Nellydean rolled her eyes and tapped her nose, a simultaneous feat of almost yogic difficulty. “Curry, chili powder, lime juice, peanut sauce. Smells like Thai to me.”
I tried sniffing—all I smelled was dust—but Nellydean was wrinkling her nose.
“Some kind-a white fish? I wouldn’t eat too much-a that if I was you. I hope that’s not what you brought for Claudia. Spicy food’s the last thing that girl needs right now.”
I
had
bought the food for Claudia, though I wouldn’t have dared to mention her name. But now that Nellydean had I said, “Please. Can’t you just tell me? What’s wrong?”
It was late afternoon, February 4, 2002; there was little light left, outside or in, but when Nellydean’s head bent forward I could see clearly every wrinkle and fold in skin worn thin as my clothes by eight decades of constant wear and tear.
“She won’t tell me neither.” Nellydean lifted her head again, stretched her neck long and taut, steeled her voice. “I was wondering if you mightn’t be able to pick up a few things.” She nudged the piece of paper on the counter again, and I realized it was a twenty-dollar bill.
“Groceries?”
“I’ll pay for em. I’d just appreciate it if you picked em up. The deli on Ann and William. I already phoned in an order.”
“But why don’t….” I let my voice trail off as I remembered Claudia and John’s rebukes concerning that word. “Who used to pick up your groceries for you?” I said then, even though I was pretty sure I knew the answer to that question too.
“Justine used to come round fairly regular, although this winter’s been a little unpredictable.” She tapped the twenty on the counter. “It’s mostly fresh food. I’ve got enough canned goods to last a lifetime.”
I went to the counter then, gave her the Thai food, took the money, but before I went back out I said, “How long has it been? Since you left No. 1?”
“That’s not the kind-a thing I keep track of,” Nellydean said, picking up the bag of food. “Well, let me see if Claudia wants any curry.”
A half hour later, as I turned onto Dutch Street from Fulton, I was immediately stopped by the glare of headlights shining from a flat-fronted white van. Sonny, I thought, but this van was bigger than his, but it wasn’t till I saw the mural on the side, the hills, the sliver of waterfall, that I recognized it as the Merton and Morton van that had brought my mother’s magic cabinet to the shop last summer. A scrolled carpet lay on the Belgian blocks at the back of the van, but then, when I got closer, I realized that what I’d taken to be some kind of spindle sticking out of the roll was actually a head fashioned from blackened bronze. It was bigger than a big watermelon, with bulging egg-sized eyes and an enormous Byzantine nose. Eight feet beneath lips like crushed cigars two steel-sandaled feet poked from the wrapping—which was, in fact, a rolled-up carpet, unraveling and full of holes. The feet were the size of Wonder Bread loaves, each toe as big as the biscuits I’d baked at the Big N.
A voice echoed out of the darkened interior of the truck.
“Sorry bout the late drop-off. The Garden’s, you know, it’s a little off the beaten path.”
A gray-haired man, maybe fifty, maybe fifty-five, emerged from the shadows and dropped nimbly onto the street, followed by a second man who looked to be in his twenties. Both of them had wheeled pallets in their hands, and they positioned these just inside the door to the shop while I watched them.
Suddenly Nellydean appeared in the doorway. She had her trusty broom in her hands and she glared at the two men, who hopped quickly out of her way, then smiled at each other behind her back. Nellydean stalked down the three steps to the statue and thumped its toga-clad shoulder with her broom handle. A hollow boom emanated from its mouth, a kettle drum’s basso profundo declaration of war, and even as my throat constricted I thought:
that
was the sound I’d wanted to hear every time I tapped my hammer on the basement’s walls.
“Bronze my ass,” Nellydean said, more to the statue than me. “Goddamned woman couldn’t tell the difference between cast iron and the Chrysler Building if her life depended on it.” She lifted a corner of the carpet then, as if inspecting
its
worth, then flipped it back derisively. “You got something for me?”
I handed Nellydean the groceries.
“And?”
I dug in my pocket for the change: all of sixteen cents. One of the movers, the young one I think, snickered.
“Whyn’t you make yourself useful here while I take these upstairs.”
