Quite early one morning he saw Crazy Charlie coming furtively out of the house next door. Charlie always tried to attend to those things that required him to leave the safety of his apartment early in the day when there were few people on the streets and in the stores. He avoided contact with people as much as possible, even crossing the street when he saw someone coming up the sidewalk toward him in order to make chance meetings or the possibility of conversation impossible.
This morning, however, Flood was waiting for him. The small red car came down the street a moment or so after Charlie emerged, pulled into its usual parking place behind Raphael’s car, and Flood bounded out. Without any preliminary word, he came around the back of his car and placed himself on the sidewalk directly in front of Crazy Charlie. ” ‘Morning, friend,” he said with a breezy cheerfulness.
Charlie mumbled something, his head down, and tried to cringe back off the sidewalk onto the grass.
“I wonder if you could give me some information,” Flood pressed. “I seem to be lost. Could you tell me how to get back to Interstate 90?”
Charlie pointed south mutely.
“I go that way?” Flood assumed an expression of enormous perplexity. “Man, I’m completely turned around. I could have sworn that I had to go that way.” He pointed north.
Charlie shook his head and gave more specific directions in a nasal, almost trembling voice.
“Man,” Flood said with an ingenuousness so obviously faked that Raphael, watching from his rooftop, cringed. “I sure do want to thank you.” Without warning, he reached out, grabbed Charlie’s hand, and shook it vigorously.
Charlie looked as if he were ready to faint. Having someone talk to him was bad enough, but to have someone actually touch him
“Beautiful morning, isn’t it?” Flood went on in the same breezy tone, releasing Charlie’s hand.
Charlie looked around, confused. In all probability he had not paid any attention to the weather for several years now. “Yes,” he said in the same hesitant voice, “it seems pretty . . . nice.”
“All that rain was starting to destroy me.”
Charlie had begun sidling away, moving up the sidewalk away from Flood’s car, but Flood kept talking, walking along beside him.
Raphael watched the two of them move slowly up toward the end of the block, Flood talking animatedly and Charlie appearing to grow less apprehensive as they went. By the time they reached the corner they were talking and laughing together like old friends.
They stood on the corner for almost ten minutes in the slanting, golden light of the early-morning sun, and when they parted, they shook hands again. Charlie seemed almost wistful as he looked at Flood’s retreating back, then his shoulders slumped again into their usual slouch, and he crossed the street to pursue his early-morning errand.
Flood was buoyant when he came up the stairs and onto the roof. “How ’bout that?” he crowed. “Were you watching?”
“Of course. Wasn’t I supposed to be?”
Flood ignored that. “I’ve been laying for that silly bastard for four days now. I knew he’d have to come out sooner or later.”
“Why don’t you just leave him alone?”
“Don’t be ungrateful. Look at all the sleep I’ve missed for your benefit.”
“Mine?”
“Of course. You’re the one who’s so damned interested in him. His name’s Henry, not Charlie, and he gets a disability pension because he’s nervous-that’s the way he put it `I get nervous.’ He’s supposed to be in therapy of some kind, but he doesn’t go. He has seven cats-he told me their names, but I forget what they are-and he used to have a little dog named Rags, but Rags ran away. Sometimes, late at night when everybody’s asleep, he goes out and looks for Rags. He calls him-very softly so that he won’t wake anybody up-but Rags never comes. Henry misses him terribly. He didn’t tell me the name of the dragon who sleeps on the floor in front of that cupboard-as a matter of fact, we didn’t get into the question of the dragon at all.”
“Jesus,” Raphael said, feeling a sudden wrenching pity for Crazy Charlie and the abysmal emptiness of his life.
“Sad as hell, isn’t it?” Flood agreed. “A couple times there I almost broke down and cried while he was talking.”
“You?”
“Come on,” Flood protested, “I’m not totally insensitive, you know.”
“You could have fooled me.”
Later, when they had gone inside to have coffee, Charlie returned to his apartment. He put down his packages and began to talk animatedly.
