Chapter 4

 

 

            Jack’s snores echoed all the way down to the front door as Maxwell let him self in without use of a key. Once again, Jack had failed to lock the bottom door, and the top door stood ajar when Maxwell climbed the long narrow stairs to it. Between the snores, Jack mumbled, and then for a moment fell silent before setting into his snores again, like waves rolling into a shore, expending themselves over the silvery flat surface, then retreating. In the retreat, the apartment seemed eerie, making Maxwell miss the endless activities of Creeley, whose bubbling experiments went on even during those few early morning hours when the old man slept.

            Maxwell missed the clutter of plants and manuscripts, missed the old man’s weary voice calling to him when he came in late, asking where he’d been and what he’d been up to, and did he need to make such a racket in the middle of the night. Maxwell had tried to fill the emptiness of the apartment, bringing Jack in as a room mate, putting his own music stands and guitars and volumes history of the 1960s in the gaps the old man’s possessions had left. Yet it felt phony, like planting artificial flowers in the front lawn of a house. No one really believed the arrangement, and most secretly chuckled over the idea that Maxwell was largely kidding himself.

            He made no move to flick on the lights, but cross the room, his hands extended, his fingers feeling out the familiar spaces between furniture, fumbling for the landmarks his memory if not his eyes could see, wicker chairs, railroad spool table, and then, visible like a single green eye, the scolding clock face telling Maxwell he’d come in late again. Whatever noise Maxwell made, Jack’s snores disguised.

            "If the man can’t wake himself up with that racket, I certainly can’t budge him by kicking a stool," Maxwell thought, fingers coming into contact finally with the small lamp near the end of his bed, then around this along the ribbed torso of his table top fan, then along the spines of the books on the shelf, pausing over one unfamiliar object until his fingers figured out this was a camera. His eyes now had grown used to the dark and he could now make out the black and white shapes of this strangely twilight world, Creeley’s paintings hung on the walls, devoid of their brilliant colors, just as were the posters of Marvel Comic super heroes Jack had installed upon his arrival to "give the place some class."

            Finally, Maxwell saw what he wanted and reached towards it, his fingers brushing the loose metal strings that jutted from the heads, giving off a kind of accidental music as he lifted the guitar out from its corner. He almost never cut off the excess string the way most musicians did. He had seen this loose arrangement on the guitars of the jazz musicians during the earlier days of the club, serious men ignoring the sway of their instrument tops, strings like chaff giving  unintentional color and movement to their act. Their reasoning had always been laziness, yet it conveyed some carefree sense that Maxwell admired, one small violation of an otherwise very orderly world, one aspect of his life that was not wound too tightly.

            He reached back to the lamp with his free hand and flicked on the lowest level of light, then seated himself on the edge of his bed, his eyes watering from even that intensity. Then, his fingers of his left hand pressed against the fret board and his strummed the guitar slowly. Soft but sour tones rose from out of the hole. Maxwell cringed, turned the tuning head slightly while thumbing the B string -- always the B string. Then, when satisfied, he strummed all the strings, the softness now harmonious, then he strummed again, moving his fingers into position for an A chord. The room captured the sound perfectly, the way church used to capture the sound of the organ when he was a kind, both bearing a holy sound. He hummed a tune he had first thought up in the bar. The words, when he started to sing, came out of nowhere.

 

She starts to dance

but there’s no one there

to guide her

She takes a chance,

hoping her faith

will hide her.

And still the world goes round

even when she’s down

her feelings will still remain

to divide her.

 

She starts to Waltz,

but there’s no one near

to show her

She has her faults

but no one appears

to know her

And still the world goes on

even when she’s gone

all her tears appears

to flow upon her

 

And so the world goes round

Baby, it goes down

like gentle clouds, it frowns

upon my soul.

And maybe you can see

what those clouds do to me

no one will let me be

inside this hole

 

She starts to laugh

but memories flow inside her

she’s had her past

but she starts to show

all the pride there

and yes the sun goes down

and the world continues round

as she waits for love

to subscribe her.

