Rumors from the Lost World (14 page)

Kafka took the stage first to a silent chorus of raised fists. —Everything is rhythm, he told Draper after the young poet's first-round knockout, and now he proved it. “Stay away from the goddamn/ neighborhood/ You punk!/ Listen to the gurgle of a carburetor,/ a tailpipe tongued into your ear!” The sweat sluiced from his receding hairline into creases above his eyebrows. He stalked the stage, hands gripping a baseball bat in pantomime. Draper felt like he was pumping a stationary bicycle just to keep up, even though it was over quick, Draper snapping awake as though from a nap on the afternoon bus, the hoots and whistles making clear who had the first round.

Jane took a final toke from the hand-rolled business she was smoking. “I am Jane Jefferson.” Her words pulsated with erotic monkey-shines. “I am Jane Jefferson/ and this is/ the poem/ you don't read/ aloud/ is the one/ about your dog/ and his exquisite bone/ a bone/ that melts/ in the steam bath/ the soft pelting of steam/ the hair around the bone/ it's/ guaranteed.” Draper had to doodle with his pen to recover from the way she stoked each syllable, but finally the big man's dementia carried things, especially with the help of the young chef, who gave him an eight and a half.

Draper had the feeling that Jane was only sparring, though, feeling out her man, getting his number. Sure enough, she hugged Kafka and scatted to the stage. Draper couldn't make sense of her words, a chant foreign to his ears, he only listened, enraptured, to her seductive fingertip voice. She stopped in the middle of a phrase. The silence was all the more audible. He had trouble coming back to the world. Even the young chef rubbed her eyes. Kafka strode across the spongy plyboard and tried to punch away the trance. “On the comer of/ Colfax and Montaigne/ I see a zero in a coat and tie/ He's singing the ‘Hallelujah Chorus'!” Still some zap, still rope-a-dope, still the zingers, but Jane won hands down.

The match went that way, strength against strength. Draper forgot who he was. Time became a series of tides: low tide, high tide, breakwater, beach. No mathematics, no numbers, only poems, not even words, and in the tenth Kafka was down 5-4. He needed the tie to keep his title, he pulled out all the stops, lip curled, voice like gravel. Images of a boxer collided like boxcars with a maimed soldier, a penny-ante huckster on the last roll of his dice, and everywhere the boxer, battered, bruised, still on his feet. “America, you have fed me pinecones and leather for breakfast/ You have taught me the alphabet and gotten it wrong/ You have climbed to the top of the Tower/ wrapped in a flag/ and pushed me/ and I dived/ into the Loop/ the endless Loop/ the endless Loop.” He got a standing ovation. His performance was instant legend for the regulars, something to take them back to the sixties, but Draper was young and gave Kafka a nine.

Jane took her time, she
emigrated,
sauntering with slow honey in her slim hips (eyes half-closed), found her spot, stood still, absolutely still for the first time. Draper held his breath, the industrial technician went “whoa, baby,” and the young chef, the third judge, folded her arms, caressed her own shoulders. “My lover's/ making me over/ again,” Jane whispered, snapping her fingers, then launching into a chant to obscenity, “a rap and rag/ of every kind of obscenity/ known to woman or man,/ every kind of obscenity/ on the face of the earth:/ the obscenity of
in
equality,/ the obscenity of
apart
heid,/ the obscenity of bad sex,/ the obscenity of
soft
drinks,/ the obscenity of p.o.w. poverty,/ the obscenity of wealth,/ the obscenity of good sex/ as sweet as sour pork,/ the obscenity of
angels,/
the obscenity of/ birds,/ the obscenity of no sex at all/ as sour as the
colored
ink/ of the Sunday comics/ or the lingerie ads, /the sweet obscenity of Satan,/ the obscenity of a
ball
-/ point pen that doesn't work,/ the obscenity of a poem/ that does.” She finished the rap, slow love song to the world, and Draper gave the first ten in the history of the Slam. The technician gave her a nine, and even the chef shaved only half a point from that.

The crowd dispersed quickly, maybe because the joint was too crowded for sociable drinking. Kafka hated to lose and headed for the door, but Draper cut him off, sat him down for a ginger ale.—Some match. On points I thought you won, but something happened there at the end.

—You got transported, Kafka said, drumming his fingers on the scarred table, studying the place with short quick swings of his head.—You forgot where you were, what you were doing. All your theory disappeared.