Flood watched him intently through Raphael’s binoculars. “I think he’s going through the whole conversation again, word for word.”
“Why don’t you leave him alone?” Raphael said disgustedly, realizing that he had said it before.
“I didn’t hurt him.” Flood was still watching through the binoculars. “For all I know, I might have done him some good. God knows how long it’s been since he actually talked to somebody.”
“That’s not the point. You’re using him-that’s the point.”
“Everybody uses people, Raphael.” Flood still had the binoculars to his eyes. “That’s what we’re here for. You used him for months and never even talked to him-didn’t even take the trouble to find out his real name. At least when I used him, he got something out of it. Here.” He shoved the binoculars at Raphael. “Go on and take a look at him. He’s genuinely happy. When did you ever do anything like that for him?”
Helplessly, feeling somehow furtive, Raphael took the binoculars and looked across the intervening space at Crazy Charlie’s broadly smiling face. He knew that what Flood had done was wrong, but he could not put his finger on exactly what it was that had made it wrong. And so he watched, and for the first time he began to feel ashamed.
Chicken Coop Annie had waddled out of her house to yell at her kids. Flood came down the street and stopped to talk with her.
On his rooftop Raphael knew that the meeting was once again deliberate and that it had been carefully staged for his benefit. He had even seen the brief flicker of Flood’s eyes as he had thrown a quick glance up to be sure that he was sitting there.
Chicken Coop Annie was wearing a tentlike wrapper that somehow accentuated rather than concealed the enormous nudity that lay beneath it. She giggled often as she spoke with Flood, her pudgy hands going nervously to the tangled wrack of her hair.
Flood eyed her boldly as they spoke, an insinuating smile playing about his lips, and Annie glowed, her eyes sly and her expression and gestures grossly coquettish.
They talked for quite a long while as Raphael watched helplessly from his rooftop. As Flood left, Annie raised her arms, ran all ten fat fingers through her hair, and shook her head with a movement that was somehow enormously sensual. When she walked back toward her house, her waddle seemed to become almost a conscious strut. “Her name’s Opal,” Flood announced when he reached the
“Really?”
“She has urges,” Flood said, leaning against the railing.
“I noticed. Are you two going steady?”
“Interesting idea. Maybe if she was a little cleaner . . .”
“Why let that bother you? If you’re going to wallow, why not go all the way?”
“Don’t be crude.” Flood suddenly laughed. “My God, she’s a big woman! You don’t realize it until you get up close to her. She’s like a monument. A woman like that could scare a whole generation of young men into monasteries.”
“Aren’t you getting tired of this game?”
“No, not just yet. The street still has enormous possibilities.”
And again, in bright and vivid morning air, Flood strode step for step with grim-faced Willie the Walker, deep in conversation, their words chopped and measured by the steady rhythm of their feet
Sitting, Raphael watched them pass and turned away in disgust. “Name’s George,” Flood informed Raphael later. “He had a heart attack ten years ago. His doctor advised him to get more exercise-suggested walking. That might have been the wrong thing to say to George.”
“How much longer are you going to keep this up?”
“The old boy covers fifteen miles a day,” Flood said, ignoring the question. “His doctor dropped dead three years ago, but old George keeps on walking. The only trouble with it is that it’s the only thing he’s got to talk about. He’s a walking city map. He talked at me for a solid half hour, reciting the street names from the river to the North Division Y.” He stopped and winced, shaking one foot. “Goddamn, my feet hurt.”
“Good.”
And again as Mousy Mary struggled down the street with two huge sacks of groceries, the ever-present Flood came to her aid with overwhelming gallantry. Suspicious at first and even apprehensive, she finally permitted him to carry one, then both. By the time they reached her porch, they were chatting together as if they had been neighbors for years. Her runny eyes brightened, and her slack mouth trembled now and then into a fleeting and tenuous smile. They talked together for almost half an hour before Flood came back across the street and up the stairs to the roof.