Story
He runs his fingerprints over concrete blocks white, little edges of black from skateboards, nervous nails, bus exhaust caught in high-rise down drafts. Marty sits cross legged in front of squirrels and a hot dog vendor.
“Like the special last night, world war II,” he says, watching a woman in the city uniform, black coat and thick heeled near-knee boots stride by. The footsteps are intentional, telling people to look first, then look away, louder as she disappears into the Columbus circle crowds.
“Yeah Marty, World War II,” Frank repeats, Polly want a cracker to his nephew, “Just like it. Eat your hot dog.”
Clack clack, another one goes by, uncle Frank watching her into the intersection and away.
Marty remembers his other hand, left side not the best, and looks down at the meat cylinder leaking onto his shirtsleeve. Can’t believe it was even an animal, and they say this was a cow once like leather, or hamburgers. It’s smooth, sure, and pink, but it doesn’t even match his shoe. He tenses his hand, squishing catsup and mayonnaise, red and white together – his favorite – onto the ground in a splatter.
“Frank, look, look at that!”
Frank should be smoking, but three days’ in it’s better to sit and watch how many people aren’t doing it, so that’s why they’re in the circle. He’s been counting, Christ, hanging out with the short bus kid too much, picking up his habits. At least a hundred people smoking out of the crowd. It’s easier to hone in on them. It’s easier to count all the people who are smoking than all the people who aren’t. Look at them. They look so happy.
“What, Marty, what,” he says, then looks around because usually the kid’s into something. He looks down and sees a splatter of white with some red in the middle and looks up.
“Pigeons. Ahh, one getcha, Marty? Let’s see your jacket.”
He pulls the kid over and checks his shoulders, then the top of his head. Marty fusses away, like Frank’s a mom, and pushes with the hot dog hand. It gets Frank in the middle of his shirt, just washed the good green one for a day outside, the meat tumbling to the ground via his jeans and running shoes. He catches the sloppy bun before it does any damage, then grabs Marty by his windbreaker. It’s eighties style, all the fashion now, bright blue with snaps and stretchy gathered cuffs and two white stripes each.
“You think this was free? I told you not to play with your food, man, look what you did!”
Frank pulls him over by his arm and slaps the bun onto his chest right below the neck. It makes a roughly butterfly-shaped mess. Marty pulls away and looks down.
Looks like a country, or maybe a bird. Yeah, a bird, like the ones above us, look at that there. He looks up and sees a gray pigeon fluffing itself, opal and shimmering around the neck.
“One got me, yeah Frank, one got me!”
“I could’ve bought a pack, almost, for what that dog and soda cost me, man. This is tourist-ville and that ain’t cheap from those bastards. Almost a pack.”
A man with his son, both in yellow and black, are stopped in front of the two. The little boy, maybe six, has thumb in mouth. His father is giving Frank the eye. It’s an eye that, years past, he’d have no problems hammering a guy for right there.
“Sir, you got a problem?”
The man in yellow shakes his head in disapproval and walks forward, son in heavy tow. The boy locks onto Marty. Marty smiles.
“Red and black, guys, sporty and ready to hit the beach! Look at that, waterproof!”
Reaching into the fountain behind him, he skims chlorine water at the boy. The little boy runs up closer to his father, holding his arm ever tighter and they disappear into the crowd.
“Marty!”
Frank curls his fingers into that old familiar, index and middle together partway for a smoke he desperately needs and then further inward for a fist he wishes to God he could make. Then he thinks of the waves Marty made and smiles.
“It’s okay, Kid. If this were another day of the week, I’d have punched that bastard right in the liver, so hard he’d be yellow for a week just like that shirt of his, man, did you get a load of that?”
“Yeah Frank, yeah.”
Frank wipes off his shirt the best he can, then grabs Marty’s arm. They walk to the hot dog vendor and grab a napkin.
“Hey, whatcho doin? You want to take my stuff, you buy something, Boss.”