She disappeared into the building, leaving me alone with the movers. It still remained to lift the statue up No. 1’s three steps and onto the waiting pallets. Though hollow, it looked, as Nellydean said, to be cast iron; I couldn’t even imagine how much something like that would weigh. By then the older man had stationed himself at the statue’s head, his younger partner at its sandaled feet, so I positioned myself in the middle with my back to the shop. I couldn’t get my hands under the statue’s back until the head man heaved up his end; then the foot man got his end in the air and I sort of played fulcrum, sort of, although in truth I couldn’t get much of a purchase on the statue’s ass, which was as hard and round as the bottom of a wok.
“Hey,” the foot man said, as, an inch at a time, we sidled toward the steps, “who is he anyway?”
“I’m—”
“Think it’s Hermes?” the foot man said over me, grunting as he took the first step.
“Nah,” the head man said, swinging his end around. “Hermes is usually depicted in a running pose with a more sensitive expression. And besides,” the head man winced as he followed us up the first step, “no wingèd sandals.”
“Wingèd, eh?”
“Fuck you, Philistine.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” the foot man said, lurching up the second step, “whoever he is, he’s fucking heavy. Apollo?”
The head man shook his head. “Look at the eyes, the mouth. Hair in disarray, laurel crown missing. This guy’s a belligerent drunk.” He’d made it up the second step by then, and we paused to catch our breath. “My guess is you’ll find an amphora under there when you unwrap him,” and then he led the assault on the third step, and it was all the foot man could do to gasp,
“Amphe-what?”
“Am
phor
a. A
jar
, jarhead.” I was wondering how I was going to get out of the way so the movers could set the statue on the pallets when we were stopped by a breathy voice.
“My goodness! It looks like I’m just in time!”
At the sound of John’s voice I started to let go of the statue, but groans from its head and feet stopped me.
“Holy Mary mother of
God!
” the foot man gasped as his right leg stumbled from the top step down to the second. His left leg, still on the upper step, folded at the knee and smacked against the corrugated metal. I thought he was going to fall over and I threw my arms around the statue, one under, one on top of its waist. The statue trembled and when it was still I was able to turn my head. The foot man’s eyes were closed, and in the oblique light from the shop his face appeared to be beet purple. His nostrils opened and closed with each heavy breath he took. Then I saw John.
He lurched wildly as he walked up Dutch from—from John, I suddenly realized, and I would have wondered about the coincidence if there weren’t more pressing matters occupying my attention. Claudia’s dress hung off John’s left shoulder like the toga worn by the statue in my arms and his hair was a hard brown-black sphere, a skullcap as matted and solid as Reggie Packman’s dreads. I wondered where his helmet was, but then for the first time ever I saw his face. It looked naked without its helmet. Something—tears, I want to say, but who really knows—had washed the dirt from his right cheek, and where bare skin showed through I could see the prickles of something that was probably scabies, and the flesh itself was so thin and sunken it outlined each tooth in his mouth. But the left side of his face was a thousand times worse: as misshapen as the badly soldered bust of the statue in my arms. It looked as though Sonny had only hit John on the left side of his head, and I could see that too, as if it were happening on the street in front of me, Sonny’s good arm—his sighted arm—swinging out and connecting with John’s profile again and again. It was as if he had beaten an image etched on a coin, and even though there wasn’t any blood on John’s face his right eye had swollen to a slitted mound and that side of his mouth looked as though it were pressed against a window. And he was crying too. Not sobbing but wailing aloud. But not for himself. For the statue.
“Oh my goodness!” John exclaimed as he careened toward us. “Whatever has happened!” He pitched himself up the steps and practically fell against the statue. He threw his reedy arms around the statue’s waist just a few inches above mine, but even that weight was enough to force a pinched
mmph
out of the foot man. That was all the breath anyone could spare for a moment. Then from my left I heard a thin voice.
“Ma’am,” the head man wheezed, “if you don’t mind?”
But John was busy stroking the statue’s covered stomach and cooing something that sounded like, “There, there. There, there.”
“Ma’am? If…you…don’t…mind.”
I turned to the head man then.
“He’s with me,” I said, and my voice sounded hollow in my ears, “kind of.”
“And who the fuck are you?” the foot man said.
I turned back to him. Despite the cold, the sweat was running into his eyes, and he had to blink repeatedly in order to see me.
“I, um, I’m Ginny’s son.”
“No shit,” the head man said from the other end of the statue. I whipped my head around. “Well I’ll be goddamned. Hey, Frankie. That’s Ginny’s son.”
“That’s great,” Frankie panted from the statue’s feet. “Now we’re a foursome. Who’s got the fucking cards?”