 

She starts to glance

but the years hand

behind her

She knows Romance

but the tears remain

to remind her

And still the world goes round

even when she’s down

her whole past is clear

she’s just waiting for it

to divide her.

 

            The words and music ended together, resounding in the empty room, seeming to finally define the limits of the space left by Creeley’s leave. Then, note by not, melody and words vanished into thin air.

            "That’s very nice," Jack said, standing in the door to his room, naked except for a pair of boxer shorts. He leaned against the door frame, the light from the dim lamp just managed to carve his shape out of the darkness. "But I thought you said you weren’t going to write any poetry to that bitch?"

            "I don’t know what you mean," Maxwell said, putting the guitar down, its long neck leaning against the round edge of the table. "It’s a song, not a poem. And it’s not written about anybody in particular."

            "Song, poem, with you it’s all the same," Jack said. "But when you come straight back from a go go bar and start singing about dancers, you’re not going to convince me or anybody else just what influenced you."

            "Can we just drop it, okay?" Maxwell asked and stood, his face tense and his eyes full of a distant look of hurt. "I’m probably not going to see her again anyway."

            "Oh? And what will keep a love-drunk fool like you from haunting her every step?"

            Maxwell shrugged.

            "Wolfman threw me out," he said.

            "Wolfman?"

            "The bar owner. Everyone but Patty calls him that."

            "He did you a favor," Jack said.

            "Don't lecture me, Jack," Kenny said. "You've done your share of gallivanting. There's rumor you've been dating a 13 year old."

            "You believe every rumor you hear?" Jack asked.

            "Not every rumor," Maxwell said. "But I don't know much about you, despite taking you in as my room mate and getting a job with me down at the Greasy Spoon."

            "What is there to know?" Jack asked. "Do you want me to go pack?"

            Maxwell shook his head.

            Perhaps it had been the look in Jack's eyes Maxwell had recognized when finding the man wandering lost near the Great Falls. He had made his way up from the bus station and still clutched the ticket in his hands.

            "Are you lost?" Maxwell remembered asking him.

            "Sort of," Jack said. "I've been sitting around here all afternoon wondering where I was."

            "You're in Paterson," Maxwell said. "Where were you intending to go?"

            Kenny remembered the tilt of Jack's head -- noting the growing bald spot on its top, and the man's reluctance to keep Maxwell's gaze.

            Jack shrugged. "No place in particular."

            "What are you running away from?"

            Again a shrug. "What I always run away from, women," he said.

            "I like the song," Jack said, sitting himself down across the large spool that served as the main table for the loft. "I mean you're getting a lot better."

            In the distance, the night echoed with the sound of police sirens, car alarms, crying babies, squealing brakes, Spanish music, and the rumble of late night pick up trucks rushing to escape downtown.

            Maxwell laughed. "Is that your professional opinion?"

            "This song had more feeling that other country crap you've written."

            "I don't know if that's a complement or what."

            Jack examined the palms of his beefy hands, and then followed the trail of goose bumps rising up his arms. "Damn it’s getting cold in here."

            "Put on more clothing, I'm not turning up the heat."

            "Why do you always turn the heat off after dark?”

            "It’s not off."

            "It might as well be," Jack said. "I wake up every morning with icicles hanging from the end of my nose."

            "You exaggerate."

            Indeed, despite the relatively low temperature, beads of sweat showed on Jack's brow.

            "Not by much," Jack said. "If I ever brought company up here, I’d have to issue winter survival gear."

            "I didn't know you were planing to bring anybody up?"

            "I'm not, but it is possible."

            "You could rent a motel room."

            "This is my home," Jack said. "Don't I have a right to bring a woman here if I want?"

            "Not if she's 13," Maxwell said.

            "Stop that," Jack said. "I'm serious."

            Maxwell recalled a similar conversation when he came here to live with Creeley.

            "I’m letting you come in here to live with me, Max," Creeley had said. "But I don’t want you taking advantage of the fact. No girlfriends come up here. No one night affairs. No female friends at all. If I catch even a whiff of perfume in this apartment when I come home, you’re back on the street. Is that understood?"

