Cain’s Book Read online

  Pier 72 is the one immediately north of the new heliport which lies in the southern end of the basin formed by Piers 72 and 71. The remainder of the basin is used to moor the scows of a stone corporation with quarries at Haverstraw, Tomkins Cove and Clinton Point on the Hudson River. Piers 72 and 73 are close together. Nine scows at most are moored there. Looking in from the river you see the gabled ends of two huge and dilapidated barns perched on foundations of stones and heavy beams, with a narrow walk round three sides of each. The gable end of Pier 73 is a landmark from the river because it is painted with red, white and blue stripes representing American Lines. At the end of Pier 72 there is a small landing stage set with bollards and cleats of cast iron. A little wooden box painted green is nailed to the gable end of the shed. It houses lists from the dispatcher’s office of the crushed stone corporation, lists which pertain to the movements of the scows.

  An hour ago I smoked some marijuana which came from Chile. It was particularly good. But for me it is an ambiguous drug. It can induce control or hysteria, and sometimes a terrifying and enervating succession of moods, new beginnings, generated spontaneously in the unwatched part of oneself... slow, quick, switchback, tumbling away from oneself in a sickening fashion, and then, suddenly, being in control. This can be exhausting. Intense concentration on an external object suddenly shatters, and one has a fleeting, ambiguous glimpse of one’s own pale face. The cause of what is to be shunned is the junction of the seer and the seen. The ordinary logic of association ceases to be operative. The problem, if one takes the trouble to pose it at all, is to find a new criterion of relevance. Understandably, at such times, the list in the box at the end of Pier 72, indicating as it does the hour at which a tug will arrive to take one’s scow in tow, has a fatality about it. One had hoped to go into the Village on arrival at the pier but on reading the list one finds one’s scow amongst those to be picked up immediately.

  This particular night – it was in the middle of winter – I was not on the list. I went over it twice very carefully, running my finger down the column of scows, O’Brien, Macdougal, Campbell, O’Malley, Matteotti, Leonard, Marshall, Cook, Smith, Peterson: Red Star, on arrival; Coogan, Baxter, Haynes, Loveday: Colonial, with the tide. There were a few scowmen hanging around the end of the pier, mostly those who were going out at once.

  I went back to the scow. In the cabin I stowed away some things that were lying about, my hashish pipe, a bottle of Benzedrine, locked the cabin and climbed over four scows and onto the pier. I walked along the huge beam which provides the narrow footpath parallel to the shed as far as the dock. I walked slowly, using a flashlight to guide my feet. On my left the corrugated iron of the shed, on my right, about fourteen feet below me, the still dark water of the basin reflecting a few naked lights. Its surface was smeared with oil and dust. Finally I reached the dock and walked between some parked boxcars to the street under the elevated road. I cut diagonally across town and at 23rd Street on 8th Avenue I took a taxi to Sheridan Square. I telephoned Moira from the drugstore that sells all the paperbacks. She told me to come over.

  She was glad to see me. We hadn’t seen one another for over two weeks. – Have you taken dope? Nope. – Our conversation was sometimes limited. She had smoked pot for some years but her attitude towards heroin was rigid. It made our relationship tense and hysterical. Sometimes I wondered why I bothered to go to see her, and that was the way it was with most of my friends who didn’t use junk. “It’s none of my business,” Moira said. “I’ve got no sympathy for them.”

  It would make me very angry when she said that. I wanted to shake her. “You say that! Sometimes I think of all those ignorant cops, all those ignorant judges, all those ignorant bastard people committing bloody murder like they blow their noses! They think it so fucking easy they can stamp it out like syphokles, whatever it is, jewry, heroin addiction, like some kind of streptococcus, and getting high an un-American rabies, Jesus, to a healthy paranoid like me who likes four walls and police locks on all doors and a couple of good Frankensteins to draw off the mob with their flaming torches, it looks like anyone who depicts you, dear Saviour, with a beard will be dealt with cold turkey until they take him before a judge and then, because it can’t stand, being bestial, scarcely human, the quivering, blubbering, vomiting mass is given half a grain of morphine ten minutes before he is arraigned so that they won’t have to take him in on a stretcher and run the risk of having some irresponsible goon send for a doctor!”