“Your stuff is what I’m wiping off my shirt, don’t get your panties in a wad, okay?”
“Ahh, get outta here”
“Ahh, get outta here,” Marty mimics. “Ahh, get outta here, ahh get outta here.”
Frank, this time Marty in tow, pulls him back to their spot. Just to get out of the house, he thinks, a man’s got to do some kind of favor, like he don’t work hard enough already to take a walk by himself that’s not making money for somebody. Just wanted to get out and breathe some clean air and see some nature, maybe look at some shops in the city, but no, Madeline wants some time to herself you’ve gotta take the kid with you. It always ends up like this, too, somebody coated in food and somebody with a bruise. Can’t take him into a bar and get a pint, either, because of the music and he don’t like the dim lights, so I’m just a damn goody goody no better than some high school kid tourist. Just a drag, that would be great. What if they sold single drag cigarettes for guys like me, that’d be perfect.”
Marty’s looking at a woman smoking what Frank wishes he had, and she’s sitting on the fountain edge too, six o’clock away from them with one black boot on and another off, that’s fleshy and pink if it wasn’t in stocking, something he’d like to see more of like looking at the full moon or the different ripples in the bath. She’s going to make ripples too, he predicts, and she rolls down the stocking from her knee, pulls it off in a bunch, and dips her toe in the water. He smiles in spite of himself, because you’re not supposed to smile at people who don’t want to be smiled at.
Frank follows three kids, all punk rockers with skinny jeans and stenciled leathers and stapled on band patches. One’s got a menthol, it’s green, one with something generic – he can smell it, stale and rotten but kind of nice – and the other, kind of looks like a girl, is smoking one of those cloves. Reminds him of something his mom used to cook when she still cooked, something sweet, but he can’t remember whether it was a pie or some kind of crazy meatloaf. They walk past and then Frank sees Marty looking off.
“Marty, you’ve got better taste than I thought, my man. But you might want to look away before you explode, right? Hell.”
“Don’t’ want to explode, okay Frank, got it.”
Frank knows Mary’s checkered history with women, and turns his nephew’s face away from the one with the toe in the water toward something more innocent. There’s a man walking six dogs at once, three big and three little, and Marty likes dogs.
“Look, Marty!”
“Wow!” Marty follows them with his whole face, making snuffing sounds. Frank takes over Marty’s job of ogling the woman who is cursing at her uncomfortable boots. She takes the other one off and opens a backpack sitting on the ground, pulling out a pair of black athletic shoes. She glances over at him and then looks away quickly, souring and quickly lighting another smoke.
“I’m gonna talk to her, Marty, what do you think about that? I’m gonna go over there and talk to your girlfriend, how do you feel about that?”
“Not my girlfriend. I want a dog, uncle Marty. I want a dog.”
“We’ll get you one. Can you sit here real quiet and not cause trouble?”
“Think a dog would be great, sure, I can sit here. I like to watch the people go by.”
“If you sit here nice and quiet I’ll buy you another hot dog, how’s that?”
“Hot dog, yeah, a dog, something I can eat, okay.”
Frank makes palms-down gestures with his hands like it will pat Marty down into the seat nice and neatly. He walk over to the woman and wipes what stain he can from his shirt, falling off in a pinkish crust, and closes his jacket.
Marty looks over to see Frank walking, and it’s like a movie; boy meets girl, but something is wrong there. The stories where that happens, they are lonely, and they want to get married and live happily ever after, but Frank’s got Aunt Madeline and he’s got Marty, and what could he want there? That’s the kind of movie where somebody drowns, or gets stabbed or worse, and the police always find out and maybe he should flag down an officer because this could be bad. But maybe it’s just to talk, you know, to make a friend and he’ll introduce her and they’ll get hot dogs together. That would be nice, really nice.