            "Okay, so you're serious," Maxwell said. "But this is a loft, not a love nest. We're hardly the kind of place women feel comfortable in."

            "That hasn't stopped that poet friend of yours."

            "You mean Ann-Marie?"

            "Yeah, the one that drops in out of the blue whenever she feels like it. One time I found her staring down at me through the skylight, and I was butt naked. She just wiggled her fingers and wanted to know if she could come on down."

            "If you’d lock the roof door like I’d asked, she wouldn’t’t be able to do those kinds of things," Maxwell said.

            "That isn't going to stop her from staring down at me. I don't even know how she gets passed the carport gate."

            "She has a key," Maxwell admitted.

            "You gave her a key?"

            "I gave it to her after Creeley left. I didn’t’t want to be the only person with a set of keys, just in case I lost mine or something happened," Maxwell said.

            "So what if I want to bring someone up here?" Jack asked. "Are you going to be puttering around here like a chaperone?"

            "I suppose we should work out some arrangements," Maxwell said. "We can talk about it later."

            "I'd rather talk about it now, if you don't mind."

            "Just go to sleep, Jack," Maxwell mumbled and yawned.

            "Fine," Jack said rising from the seat to make his way back to his room, bare feet slapping at the wooden floor. "But we'll talk about it first thing in the morning."

            "Whatever you say, Jack," Maxwell said as he turned out the light near his bed.

            Weariness rolled over him. He could barely keep his eyes open, though his brain stirred with images from the club.

            The last thing he saw before falling off was Jack striking a match from the distant room, and the sound of Jack exhaling.

            "That's funny," Maxwell thought as a chemical scent reached him. "Jack doesn't smoke."

                                                                    **********

            Maxwell opened his eyes to blazing sunlight and Jack's uninterrupted snores.

            Stiff, Maxwell sat up, pushing his bare legs out from under the covers. The plastic thermometer on the nearby book shelf showed the temperature hovering at 40 degrees.

            It was a cool trek from bed to the kitchen where the gas space heater huffed and puffed on its low setting. Years of use had worn away the numbers, and Creeley carved notices in their place. Maxwell eased the knob from low to medium, causing a stir of pops inside.

            It was a small concession to the sleeping Jack who would wake a little later to a significantly warmer lot. Maxwell wasn't being cheap for no reason, despite Jack's constant claims. Each degree hiked up the gas bill at the end of the month and subtracted from the amount Maxwell could put away for his eventual trip to Nashville.

            Jack snores continued.

            "Jack!" Maxwell called. "Time to get up."

            Snort, sputter, cough, snore.

 Maxwell sighed, then marched out of the kitchen, down to Jack’s door, which stood ajar, jammed from the junk that spilled out: loose magazine, clothing, cassette tapes, video tapes, shoes, dirty aprons from the store, half finished boxes of cookies or cakes, the overflow of the Oscar Madison life style Jack lived.

            "It’s hard to keep it straight," Jack once complained. "I mean you try and cram your whole life into one single room and see if some of it doesn’t’t spill out, too."

            "That was my room, Jack," Maxwell told him. "Remember? And I had things pretty organized. Why can’t you? You’re not supposed to expand your collection to fit whatever space you happen to occupy."

            "Hey Jack!" Maxwell shouted from the door. "It’s time to get up."

            Again, the snoring sputtered long enough for a cough. The blankets parted until Jack's oval head popped out from the edge.

            "Huh?"

            "Time to get up."

            "What time is it?"

            "Almost seven. One of us should have been at the store already."

            "You go, I'm tired," Jack said, covering his head again with the blanket.

            Maxwell sighed, and recrossed the main room to his side of the loft, where he took out underwear and socks from his dresser -- each item so neatly folded he might have been expecting a military inspection. He closed the top drawer and pulled out the drawer immediately beneath, from which he removed his jogging suit, a matching set of a blue-hooded sweat shirt and long legged gym pants. Both had a ragged look from frequent use. The pants had been stitched several times. The jogging suit -- or least, the memory of frost bite, had jolted loose an odd association. For some reason, he was thinking of Suzanne again, and that period of time when he had moved out from this loft to live with her.

