The Folk Of The Air Read online

  “Tell them you cut yourself shaving,” Farrell said. “Tell them you got French-kissed by the Hound of the Baskervilles. Good-bye.”

  Pierce/Harlow nodded meekly. “I’ll just get my gear out of the back.” He rose and squeezed past Farrell, who turned to follow his movements. He picked up his sweater and groped unhurriedly for the authentic Greek fisherman’s cap and the pocket stereo. Farrell, bending to recover his wallet, heard a sudden sweet clunk and straightened up quickly, making a sound like Madame Schumann-Heink’s transmission.

  “I’m sorry,” the boy said. “That’s your mandolin thing, isn’t it? I’m really sorry.” Farrell handed him his knapsack, and he opened the slide doors and started to step down, then paused, looking back. “Well, I thank you very much for the ride, I really appreciated it. You have a good day, okay?”

  Farrell shook his head, marveling helplessly. “Do you do this a whole lot? I ask out of some concern.”

  “Well, I don’t do it for a living, if that’s what you mean.” Pierce/Harlow might have been a college golfer defending his amateur standing. “It’s more like a hobby, actually. You know, some people do underwater photography. I just get a kick out of it.”

  “You don’t know how it’s done,” Farrell said. “You don’t even know what to say. Somebody’s going to kill you, you keep this stuff up.”

  Pierce/Harlow shrugged. “I get a kick out of it. The look on their faces when it finally starts to sink in. It’s really addictive, just knowing I’m not what they’re so sure I am. Sort of like Zorro or somebody.” He dropped to the curb, turning to give Farrell a reminiscently affectionate smile, as if they had shared an adventure long ago, in another language. He said, “You ought to try it. You’re practically doing it anyway, right now. Take care, Mr. Farrell.”

  He slid the doors carefully shut before he sauntered away toward the clinic. Farrell put Madame Schumann-Heink in gear and eased her into the thickening San Francisco commuter traffic that seemed to be starting far earlier than he remembered. What would you know? Back then, everyone in the world lived on Parnell Street and slept till noon. He decided that whatever Madame Schumann-Heink was dragging would keep until he got to Ben’s house, as would thinking about the events of the last half-hour. His skin felt stiff with dried sweat; his head had begun to thump with each heartbeat. The Volkswagen smelled of feet and blankets and cold Chinese food.

  Driving north on Gould Avenue—where the hell is the Blind Alley? It couldn’t be gone, everybody played there, I must have missed it—he did allow himself to consider, though with some wariness, the matter of the green convertible. At the time, his mind—having promptly skipped town, leaving no forwarding address but only those weary, cynical old suckers, his nerves and reflexes, to settle his debts and post bail one more time—had registered nothing but the driver’s huge helmet, the black man’s jaunty toy sword—was it a toy?—and the woman dressed entirely in gold chains. But the black guy was wearing something like a mantle, a bearskin? And the back seat had been tossing with velvet cloaks and stiff white ruffs and plumes like firelight in the fog as the old rag-top hurtled by. Doubtless the Avicenna Welcome Wagon. The one with the chains must be from the Native Daughters.

  Gould was a long street, stretching from one end of Avicenna nearly to the other and effectively dividing student country and the hills beyond from the hot, black flatlands. Farrell drove until the used-car lots gave way to antique shops, those to office buildings and department stores—damn, what happened to that nice old fish market?—and those in turn to one- and two-story frame houses, white and blue and green, with stairs on the outside. They were old, thin houses, most of them, and in the dour morning air they looked like boats abandoned on the beach, unsafe to take to sea. Farrell’s breath tightened, just for a moment, at the southwest corner of Ortega; but the gray, bulging, fish-scaled house was gone, replaced by a Tas-T-Freeze.

  They were trying to condemn that place all the time I lived there. As unseaworthy a house as ever I went deepsea sailing in. Ellen. Even after so much time, he touched the name cautiously with his tongue, like a sore tooth, but nothing happened.

