Seeing Red, page 8
A very small noise—an ashtray, perhaps, falling from a table and bouncing on a throw rug.
Something had stalked Leona—oh, she knew what it was, she'd seen it at last, once, long ago, before she learned all the precautions—and now something was making enough timed-release racket above her to rouse her. But she knew this enemy, too, now that she was calmer, more awake, and listening thoughtfully, analyzing each sound.
Mrs. Elvie Rojas, a widow for four of her eighty-six years, had been booked into a convalescent home by her eager and hungry heirs two months before. Her apartment, the one just above Leona's, had been claimed by a stringy and unkempt working-class couple. No mystery there; their history had been etched all over their faces the first time Leona had seen them lugging groceries up the rear stairs: gas-station pump jockey meets career waitress for a first date in the backseat of his Chevy. Or maybe someplace romantic, like the women's john at the Exxon station. Their second or third date would be at some abortion clinic, a regular pit stop for the girl since high school. She stomps out of her parents' split-level to seek connubial bliss with Mr. Grease Clot of the Year and they scan the classifieds for the cheapest rent just when Elvie Rojas has the bad form to vacate.
Elvie was one of the last older tenants to go. Leona supposed that during the Depression their building had been a modest address; now—after the relentless attrition of years, after being endlessly subdivided with apartments quartered, chopped up, and rearranged, after being handed down from one grubby foreign landlord to the next—it was thin-walled, grayly dilapidated, stuffy, and unsafe. To Leona it had become like a dormitory for transients, or a cellblock, considering the nature of the newer tenants.
Over the past eight years the elderly occupants had trickled away, to be replaced by blacks, by Latinos, by wet ends bearing squalling kids.
Leona had been surrounded. Their very alienness intimidated her; she found it best to pretend they did not exist. She did not speak to any of them in passing, and soon enough, they lit out and were replaced by fresh, more threatening faces. No one came to this building to stay anymore. It had become a way station with all the charm of a metropolitan bus depot at three in the morning—from here, people either improved their life, moving upward and out, or receded into oblivion. Leona tried to ignore them. She saved pennies and signed leases, unwilling to dare a step into the less familiar. It probably would not be a matter of choice in the end. If the increasingly dangerous inhabitants did not compel her to flee, the building itself would eventually cave in and absorb her.
The white trash upstairs had proven more irritating by virtue of their proximity to Leona's pocket of existence. The stink of beer, the clogging odor of pot, the blaring radio impinged on her in a way she could not tune out. Then there were the weekend tights, the yelling in stereo. Sometimes he smacked his little wifey and blacked her eyes before their argument calmed into weeping and the rhythmic grunting of copulation. They were animals, thought Leona: the bitch clinging to the ape, she praying for the intervention of a prince who could kiss her out of her caste, he merely waiting for his boss to die. The young American dream.
They were forever tromping lead-footedly about, knocking things over or blundering their furniture into heart-stopping basso skids across the obverse of Leona's ceiling. This, she presumed, was her reward for not complaining about them—not that it would have brought satisfaction. The latest landlord seemed to be from some unfathomably strange Middle Eastern country. Gnomelike and dulleyed, he exuded the smell of stale dates and sour sweat. There were brown gaps between each of his teeth, and the tips of his slicked-back hair were perpetually gravid with droplets of an opaque liquid. He only understood English clearly around the first of each month, and had just bumped the rules so that only cash or money orders were acceptable for rent, this edict due to the untrustworthy nature of the newer tenants.
Something in the room above hit the floor with a leaden whump that rattled the bulbs in Leona's ceiling light fixture.
"God damn it," she muttered, surprising herself by actually letting that out of her mouth. If only they would go away, and leave her to her peace.
She listened. The metronomic noises of fornication had not yet begun. She wondered if Michael Donnelley, at work, thought about her that way, if, when he had asked her to coffee not once but twice, he had in mind the ultimate goal of making nasty between her legs.
And then she thought that that fate might not be so bad, compared with other things. And she remembered bolting to wakefulness just like this, on a different night, long ago, when she was still a child. That night had been windblown and howlingly hostile. She cringed beneath her blankets and squeezed her eyes shut, telling herself over and over that the shape she had seen at the dining-room window had not figured out where her bedroom was, was not peering in at her now, did not seek her consort especially. She made herself invisible. Her breathing slowed from panic speed to normal. She regained control. She opened her eyes.
She had seen the moon hanging there, like a slice from a spoiled orange. It threw the shape lingering outside her bedroom window into silhouette, framing its lank, dead hair and mercifully obscuring the rotted leftovers of a face, the maggots plugging up its nostrils, the gaps where flesh should be, through which she could see the starlight. Despite the bucking October wind outside, its feculent breath steamed her window as he looked in on her, looked right at her as she fought not to twitch, even though she could feel the dead eyes boring through her, even though her stomach was spasming convulsively.
Go away go away go a way go . . . !
