Ironweed (1984 Pulitzer Prize) - William Kennedy [89]
He would think about this for another incalculably long moment and decide finally there was no way for him to pray: not for Helen, not even for himself.
He would then reach down and touch Helen on the top of the head and stroke her skull the way a father strokes the soft fontanel of his newborn child, stroke her gently so as not to disturb the flowing fall of her hair.
Because it was so pretty.
Then he would walk out of Helen’s room, leaving the light burning. He would walk down the hall to the landing, salute the night clerk, who would be dozing in his chair, and then he would reenter the cold and living darkness of the night.
o o o
By dawn he would be on a Delaware & Hudson freight heading south toward the lemonade springs. He would be squatting in the middle of the empty car with the door partway open, sitting a little out of the wind. He would be watching the stars, whose fire seemed so unquenchable only a few hours before, now vanishing from an awakening sky that was between a rose and a violet in its early hue.
It would be impossible for him to close his eyes, and so he would think of all the things he might now do. He would then decide that he could not choose among all the possibilities that were his. By now he was sure only that he lived in a world where events decided themselves, and that all a man could do was to stay one jump into their mystery.
He had a vision of Gerald swaddled in the silvery web of his grave, and then the vision faded like the stars and he could not even remember the color of the child’s hair. He saw all the women who became three, and then their impossible coherence also faded and he saw only the glorious mouth of Katrina speaking words that were little more than silent shapes; and he knew then that he was leaving behind more than a city and a lifetime of corpses. He was also leaving behind even his vivid memory of the scars on Helen’s soul.
Strawberry Bill climbed into the car when the train slowed to take on water, and he looked pretty good for a bum that died coughin’. He was all duded up in a blue seersucker suit, straw hat, and shoes the color of a new baseball.
“You never looked that good while you was livin’,” Francis said to him. “You done well for yourself over there.”
Everybody gets an Italian tailor when he checks in, Bill said. But say, pal, what’re you runnin’ from this time?
“Same old crowd,” Francis said. “The cops.”
Ain’t no such things as cops, said Bill.
“Maybe they ain’t none of ‘em got to heaven yet, but they been pesterin’ hell outa me down here.”
No cops chasm’ you, pal.
“You got the poop?”
Would I kid a fella like you?
Francis smiled and began to hum Rudy’s song about the place where the bluebird sings. He took the final swallow of Green River whiskey, which tasted sweet and cold to him now. And he thought of Annie’s attic.
That’s the place, Bill told him. They got a cot over in the corner, near your old trunk.
“I saw it,” said Francis.
Francis walked to the doorway of the freight car and threw the empty whiskey bottle at the moon, an outshoot fading away into the rising sun. The bottle and the moon made music like a soulful banjo when they moved through the heavens, divine harmonies that impelled Francis to leap off the train and seek sanctuary under the holy PheIan eaves.
“You hear that music?” Francis said.
Music? said Bill. Can’t say as I do.
“Banjo music. Mighty sweet banjo. That empty whiskey bottle’s what’s makin’ it. The whiskey bottle and the moon.”
If you say so, said Bill.
Francis listened again to the moon and his bottle and heard it clearer than ever. When you heard that music you didn’t have to lay there no more. You could get right up off’n that old cot and walk over to the back window of the attic and watch Jake Becker lettin’ his pigeons loose. They