When the Nines Roll Over (11 page)

“Yes,” I said.

“I didn't really have the money to move here, but it's one of the requirements. As a title holder.”

“What title?” I examined his scrawny neck, his small white hands. “You're not a boxer?”

“Nope.” He smiled, bits of blackened beef on his lips, in his teeth. “Nothing like that.”

“You're going to make me guess? You're Anastasia, daughter of the czar?”

“It's something I kind of have to keep a low profile about. No publicity.”

I sighed and waited.

“All right,” he said, “all right. But you can't go around telling people. It's part of the deal, I have to keep it undercover. I'm the Lover,” he said, beaming a little in spite of himself.

“Okay,” I said. “Whose lover?”

“No,
the
Lover. Capital
L
.”

“Right,” I said, finishing my beer. The bartender, quartering limes, kept whistling his one song. “You're a porn star.”

“No,” he said, offended. “Nothing like that.” He looked around the shadowy barroom, making sure nobody was within hearing distance. “The Lover of the East Coast. I'm the Greatest Lover on the East Coast. Not counting Florida, they're independent.”

I smiled at him happily. The great thing about New York, no matter how insane you are, the next man over is bound to be twice as bad.

“What is there,” I asked him, “a tournament?”

“It's not something you compete for,” said Butchko. “It's more like the poet laureate. The last guy, Gregory Santos, he lives up in the Bronx, near Mosholu Parkway. Really nice guy. He took me out for drinks when I got the title, told me how to handle certain situations. He said it would change my whole life. The pressure is—I mean, women have
expectations
now. It's like being the New York Yankees.”

I was pondering that for a while. The New York Yankees? No other customers remained in the bar, just the two of us and the bartender whistling. I imagined the Cypriot coming to work on the subway, head buried in the newspaper, while a small black-eyed girl sitting next to him whistled notes she heard at breakfast from her father's razor-nicked lips, notes her father heard the night before as he stood in a crowded elevator and watched the lighted floor numbers count down.

I concentrated on Butchko's sallow face, the purple blooms below his eyes. Studying a face will keep things quiet for a while. I tried to imagine that this was the man millions of East Coast women fantasized about while doodling in the margins of crossword puzzles. I tried to imagine him mounting bliss-faced seducees from the northern tip of Maine to Georgia, whispering in their ears, making them go all epileptic, their skin stretched so tight over rioting nerves that one touch in the right place would send them ricocheting around the room like an unknotted balloon.

I could picture the rapturous women because I had read about them in novels, had seen them in movies, but I had never held one in my arms. I had not touched a naked breast since the day my mother weaned me. The only contact I had with women was incidental: the brush of a supermarket clerk's fingers as she handed me my change, or an old lady tapping my shoulder, asking me to move aside so she could step off the bus. Like my beloved Saint Francis, I was a virgin.

“So what happened,” I asked Butchko, “your high school girlfriend said you were the greatest?” I was trying to figure the origins of his fantasy.

He seemed mystified by the question. “Well, yeah.”

There was something appealing about him. His delusions had originality, at least. All the other New York immigrants think they're the greatest actor, artist, writer, whatever—it was nice to meet the greatest lover.

The whistling Cypriot would never quit. Verse chorus verse chorus verse. If there was a bridge, the man didn't know it. I dug my knuckles into the corners of my eye sockets and breathed deeply.

“Mackenzie? You okay?”

“This
song
,” I whispered. “What is this song he's whistling?”

“ ‘Paper Moon,' ” said Butchko. He sang the chorus with the whistling as his accompanist. Butchko's voice was gorgeous, a pitch-perfect tenor, and for a moment I believed everything, all of it, the cities, towns, and countrysides full of quivering women sloshing about their bathtubs, moaning his name,
Butchko, Butchko,
wetting a thousand tiled floors in their delirium.

“Lion,” he said, plowing the ketchup on his plate with the tines of his fork. “My first lion.”

As soon as I got home I began preparing the house for my father, transferring six steaks from the freezer to the refrigerator, vacuuming the carpet in the master bedroom, stacking the logs and kindling in the library's fireplace, arranging the ivory chess pieces in their proper formations. I knew that he would have heard about the lion, that he would be on a plane crossing the Atlantic. We lived in a turn-of-the-century brownstone, the facade adorned with wine-grape clusters and leering satyrs. My room was on the top floor, beneath a skylight of pebbled glass. After the house was made ready for its master, I locked myself in my bedroom and turned off the lights.

