Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [110]
I glance down the street to make sure I’m not alone with this grave-robbing smackhead lunatic.
“Can you?” he asks.
“Can I what?”
“See them.”
“No.”
“They’re everywhere. Sometimes they want my food. Sometimes they want to talk. Sometimes they’re angry at me.”
“I bet they are. I bet they’d like to kick your ass. But they can’t. You stole their legs.”
He laughs. Finishes his gyro. Sparks up a cigarette. “My grandmother, she was Roma. You know … a Gypsy?” he says. “She used to tell me that it’s a sign, when the dead appear. A sign of death.”
“Wow. That’s so perceptive.”
“She meant the death of the one who sees them. It’s a warning. It means you’re drawing too near to them, to their world.” He starts drumming again. “Do you?” he says.
“Do I what?”
“See them.”
Why is he asking me that? I wonder. I’m about to say no when I suddenly remember that night on Henry Street when I was walking home from school and saw Truman. I remember my trip to the catacombs, when I thought I heard the dead talking to me. I tell him no anyway.
“They see you,” he says. “They’re watching. Waiting.”
“Uh-huh,” I say, rattled but trying not to show it.
I finish with the jewelry and cast an eye over the rest of his offerings—moldy paperbacks, coffee bowls, dishes, a Pernod ashtray, old porn mags, grimy bow ties, a box of vintage Christmas cards. I’m about to leave when I see it—stuck in a box by the trunk of his car—a small oil. A still life.
I pick it up. It’s really old and really good. The paint is cracked and the frame is chipped. There’s a tiny tear in the canvas. But the painting itself is beautiful. It shows pears, some chestnuts, an old copper pot, and a dead rabbit. My mother would love it. It’s the sort of thing she has hanging near her easel. At home. The more I look at the painting, the more I want to get it for her. To bring it to the hospital tomorrow and hang it on the wall of her room. It’s better than anything I’ve bought so far. Maybe it will help her. Maybe it will do what Dr. Becker’s pills never will. Maybe it will be an iron band.
“How much?” I ask him.
“A hundred,” he says, taking a drag on his cigarette.
I open my wallet. I haven’t got it. Not a hundred. I have enough money for a cab to the airport, with a few twenties left over.
“How about sixty?” I say, hoping he’ll go for it because his hands are trembling, but he tells me no.
“Come on, you need it. You know you do.”
“Not as bad as you do,” he says, looking at my own shaky hands.
I take out all the money I can spare and put it on the roof of his car. It comes to sixty-eight euros and change. “It’s all I’ve got,” I tell him.
He looks me up and down, then tugs on my belt. He’s so close to me that I can smell the lamb he ate.
I step back really fast. “Later, asshole,” I say.
He laughs. “Don’t flatter yourself. The belt’s worth money,” he says.
I get it now. I take it off and put it on top of the euros.
“Keep going,” he says.
I take off my rings and put them on the pile. And my bracelets. He rakes through the jewelry, then points at my earrings.
“Come on!”
“You want the painting?”
I grumble, but I take them off and add them to the pile. I feel naked and defenseless, as if he took all my armor. There’s no metal left anywhere on me. Well, almost none. His eyes go to Truman’s key. I cover it with my hand.
“Forget it. Not for sale,” I tell him.
He stares at the key, then raises his eyes to mine. They aren’t unfocused anymore. They’re sharp and dark. As dark as midnight.
He smiles at me, his crazy eyes glittering. “Life was blotted out,” he says. “Not so completely but scattered wrecks enough of it remain.”
“What?” I say, pretty freaked out. “Why did you say that?”
But he doesn’t answer me. He just laughs.
It’s just more smackhead nonsense he’s spouting, I tell myself. He doesn’t know anything. Not about me. Or Truman. Not about the key.
“Are you going to sell me the painting