The Prisoner of Vandam Street (10 page)

T
hey say an apple a day keeps a doctor away. Sometimes in life, however, it takes a little bit more than that. I was well enough to realize that leaving the loft would be against the doctor’s orders and would further exacerbate my condition, not to mention my relationship with officious bastards like Ratso, McGovern, Brennan, and Piers Akerman. Nevertheless, I was sick enough to instinctively recognize when another soul was in trouble like myself. The girl on the street was obviously not running to catch a bus. She was clearly, to my mind, running for her very life.

I rummaged through the closet, found my old brightly colored Indian jacket and my cowboy hat and boots. The cat stared at me rather quizzically as I hurriedly put on these disparate articles. It was an ensemble that the cat evidently did not appreciate, for she gave a slight, dismissive mew of distaste and walked off in the direction of Ratso’s backpack, which, for all practical purposes, had become her happy dumping ground. Cats, as a rule, do not like cowboys. They do, however, heavily empathize with Indians. I’ve often said, in fact, that all cats are Indians and all dogs are cowboys. Whenever I say this, people usually look at me like I’ve got a nail in my head. People don’t often have big spirits, but most cowboys, Indians, dogs, and cats do. Jerry Lewis, small spirit; Dean Martin, big spirit. The smallest spirits of all, of course, belong to the throngs of German tourists who congregate around American Indian reservations, possibly attempting to heal their psychic wound and suck out the soul they don’t inherently possess. If they really knew anything about Indians they’d no doubt realize that Indians do not believe much in ownership or possession. Indians, for instance, do not believe you can own land, or a river, or a dog, or a horse. The only things Indians truly believe you can own are casinos.

You might think that all the above is a fairly involved and convoluted thought process for one to be going through while attempting to get dressed quickly in order to attempt the rescue of a damsel in distress. You’d be wrong again. The busier one is, the busier is one’s mind. And though one’s movements may be frantic, one’s mind may sail true as an arrow. And the unaimed arrow never misses. Especially when it’s flying through one’s brain at one hundred miles an hour and one has malaria. Too many ones, innit? “You” is better than “one,” innit? Let’s all go back to you. It’s all about you anyway, innit? It’s never about me. It’s always about you. And at least I realized that I was crazy.

To stand at a window dressed in an Indian jacket and a cowboy hat was crazy. To see a lighted apartment across the street and believe some form of evil was emanating from the place was crazy. To grab a cigar out of Sherlock Holmes’s head was crazy. To leave the cat in charge was crazy. To have care-givers who were all out getting drunk because they couldn’t take care of themselves was crazy. To go against your doctor’s orders when you’re seriously ill was crazy. And at last I realized that I was
not
crazy. I was, I now believed, quite sane, indeed.

“I’m the only sane man on this train!” I shouted to the cat from the doorway.

The cat, of course, said nothing at all. She knew I was crazy.

All of this took only a matter of moments, and in a few moments more, I was out of the loft, down the stairs, and out of the building for what seemed like the first time since Christ was a cowboy. The cold outside air hit me about the same time as I glanced up at the building across the street. The woman had not been gone long at all, yet the lighted window now seemed to be calling to her through my brain. “Come back, you rotten cunt!” it screamed, seeming to pulsate horror into a world already pregnant with the stuff. I caught myself walking almost robotically toward the building with the intent in mind evidently to throttle the bastard on the third floor. Before I got there, my rational mind convinced my malarial sensibilities that this strategy at this time was probably not best foot forward.

“Go after the girl,” said a voice in my head.

“Get back here you fucking bitch!” said another voice.

“You’re doing fine, sonny boy,” said the voice of my father.

“Kiiinnnnk,” said the voice of Kent Perkins.

I ran then, like the wind I was married to. I ran right down the middle of the street toward Hudson, the same direction the girl had run. As I ran I felt the fever running through my soul, carrying me along toward delirium or destiny, or maybe these two imposters inhabited the same scruffy corner of the nighttime street. As I ran I saw dogs and cats and Indians and cowboys and angels. But I could not see the girl.

I ran for miles through a fog-shrouded uncrowded nocturnal valley where newspaper pages blew around the sky like giant tropical leaves that had fallen from trees made of steel. I searched and searched for a woman and saw only gutters and trash and neon lights and windows behind which lived possible people. I saw a black man walk a white dog. I saw a cake someone had left out in the rain. I saw a rat running next to me and I asked the rat if he’d seen a woman and he said he never could see a woman and if they didn’t have pussies there’d be a bounty on them and he said I looked like I could use a good meal would I like some spare cheese and I said no thanks I had an apple on the train. Then the rat got into a Mercedes and drove away and I was alone again running, falling, looking for eyes in the city of night.

“Taxi!” said a woman with roulette eyes and a necklace of garbage cans. “Taxi!”

