Part 7 (2/2)
”Poor old tomcat,” Linda mourned. She had moved in with Mercer about a month before it happened, remembered his stony grief when their search had turned up the mutilated cat. ”The city ought to clear off these weed-lots.”
”All they ever do is knock down the houses,” Mercer got out, between puffs. ”Condemn them so you can't fix them up again. Tear them down so the winos can't crash inside.”
”Wasn't that what Morny was doing? Tearing them down, I mean?”
”Sort of.” Mercer coughed. ”He and Gradie were partners. Gradie used to run a second-hand store back before the neighborhood had rotted much past the edges. He used to buy and sell salvage from the old houses when they started to go to seed. The last ten years or so, after the neighborhood had completely deteriorated, he started working the condemned houses. Once a house is condemned, you pretty well have to pull it down, and that costs a bundle-either to the owner, or, since usually it's abandoned property, to the city. Gradie would work a deal where they'd pay him something to pull a house down-not very much, but he could have whatever he could salvage.
”Gradie would go over the place with Morny, haul off anything Gradie figured was worth saving-and by the time he got the place, there usually wasn't much. Then Gradie would pay Morny maybe five or ten bucks a day to pull the place down- taking it out of whatever he'd been paid to do the job. Morny would make a show of it, spend a couple weeks tearing out sc.r.a.p timber and the like.
Then, when they figured they'd done enough, Morny would set fire to the sh.e.l.l. By the time the fire trucks got there, there'd just be a bas.e.m.e.nt full of coals. Firemen would spray some water, blame it on the winos, forget about it. The house would be down, so Gradie was clear of the deal- and the kudzu would spread over the empty lot in another year.”
Linda considered the roach, snuffed it out and swallowed it. Waste not, want not. ”Lucky they never burned the whole neighborhood down. Is that how Gradie got that mantel you've been talking about?”
”Probably.” Mercer followed her into the front parlor. The mantel had reminded Linda that she wanted to listen to a record.
The parlor-they used it as a living room-was heavy with stale smoke and flat beer and the pungent odor of Brother Jack's barbecue. Mercer scowled at the litter of empty Rolling Rock bottles, crumpled napkins and sauce-stained rinds of bread. He ought to clean up the house today, while Linda was in a domestic mood-but that meant they'd have to tackle the kitchen, and that was an all-day job-and he'd wanted to get her to pose while the sun was right in his upstairs studio.
Linda was having problems deciding on a record. It would be one of hers, Mercer knew, and hoped it wouldn't be Dylan again. She had called his own record library one of the wildest collections of curiosa ever put on vinyl. After half a year of living together, Linda still thought resurrected radio broadcasts of ”The Shadow” were a camp joke, Mercer continued to argue that Dylan couldn't sing a note. Withal, she always paid her half of the rent on time. Mercer reflected that he got along with her better than with any previous roommate, and while the house was subdivided into a three-bedroom apartment, they never advertised for a third party.
The speakers, bunched on either side of the hearth, came to life with a scratchy Fleetwood Mac alb.u.m. It drew Mercer's attention once more to the ravaged fireplace. Some Philistine landlord, in the process of remodelling the dilapidated Edwardian mansion into student apartments, had ripped out the mantel and boarded over the grate with a panel of cheap plywood. In defiance of landlord and fire laws, Mercer had torn away the panel and unblocked the chimney. The fireplace was small with a grate designed for coal fires, but Mercer found it pleasant on winter nights. The hearth was of chipped ceramic tiles of a blue-and-white pattern-someone had told him they were Dresden. Mercer had sc.r.a.ped away the grime from the tiles, found an ornate bra.s.s grille in a flea market near Seymour. It remained to replace the mantel. Behind the plywood panel, where the original mantel had stood, was an ugly smear of bare brick and lathing. And Gradie had such a mantel.
”We ought to straighten up in here,” Linda told him. She was doing a sort of half-dance around the room, scoopingup debris and singing a line to the record every now and then.
”I was wondering if I could get you to pose for me this morning? ”
”h.e.l.l, it's too nice a day to stand around your messy old studio.”
”Just for a while. While the sun's right. If I don't get my figure studies handed in by the end of the month, I'll lose my incomplete.”
”Christ, you've only had all spring to finish them.”
”We can run down to Gradie's afterward. You've been wanting to see the place.”
”And the famous mantel.”
”Perhaps if the two of us work on him?”