— How'd you know?

— Same thing happened to me. Think I'm
immune?

— Words don't add up.

— So, congratulations. You might be a poet yet.

They talked, listening to subliminal texture, the way words traveled. Kafka ignored the MTV director, who wanted an interview, ignored the slummers in their soft silks who wanted to know him before he became a movie star or a singer with a rock group. Kafka and Draper kept talking to each other, after a while Jane came over. All three did two things at once, they talked, really talked, they paid attention, but they also made up poems in their heads, Jane a poem to Walter Payton, Kafka a poem to Ezzard Charles, Draper a poem in prose to the poetry slam.

W
ith Deb asleep in her mother's room, Hugh climbed the stairs and listened past the ringing in his ears. Empty beds settled into floorboards. Other suspicious sounds scratched away at the night's peace. It took Hugh a minute to understand what he was hearing—a whole family of raccoons in the crawlspace that tunneled alongside the hallway. They cried out in pleasure, ticking claws over cardboard boxes filled with decades of family artifacts. Unmarried, Hugh and Deb had given up a small expensive apartment in Chicago and moved to her mother's house in the suburbs. Her mother lived in the Bahamas as a companion to a wealthier woman; divorced, she could afford to keep her house only if she didn't live in it. But she was too attached to it to put it on the market. It was 1980, that kind of year for all three of them, and for lots of other people, too.

Downstairs, Hugh found Deb's schoolgirl encyclopedia on an undusted mahogany shelf. Raccoons, he read, are so determined in their bandit way to endure that in man's absence the earth might well become their domain. The message frightened him a little. Their garbage-can raids came like clockwork every night, and neither Deb nor Hugh was much good at fending them off. The two of them had enough trouble just getting to work each day, arriving at the station seconds before the train pulled from the platform, where they joined thousands of other commuters.

“The Humane Society can put traps around the yard,” Hugh said the next day, leaning on the horn. They were caught on the expressway in rush-hour traffic after missing the train. “We should have waited for the next goddamn train.” He tapped the horn.

“That won't do any good.”

“It won't get us to the Loop any faster, but it might help my blood pressure.” He reached for a cigarette.

“By the way,” she said quietly, “I'm still waiting for my period. I was a little nauseated this morning.”

“They were at the window.” Hugh massaged his chest, poking between the right ribs because something was sore. He tried to remember cancer's seven warning signs.

“What?”

“The raccoons, Deb. What are we talking about?”

“Look, get in the right lane,” she said, drumming the briefcase on her lap. “You mind dropping me off? I'm late.”

“No, I don't mind. I can be the one who spends an hour looking for a parking space, even though it's your turn.”

“Just park underground. I'll pay.”

A few days later, Deb's pregnancy a fact of life, Hugh threw away his pack of cigarettes on the wooden platform of the suburban station. Everyone waiting was cloaked in the dull colors of freeze-dry vegetables.

“Good for you,” Deb said, rolling her eyes. She opened her mouth in a toothy parody of a scream.

The passengers, lost in their
Wall Street Journals
or
Tribunes,
were scoping out the day's headlines. Hugh didn't even bother to read over their shoulders. Now, he lives in a small town and misses the glamour of big-city dailies, but that December he always slung a mystery into his briefcase. He didn't want to get any closer to reality than Robert Parker's Spenser or Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe could take him.

They glided past grain-storage elevators and high-power lines. The sky was the color of granite. “About the raccoons,” he said. “What are we going to do?”

“Raccoons?” She squinted. With her pregnancy and his hypochondria, they lived half in the world and half in their fears, and their non sequiturs were standard-issue.

“The cubs were at the window watching me read, on their hind legs, noses against the glass, tiny black buttons on their snouts.”

“To hell with raccoons,” she said. They were passing through the city's industrial belt. “What are we going to do about this baby?” Beyond an endless file of Inland Steel freight cars and tree-lined tracks, long aisles of World War II vintage cottages and bungalows went to seed along with idle factories: quonset huts of galvanized steel, some as long as football fields, and dark brick buildings with unpainted facades, rust-red smokestacks, and cracked windows.

