Poe - [Anthology] Read online

  Matt had found them fascinating. They were an ancient people of several ethnic roots, he’d told her almost reverently, spread all over the world from pole to pole and in all kinds of terrain and climate. You had to admire people so adaptable, he’d said. They served an ecological purpose; they cleaned up after the rest of us; you had to be grateful, he’d said. No, she’d said, she didn’t.

  When Matt got interested in something he wouldn’t shut up, and it had been hard not to let his useless information into your brain whether you wanted to or not. So now, in an annoying sort of haunting, she knew stuff about the Court of Louis XIV, the life of Edgar Allan Poe, the mating habits of crows, and urban legends about pickers.

  Pickers could affect the weather. Some god had sent pickers named Thought and Memory—or maybe it was Darryl and Darryl, who knew?— out every night to bring back secrets from the ends of the earth so he could pretend to be wise and all-knowing, which sounded like something Matt would do. Pickers could divine the future. Pickers could foretell death. Pickers could bring death. Pickers were tricksters; they’d do things to make life difficult for normal people, just for the sport of it—set off car alarms, sell you stolen property to get you in trouble. Back when criminals used to be strung up at crossroads in the woods as an example to the rest of the population, travelers could tell there’d be a body hanging from a tree before they even got there because of the noise of pickers. Pickers associated with large predatory animals—polar bears, wolves, killer whales, humans. They hung around hospitals for the medical waste, and battlefields and slaughterhouses to clean up, around garbage dumps and landfills. Anywhere human beings lived, from caves to cliff dwellings to medieval villages to campsites to farms to mountain towns to this trendy downtown area of expensively converted warehouses and pricey new condos built to look like converted warehouses.

  Matt had found all this disgusting nonsense colorful and cool. Toni suspected he’d made up some of his own legends to add to the lore, so he could be part of something that had gone on since the beginning of history. She hated it. Considering how much you paid to live down here, you’d think they could keep the riffraff out. When she’d said that to Matt he’d looked at her grim-faced and narrow-eyed and informed her self-righteously that they were just people like anybody else. Then he’d died.

  As she came out into the alley now, they paid little attention to her, keeping at their repulsive work like the most natural thing in the world. Their kids dived and rolled and bounced in the dumpster the way other kids played in the ball pit at the McDonald’s playground. Every one of them was eating something. Adults sorted and carried and arranged, making sounds that might have been exclamations of delight or dismissal. Snow kept falling.

  “Hey!” she called and one of them deigned to look at her, a big ungainly woman about her own age. A spot the size of a saucer had been shaven at the crest of her head, and black hair hung below it to the middle of her back—oily, dirty, just like everybody said.

  Toni didn’t like noticing that the woman’s hair was also beautiful, glimmering blue and green and purple in the alley lights with the snow on it. Her bare dark arms looked strong hoisting the sodden boxes of Matt’s books onto the overloaded pick-up. Her long black-fringed shawl was elegant even though it had no doubt come out of somebody’s trash. Her speech sounded intelligent and educated when she said, “Good morning to you, Ms. Barlow. May I take that off your hands?” and reached for the trash bag, which was slick from the snow and faintly stinking. Toni didn’t let go and so they were both holding it, the woman’s fingers intertwined with hers for an instant, no doubt passing along some contamination from neighbors’ bubble wrap, coffee grounds, used condoms, shredded credit card slips, yesterday’s newspapers, spoiled meat, mementoes of sorrow and passion and the excess packaging of everyday life, all secret filth until the pickers got to it.

  “How do you know—” She stopped herself, supposing there’d be plenty of identification in garbage if you looked for it. But this was a dumpster for the whole building. How would the woman know which of its contents had belonged specifically to her? “Get out of here!” was the best she could do as she relinquished the sack.

  When the picker laughed and tossed her head, the hair moved in a ghastly sort of way. Snow glowed in passing headlights. Cold now and wet, Toni moved under the narrow eave of the building for what little shelter it offered. In a reasonable, infuriating tone, the picker explained, “Of course the alley is public space.”

  The dumpster was crawling now with children and even babies. “This is personal stuff,” Toni insisted. “Private property.”

  The woman had broken the trash bag and was peering into it. Toni thought furiously of the dirty diapers, baby food jars, unreadNewsweeks and New Yorkers, and Matt’s hardly-worn running shoes, the thing of his she’d made herself throw out today, after she’d made it through the books one box a day. She’d been thinking that tomorrow’s one thing might be his watch, but wasn’t about to give these people something that easy to sell. The woman pulled out the shoes and tried one on, leaving her own black loafer to catch snow. “When something is designated as no longer of use, personal and private claims have been forfeited. It becomes part of the common landscape we all have responsibility to maintain. One person’s detritus is another person’s sustenance. We do not create waste. We use it.” Apparently satisfied with Matt’s shoes, she tossed her old ones, now powdered with snow, into the pick-up bed. Then she withdrew a small box from under her shawl and offered it to Toni. “Would you care for an herb-wheat cracker? Your neighbors at the other end of the block evidently had a gathering this week.”

