The City

We had walked almost to Saint Stanislaus, and Grandpa said, “Let’s rest a bit on the church steps there.”

We sat side by side on the steps, and he took a pack of Juicy Fruit gum from a pocket and offered me a stick, but I was too scared to want any. Maybe he was a little scared, too, because he didn’t want any chewing gum, either, and he returned the pack to his pocket.

“Let’s say you’re walking home from the community center one day, and your father pulls to the curb in a car and wants to take you somewhere. What should you do?”

“Where would he want to take me?”

“Let’s say it was somewhere you’d like to go, maybe to a movie or for a milk shake.”

“He wouldn’t take me anywhere like that. He never did before.”

“Well, maybe he wants to make things right with you, apologize for things he’s done by taking you out for some fun.”

“Would he? I don’t think he would.”

“He might. He might even have a present for you, wrapped and on the passenger seat. You’d just have to get in the car and unwrap it while you go to the movie or for that milk shake.”

The air was warm and the steps were warm from the sun, but I was cold. “I’ve got to walk the line you talked about, give him respect.”

“So what should you do?”

“Well … I’d have to ask Mom, was it all right to go with him.”

“But your mother isn’t there.”

“Then he’d have to come back later, after I talked to her, but even if Mom said it was all right, I wouldn’t want to go.”

Three crows landed on the sidewalk and hopped along, pecking at grains of rice from a wedding the day before, each of them studying us warily with glistening black eyes.

We watched them for a while, and then I said, “Would Tilton … would my father ever hurt me?”

“I don’t believe he would, Jonah. There’s an emptiness in him, a hollow place where there shouldn’t be, but I don’t think he’d hurt a child. It’s your mother he might hurt by taking you away from her.”

“I won’t let that happen. I just won’t.”

“That’s why I wanted us to talk, so you wouldn’t let it happen.”

I thought about the two trash-talking delinquents in Riverside Commons a few days earlier. “Boy, it’s always something, isn’t it?”

“That’s life. Always something, more good than bad, but always interesting if you’re paying attention.”

He offered me the gum again, and I took a stick, and so did he. He took the paper and foil from me, and he folded them with his paper and foil, and he put them in his shirt pocket.

After we chewed the Juicy Fruit for a minute or two and watched the crows at the rice, I thought of Mr. Gluck’s pendant and took it from my pocket and showed it to Grandpa.

“Isn’t that a marvelous piece of work.” He took the pendant and dangled it in the sunlight and asked where I’d gotten it. When I told him, he said, “Son, that is a classic story of the city if I ever heard one. Just classic. You’ve got a lasting conversation piece.”

“What kind of feather do you think it is, Grandpa?”

He gently twisted the chain between his fingers, so that the Lucite heart turned back and forth. “I’m no expert on feathers, but there’s one thing I can say with complete confidence.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s not an ordinary feather. It’s extraordinary. Otherwise no one would’ve gone to the trouble of sealing it in Lucite and shaping the Lucite into a heart.” He frowned at the pendant for a moment, then smiled. “I feel comfortable saying it’s not a bit of juju.”

“What’s juju?”

“A religion in West Africa, full of charms and curses and lots of gods, good ones and bad ones. In the Caribbean, they mix it up with some Catholic bits and call it voodoo.”

“I saw this old voodoo movie on TV. It scared me, so I had to turn it off.”

“Nothing to be scared about, because none of it’s true.”

“In the movie, the voodoo wasn’t on some island somewhere, it was right in the city.”

“Don’t give it a thought, Jonah. This piece the taxi driver gave you, it’s too well meant to be anything dark and dangerous. Whatever feather this might be, you should figure it was so important to someone that they preserved it. You should keep good care of it.”

“I will, Grandpa.”

Returning the pendant to me, he said, “I know you will.”

We got up, and the crows squawked into flight, and we walked back to the house, where lunch would soon be ready.

“The little talk we had about your father is just between you and me, Jonah.”

“Sure. We don’t want to worry Mom.”

“You’re a good boy.”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“I do. And if you stay humble about it and remember talent is a gift you didn’t earn, then you’re going to be a great piano man. If that’s what you want to be.”

“It’s all I want to be.”

Under the maples, the black-and-white patterns of leaf shadow and sunlight didn’t remind me of schooling fish in bright water, as before. They sort of looked like piano keys, not all lined up in the usual order but instead intersecting at crazy angles and shimmering with that kind of music that makes the air sparkle, what Malcolm calls banish-the-devil music.

12 (#ulink_b998cf81-3a4b-5a14-b052-e8ae79edf3e1)

During his off-the-rails period, when Malcolm was twenty-two, he lost his way in grief. He began secretly using drugs. He withdrew into himself and went away and didn’t tell anyone where he was going. Later, I learned that he had left the city, which was a mistake for a young man so suited to its streets. He had enough money for a year, and he rented a cabin by a lake upstate.

He smoked pot and did a little cocaine and sat on the porch to stare at the lake for hours at a time. He drank, too, whiskey and beer, and ate mostly junk food. He read books about revolutionary politics and suicide. He read novels, as well, but only those full of violence and vengeance and existential despair, and he sometimes was surprised to rise out of a kind of stupor, bitterly cursing the day he was born and the life in which he found himself.

One night, he woke past one o’clock in the morning, at once aware that he had been talking in his sleep, angry and cursing. A moment later, he realized that he wasn’t alone. Although faint, a foul odor filled him with revulsion, and he heard the floorboards creak as something moved restlessly back and forth.

He had fallen asleep half drunk and had left the bedside lamp set low. When he rolled off his side and sat up, he saw a shadowy form on the farther side of the room, a thing that, to this day, he will not more fully describe than to say that it had yellow eyes, that it wasn’t any child of Nature, and that it was no hallucination.

Although Malcolm is superstitious, neurotic in a charming sort of way, and undeniably eccentric, he recounts this incident with such solemnity, with such disquiet, that I’ve never doubted the truth of it. And I can’t hope to convey it as chillingly as he does.