Not counting the skylight there was only one window in my room, small and round as a porthole, facing south. Next to this window, mounted on a tripod, stood a brass telescope that my father had given me for my twelfth birthday. The telescope had belonged to the Confederate general Jubal Early; his monogram was stamped into the brass below the eyepiece. Humbled telescope: once used to track Union troop movements in the Shenandoah Valley, now spying on the
bento
-box apartments of New Yorkers. A red-haired woman watching television with a thermometer in her mouth; four young girls sitting cross-legged on the living room rug, folding origami cranes; an old man, bare-chested, arms folded on the windowsill, looking over me to Harlem; two women, one old, one young, slow dancing in the kitchen; a small boy with a bowl haircut, wearing Superman pajamas, lying in bed reading a book.

I peered into the building's other windows to make sure everyone was safe. That was my nightly ritual—I was a responsible voyeur. Sometimes I half-hoped to see smoke pouring from a toaster oven so that I could call the fire department and watch the snorkel truck raise its boom to the redhead's window, watch the fireman pluck her from danger. Even in my fantasies I wasn't the hero.

I capped the telescope's lens and eyepiece, undressed, climbed into bed. It was a marvelous bed, with four tall cedarwood posts and handwoven mosquito netting from the Ivory Coast. There weren't many mosquitoes in the brownstone, but I loved how the netting swayed in the air conditioner's breeze, pale lungs inhaling and exhaling.

In the strange space between sleeping and waking I imagined myself lionized. I paced the avenues, mane dreadlocked by city dirt. I met my stone brothers on the Public Library's steps; I sat with them and watched the beat cop pass, orange poncho clad, walkie-talkie chattering on his hip. I went underground, below the sidewalks, prowled the subway tunnels. The big-bellied rats fled when they smelled my hide. I curled up beside a soliloquizing madman, a filthy bundle of piss-damp rags, once a babe in a cradle, a shiny possibility. I licked the dirt from his face; he buried his head in my mane. Soon he slept, and it was the first good sleep he'd had in years.

Rain pounded the pebbled glass of my skylight, the hoof-steps of a cavalry brigade heard from a great distance. It was almost dawn. The house was less empty than it had been. I pulled on a pair of green plaid pajamas, walked downstairs and knocked on the door of the master bedroom.

“Come in,” called my father.

I opened the door. He sat cross-legged on the floor, the parts of his rifle disassembled, gleaming and oiled, on a spotted towel thrown over his steamer trunk. He wore his undershirt and a grass-stained pair of khakis; wire-framed glasses; a black steel wristwatch with a nonreflective face, the gift of a Ugandan general.

If you are sitting in your home, late at night, alone, strange noises echoing down the hallways, disturbing your mind, and if you look out across the street, look through the window of a stranger's apartment, the apartment lit only by the television's static, and the stranger's room glows a cool and eerie blue—that was the exact color of my father's eyes.

He wiped his hands clean on a corner of the towel, stood up, walked over and clasped my shoulders, kissed me on the forehead. “You look thin.”

“I was sick for a while. I'm okay.”

“You're eating?” He watched me carefully. I was never able to lie to my father. I mean, I was able to lie to him but I never got away with it.

“I forget sometimes.” That was the truth. On bad days the idea of eating seemed somehow ridiculous, or indulgent.

He walked to his desk, a rolltop of luminous mahogany that supposedly belonged to Stonewall Jackson. Hanging on the wall above the desk were four masks—carved wood embellished with feathers and shredded raffia—that my father had bought in Mali. Each represented a figure from the old Bambaran saying: “What is a crow but a dove dipped in pitch? And what is a man but a dog cursed with words?”

My father pulled a sheaf of fax papers from his desktop and looked through them. “I saw your name in here. You were one of the witnesses?”

“He winked at me.”

My father continued reading through the papers, holding them at arm's length because his prescription was too weak and he never bothered to get reexamined. Being farsighted had no effect on his aim, though. I remember reading a profile of my father in a glossy hunting magazine; accompanying the article was a photograph of a silver dollar that had been neatly doughnuted by a high-caliber bullet. The caption below the picture read:
Shot by MacGregor Bonner at 400 Yards in the Transvaal (prone position).
My father had bet a drunk Johannesburg socialite one thousand dollars that he could make the shot; when the woman paid up she told him, “I hope I never make you angry, Bonner.”

My father read through the fax papers and I said again, “He winked at me. The lion. He was staring right at me and then he winked and then he walked away.”

My father removed his glasses and hung them, by one stem, from the neck of his undershirt. He pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment and then laughed.

“All mammals blink, Mackenzie. It keeps the eyeballs from drying out.”

“Wink, not blink. He winked at me.”

A sad smile lingered on his face as he regarded me. It was the Smile for Mackenzie, the expression he reserved for me alone. This is what you need to know about my father: He was a man who made a living killing animals, though he adored animals and disdained men. But I was his love's son and that gave me immunity from disdain, immunity from the cool hunter's stare he aimed at everyone else. His turn in this world was far from gentle, but he was gentle with me.