Blood and Water and Other Tales Read Free

to go bad, and the trucks were soon rolling again—stinking ripely and clouded with insects, noxious monsters trumpeting and wheezing through the midnight streets. The one that serviced my block was called The Pioneer , and on the side of it was painted a covered wagon rumbling across some western prairie. When I found myself downwind of The Pioneer , I thought, unkindly, of Harry.
    It was at around this time that I began to toy with the notion of a historical novel about heretics. I’d chanced upon a gnostic tale in which Satan, a great god, creates a human body and persuades a spirit called Arbal-Jesus to project his being into it for a few moments. Arbal-Jesus complies with Satan’s seemingly innocent request, but once inside the body he finds himself trapped, and cannot escape. He screams in agony, but Satan only laughs; and then mocks his captive by sexually violating him. Arbal-Jesus’ only consolation is that another spirit accompanies him in the body, and guarantees his release. That spirit is Death.
    But then the brief taste of fall vanished, and the heat returned with greater ferocity than ever. On my way out one morning I met Harry. “Bernard,” he said, “why do I never see you now?” I felt guilty. He looked rather more seedy than usual; his jaw was stubbled with fine white hairs, and traces of dried blood adhered to his nostrils. His bony fingers clutched my arm. “Come down this evening,” he said. “I have gin.” Poor old man, I thought, lonely and shabby, scraping about in two rooms after all these years... why does he still cling to the raft?
    I knocked on Harry’s door around seven. All was as usual—the smells, the gin, the Chrysler Building rising like a jeweled spearhead against the sky, and upon Harry’s wall the crucifix shining in the shadows of the fading day. Poor old Harry; I sensed immediately he wanted to continue with his story, but was holding back out of deference to me. I felt compelled to reopen the subject, though not simply out of courtesy to an old man’s obsession. I had been thinking some more about this shadowy figure, the beautiful, decadent Anson Havershaw, he of the milk-white flesh and the nonexistent navel, and about Harry’s cryptic but no doubt carnal relationship with him. It was, I felt, a most bizarre fiction he had begun to weave about a man who, I presumed, had in fact actually existed, and indeed might still be alive.
    So Harry began to talk. He described how Anson swept him into a summer of hectic and dazzling pleasures, of long nights, riotous and frenzied, when all of America seemed to be convulsed in a spasm of fevered gaiety, and the two of them had moved through the revels like a pair of gods, languid, elegant, twin souls presiding with heavy-lidded eyes over the nation’s binge. That summer, the summer of 1925, Harry often found himself leaving Anson’s house in the first light of dawn, still in evening clothes, and slipping into the welcome gloom of St. Ignatius Loyola on Park Avenue. “You wouldn’t know it, Bernard,” he said; “they tore it down in 1947. A lovely church, Gothic Revival; I miss it... at the early Mass it would be lit only by the dim, blood-red glow from the stained-glass windows, and by a pair of white candles that rose from gilded holders on either side of the altar and threw out a gorgeous, shimmering halo... The priest I knew well, an ascetic young Jesuit; I remember how his pale face caught the candlelight as he turned to the congregation—the whole effect was so strangely beautiful, Bernard, if you had seen it you would understand the attraction Catholicism held for so many of us... it was the emotional appeal, really; disciplined Christianity we found more difficult to embrace...”
    Harry rambled on in this vein for some minutes, his eyes on the spire and his fingers curled about his glass. My own thoughts drifted off down parallel tracks, lulled comfortably by his voice. As a raconteur Harry was slow and fastidious;