  Ben had been living on Scotia Street for a little more than four years, almost since his move from New York. It was not territory Farrell had ever known well, and he was flying blind when he turned right arbitrarily on Iris and sweettalked Madame Schumann-Heink up a triple fall of short, steep hills. The houses were changing within a block, becoming larger and darker, with shingly New England angles supporting California sun decks. The higher he drove, the further they drew back from the street, keeping to the shadows of redwood, eucalyptus, and ailanthus, except for a few corner stuccos, parrot-bright. No sidewalks. I can’t imagine Ben in a place without sidewalks.

  The sky was still overcast behind him by the time he found the house; but up on Scotia Street the sun was already clambering around in the vines and bushes, purring, rubbing itself against bougainvillaea. Scotia was a shaggy, cranky jungle, winding and crimped as a goat path—a street meant for broughams, post chaises, and ice wagons, where Madame Schumann-Heink and a descending Buick briefly got wedged into a curve like fighting stags. Unlike the tame lawns and gardens of the slopes below, the Scotia shrubbery was voluptuously brazen, spilling across garage roofs and over low stone walls to link properties in defiant wrong-side-of-the-blanket alliances. A long way from Forty-Sixth and Tenth Avenue, boy.

  He recognized the house from Ben’s letters. Like most of its neighbors, it was an old, solid, two-story structure with the majestically shabby air of a buffalo shedding its winter coat. What made it unique on Scotia was a porch roof that ran all the way around the house, wide and level enough for two people to walk comfortably abreast. “Nothing at all to do with sea captains’ widows,” Ben had written. “Apparently the guy who built the place in the nineties was trying for a pagoda. They took him away before he got the corners turned up.”

  When he parked the bus and scrambled in back to get the lute, he discovered that his cooking kit was missing. Momentarily enraged as he had not been during the entire holdup, he was quickly fascinated, amazed that the boy could have gotten away under his eyes with something that bulky. The electric razor was gone too. Farrell sat down on the floor with his legs straight out in front of him and began to laugh.

  After a little while he drew the lute to him from the corner where it had ended up. Afraid to remove the cloth and plastic swaddlings to check for damage, he only said, “Come on, love” to it and got out of the bus, sneezing sharply as the smell of damp jasmine and rosemary tickled his nose. He glanced at the house again—birdhouses, I’ll be damned—then turned and walked slowly across the narrow street to look back down the hills at Avicenna.

  The Bay took up half the horizon, rumpled and dingy as a motel bedspread, with a few sails frozen under the bridge and San Francisco beyond, slipping like soap through a dishwater mist. From where Farrell stood in the private sunlight of Scotia Street, treetops and gables broke up his line of sight; but he could make out the university’s red-brick bell tower and the campus plaza where he had first met Ellen hustling chess games with freshmen. And if that’s the corner of Serra and Fox, then that window has to be the Nikolai Bukharin Memorial Pizza Parlor. Two years waiting tables and breaking up fights there, and I still always got him mixed up with that other one, Bakunin. The only movement that he could see anywhere was the green wink of a streetcar sliding down through the flatlands, vanishing between the naked pastel roofs that seemed to overlap one another like lily pads all the way to the freeway. He stood on tiptoe for a moment, looking for the Blue Zoo, the warty indigo frog of a Victorian in which he and Clawhammer Perry Brown and a Korean string trio had shared the top floor rent-free for almost three months, before the party downstairs ended and the owner noticed them. Did I dream all that, that time, those people? What begins now?

  Walking up the stump-flagged path to Ben’s house, he unwrapped the lute, his chest aching with gratitude to find it whole. He sat down on the
porch steps, marveling as always at the sight of his own hand on the long golden curve of the instrument, as he had once caught his breath to deny the miracle of his hand touching a woman’s bare hip. He hugged the lute gently into his belly and held it there, and the coupled strings sighed into the air, though he had not yet touched them.

  “Come on, love,” he said again. He began to play Mounsiers Almaine, too fast, as he often took it, but not trying to slow it down. After that he played a Dowland pavane, and then Mounsiers Almaine again, properly this time. The lute grew warm in the sun and smelled like lemons.

  Chapter 2

  The old woman said, “You had better be Joe Farrell.”