            He crossed the loft to the bathroom -- a misnomer since it had only a stall shower, a toilet and a small sink -- was little larger than a phone booth, a last minute addition to what had largely served as storage space for the furniture store downstairs. The room stood against the Eastern wall with a small lead-wired windows looking over upper Main Street. Creeley had installed shelves across the inner window upon which he had installed planters. These plants like the rest of the plants in the loft had withered from neglect.

            Maxwell washed his face, then dressed, glancing briefly in the mirror above the sink. He couldn't believe how old he looked. He always expected to see his 16-year-old-face staring back. The years had given him a permanently bewildered stare.

            He thought of Puck again, dripping on Creeley's doorstep, that trapped rat expression with eyes full of hate. It was that last look that imprinted itself in Kenny's memory, forcing a struggle to recall an earlier, more complementary Puck. Sometimes, if Maxwell thought hard enough, he could even recall the Puck's face from when they first met, a disheveled street imp that had stepped out of a doorway one day when Maxwell was on an errand for his Uncle Charlie.

            "Who are you?" Puck had asked as Maxwell clutched the slightly soggy paper bag to his chest, the smell of coffee rising from it like pungent perfume.

            "Maxwell Zarra," Maxwell said, the side of the bag warm against his stomach and hands.

            He needed to hurry home before the coffee cooled. It wouldn’t’t do to bring Charlie cold coffee and yet Maxwell could not pull himself away, staring as hard at Puck as Puck stared at him, studying the boy from the torn, laceless, mud-covered sneakers to the streak of dirt across the boy’s forehead.

            "People call me Puck," the boy said, swiping a loose hair out of his face.

            "You live around here?"

            Puck looked sour. "My ma does. My pa lives downtown. I don’t exactly live with either of them."

            "Where do you sleep?"

            "Wherever I want."

            "You don’t go to school?"

            "Hell no."

            "No one makes you?"

            Puck hitched up his faded and knee-bursting jeans and glared. "Nobody’s tough enough to make me go where I don’t want," he said.

            "My uncle Charlie said the school calls the police if I don’t go."

            Puck grinned, a piece of one of his upper front teeth was missing, a slanting slice that left a dark right-angled triangle in the center of his smile.

            "No cops have got me yet," he boasted. "And won’t ever get me unless they put a bullet in me."

            "Doesn’t’t your mother or your father do anything?" Maxwell asked, more than a little awed, and frightened, too, distrusting something in this stranger’s swagger, something in this stranger’s stare.

            "Ma don’t care about anything but this," Puck said and held a paper bag of his own, which gripped in his fist, was shaped like a bottle. The pink state license stamp showed on its protruding top. "And Pa don’t care about nobody but himself and his books."

            "Books?"

            "He’s a teacher or was," Puck said, spiting off into the gutter in clear contempt. "Now he sits and thinks, got some idiot job with the city that lets him goof off. What about your folks? I’ll bet you got a nice ma and pa, and maybe a pet dog, too."

            "No, I don’t neither!" Maxwell said. "I live with my uncles and my grandparents."

            Puck’s stare narrowed, his blue eyes pale against his dirty flesh, hard eyes like two blue stones stuck into a piece of rotten wood.

            "Say," Puck said. "I know you. You’re that kid from up on the hill."

            Maxwell swallowed slowly, looking a little uneasy.

            "Yeah? So what?"

            "So people say your folks got money."

            Maxwell laughed. He’d heard enough of his uncles moaning to know that wasn’t’t true, men complaining around the supper table about how they might not make the next payment on the house or how they couldn’t’t pay a bill from the boat suppliers, so hearing Puck say otherwise seemed like an outrageous joke. Yet the laugh died in Maxwell as Puck’s brutal stare grew more intense. Compared to some people, maybe Maxwell’s people did seem rich, having that house and its property, and not another neighbor within a sling shot’s range of the porch.