At its downtown dock, the train braked to a noisy electric crawl. Deb looked sick; everyone else, already angling for exits, ruffled paper, snapped shut briefcases, and wiggled into coats. They pushed forward into the echoing chilliness of a concrete areaway. On the stairs, Deb clutched the metal rail so fiercely her fingers turned milky.

Inside the terminal, spongy with echoes, Hugh could taste fried eggs, dusty linoleum, and grease. Deb repeated her question. “It's totally up to you,” he answered. “You want the baby, fine. You don't want it, fine.” Anyone can talk about anything in a city crowd with little fear of discovery, but he lowered his voice, raised his chin, and glanced to either side. He tucked his briefcase under one arm and flexed his fingers, as though ready for a martial arts demonstration in the dingy corridor between Feski's Donut Shop and the flower kiosk. “It's up to you. You're carrying it. You're the one who won't have so many options. How does that saying go? ‘A buggy in the hall is the enemy of freedom'?”

“That's real fair,” she said. “You ever hear of shared responsibility? It's a brand-new concept.”

They pushed through a smudged glass door. “What's not fair is for a man to tell a woman what to do in a situation like this.” At the end of a long concrete tunnel full of candy wrappers and cigarette butts, escalators climbed to the street. A bearded man with a long stocking cap and cracked leather jacket blew on his saxophone, his head tilted into “Imagine,” the John Lennon song. It was a radio standard, but not the sort of thing that sounded great on sax, especially with concrete echoing its refrain. Deb stepped to one side and searched her big coat pocket among ticket stubs, bus transfers, breath mints, and notes scribbled to herself until she found two quarters. She tossed them into the saxophonist's instrument case. There was real money in it, lots of bills and a jumble of coins. People weren't usually so generous, especially to a lone sax player, offkey even to Hugh's untutored ears.

His music faded in the bustle of street-level noise. After a soggy glance and a perfunctory peck on the cheek, Deb crossed Randolph Street with the light. Hugh turned casually to the newspaper kiosk, nestled beneath the imposing Italian Renaissance design of the Chicago Public Library and Cultural Center, and saw the headline:
JOHN LENNON SLAIN
.

He bought the tabloid. Surrounded by the usual crowd of freaks, small-time hustlers, and derelicts waiting for the library to open, he read about the murder, absorbing every gruesome detail. Other bystanders, like himself, were neatly attired, obviously on the way to an office in a tall building, but their eyes told the real story. They didn't live where they worked, or even where they lived, but in some staging area of the mind, making raids on the way things had turned out.

“Let's have a moment of silence for poor John Lennon,” Hugh said at the office, holding up the paper. Everyone looked askance, a little embarrassed. “To tell you the truth,” one senior copywriter said, “I didn't even know that guy was still around.” “Yeah,” Hugh mumbled, “he was still around.” Though they mostly gathered dust, Hugh owned every album Lennon made after the Beatles broke up, so he had lunch with Tom Hogan, a closet socialist with thinning hair. They stood at Berghoff's polished mahogany counter, munching on sausages and drinking beer. “You know, I subscribe to
Playboy
—mostly for the interviews,” Tom said between bites of sausage. “So I knew Lennon was back. I read the interview there.”

They speculated on his years of silence. “He was a househusband,” Tom said. “He brought up his son.” Hugh told him about
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
“I'd put the speakers loud and lie there on my parents' bedspread, one of those tufted chenille things. I was waiting for enlightenment.” He grunted when Tom grinned. “I ended up losing a little hearing. My left ear rings all the time now.”

Tom adjusted his glasses. “I didn't pay that much attention. Folk music was my thing. I'd sit in Earl's in New Town or drive to New York and camp in the Village. Everybody screamed over the Beatles, I listened to Dylan, Ray and Glover, Paxton, Phil Ochs.” He took a sip of beer and wiped a smidgin of mustard from his lip. “Then Lennon got political. I paid attention to
that.”
He adjusted his glasses again. “I've got to say, though, even if the timing's wrong, that he was never a socialist. Not really.”

That afternoon Deb was exhausted, her hair lank. Until they reached their stop, Hugh buried himself in the papers, hypnotized by the murder, reciting details. She waved him off, a little breathless. “Who wants to hear it? Here one minute, gone the next. Some guy decides to do you in, and that's it.” She was still shaking her head when they queued up to leave the train. “Whatever happens doesn't matter, until something happens you can't change. Then you spend your life regretting.”