  “It’s none of my business!” Moira screamed.

  “Whose business is it? What are you going to do? Leave it to the experts? Tomorrow, the Age of the Doctors! They’re already challenging the taxmen and the FBI for a profitable monopoly. Let’s put it on prescription, eh? Confine it to the laboratories for more tests. They’re always talking about a lack of scientific evidence, about its being unsafe to make it public! They’re scared the public will find out it ain’t that fucking horse after all!”

  “They’re scared! Who’s they?”

  “You! Dammit to hell, Moira! You!”

  “I don’t want to discuss it! I won’t argue with you!”

  At that moment the telephone rang. She was grateful for the distraction. But it was Tom Tear. As welcome as a newborn Mongolian idiot. He had heard I was in town and wanted to know if I wanted to score. She held her hand over the mouthpiece of the receiver and her face became angry as she became aware of my hesitation. She spoke coldly into the telephone: “He’s here now. You’d better speak to him yourself.” As she handed me the telephone she said she didn’t want him telephoning me there. She avoided my disbelieving eyes and her face became set and hard. I could see only the back of her head now, the long blonde hair in a smooth bell. – I remember the first time I smelt it; her cheek was cold; it was the middle of winter and in Glasgow there was snow in the streets. By the time I turned my attention to the telephone I knew I would score, that it was only a question of arranging the time and the place. The thought of an evening with her in her present mood was stifling. Tom’s voice, because he had been sensitive to the tone of Moira’s, was apologetic, almost wheedling. “Don’t be so fucking sorry,” I said to him, watching her overhear. “Where’ll I meet you?” A place at Sheridan Square in half an hour’s time. I put down the telephone. Moira was pouring coffee.

  I had to say something. I said: “Look, Moira, I know what I’m doing.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said dully.

  And we didn’t. I wanted to explain and not to explain. At the same time I considered her attitude impertinent. I drank my coffee and left.

  Fay was with Tom. Tom made the run alone and Fay and I walked over together to his place from Sheridan Square. We walked quickly so as to get there by the time he returned with the heroin.

  “It’s going to be good, baby,” Fay said.

  The room has a low sloping ceiling with two small windows on one side and a fireplace with a raised brick hearth in an opposite corner, at the far end of the adjacent side. Sometimes Tom Tear burnt a few sticks in the grate and we sat with our knees at the level of the fire which cast shadows on the dirty ceiling and walls and on the bricks of the fireplace, the three of us on a small, backless couch spread over with a fawn blanket, looking into the fire, Fay in the centre, still wearing her moth-eaten fur coat, her arms folded, her head sunk on her chest, her slightly bulbous, yellowish eyes closed. We sat there after we had fixed and watched wood burn. The white boxwood burnt quickly. Tom Tear leant forward and added a few sticks to the blaze. He is a tall man in his late twenties, lean, with a beautiful, pale, lean face expressionless often as porcelain, the nose long, the eyes half-closed and heavily lidded under the drug.

  I also am tall. I was wearing my heavy white seaman’s jersey with a high polo neck, and I sensed that the angularity of my face – big nose, high cheekbones, sunken eyes – was softened by the shadows and smoothed – the effect of the drug – out of its habitual nervousness. My eyes were closed. My elb
ows rested on my thighs and my hands were clasped in front of me. Tom Tear is a Negro who sometimes speaks dreamily of the West Indies.

  At that moment I felt impelled to speak and I said: “My father had false teeth.”

  I was aware that I flashed a quick, intimate glance first at Tom, across Fay’s line of vision, and then, turning my head slightly, I caught the glint of appraisal in her pale protruding eyes.

  “Yes,” I said, and my face grew radiant, encouraging them to listen, “he had yellow dentures.”

  Tom’s teeth – they are long and yellowish and give his mouth a look of bone – were clenched in a tight smile, the pale lips falling away, exposing them. It was almost a mask of ecstasy, part of the game, I might have said in some contexts, in some rooms.