            "We’ve got no more than most," Maxwell said, in a much more sober voice.

            "Yeah," Puck growled, his blue eyes glowing. "I’ve thought about visiting your folks’ place a few times."

            Maxwell frowned. "Why? We don’t know you."

            Puck threw back his head and laughed, giving off a gurgling sound like a wolf clearing its throat of blood.

            "Man, you’re funny," he said, then stared again. "I like you. You’re not stuck up like most folks around here. You ain’t’t afraid to be seen talking to someone like me."

            This was not true. It was only morbid fascination that kept Maxwell from bolting back up the hill to his house and his uncle, spilling behind him a trail of now lukewarm coffee. Puck’s dirt disgusted Maxwell, the smell reminded him of the bums downtown or those along the tracks, those lackadaisical loliggagers that enraged Charlie whenever he took Maxwell for a ride.

            "Look at them, boy. Lazy good for nothing bums," Charlie’d say. "You’d think they’d have some pride, want to get somewhere in this world. But they don’t. They just sponge off the rest of us, always with their goddamn hands out, always looking to get something for free. Can you smell them? That’s the smell of the street, boy. That’s what happened to people when they give the fuck up on life. It’s disgusting. It’s flesh rotting slowly off the bond. A working man smells, yes, but different, of grease and oil, of saw dust, even of shit -- if the man’s unlucky enough to have to spend his life working in a sewer. But even shit’s a lot more honest that what you’re smelling now. Honest sweat makes a man feel proud. This smell has dishonesty all over it. These people will steal your eyes out if you don’t watch out. Smell it, boy! Remember it. And when you come across it, run like hell."

            Puck had that smell, stronger than Maxwell had yet encountered. But Puck looked different, sounded different and moved with in a different way than the bums. Puck walked and talked as if he was proud of smelling that way, as if he had worked hard to get it the way other working men worked to get their smell. He glared at people, cars, buses and trucks with his shoulders back, his eyes fierce, challenging everything he encountered.

            "I -- like you, too," Maxwell found himself saying, watching the boy’s grin rise again with its triangular gap, watching the strangely satisfied look wash over the boy’s unclean face -- the hard blue eyes as firm in this new conviction as they had been in the old.

            "See you around," he said. "I gotta bring my ma her medicine."

            Maxwell shivered, still standing naked before the mirror, his vision clearing the way the glass did after the steam of a shower dissipated.

            His image hadn't changed much in the twenty years, just a few extra lines etched around his eyes and mouth. He had the same light brown hair, the same large nose, the same wide mouth, and the same intense hazel eyes some women found attractive -- the Welsh traits of his family coming out prominently in him, shaping him into someone starkly different from the dark Italians that made up the rest of his family.

            His running sneakers sat in a neat row with his other shoes near the front door, a contrast to Jack's two sets that sat at precarious angles against the wall, kicked off when Jack came in, and left.

            Although struck with the urge to straighten, Maxwell simply slipped his sneakers on, putting the right on first, then the left -- one of the many rituals that annoyed Jack to no end.

            Charlie had warned Maxwell against giving into small temptations, and maintaining his own vision.

            "Don't compromise on anything if you believe in it strongly," Charlie had said.

            With his sneakers on, Maxwell, grabbed his keys from the hook behind the door and climbed the steps to the roof door. It had three locks. He undid the chain and stepped out into the brisk air.

            Saturday morning, Paterson, greeted him in a host of smells, sweet cross bun scents replacing those of Kaiser rolls, cookies and cakes shaking off ham and eggs. Many of the north side and south side families shopped here on their way home from church, carried here with the smell on the wind. But underneath these, the air itself smelled better, fresher, absent the thick diesel smell the tractor trailers brought with their deliveries, free of the smog left by the bumper to bumper morning commuters clogged along Route 80, wall to wall Pennsylvania drivers making their daily trek between the Delaware Water Gap and the George Washington Bridge, closing their windows and locking their doors as they came through Paterson.