But there was no taxi. Only lights and wheels and pain and a woman.

“What do you want?” she said.

Her face had blood. Her eyes had tears. Her voice had sadness.

“Why are you following me?” she said.

“I saw you,” I said, feeling pain in my heart and in my head. “I saw you in the window.”

She was the same woman. A different night. A different street. A different man. But she was the same woman. Her eyes remembered.

“Let me help you,” I said, reaching for her arm.

“Go away,” she said. “Everything’s fine. I don’t need your help.”

“If you go back,” I said, “he’ll only hurt you worse.”

She ran away from me then and I ran and I fell and it started to rain and everything was fine.

A
wise old man named Slim, who wore a paper Rainbow Bread cap, drank warm Jax beer in infinite quantities, listened faithfully on the radio to the hapless Houston Astros, and washed dishes at our family’s ranch, once told me something I’ve never forgotten. He said: “You’re born alone and you die alone so you might as well get used to it.” It didn’t mean much to me then, but over the years I’ve come to believe that old Slim might have been on to something.

I live alone now in the lodge my late parents once lived in, and I’m getting used to it. Being a member of the Orphan Club is not so bad. Sooner or later, fate will pluck us all up by our pretty necks. If you have a family of your own, maybe you won’t feel it quite as much. Or maybe you will. I’m married to the wind and my children are my animals and the books I’ve written, and I love them all. I don’t play favorites. But I miss my mom and dad. In the past fifty years, thousands of kids have known them as Uncle Tom and Aunt Min. They bought our ranch in 1952, named it Echo Hill, and made it into a camp for boys and girls. Echo Hill will be open again this summer, but though the kids will ride horses, swim in the river, and explore the hills and canyons, they will not get to meet Uncle Tom and Aunt Min.

My mother died in May 1985, just a few weeks before camp started, and my father died in August 2002, just a few weeks after camp was over. I can still see my mother at her desk, going over her cluttered clipboard filled with all the camp rosters, schedules, and menus. I can see her at the Navajo campfire, at the big hoe-down on the tennis courts, at the friendship circle under the stars. I can see my dad wearing a pith helmet and waving to the kids in the charter buses through the dust of the years. I can see him raising the flag in the morning, slicing the watermelon at picnic suppers, sitting in a lawn chair out in front of the lodge, and talking patiently with a kid having problems with his bunkmates. If you saw him sitting quietly there, you’d think he was talking to one of his old friends. Many of them became just that.

I don’t know how many baby fawns ago it was, how many stray dogs and cats ago, or how many homesick kids ago who came to see Echo Hill as their home, but fifty years is a long time in camp years. Yet time, as they say, is the money of love. And Tom and Min put a lot of all those things into Echo Hill. Most of their adult lives were given over to children, daddy-long-legs, arrowheads, songs, and stars. They lived in a little green valley surrounded by gentle hills, where the sky was as blue as the river, the river ran pure, the waterfalls sparkled clear in the summer sun, and the campfire embers seemed to never really die. I was just a kid then, but looking back, that’s the way I remember it.

But what I remember most of all are the hummingbirds. It might have been in 1953 when my mother hung out the first hummingbird feeder on the front porch of the lodge. The grown-up, outside world liked Ike that year and loved Lucy, and Hank Williams died, as did Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. I believe now that I might have been vaguely aware of these things occurring even back then, but it was those tiny wondrous rainbows of flying color that really caught my eye. Those first few brave hummingbirds had come thousands of miles, all the way from Mexico and Central America, just to be with us at Echo Hill. Every year the hummers would make this long migration, arriving almost precisely on March 15, the Ides of March. They would leave late in the summer, their departure date usually depending upon how much fun they had at camp.

For those first few years, in the early fifties, the hummingbird population, as well as the number of campers, was fairly sparse, but as the green summers flashed by, more and more kids and hummingbirds came to Echo Hill. The hummingbirds nested every year in the same juniper tree next to the lodge. Decades later, after my mother’s death, the tree began to die as well. Yet even when there were only a few green branches left, the hummers continued to make that tree their summer home. Some of the staff thought the tree was an eyesore and more than once offered to cut it down, but Tom wouldn’t hear of it. I think he regarded the hummingbirds as little pieces of my mother’s soul.

My father and I more or less took over the hummingbird program together in 1985. As time went by, we grew into the job. It was amazing how creatures so tiny could have such a profound influence upon your peace of mind and the way you looked at the world. My father, of course, did many other things besides feeding the hummingbirds. I, unfortunately, did not. That was how I gradually came to be known as the Hummingbird Man of Echo Hill.

