A young woman he did not recognize was standing at the row of mailboxes at the front of the apartment. For an instant his chest seemed to constrict almost with fear. From a particular angle she almost exactly resembled Marilyn Hamilton. Then she turned, and it was all right. The similarity was not that great.
He got out of his car slowly in order to give her time to get her mail and go back inside, but she did not move. Instead, she stood looking somewhat distracted, one hand to her stomach, and her face turning suddenly very pale.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She looked sharply at him with quick, hard suspicion. Then she saw the crutches and relaxed. “I think I’m going to faint,” she announced quite calmly.
“Around here,” Raphael said, loping toward her with his long, one-legged stride. “Hang on to the building.” He led her around the corner to the stairs that went up to his rooftop. “Sit down. Put your head between your knees.”
Gratefully, she sank down onto the bottom step and put her head down.
“Breathe deeply,” he instructed. “I know.”
“Are you sick? I mean, do you want me to take you to a hospital or anything?”
“No. I’m just pregnant,” she said wryly, lifting her head.
“There’s no cure for that except time-or a quick trip to a non-Catholic doctor.”
“Is it-” He faltered. “I mean, it’s not time or anything, is it?”
She grinned at him suddenly, her face still pale. “Either you aren’t very observant, or you haven’t been around very many pregnant women. You swell up like a balloon before you get to the point of the trip to the hospital. I’m getting a little hippy, but my tummy hasn’t started to pooch out that much yet. I’ve still got months of this to look forward to.”
“Are you feeling better now?”
“I’ll be all right. It’s a family trait. My mother used to faint all the time when she was carrying Brian-that’s my kid brother.” She got up slowly.
“Maybe you ought to sit still for a little longer.”
“It’s all passed now. Thanks for the help.”
“You sure you’re going to be all right?”
“I’ll be fine. Do you live here?”
“Up there.” He nodded his head at the steps.
“The penthouse? I wondered who lived there. Isn’t it a little . . .” She glanced at the crutches.
“It’s no particular problem.”
“Well, I guess I’d better get back to cleaning my apartment. I think that whoever lived there before kept goats or something.” She smiled at him. “See you.” She went back around to the front of the building again.
Later, on his rooftop, Raphael thought about the girl. In some ways she seemed to be much like Marilyn, but there were differences. Her voice was lighter, and the expressions were different. And this girl seemed wiser, less vulnerable than Marilyn had been.
It surprised him that he could think about Marilyn now without pain or even the fear of pain that had locked away that part of his memory for so long. He found that he could even remember Isabel without discomfort. He experimented with the memories-trying consciously to stir some of the old responses, wondering almost clinically if there might be some vestigial remnants of virility left. But there were not, of course. Finally, disgusted with himself, he thought about other things.
Flood drove by late that afternoon and came up to the rooftop instead of stopping at the house where Heck’s Angels lounged belligerently on the lawn, daring the neighbors to complain. Raphael resisted the temptation to make some clever remark about Flood’s new friends. Things were uncomfortable enough between them already.
Flood leaned negligently against the railing as always. His face seemed strained, and his complexion was more sallow. There was something tense about him, almost as if somehow, in some obscure fashion, things were going wrong, and he was losing control-not only of the situation, but of himself as well. He smoked almost continually now, flipping the butts out to arc down into the street below and almost immediately lighting another. “I hate this goddamned town,” he said finally with more passion than he’d probably intended.
“You don’t have to stay.”
Flood grunted and stared moodily down at the street. “It doesn’t mean anything. This is the most pointless place in the whole damned universe. What the hell is it doing here, for Chrissake? What possessed them to build a town here in the first place?”
“Who knows? The railroad, probably.”
“And the people are just as pointless as the town,” Flood went on. “Empty, empty, empty-like the residents of a graveyard. They have no meaning, no significance. I’m not just talking about your losers-I’m talking about all of them. Good God, the vacancy of the place! How the hell can you stand it?”
“I grew up in a pretty vacant place, remember?”
“You’re wrong. I saw Port Angeles. At the end of his life a man there can say, `I cut down some trees and made some lumber. They took the lumber and built some houses with it.’ That’s something, for God’s sake! What the hell can a man say about his life here? `I buried my grandpa in 1958, my mother in seventy-two, and my old man in eighty-five; I contributed about eight tons of shit to the sewage= treatment plant; and they’re going to bury me right over there in that dandy little graveyard on the other side of the river.’ Fertilizer-that’s all they’re good for, fertilizer.” He turned to Raphael suddenly. “Well, by God, I decline to be a fertilizer factory for the greater glory of the shit capital of America. I’ve had it with this place.”
“When do you think you’ll be leaving?” Raphael asked, his voice neutral.
Flood grinned at him suddenly. “Gotcha again,” he said.
“Damon,” Raphael said in annoyance, “quit playing games.”
“Oh no, Raphael,” Flood declaimed. “You won’t escape me so easily. I will hound you; I will dog your footsteps; I will harry you out of this vacuum and deliver your soul to the Prince of Darkness, who sits expectant in steamy hell. Double-dipped in vilest corruption shall I send you to the eternal fire and the loathsome embrace of the Emperor of the Inferno.”
“Oh, that’s good,” Raphael said admiringly. “I thought you’d lost your touch for a while there. That was particularly fine.”
“I rather liked it,” Flood admitted modestly, and then he laughed, the mocking laughter that Raphael remembered so well, and his eyes glittered in the ruddy glow of the dying sun.
ii
And then in mid July it turned suddenly hot. With no apparent transition from pleasant to unbearable, the temperature soared to the one-hundred-degree mark and stuck there. The streets shimmered like the tops of stoves, and lawns that were not constantly watered wilted and browned under the blasting weight of the swollen sun.
Sleep was impossible, of course. Even long past midnight the interiors of the houses on Raphael’s block were like ovens. The losers sat on their porches or on their lawns in the dark, and the children ran in screaming packs up and down the streets. Fights broke out with monotonous regularity. Since they lived in continual frustration anyway, always on the verge of rage, the added aggravation of the stunning heat made the smallest irritation a casus belli.
Raphael’s tiny apartment on the roof was unprotected from the sun for the largest part of the day, and the interior heated up like a blast furnace. The rooftop was unbearable under the direct weight of the sun. He lingered at work, finding refuge in the dim coolness of the barnlike store, and he helped Denise with the volumes of paperwork that were a part of her job.
The heat added a new dimension to his discomfort. Perspiration irritated the relatively new scar tissue on his hip, and he sometimes writhed from the phantom pain of the missing leg. The swimming that was a part of his therapy helped, but ten minutes after he had pulled himself out of the pool, he was sweltering again.
Only at night, when there was sometimes a slight breeze, could he find any kind of comfort. He would sit on his rooftop stupefied by lack of sleep and watch the streets below.
“Hello? Are you up there?” It was the girl from downstairs. She stood one midnight on the sidewalk in front of the house, looking up at the roof.
“Yes,” Raphael said, looking over the railing.
“Would it be all right if I came up? I’m suffocating in there.”
“Sure. The stairs are on the side.”
“I’ll be right up.” She disappeared around the corner of the house. He heard her light step on the stairs, and then she came out onto the roof. “It’s like a stove in my apartment,” she said, coming over to where he sat.
“I know. Mine’s the same way.”