Her parents had found her tossing up her dinner of tuna casserole and macaroni and cheese all over the bathroom floor. They cleaned her up and gently returned her to bed. They did not notice her nervously eyeing the window, and she knew they could not save her. Her mother had made the curtains from a Sears floral print bedspread. They were diaphanous, allowing too clear a view of the world outside. They might too easily reveal the shadow, should the shade return to peek in.
Later, she had cut several cardboard clothes boxes to fit just-so underneath her bed, to crowd out whatever demons waited there patiently for a chance at her bare feet. She talked her parents into buying her a night-light. And she learned the trick of stapling her curtains shut, and of placing things to conveniently block the window.
Now, over thirty-five years later, the old habits stuck. Leona continued to rise from her bed in the peculiar, awkwardly acrobatic fashion she'd taught herself while small, to put her outside the reach of whatever might nestle beneath the bed. She still used a night-light—now it was a plastic thing in the shape of a tiny eighteenth-century gas lamp, and it was in her bathroom. And the curtains in her apartment were stapled shut. She had discovered it was a maintenance-free way to keep them closed, when she had lived for a while in a ground-floor room next to a busy sidewalk. Privacy was the rationale; it made good sense.
She half sat, pillows pressing into the small of her back, listening while two full minutes ground past on her alarm clock with no further interruptions from above.
Michael Donnelley seemed a nice man. Over an almost ritualistic lunch date he had ticked off the stand-out events of his life for her in the way she might check a used car for defects that would thwart a resale. His seven-year-old son, Chad. His status as a widower. His tough bout with alcoholism after his wife's death from leukemia, and the touchy convalescence at CareUnit after that. Calex's medical insurance had covered his dry-out, and his status as an account executive with the company was secure. There, Leona, he'd said, forwardly using her first name, now you know all my dirty little secrets.
It had all sounded acceptable to her until he'd let that lie slip. He was shopping; his conversational confessions were littered with honesty, but it was the honesty of a piece of live bait thrown out when the fish scorns a rubber lure. He was being honest instead of charming. He was telling her that his boy needed a mother, that he wanted a surrogate for his wife, and that neither of them was getting any younger. He was suggesting that he could do her a favor since she had not snared a husband—but he had not said any of these things. And that meant that while they were discoursing, pretending to be civilized, he was thinking of her warming the half of his bed left cold by his dead wife. He was imagining her with her nightgown pushed rudely up around her waist and her legs in the air, like the pom-pom princess upstairs looked in the picture Leona's mind formed whenever the cadenced jostling of post-argument rape set the floorboards to creaking above her. She always imagined the grunting.
A shifting, dragging sound came faintly from above. It wandered from the window side of her ceiling toward the short hallway, then stopped. Somebody up there was going to the bathroom. It was not a noise of aggressive misbehavior, but one of aftermath. Perhaps the rodeo upstairs was done for another night.
Michael Donnelley had set off Leona's alarms. She was always alert against attacks on her hard-won independence; her apron strings had been cut with surgical neatness and cauterized. Her armor now included her sensible wardrobe, her books, her modest cooking, her malfunctioning television, and the security of routine. She was living the dream of the independent woman and refused to encumber herself. When Donnelley had started talking, all the warning gongs went off. He was sniffing for a "relationship." And now his dishonest entreaties were efficiently rebuffed. She would know when the time was right for a commitment.
Her problem, as she perceived it, was one of lateral drift. Once one has scored the goal of nondependent existence, she thought, what was one to do with it? For her, snuffing out entanglements had been as direct as clicking off a row of switches. She was a mass of raw potential. Nothing held her. She was free and inertia did not matter because a battery full of power could not stagnate . . . could it?
Someday, she would have to invest some of her accumulated power in a test, to see how her presence changed the world. But not tonight, not while she was sick, and physically unstable, and underslept . . .
When she opened her eyes again, the minute hand on the alarm clock had cranked away another hundred and eighty degrees, her bladder was prodding her, and a dripping noise was leaking irritatingly into earshot from the bathroom. Cold air pushed through her old, nearly transparent blue nightgown; she'd dozed off without covering up. The bed stand light was still blazing, and that woke her up faster, with a tiny stab of panic. It was unnatural to sleep with the lights on, like not dressing for bed. It was dropping off to unconsciousness before everything was secure. It was another of her smart rationalizations.
She sighed, swung her legs from beneath the blankets, and unloaded herself from bed with her usual odd choreography. The dripping tap was probably the shower's hot-water faucet. Again. "Damn it," she said, thinking of her viscid troll of a landlord.
The "improvements" worked on the building by this squalid little man were stopgap jobs, fleeting and cosmetic, and Leona's bathroom was an exemplar of his overwhelming inadequacy. Before she had moved in, a halfhearted attempt to tile the bathroom had been made; it was not a success. Inadequately glued tiles periodically disengaged to shatter in the bathtub, scaring the starch out of her every damned time.