He sees Frank standing with his hands in his pockets saying something to the woman in black shoes, and he wonders if when she talks it will make the same sound as he shoes, clunk, or if she’ll have a voice like the pigeons overhead, the birds that never stop their sounds for anybody, even the taxicab horns and yelling people. Then the woman shakes her head and says something with no sound at all and takes her boots and walks away fast, Frank just standing there looking around for something, but for what Marty can’t tell. Marty looks at him long, and sees his face black like it has no mouth, like there’s nothing to breathe through. Frank walks slowly back and stands in front of Marty.
“Got a staring problem? What you looking at?”
Marty shakes his head like the bumblebee man in yellow and black, and then keeps staring, then smiles.
“I said, what are you looking at?”
Marty feels like he should laugh, because there’s something funny when Frank stands with his shirt dirty and his jacket buttoned up like he wants to be in a suit or make lots of money, and something funny when his back is hunched over, like he should be ringing a bell, so he laughs out loud. But then the laugh feels strange across his face; it feels sharp, like a needle at the doctor, but everywhere at once, and then he falls over.
Frank stands over Marty, who has fallen to his side, one arm in the water, face red across the side and imprinted with Frank’s class ring, class of 1973. He’s shaking all over, vibrating with some energy that had been waiting like a fault line, stored up and ready to slip and go back into silence for another century.
“Learn your manners, you little birdshit. Learn your manners.”
Things get quiet like they do when people in the same family hurt one another; objectivity ceases to be, cleaved by blood lines, and the rules on how to treat children, or the elderly, or one’s wife or husband disappear. Everybody is quiet because they know how they should deal with the situation, or how they should deal with the person in the situation, but most will never say so. So it gets quiet with the sound of thought, the sound of a train arriving in the station and the rush of hot wind from underneath the sidewalk and through metal grates.
A man sitting near them gets up and makes a telephone call. Two elderly women walk away, too. A young man, maybe twenty, with a ballcap and a sports jacket nearly says something – Frank can see it – but then holds back, pulling a freshly lit smoke from his mouth and tossing it on the ground in protest.
Frank says nothing in the silence, but simply waits until the opinions stop going through their minds, until the chatter stops and the heroes turn back into regular people going about their business. He doesn’t care what they do. No guts, none of them have guts. He looks at the butt on the sidewalk, thirsty.
He picks it up, cherry still hot and maybe two drags down. It’s a waste of resources and a damn insult. How many germs could get on there from just a drag or two? Why couldn’t it be from a woman, with some lipstick, instead of some punk kid? Beggar’s can’t be.
Frank takes a drag and closes his eyes.
“Look, Frank.”
Frank opens his eyes and exhales slowly.
“Look at what, kid?”
“Look at the birds, aren’t they beautiful?”
Two pigeons, speckled white and light gray, waddle circular on the sidewalk, heads pulsing back and forth. Somebody tosses a pebble at them and they flutter, then return to their ritual.
“They’re dancing. It’s like people.”
“You don’t want anything to do with that, Marty. That’s no good, you know? They’re dirty, not like other birds. They’re just rats with wings.”
Marty watches, thinking about birds and rats.
Not rats, no, I know rats, he thinks. Rats are dirty, rats look for food on subway tracks, the size of dogs, that’s what Frank says, and eat people’s cats instead of cats eating them.
He looks up at the tree above, leaves mint green and sunlight pinpricking in the hundreds across his face. A white pigeon flutters from one branch to another, low coo rolling in the warm air from a city bus.
‘Not rats, uncle Frank.’
“No? Then what, know it all?”
“Angels.”
“Angels? Where’d you get that?”
“Angels with white shit, Frank.”
Frank sits with the smoke burning down to a long ash, longer than an ash has any business being, and right until it burns hot and red, burning his finger.
He drops the butt and curses.
A woman with black shoes glides by, clack clack clack, and crushes the butt.
“Clack clack clack,” Marty says, “angels.”
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tainenator's journal
contemplative