  These days the mere thought of any sort of food made Toni nauseous. Now she thought she might actually vomit, though there wasn’t much left in her stomach to get rid of. “No,” she said, trying for sarcasm. “But thanks.”

  “We also have banana chips, mustard pretzels, honey almonds, and chocolate espresso beans. They seem to have had fewer guests than anticipated.”

  For some reason vaguely related to power, Toni demanded, “What’s your name?”

  After a slight but obvious hesitation, the woman said what Toni thought was “Dee.”

  “You’re lying. Why would you lie about your name?” Well, duh. There were a lot of reasons.

  “I was not lying. I was choosing. We have many different names.”

  “How very mysterious.”

  The woman shrugged, “It merely has to do with geographic locale.”

  “D-E-E?”

  “Just the letter D.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite. What does it stand for?”

  “It stands for nothing. It is what it is.”

  “D what?”

  “Rawnston.”

  “How do you spell that?”

  The woman spelled it for her and added helpfully, “It is derived from an Old English place name meaning ‘execution site.’“

  “Lovely.” Shivering and exhausted, Toni started through the snow toward the building, flinging back over her shoulder, “Get out of here or I’ll call the cops. Now that I have your name.” It sounded silly even to her.

  The door was locked. She hadn’t brought her keys. Inside, among his dead father’s belongings boxed and bagged but not yet turned into trash, not quite yet, Ryan was quiet. You’d never have guessed there was a baby in there if you didn’t already know. For a minute she just stood helplessly hoping somebody would come out of the building, dreading the prospect of slogging around to the front in nightshirt and slippers and buzzing the party-boy manager or a tenant she barely knew in the middle of the night.

  A hand fell lightly on her shoulder. She gasped and twisted away. D slid something long and thin against the jamb, jiggled the knob, and opened the door. Faint with relief and unnerved by how easy it was to break in, Toni rushed past and then stopped, not wanting to lead the woman to her unit, then realized that door was also locked and the key on the same key ring.

  D strode ahead. The place w
as a pit—Toni didn’t do a lot of housecleaning anymore; Ryan wouldn’t notice, Matt certainly wouldn’t, and she didn’t care. Matt’s stuff scattered all over added to the general mess of everyday life with a baby. It was stupid to worry about housekeeping standards when your guest was uninvited and a garbage picker.

  By the time she got there, her door stood open, the picker was inside, and Ryan was crying. Toni forced herself to go in.

  They were already in the rocking chair with the blue quilt from Matt’s grandmother wrapped around them. The woman’s iridescent black hair feinted and fluttered over the baby like wings, shorn crest glistening as she bent her head to him. The song she crooned to him in her own simple language was obviously meant to be a lullaby, but Ryan was agitated.

  “Are you hungry, sweet boy?” The picker looked up at Toni. “Do you have milk for him?”

  She’d forgotten. “I—no, I have to go to the store.”

  “You are not nursing?”

  “Not anymore. I can’t.”

  The woman opened her shawl and the purple shirt under it and put Ryan to her breast. It took him a minute to latch on, but then he was sucking noisily. Toni felt faint. “Get out of those wet clothes,” the picker crooned to her, making it part of the song. “You’ll catch cold.”

  Toni’s knees buckled and she sank onto the couch among Matt’s clean socks and underwear and big cotton T-shirts she picked from to wear to bed. “I’m so tired.”

  “Get some sleep. I’ve got the baby.”

  “My husband—” She still couldn’t say it aloud.

  D nodded and kept on singing. Toni was starting to hear nuances in the words and phrases, complexities of inflection and pause. She thought Matt’s name was scattered in there like bits of eggshell, and, though it broke her heart every time, she listened desperately for it in the sonorous chant. Outside, the noise of the other pickers had stopped, and Toni tried confusedly not to imagine what they might be finding in somebody else’s garbage. Ryan was still nursing.

  With effort she said, “I’m okay now. Thanks for your help.”

  “My pleasure.” D smiled but didn’t move.

  Toni snapped wide awake, appalled by her own carelessness. She stood up shakily and took Ryan. D didn’t resist but he did, holding on tight with tiny hands and mouth, wailing when his mother got him loose. “You’ve got more than enough kids of your own to take care of.”

  “One can never have enough children,” D rebuked her placidly, fastening her clothes.

  The nerve of the woman—barging into her home, sitting in her living room as if she owned the place, taking it upon herself to find and hold her baby, lecturing her about being a parent—made Toni stubborn. “You have to dig around in other people’s garbage to support them. Haven’t you people ever heard of birth control?”

  Now D was chuckling. “Noah said something very like that.”

  “Noah who?” Playing guessing games with this person was seriously annoying.

  “There was a ban on sexual activity, but of course we ignored it. After all, when the forecast is for floods and the end of civilization, one would think the goal would be more rather than fewer children, not to mention as much pleasure as possible.”