Tom and I disagreed, sometimes almost violently, about the feeding methods for these fragile little creatures. He measured exactly four scoops of sugar and two drops of red food coloring into the water for each feeder. I eyeballed the whole process, using much more sugar and blending many weird colors into the mix. Whatever our disagreements over methodology, the hummer population grew. This past summer, it registered more than a hundred birds at “happy hour.” Tom confided in me that once long ago he mixed a little gin in with the hummers’ formula and they seemed to have a particularly lively happy hour. Min was not happy about it, however, and firmly put a stop to this practice.

Some bright cold mornings I stand in front of the old lodge, squinting into the brittle Hill Country sunlight, hoping, I suppose, for an impossible glimpse of a hummingbird or of my father or mother. They’ve all migrated far away, and the conventional wisdom is that only the hummingbirds are ever coming back. Yet I still see my mother hanging up that first feeder. The juniper tree blew down in a storm two winters ago, but the hummers have found other places to nest. One of them is in my heart.

And I still see my dad sitting under the dead juniper tree, only the tree doesn’t seem dead, and neither does he. It takes a big man to sit there with a little hummingbird book, taking the time to talk to a group of small boys. He’s telling them that there are over three hundred species of hummingbirds. They are the smallest of all birds, he says, and also the fastest. They’re also, he tells the kids, the only birds who can fly backward. The little boys seem very excited about the notion of flying backward. They’d like to try that themselves, they say. So would I.

T
o feed a hummingbird,” I said softly to the cat. I was back in my bed, I supposed. The cat said nothing, I supposed. Pretty much what I’d expected, I supposed.

It was very similar to being a child again, I thought. Waking up in the middle of the night and maybe you’d done something wrong or maybe you hadn’t. You weren’t sure. But you could hear the adults talking in the next room. And every word they spoke seemed to be so important, falling like a raindrop through the long dark night of childhood onto the window of your heart.

“So how’d you get him into the soddin’ building, mate?”

“I carried him,” said the confident voice with the warm, friendly Texas drawl. “I found him down the block lying in the gutter in the rain. I carried him back here and put him in bed. The best thing to do now is let him sleep.”

“But how’d you get into the soddin’ building, mate? How’d you get into the soddin’ flat?”

“Your security system’s a bit lax, and I don’t mean the airport. But there was really nothing to it. I don’t usually make a practice of breaking and entering, but I am a licensed detective and, in fact, I have my own agency in California. That’s the long, sort of banana-shaped state on the left coast of America. You’ve heard of America, haven’t you?”

“We settled you, mate. Back several hundred years ago when we were all puritanical pilgrims just tryin’ to plow some Indian maidens.”

“You didn’t do a very good job, mate,” said Piers Akerman’s booming voice. “Settling or plowing. You mucked up Australia as well.”

“And don’t be fucking our maidens,” said McGovern loudly. “I’m part Indian, too.”

“Which part, mate?” said Brennan.

“This part,” said McGovern.

The sounds of a large drunken Irishman and a small, scrappy, and equally drunken Brit scuffling in a loft beneath the pounding feet of a recently activated lesbian dance class could clearly be heard. After a few moments, however, cooler heads apparently prevailed. I could hear Kent Perkins’s calming voice bringing everything under control.

“Fellas,” he said. “Fellas. This isn’t getting us anywhere. We all want the same thing, don’t we? To help the Kinkster get well and help him resolve his latest investigation and determine if, indeed, a crime has occurred. To do that we’ll have to all work together.”

Kent, I knew, had several rules of investigation and interrogation and one of them he’d borrowed from my father. That was to always treat children like adults and adults like children, and it seemed to be working very well on this particular occasion. Listening to Kent from the bedroom, you might have thought he was speaking to a kindergarten class.

“McGovern will fuck things up, mate,” piped up Mick Brennan.

“No, I won’t, you poison dwarf!” responded McGovern. “
You
will!”

“Bollocks!”

“Now, now,” said Perkins soothingly. “This won’t get us anywhere. Let me tell you what Kinky was mumbling to me about as I carried him in from the rain.”

“I wouldn’t put too much stock in it,” said Ratso. “The Kinkstah’s been mumbling weird shit ever since the day he got out of the hospital.”

“Joan of Arc heard voices in her head,” said Kent. “As a result, she was able to save the entire nation of France.”

“Pity,” said Ratso.

“All right now,” said Kent. “Let’s focus in on the investigation. Since I met Piers years ago with Kinky in L.A., I’m going to make him second in command.”

“That’s a mistake,” said McGovern. “He’s blind as a kangaroo.”

“He’s one of those anti-Aussie bigots,” said Piers. “He can’t hear a word that’s been said.”

“What?” said McGovern. “What about tickets to the Grateful Dead?”

“See what I mean?” said Piers. “He’s a true no-hoper.”

“All right now,” said Kent. “Piers will be second in command and Kinky’s told me wonderful things about you other Village Irregulars.”