  Afterward, at odd times and places, he liked to think about the first time that Sia and he ever looked at each other. By then he remembered no single detail of the moment, except that both of them had instinctively clutched something close—Farrell his lute, and Sia the belt of the worn blue robe, which she drew tight under her heavy breasts. Sometimes he did recall being instantly certain that he had just met either an old friend or a very patient, important enemy; more often he knew that he was making that up. But he felt strange trying to imagine not knowing who Sia was.

  “Because if you are not,” she said, “I have no business being out here at six in the morning listening to a strange lute player on my front porch. So if you are Joe Farrell, you can come in and have breakfast. Otherwise I am going back to bed.”

  She was not tall, actually, nor was she very old. Ben had described her hardly at all in his letters, and Farrell’s first vision had been of a great, drowsy monolith standing above him, a menhir in a frayed flannel bathrobe. As he stood up, he saw that the broad, blunt-featured face was no older than sixty, the dark-honey skin almost without lines, and the gray eyes quick and clear and imperiously sad. But her body was as lumpy as a charwoman’s—waistless, short-legged, wide-hipped, bellied like the moon—although she carried it with all the vivid rigor of a circus wire walker, even in bedroom slippers like heaps of fluffy slush. The bathrobe was too long for her, and Farrell shivered slightly to realize that it must be Ben’s robe.

  “You’re Sia,” he said. “Athanasia Sioris.”

  “Oh, I know that,” she answered, “even this early. What about you? Have you decided if you’re Joe Farrell yet?”

  “I’m Farrell,” he said, “but you can go back to bed anyway. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  Her hair was very thick and a little coarse, gray and black together, like a winter dawn. It fell down between her shoulder blades, caught, not in a ribbon, but with a gnarled silver ring. Her eyes had almost no white to them. Farrell could see the pupils breathing slowly in the morning light, and he fancied that he felt their full weight testing his strength, as boxers will lean thoughtfully on each other in the early rounds. She said, “Am I afraid of you?”

  Farrell said, “When Ben first wrote me about you, I thought you had the prettiest name in the world. I still do, except maybe for a woman named Electa Arenal de Rodriguez. It’s a close thing either way.”

  “Am I afraid of you?” she asked again. “Or am I glad to see you?” Her voice was low and hoarse, the Greek accent less of a sound than an aftertaste; not unpleasant, but not an easy voice, either. He could not imagine it teasing, consoling, caressing—Christ, she’s older than his mother—or telling lies. It was a voice suited only for asking nettly questions with no safe answers.

  He said, “No one’s ever been afraid of me. It would be grand if you were, but I don’t really expect it.”

  She had been looking at him, so it was not that the dark regard suddenly shifted or focused on him more intensely, but rather as if he had managed to attract the attention of a forest, or of a large body of water. “What do you expect?” Farrell stared back at her, too tired and uncertain even to shrug, almost peacefully at a standstill. Sia said, “Well, come in, good morning.”

  She turned her back; as she did so, Farrell felt a curious desolation pass over him—a fox-fierce little autumn wind of abandonment and loss that might have blown out of his childhood, when sorrows were all the same size and came and went without ever explaining themselves. It was gone instantly, and he walked into the house, following a middleaged woman in a blue bathrobe who moved cumbrously on legs that he knew must have varicose veins.

  “Sia’s house is a cave,” Ben had written to him three years ago, having lived with her then for more than a year. “Bones underfoot, little clawed things scampering in the shadows, and the fire leaves greasy stains on the walls. Everything smells of chicken blood and skins drying.” But that morning Farrell thought the house was like a green tree, and the rooms were branches, high and light and murmurous with the sounds that wood makes in the sun. He stood in the living room, studying the manner in which the toast-colored boards of the ceiling went together like the back of his lute. There were books and big windows; mirrors and masks, small, thick rugs, and furniture like drowsing animals. A chess set stood on a low cast-iron table in front of the fireplace. The pieces were of wood, worn almost as round and featureless as the spindles of the staircase. Farrell saw a tall old windup phonograph in a corner, next to a wicker basket full of pampas grass and rusty spears.