I didn’t have to look at John to know he was looking at me: his breath was so foul it was almost blinding. But I looked anyway.
“Oh my poor baby,” he was saying through half his mouth, “whoever has
done
this to you?”
When he spoke I could see the gap of missing teeth on the left side of his mouth. The movers seemed to have taken stock of John’s wounds too, of his masculinity and the ill-fitting dress he wore, and they too fell silent. They swayed under their burden and I could feel the statue begin to vibrate as their strength failed.
“What happened to your face, John?”
“What happened? What happened? He’s fallen. Somebody has struck the hero down in his prime.” He inched his way toward the statue’s head. “Oh, you poor,
poor
man.”
“Goddamn it!” the foot man shouted. “If this bitch don’t back the fuck—”
“No!” John practically hissed at him. He felt around Claudia’s dress as if looking for one of the deep pockets Nellydean had sewn into his former habit, and even though I knew Claudia’s spiked heels were up in her apartment I still screamed,
“No, Justin, don’t! He’s a friend, he’s trying to help!”
It’s hard to say what might have happened had Nellydean not appeared. I heard her before I saw her: heard the bells of the shop ring behind me, heard the metal landing creak beneath the weight of a body, and without hurrying she moved around the statue and put her hands on John’s shoulders.
“Come on, honey. We got to set him down so we can tend to him.” She didn’t pull, just nudged him slightly, and, reluctant but docile, John stepped down to the street. The foot man heaved the statue off his leg with a crashing boom that made Nellydean’s earlier note sound like a tinkle from a tin drum, and I barely had time to stumble backwards before the head man dropped his end.
By the time the ambulance came the movers had abandoned us, leaving the statue in front of the door like a barricade. Nellydean had gone as well, leaving John stretched out beside the statue and cooing into its ear. He didn’t notice the cold, the siren that filled up Dutch Street like a flash flood of noise, just ran his hands over his fallen comrade’s lips and nose and cheeks. He started to rave when the paramedics took him by the arms and pulled him away. I went for his ankles then, but Sonny had beaten me there: John’s shoeless feet were as tiny and tender as the unbound feet of a Chinese princess.
At the hospital my pen scratched out a
J
, then wavered over the intake form. I settled on
John
finally, then paused again over the last name, finally wrote in
Dionysus
. Because, you know, that’s who the statue was. For an address I put down No. 1 and for next of kin I put down myself. Everything else on the form I left blank.
When I got home that night there was one more surprise waiting for me: not just my dinner, which sat on the floor in front of my apartment door, but a white envelope propped on top of the doorknob. When I picked it up I saw that it was addressed “To the Son of Ginny Ramsay.” As I walked down the hallway I dropped it in the dumbwaiter’s shaft, and a moment later I returned from my bedroom with John’s stuffed dress, threw it in after. I figured if there was anything important among all that paper it would find its way back to me eventually. It always did.
THE SLAM OF A CAR DOOR bouncing up Dutch Street woke me the next day. People were coming and going all the time now. In the quiet of the morning I could even hear the car drive away, but before it reached John I heard the squeal of wheels as another car entered Dutch from Fulton, and by the time it screeched to a stop below my windows I was leaning out, looking down. The first car was gone by then but the second was a cab, and who jumped out of it was Reggie, and what he screamed was:
“Goddammit, Claudia! Stop!”
If she answered him—if she was even there—I didn’t hear, because I was at the bedroom door by then. When I came out of the stairwell downstairs I saw Nellydean and Claudia, and I ducked behind a shelf. Claudia was holding a golden bundle it took me a moment to recognize as Divine wrapped in the yellow blanket Nellydean had given her four days ago. Nellydean held her broom like a lance. Reggie was there too, and I advanced on the three of them stealthily, shelf to shelf, pile to pile.
Reggie rocked back and forth between Claudia and Nellydean. His face was streaming with sweat and his eyes were wide but not quite focused. When he got close to Claudia she turned her body away from him, curled it protectively around Divine, and when he got close to Nellydean she brandished her broom. He bounced back and forth between them half a dozen times then suddenly changed trajectory, bounced back and forth between two rows of shelves. Every time he got close to one or another shelf his hand swept out and sent something crashing to the floor until finally he tripped over the scattered spokes of a croquet set and crashed down on top of a pile of dented boxes. Then he was up again, a wooden mallet in either hand, but he just stood there, swaying between Claudia and Nellydean. I ducked down and crawled a few steps closer.