“Bollocks!” said Brennan. “You haven’t even talked to Kinky about us.”

“Yes I have,” said Kent. “Kinky said you guys can can piss off a Good Humor Man. He says you’re the original gang who can’t shoot straight. He also says you’re the best, most loyal friends he’s got in the world and he wouldn’t hesitate to trust you with his life.”

There was a long silence in the loft. Even the lesbian dance class seemed to stop in its tracks. The cat looked at me rather quizzically. I shrugged.

“We’re doing this investigation for three reasons,” said Kent. “One is for Kinky. At a time when he’s so weak and delirious, he needs to have evidence that something of a criminal nature really is occurring across the street. In other words, his mental health and his own self-worth require some kind of proof that he’s not insane.”

“What if he is, mate?” asked Brennan, not unreasonably.

“Well,” said Kent, “does anyone here have any background in psychology?”

“I do,” said Ratso. “I’ve got a master’s in psychology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.”

“Why didn’t you go ahead and get your Ph.D.?” asked Kent.

“A spider bit me on the scrotum,” said Ratso.

“I see,” said Kent. “Well, you still have the most training of anyone here. We’ll certify you as house shrink. Do you think at this moment that Kinky’s insane?”

There was silence for a longer time than I would have wished as Ratso evidently grappled with the question. At last, he came up with an answer that was not a strong vote of confidence for the general state of my mental hygiene.

“No, I don’t think he’s really insane,” said Ratso, rather uncertainly. “At least not yet.”

“Okay,” said Kent. “You watch him closely, Ratso. If you think we need to call in a shrink, we will. In the meantime, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Now the second reason for the investigation is that if there really is an abused woman across the street, her life may be in mortal danger. Sometimes you just have to have a knack for knowing if something’s worth doing, if someone’s worth loving, if an investigation’s worth taking on. I’ve brought a spotter scope and some other equipment out here with me, so obviously I believe this one is. Sometimes you can see things clearly in life and sometimes you just have to go with your gut instinct.

“There was a guy I knew over thirty years ago named Joe back in Azle, Texas, outside of Fort Worth. He could lie on his back on the floor of a bar and spit chewin’ tobacco high enough to hit the ceiling. Joe was in the septic tank business and on his truck he had a sign that read: ‘Your Shit Is My Bread and Butter.’ ”

“Where’s this going, mate?” asked Piers.

“Yeah,” said McGovern, “what’s a slit who’s a ball-cutter got to do with this?”

“ ‘Your Shit Is My Bread and Butter,’ ” repeated Kent.

“Your clit runs a bed and breakfast?” asked McGovern, who was not only not hearing very well, but was also, apparently, drinking rather heavily.

“Now another friend of mine back then,” continued Kent smoothly, “was a guy named Gary Lynn who started a printing business and on his truck he had a sign that said: ‘We Print Everything But Money.’ Well, the printing business was going a little slow so Gary thought he’d try his hand at printing twenty-dollar bills. And he got pretty good at it so one day he thought he’d see if he could pass them off for the real thing. He got in his truck and drove over a hundred miles up into Oklahoma and found this little gas station in this little town up there. He bought gas from the old man at the little station and bought some other stuff and paid for it all with one of the twenties. Then he got back in his truck and drove back to Azle where the cops were waiting to arrest him. What he didn’t know was that the old man had only recently bought that gas station because he’d gotten bored after retiring from his other job. His other job, to which he’d devoted most of his adult life, was as a counterfeit investigator for the U.S. Treasury Department.”

“What’s the moral of the story, mate?” said Brennan.

“I told you this was a hard room to work,” said Piers.

“The moral is,” said Kent with a bit of irritation, “some things are written on trucks so they can even be seen by shmucks.”

“Hey!” shouted McGovern. “You said there were three reasons for the investigation. What’s the third?”

“The third reason for the investigation is that you guys have made me so mad I’ll do it all by myself if I have to.”

I could hear the murmur of the Village Irregulars as they consulted, chided, sucked, fucked, and cajoled each other. Finally, they spoke in turn.

“I’ll help you,” said Ratso.

“I’m with you, mate,” said Brennan.

“I’m always with you, mate,” said Piers.

“What fucking little leprechaun took the Jameson?” said McGovern.

“All right,” said Kent. “We’ll spread out some sleeping bags and get some sleep tonight. But we hit the ground running tomorrow. You never know what’s going to happen when you get into an investigation. So what we do, we do with all our hearts.”

A small cheer went up from the living room. It was rather poignant but very heartening for me to hear and it lifted my spirits considerably. Only the cat looked at me with doubt in her eyes.

“So give it all you’ve got,” said Kent. “Remember what my daddy back in Texas used to say?”

“What was that, mate?” said Brennan.

“Never save your best shirt for Sunday,” said Kent.