  Fay’s face was more reserved. Swinish? More like a pug than a pig. Her untidy dark hair tumbled into her big fur collar. A yellow female pigdog, her face in its warm nest beginning to stir with knowing.

  “He was outside in the hall, spying on the lodgers,” I said. “My father was a born quisling, and he had false teeth.”

  Tom Tear’s face was patient and serene. The flicker of the fire stirred in the sparse black stubble on his lower face, making the hairs glint.

  I went on for the friendly silence: “While he was in the hall his false teeth were squatting like an octopus in a glass of water on the kitchen dresser. The plates were a dark-orange brick colour and the teeth were like discoloured piano keys. They seemed to breathe at the bottom of the glass. The water was cloudy and tiny bubbles clung to the teeth. That was the kitchen where we lived, and they sat there like a breathing eye, watching us.”

  Fay’s bluish lips had fallen apart in a smile. She made a grunt of understanding through her decayed teeth. Fay is forty-two. She has lived all her life in this city.

  Tom Tear leant forward and threw more wood on the fire. Wood is plentiful. We gather it, when we can be bothered, on the streets.

  “He went on tiptoe about the hall for nine years,” I said. “In tennis shoes and without his teeth. The hall was no-man’s-land.”

  Tom Tear nodded as he leant back again away from the fire. His right cheek, which was all I saw from where I sat, was impassive, long and smooth.

  “If someone came to the front door he came flying back into the kitchen for his teeth. He came in puffing and blowing with his hand on his paunch. He wore a collarless shirt with a stud in it and he went round in his shirtsleeves and this old grey, sleeveless pullover.” I paused. A white stick darkened and burst into flame. “When he grew older he became less frantic about the teeth,” I said, smiling. “He slipped them into his mouth furtively in front of the visitor as though he suddenly remembered and didn’t want to give offence. Perhaps he no longer needed defences.”

  “He’d given up by that time,” Fay said. She looked straight into the fire.

  We were all silent for a moment. I felt I had to go on. I said: “I’ll tell you a story...”

  The others smiled. Fay touched the back of my hand with her fingertips. I remember noticing she had prominent eye-teeth.

  “It’s not really a story,” I said. “It’s something I read somewhere, about a river bushman. This man wanted to track down some bushmen and he went to a place called Serongo in the swamps. One day he caught sight of a bushman paddling alone in a boat and he asked his head bearer if he would speak to him and get him to lead them to his tribe. The bearer told him he had known the bushman for thirty years, that he lived alone on a termite mound in the middle of the swamps, and he was deaf and dumb as well.”

  The others looked at me. I moved my clasped hands forward and stared at the thumbs. They were dirty at the knuckles and at the nails.

  We were all silent.

  “It’s necessary to give up first,” I began tentatively, “but it should be a beginning...” I sensed an ambiguity, something not quite authentic, and stopped speaking.

  “Go on,” Tom said after a moment.

  But the inauthenticity was in the words, clinging to them like barnacles to a ship’s hull, a growing impediment. I shook my head, closed my eyes.

  Again we were all silent. The smoke from the burning wood wound its way towards the chimney, some of it spilling outwards into the room where it clung to the low ceiling.

  “Does anyone want to go out?” Fay said.

  When neither of us answered she made the motion of snuggling inside her warm fur coat. “It’s cold outside, too cold,” she said.

  I was sitting hunched forward with my eyes closed, my chin deep in the high woollen collar. The phrase “ex nihilo nihil fit”3 had just come to me. It seemed to me that nothing would be beginning, ever.

  Tom Tear, who a moment before had moved to a stool at the side of the fireplace, was leaning backwards against the wall and his soft black eyelashes stirred like a clot of moving insects at his eyes. His face had the look of smoke and ashes, like a bombed city. It was at rest, outwardly.