  Burning with sudden memories of Matt, Toni made herself sneer, “Noah like the Ark? What are you talking about?” The baby had quieted, but she could still feel him trembling against her.

  “So we were evicted.” D’s laughter was hearty, too loud. “Then he called us back to search for land, which of course we found and of course we did not tell him about. Let the dove be his lackey.”

  “Whatever.” Toni backed away from the musky smell of D’s hair and clothes, the shape of her big hands. Ryan had settled down. “Please go now.”

  D didn’t give her attitude. But as she swooped out into the hallway she said, “I would be honored to assist you in taking care of Matthew’s belongings whenever you are ready. We can put them to good use, give them back into the world.”

  For Ryan’s sake Toni kept herself to a ferocious whisper. “Get the hell out of my house!” D made a little clucking sound, nodded, and went away. On the back of the rocking chair was a black plume of hair, tangled in the rungs. She could hardly bring herself to touch it even through the newspaper she used to wrap it and throw it away. When she went indignantly to investigate another tap at the door, she found a case of formula in the hall, half a dozen cans missing and the cardboard stained, two used plastic baby bottles on top. Hand inside a sandwich bag, she threw away the bottles, but the cans of formula were unopened. She found a bottle in the cupboard, rinsed it under hot water, mixed up the formula, and gave it to Ryan in his crib. He wasn’t interested.

  When she got home from work the next day D was back, waiting politely by the dumpster with a big box in her arms. “Good evening, Antonia. How was your day? And how is my little buddy?” Ryan had been fussy from the minute his mother had picked him up at daycare. D came closer to peer at him. “Is he ill? His eyes look a bit rheumy.”

  Terror shot through Toni. “He’s fine.” Struggling to organize briefcase, purse, groceries, and baby, she steeled herself for the woman to try to take something out of her hands.

  Instead, D held out the box. A microwave had come in it; now it was filled to overflowing with baby clothes and jars of baby food. “One of my nephews found these, brand new with the tags still affixed, behind an upscale downtown shop. Sizes six, nine, and twelve months. I thought perhaps you could use them for Ryan.” She added with a sly smile, “The baby food comes from the supermarket. Please save the empties.”

  Toni locked the car, folded her keys into her fist, and carried her precarious load as fast as she could through the gate. Backing up into it to push it shut, she shouted, “Get out of here! Leave me alone!” On her way to the building she dropped her briefcase in the snow, and Ryan almost slipped out of her grasp so she held him too tightly and he was complaining loudly. The minute she got inside she left an irate and, with Ryan yelling, probably unintelligible complaint on the building manager’s machine for all the good it would do. The next day she wasted time and money and sick leave taking the baby to the doctor, who said he was fine although a little underweight, prescribed a higher-calorie formula, and gave her a little speech about relaxing into motherhood and the importance of a support system. Toni didn’t mention Matt.

  She called the cops again but was told the pickers weren’t doing anything against the law unless they were threatening her or panhandling or trespassing or stealing items not set out for the trash. She considered lying, or setting up those things to happen, but it wasn’t worth the effort.

  D was always in her face, opening the car door for her, foisting scavenged items like loaves of bread and bottles of orange juice off on her. She took them and set them on the floor or the counter. “You must eat,” D said, “if you are to get through this hard time.” Toni had no interest in eating or in getting through.

  Having finally slept soundly since his first week home, now he was up and down all night wanting to eat. Nothing she did pleased him, and he wasn’t pleasing her much anymore, either. She took him back to the doctor, who checked him again, again said there was nothing wrong and he’d even gained five ounces, and prescribed something for Toni’s nerves that made her drowsy all the time but no calmer.

  She kept trying to go through Matt’s stuff, intending to get rid of most of it, maybe keeping just a few little things for Ryan for when he got older. Piles grew everywhere and she was helpless against them. Every now and then she’d try to eat, but her stomach cramped after a few bites and she had trouble swallowing. Dozing, fearing, wondering, dreaming, she took one personal day after another and began to lose track of time.

  She also began to lose track of objects. Her car keys vanished for a day and a night and most of another day, and then were right there on their hook by the door. Early one morning, bleary from not enough food or sleep, she finally found the instant breakfast in the top of the coat clos
et, but couldn’t make herself drink it.

  Too tired and sad and scared to worry very much about the tricks her mind or the world was playing on her, she didn’t even panic when Ryan wasn’t in his crib where she was sure she’d left him, just looked for him in one room after another, upstairs and down, until she came upon him sound asleep in the cradle she hadn’t used for months, tucked away in a corner of the ground floor room Matt had, for no good reason, called the study. She didn’t remember putting the baby down here, or digging the cradle out of the closet. But she wasn’t remembering much these days except Matt. She sat for a while and watched the baby. She ate three bites of baby food squash and gave up.

  On another bleak midnight, she came upon the little wheeled stool with the violet velvet cushion that matched the curtains. Sinking onto it, she tried not to remember Matt’s enthusiasm when he’d brought it home. The wheels were loose and the three legs uneven.