing here, singing: only that.

  Something happened as soon as Johnny opened his mouth, and it had happened to her before, happened plenty, but it was the last thing she’d expected from a session like this. She came in on the second verse—Little Suzy Snowflake/Came tumbling downfrom the sky—and felt it, the movement inside of her, the first tick into unconsciousness, what her mother used to call opening up the soul. You’re a soul singer, her mother used to say, you know that, little sister? A real soul singer. She couldn’t help herself. She took Johnny’s lead and she flew, and so what if it was corny, so what if the glockenspiel was a cliché out of some fluffy nostalgic place and time nobody could remember and the arrangement was pure chintz? She flew and so did he.

  And then the B-side, warmer, sweeter, with some swing to it—“Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow”—and they traded off, tit for tat, call and response, But baby it’s coldoutside. When Harvey’s voice came at them—“That’s it, kids, you nailed that one down”—she couldn’t quite believe it was over, and from the look of Johnny, his tie tugged loose, the hair hanging in his eyes, he couldn’t believe it either.

  The musicians were packing up, the streets and the night awaiting them, the sleet that would turn to snow by morning and the sky that fell loose over everything because there was nothing left to prop it up. “Johnny,” she murmured, and they were still standing there at the mike, both of them frozen in the moment, “that was, I mean that was—”

  “Yeah,” he said, ducking his head, “we were really on, weren’t we,” and from the way he turned to her she was sure he was going to say Let’s go have a drink or Your place or mine? but he didn’t. Instead he just closed his eyes and began to sing, pure, sweet and high. Nobody moved. The ghostly heads in the recording booth pivoted toward them, the horn players looked up from their instrument cases and their felt rags and fragile mouthpieces. Even the strings—longhairs from the Brooklyn Academy of Music—hesitated. And then, on the third bar, she caught up to him, their two voices blended into one: It is the night/Of ourdear Savior’s birth.

  The moment held. They sang the song through, then sang it again. And then, without pause, as if they were reading from the same sheet, they swept into “Ave Maria,” “O Come All Ye Faithful,” “What Child Is This,” the sweet beat of the melody as much a part of her as the pulsing of the blood in her veins. She didn’t know what time it was, didn’t know when Harvey and the A&R man deserted the booth, didn’t know anything but the power of two voices entwined. She knew this only—that she was in a confined space, walls and floor and ceiling, but that didn’t make any sense to her, because it felt as if it opened up forever.

  WILD CHILD

  1

  During the first hard rain of autumn, when the leaves lay like currency at the feet of the trees and the branches shone black against a diminished sky, a party of hunters from the village of Lacaune, in the Languedoc region of France, returning cold and damp and without anything tangible to show for their efforts, spotted a human figure in the gloom ahead. The figure appeared to be that of a child, a boy, and he was entirely naked, indifferent to the cold and the rain. He was preoccupied with something—cracking acorns between two rocks, as it turned out—and didn’t at first see them coming. But then one of the party—Messier, the village smith, whose hands and forearms had been rendered the color of a red Indian’s with the hard use of his trade—stepped in a hole and lost his balance, lurching into the boy’s field of vision. It was that sudden movement that spooked him. One moment he was there, crouched over his store of raw acorns, and the next he was gone, vanishing into the undergrowth with the hypersensitivity of a stoat or weasel. None of them could be sure—the encounter had been so brief, a matter of seconds—but they unanimously claimed that the figure had fled on all fours.

  A week later, the boy was spotted again, this time at the verge of a farmer’s fields, digging potatoes from the ground and bolting them as they were, without benefit of cooking or even rinsing. The farmer’s instinct was to chase him off, but he restrained himself—he’d heard the reports of a wild child, a child of the forest, un enfant sauvage,and he crept closer to better observe the phenomenon before him. He saw that the child was very young indeed, eight or nine years old, if that, and that he used only his bare hands and broken nails to dig in the sodden earth, like a dog. To all outward appearances, the child seemed normal, having the fluid use of his limbs and hands, but his emaciation was alarming and his movements were swift and autonomous—at some point, after the farmer had approached to within twenty yards of him, the child reared his head and made eye contact. It was difficult to see the child’s face because of the unbarbered thatch of his hair and the way it masked his features. Nothing moved, not the flock on the hill, nor the clouds in the sky. The countryside seemed preternaturally silent, the birds in the hedgerows holding their breath, the wind stilled, the very insects mute underfoot. That look—the unblinking eyes, black as coffee poured straight from the pot, the tightening of the mouth around discolored canines—was the look of a thing out of Spiritus Mundi, deranged, alien, hateful. It was the farmer who had to turn away.

  That was how it began, the legend brewing, stewing, simmering in every pot throughout the district through the fall of 1797, in the fifth year of the new French Republic, and into the year that succeeded it. The Terror was over, the King was dead, life—especia
lly in the provinces—returning to normal. People needed a mystery to sustain them, a belief in the arcane and the miraculous, and any number of them—mushroom gatherers and truffle diggers, squirrel hunters, peasants bent under the weight of faggots or baskets of turnips and onions, kept watch in the woods, but it wasn’t until the following spring that the boy was sighted again, this time by a party of three woodcutters, led by Messier, the smith, and this time they gave chase. They chased the boy without thinking, without reason, chased him because he ran from them, and they might have been chasing anything, a cat, a hind, a boar. Eventually, they ran him to tree, where he hissed and flailed the branches, flinging things down on them. Each time one of them attempted to mount into the branches and snatch for the boy’s callused foot, he was pummeled and bitten, until finally they decided to smoke him out. A fire was built beneath the tree, the boy all the while watching these three bipeds, these shagged and violent and strangely habited and gibbering animals, out of the deep retreat of his eyes. Picture him there, crouched in the highest branches, his skin so nicked and abraded it was like a hide haphazardly tanned, the scar at his throat a bleached white tear visible even from the ground, his feet dangling, arms limp, as the smoke rose about him.

  Picture him, because he wasn’t able to picture himself. He knew nothing but the immediate, felt only what his senses transmitted to him. When he was a child of five, small and undernourished, the stubborn thirteenth child of a stubborn peasant family, his mind lax and pre-lingual, he was taken out into the forest of La Bassine by a woman he hardly knew or acknowledged, his father’s second wife, and she didn’t have the strength to do what she had to do, and so when she took him by the hair and twisted his head to expose the taut flesh of his throat she shut her eyes fast and the kitchen knife missed its stroke. Still, it was enough. His blood drew steam from the leaves and he lay there in a shrunken, skeletal nest, night coming down and the woman already receding into the trees.