  There is a bed in the room, a low double bed on which three dirty grey army blankets are stretched. On the wall between the two square windows – they are uncurtained and at night the four panes of glass in each are black and glossy – is a faded engraving, unframed. It curls away from the wall at one corner where the Scotch tape has come away. There are two similar engravings on two other walls, both of them warped and one of them with a tear at the corner. On the fourth wall there is an unskilful pencil sketch of some trees and a watercolour of a woman’s face, vague and pink, and painted on flimsy paper. This is the work of Tom Tear’s girlfriend. A self-portrait. He talks of her now and again, always vaguely. She is kicking her habit in some clinic out of town. The last piece of furniture apart from the backless couch and the stool on which Tom Tear sat is a draughtsman’s table which tilts on a ratchet to any required angle. This is the table on which Tom Tear will work if ever he becomes an architect. At that moment the table was horizontal and there was a clock on it, and an electric lamp which didn’t work, and a burning candle, and a radio with a plastic cabinet in which another clock was inlaid. Both clocks said twenty-five past nine. That was all there was on the table, apart from the spike, and the glass of water, and the spoon.

  We had fixed over an hour ago. We had used all the heroin.

  Each of us was conscious of the well-being of the others. The blaze of wood in the fireplace made our cheeks glow. Our faces were smooth, and serene.

  “I can’t do with it and I can’t do without it,” Fay had said earlier as she prodded the back of her left hand – the flesh was thin there and waxy – in search of a possible vein. At the third attempt she found a vein and the blood rose up through the needle into the eye-dropper and appeared as a dark red tongue in the colourless solution. “Hit,” she said softly, with a slow smile. When she put the eye-dropper with the needle attached back into the glass of water and dabbed the back of her bluish hand with tissue paper there was no longer any fear in her eyes, only certainty, and in their yellowish depths ecstasy. I knew at that moment she was impregnable. I laughed softly at her and touched the slack flesh of her cheek lightly with my fingers. At that moment I was happy for her and I knew that she, when she watched me fix a moment later, would be happy for me.

  Each of us was conscious of the well-being of the others. The sense of well-being in each of us was reinforced by that consciousness.

  I said suddenly that the wheel hadn’t been invented yet.

  “What’s a wheel?” Tom Tear said.

  We were sitting, three absent faces towards the fire, a crude fire, and gloom beyond our shoulders. Fay’s moth-eaten fur coat was gathered under her chin like an old animal skin. “Outside,” Fay said, her protruding yellow eyes glinting dully in the firelight, “there is the jungle.” She laughed huskily and laid her friendly blue hand on my knee.

  Tom’s face, tilted towards the ceiling, was idyllic, inviolable.

  “And it’s raining outside,” she said softly.

  A moment later, she said: “You said your father
was a spy, Joe. You mean he was inquisitive?”

  I said: “The job he had before he became unemployable was a spy’s job. He was a musician to begin with but he became a spy. His job was to snoop round clubs and concert halls to see that no one infringed copyrights. He was the fuzz, the executioner, the Man. He was always closing curtains...” I leant across and whispered loudly in Fay’s ear, “Don’t you know that people can see in?”

  I said: “In the end he identified himself so completely with authority that he became unemployable, he took too much upon himself, he felt himself free to make executive decisions, even if he was only the doorman. When he was summoned during the war for selling confectionery at black-market rates without coupons – he sold it by the quarter pound to anyone who expressed conservative sentiments – he ranted against socialism and red tape. When he was arrested for soliciting on the street he pleaded with tears in his eyes that he was only trying to control a queue.”

  Fay was poking at the fire with a stick, smiling like a yellow idol.

  “I’ll go and break some more wood,” I said. I got up and moved over to the door. As I opened it Tom’s dog bounded in. “That damn dog again,” I heard Fay say as I crossed the large, low studio, now brimming over with lumber and other materials, into which the door led. I selected a flimsy box and began breaking it into pieces.

  When I returned to the room with my arms full of broken sticks, the terrier, an old bone in its mouth, was growling. That dog has a mad eye. I looked down at the shaggy brown head, at the shining wet fangs, at the mad eyeball, and I said quietly: “What a fucking animal!”

  “Get out!” Tom Tear yelled at the dog. “Get out of here, you ill-mannered bitch!” He got up, grabbed the dog by the collar, and ran it rigid-legged into the next room.