  She led him to a small kitchen where she scrambled a lot of eggs and made coffee, working swiftly with brown, rather stubby hands, saying very little and never looking at him. But when she was done, she brought their plates to the table and sat down across from him, settling her chin between her fists. For a moment the gray eyes—clear and savage as snow water—regarded him with an earnest, personal hostility that seemed to lick along his bones, scouring them hollow. And then Sia smiled, and Farrell took a very quick breath before the mischief of the women and smiled at her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “May I take the last fifteen minutes back?”

  Farrell nodded seriously. “If you leave the eggs.”

  Sia said, “Frightened lovers are hideous. I have been dreadful to Ben for a week, just because of you.”

  “Why? You sound like the Pope receiving Attila the Hun. What have I done to deserve all this terror?”

  She smiled again, but the deep, secret amusement was gone. She said, “My dear, I can’t tell how used to this sort of situation you are, but you should certainly know that no one really welcomes the old best friend. Don’t you know that?” Farrell felt the kitchen sunlight stir against him as she leaned forward.

  “Oldest friend, maybe,” he answered. “Best, I don’t know. I haven’t seen Ben for seven years, Sia.”

  “In California, oldest is best,” she answered. “Ben has good friends here, people at the university, people who care for him, but there is no one who knows him except me. And now here you are. It’s very silly.”

  “Yes, it is.” Farrell reached for the butter. “You’re Ben’s best friend now, Sia.” An enormous Alsatian bitch came and barked once at him; then, with that over, put her head on his knee and drooled. Farrell gave her some of his scrambled eggs.

  Sia said, “You knew him when he was thirteen years old. I can’t ever catch up with that. What was he like?”

  “He had a high, shiny forehead,” Farrell said, “and I used to call him Rubberlips.” Sia began to laugh very quietly. Her laughter was almost too low for him to hear; it played at the edges of all his senses, like whale song. Farrell went on. “He was a hell of a swimmer, a really rotten actor, and in high school he got me through trigonometry one year and chemistry another. I used to make faces at him in math class, trying to get him to laugh. His father died, I think when we were juniors. He hated my plaid winter hat with the earflaps, and he loved Judy Garland and Joe Williams and little nightclubs where they’d put on a show with five people. That’s the kind of stuff I remember, Sia. I didn’t know him. I think he knew me, but I was too busy worrying about my pimples.”

  She continued to smile, but the expression, like her laughter, seemed a part of some other, slower language, where everything he understood meant something e
lse. She said, “But you had a room together, later, when you lived in New York. You would play music together, and nothing is closer than that. You see, I am jealous of anyone who was before me, like God. I can be jealous of his mother and his father sometimes.”

  Farrell shook his head. “No, you aren’t. I’m reasonably stupid, but you’re playing with me. Jealousy is not your problem.”

  “Get down, Briseis,” Sia said sharply. The Alsatian left Farrell and trotted clicking to her. Sia fondled the dog’s muzzle, never taking her glance from Farrell.

  “No,” she said. “I am not jealous of anything you know about him, or anything you may have of him. I am only afraid of what comes with you.” Farrell found himself turning solemnly, so truly did she seem to see the sullen companion at his shoulder. Sia said, “Being young. He forgets how young he is—there’s nothing like a university to make you do that. I never try to make him old, never, but I let him forget.”

  “Ben was always a little old,” Farrell said. “Even shooting paper clips in home room. I think you must be younger than Ben.”

  The playfulness came back—again somehow shocking to see turning lithely in her eyes. “From time to time,” she said. The big dog reared up suddenly, putting its paws in her lap and pressing its cheek against hers, so that the two faces confronted Farrell with the same look of impenetrable laughter, except that Sia kept her mouth closed. He turned away for a moment, looking out of the window at the squat gathering of oaks behind the house. The glass reflected, not his face at all, but the single figure seated in the chair across from him. It had the vast stone body of a woman, and a dog’s grinning head.

  The vision endured for less time than it took his eyes to translate, or his mind to sidestep, promising to write. When he turned again, Briseis had started after the butter, and Sia pushed her to the floor. “You are hurt.” There was neither alarm nor what Farrell would have called concern in her voice; if anything, she sounded slightly offended. He looked down at himself and noticed for the first time that his right shirtsleeve was ragged from wrist to elbow, the edges of the cut dappled rust-brown.