Chunks of grout dropped out to crumble underfoot, leaving a maze of trenches where vermin could hide. Occasionally a drowning cockroach would make a leap for life and land on Leona's leg while she was bathing. After all these years, the sink light was still a naked bulb on a pull chain. The building's horrendous seasonal plumbing problems were evidenced by the bathroom ceiling. It had been replaced about twenty months back with sheets of gypsum board (stamped Sheetrock Firecode), the seams spliced with fat slices of duct tape. It promptly sagged, growing moist and gray once weekly from seepage. Her note to broach this topic before remitting another month's rent, she knew, was taped to the bathroom mirror. As she stepped through the tiny alcove hallway she saw the pinkish glow from the night-light and heard clearly the metronomic dripping sound bap bap bap.
"A slum," she said to herself, rubbing her eyes. She reached for the pull chain she knew to be just above the night-lamp and bap moisture impacted with the back of her hand, making her jump. Bap. So the roof of this sleaze pit was finally leaking all over everything.
It was only as she pulled the chain that she noticed the plastic panes of the little streetlamp were not their usual soft yellow. They were red. The light came on.
Leona saw a daub of blood on the back of her hand. Microscopic motes of plaster dust danced in it as it trailed languidly toward her wrist. Bap. Droplets hung in streaks on the tiny shaving mirror, reflecting themselves. Her note, taped there, was damp and drooping with the red wetness that oozed down the wall in front of her, slowing as it coagulated. The painted porcelain sink was mottled in thickening crimson streaks that converged on the rusty drain. Bap.
Right over her head the make-do ceiling looked insanely like a bisected redwood tree concentric rings of dead brown radiated wetly from a dense maroon bull's-eye. As she looked up, a fresh drop cut loose from the moist center and bap joined the others in the sink. Blood began to steam off the sixty-watt bulb above the mirror.
When she saw her bloodied reflection, her lower lip started trembling. Her heartbeat pulsed painfully in her kidneys, and her stomach felt full of crushed ice. In the mirror, she saw there was just enough lag space behind the open door for something or someone to be hiding.
She jerked clumsily around, wetting herself; a warm finger traced down the inside of her right leg and over the bump of her ankle, to soak into the shabby rug. In that moment she had fully expected a skeletal hand to clamp down on her shoulder from behind, in a graveyard salutation accompanied by the spicy reek of dry, cured, dead flesh. A beetle would clamber off the hand to burrow into the warmth of her thin night clothing. And she would scream and jitter about like a mad victim of St. Vitus.
There was nothing behind the door. Her teeth had bitten away a tissue-fine slice of lip skin . . . and her nails, tucked inside of clenched fists, had left deep purple breves in the soft part of each palm. But none of her own blood had been drawn. Bap.
The gruesome pattern on the bathroom ceiling was now giving up droplets more slowly, and Leona realized with a weird sense of detachment that the blood was drying. Good, it will stop soon and I can go back to bed, she thought irrationally, denying the reality of what she saw.
Bap. A gelid red drop skidded down the front of her nightgown.
Her mind pitched crazily for control and apparently won, though she had to steady herself against the unstained doorjamb. This was real; who was to say it wasn't? Now, her obnoxious neighbors, the sleazy landlord, the decaying deathtrap in which she endured—they all comprised a sitcom scenario much less convincing than the blood dripping from her bathroom ceiling.
Did the grease chimp murder his bimbo? And why should Leona care?
Whistling up the police would take time. They would invade her apartment to dun her with questions and see how shabbily she was living. It was not the image she wished to project. They'd see the curtains stapled shut and scribble things on their pads about how odd she was. Calling the law seemed immediately to be at cross purposes with what Leona wanted to accomplish. But if there had been some kind of mayhem, wasn't it her civic duty to help foster a noiseless neighborhood peace by determining whether the cops needed to be called? And—her mind grasped the notion almost too eagerly—if she discovered something serious enough to warrant calling the cops, would she not have set in motion a series of events that would rid her at last of the losers who had become such a burden to her private existence?
It seemed like logic to Leona, but in her belly it felt like a fiery flash of satori: her precautions, from the stapled drapes on up, for all these years, had worked. The bomb-blast of catastrophe had missed her and hit one floor up. She had lived most of her life as a chicken, afraid, wincing when she tripped over the word xenophobe in the dictionary. For all that time she had been waiting for the moment when she could venture outside her cocoon of safety and see what her stored power could do.
What had happened tonight was the most undeniable of portents. The time was now, and there would be no phone calls to the police.
The sickness in her belly rolled over and became a kind of glowing excitement tinged with residual fear. She looked down at the elongated blood-smear between her breasts; it was talismanic, she now saw, like a standard, singling her out. To return to bed, to relegate what had happened to the realm of nightmare, would be to deny whatever destiny this sequence of events was intended to lead her toward.
Why was she even thinking of going upstairs, she stopped to consider, unless she had just been changed in some chrysalid way?
Carefully she stepped from the bathroom, noticing her constricted quarters seemed uglier now, and somehow used up, like an empty womb. This, too, clicked for her—from this place one either moved up in the world, or . . .
In her mind the voices of her parents chastised her: Yes, quite insane, something about monsters nobody but she can see and things only she could know oh she was such a well-behaved little girl. . . .
Her hands found her robe and belted it about her without looking. She was snug—or secure—when she sprang the double police bolt on the door and peeked out into the real world.