            No northsider or southsider would dare descend into the city until ten by which time the air would percolate with thicker and thicker ethnic scene, rolling over Market and Main, into the tiny, dead-end streets that make up the webwork of the so-called historic district, from the thousand tiny enclaves of South and Central American culture the pock-marked Spruce, Ellis, Mill and Chancy.

            Tree tops poked up from among what seemed like endless roofs, in puffs of brown twigs, a few bits of green indicating the final end of winter. Half empty drums of tar and rolls of black roofing paper littered the flat surface around the sky light, an indication of the carelessness with which the workers had done their job. For years, the roof had leaked and for years, the land lord had ignored Creeley's complaints, until the water worked through the loft to the first floor furniture store -- at which point the repair became a priority. Yet afterwards, the roof still leaked.

            The fire escape was little more than a metal ladder down from the roof lowered only to a point a foot short of the car port below. It hung off the side of the building and Maxwell had to twist himself around to descend, always with the feeling he might find something dangerous waiting for him at the bottom. The ladder slid down a few feet under his weight, rolling with spurts and shudders on some garage-door-like shaft and ball bearing arrangement, now nearly ruined from constant exposure to the elements. Sometimes, when Maxwell attempted to pull it down from below, it refused to budge.

            How Ann-Marie managed the thing, Maxwell could only guess, though she likely got the men in the yard to pull the ladder down for her. Most evenings the car port was a hive of activity as his Latino neighbors on the block came to work on their cars. These men were an odd lot, some of them macho maniacs Maxwell recalled from high school auto shop. But many were the dorks, thick-lensed outcasts who had grown too old for the plastic models they put together as kids.  Both kinds looked to Kenny with grave respect when the town truck initially brought the 1966 mustard green GTO in from the street.

            "Where did you get it?"

            "How much did it cost?"

            "It looks like it needs a lot of work."

            "I got it from the junk yard," Kenny said, answering the questions in order. "It cost me $50 and $50 more for the town and I know it needs work."

            "Couldn’t’t you have found one in a little better shape?"

            "Probably. But I wanted this one."

            "Why?"

            "It called to me," Maxwell drawing knowing nods from men whose own cars had done the same.

             This one was Charlie’s car, the very car his uncle had owned, back when Charlie had tried to teach Maxwell to drive. Maxwell recognized it the moment he saw it in the junk yard, seeing the nick he had put it in the bumper, and the parade of cigarette burn marks across the dashboard from Charlie's careless habit.

            Maxwell heard the dog snuffling long before he reached the bottom of the ladder, and felt the creature’s fur brushing against his leg, its friendly manner startlingly deceptive. Maxwell had seen the beast tear a good sized chunk of flesh from an intruder, and to Maxwell’s knowledge, only he and Ann-Marie ever actually drew affection from the dog. Men who fixed their cars here endured the dog’s suspicious stared and occasional growls and snaps. Creeley never felt truly comfortable around it, saying the dog had some dark force around it he could not peer into. Jack, positively panicked with each encounter, swearing the beast had "it in" for him.

            "God help me if there’s ever a fire," Jack said more than once. "Then I’d have to choose between the flames and that monster’s teeth."

            The dog pressed its cold nose into Maxwell's palm, warm tongue licking at his fingers.

 

            "No goodies this morning," Maxwell told the dog, calling him Dante, though almost everyone else had their own name for it with no inkling as to what the dog’s name really was.

            The lack of a treat did nothing to dampen the dog’s affection, it rubbed, licked, nuzzled and barked softly, following Maxwell across the court yard to the door of his garage. Maxwell did not unlock the door, but only peered through the small door window to make sure no obvious harm had come to the machine inside.

            Satisfied, Maxwell patted the dog's head, crossed the yard to the outside gate, and reaching through the gap -- just barely large enough to fit his wrists, he undid the over-sized master lock and let himself out. When he had closed the gate again and refasten the lock, he began to run, sneakers slapping the sidewalk as he made his way up Market Street to Main Street for his longer weekend route, around him, the city just yawning as it woke to greet the day.

 

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