The studio-so Mercer dignified it-was an upstairs front room, thrust outward from the face of the house and onto the roof of the veranda, as a sort of cold weather porch. Three-quarter-length cas.e.m.e.nt windows with diamond panes had at one time swung outward on three sides, giving access onto the tiled porch roof. An enterprising landlord had blocked over the windows on either side, converting it into a small bedroom. The front wall remained a latticed expanse through which the morning sun flooded the room. Mercer had adopted it for his studio, and now Linda's houseplants bunched through his litter of canvases and drawing tables.
”Jesus, it's a nice day!”
Mercer halted his charcoal, scowled at the sheet. ”You moved your shoulder again,” he accused her.
”Lord, can't you hurry it?”
”Genius can never be hurried.”
”Genius my a.s.s.” Linda resumed her pose. She was lean, high-breasted and thin-hipped, with a suggestion of freckles under her light tan. A bit taller and she would have had a career as a fas.h.i.+on model. She had taken enough dance to pose quite well-did accept an occasional modelling a.s.signment at the art school when cash was short.
”Going to be a good summer.” It was that sort of morning.
”Of course.” Mercer studied his drawing. Not particularly inspired, but then he never did like to work in charcoal. The sun picked bronze highlights through her helmet of curls, the feathery patches of her mons and axillae. Mercer's charcoal poked dark blotches at his sketch's crotch and armpits. He resisted the impulse to crumple it and start over.
Part of the problem was that she persisted in twitching to the beat of the music that echoed lazily from downstairs. She was playing that Fleetwood Mac alb.u.m to death- had left the changer arm askew so that the record would repeat until someone changed it. It didn't help him concentrate-although he'd memorized the record to the point he no longer needed listen to the words: I been alone All the years So many ways to count the tears I never change I never will I'm so afraid the way I feel Days when the rain and the sun are gone Black as night Agony's torn at my heart too long So afraid Slip and I fall and I die When he glanced at her again, something was wrong. Linda's pose was no longer relaxed. Her body was rigid, her expression tense.
”What is it?”
She twisted her face toward the windows, brought one arm across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. ”Someone's watching me.”
With an angry grunt, Mercer tossed aside the charcoal, shouldered through the open cas.e.m.e.nt to glare down at the street.
The sidewalks were deserted. Only the usual trickle of Sat.u.r.day morning traffic drifted past. Mercer continued to scowl balefully as he studied the parked cars, the vacant weed-lot across the street, the tangle of kudzu in his front yard. Nothing.
”There's nothing out there.”
Linda had shrugged into a paint-flecked fatigue jacket. Her eyes were worried as she joined him at the window.
”There's something. I felt all crawly all of a sudden.”
The roof of the veranda cut off view on the windows from the near sidewalk, and from the far sidewalk it was impossible to see into the studio by day. Across the street, the houses directly opposite had been pulled down. The kudzu-covered lots pitched steeply across more kudzu-covered slope, to the roofs of warehouses along the rail yard a block below. If Linda were standing directly at the window, someone on the far sidewalk might look up to see her; otherwise there was no vantage from which a curious eye could peer into the room. It was one of the room's attractions as a studio.
”See. No one's out there.”
Linda made a squirming motion with her shoulders. ”They walked on, then,” she insisted.
Mercer snorted, suspected an excuse to cut short the session. ”They'd have had to run. Don't see anyone hiding out there in the weeds, do you?”
She stared out across the tangled heaps of kudzu, waving faintly in the last of the morning's breeze. ”Well, there might be someone hiding under all that tangle.” Mercer's levity annoyed her. ”Why can't the city clear off those d.a.m.n jungles!”
”When enough people raise a stink, they sometimes do-or make the owners clear away the weeds. The trouble is that you can't kill kudzu once the d.a.m.n vines take over a lot. Gradie and Morny used to try. The stuff grows back as fast as you cut it-impossible to get all the roots and runners. Morny used to try to burn it out-crawl under and set fire to the dead vines and debris underneath the growing surface. But he could never keep a fire going under all that green stuff, and after a few spectacular failures using gasoline on the weed-lots, they made him stick to grubbing it out by hand.”
”Awful stuff!” Linda grimaced. ”Some of it's started growing up the back of the house.”
”I'll have to get to it before it gets started. There's islands in the TVA lakes where nothing grows but kudzu. Stuff ran wild after the reservoir was filled, smothered out everything else.”
”I'm surprised it hasn't covered the whole world.”
”Dies down after the frost. Besides it's not a native vine. It's from j.a.pan. Some genius came up with the idea of using it as an ornamental ground cover on highway cuts and such. You've seen old highway embankments where the stuff has taken over the woods behind. It's spread all over the Southeast.”
”Hmm, yeah? So who's the genius who plants the c.r.a.p all over the city then?”
”Get dressed, wise-a.s.s.”
*III*
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