The Bad Sky

By Peter Darlington

The letter, was it a hoax? Why would a younger man, a white man, write to him, a retired black San Francisco cop, a confession of crimes from years ago? He may never know. He did know that the story he was reading was altering irrevocably his own life, with a white woman 20 years his junior, a decent pension, travel, a life he had, before the letter arrived, considered pretty much satisfactory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Darlington
• Release date: Feb 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301644889

Peter Darlington

Peter Darlington, a long-time resident of San Francisco now lives and works in Italy.

Book preview

THE BAD SKY

By Peter Darlington

Smashwords Edition

Cover Design and Photography Copyright 2012 Christopher Dye

Copyright 2012 Peter Darlington

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The Moon! The Police. The foghorns of the ocean liners!

Facades of urine, of smoke, anemones, rubber gloves.

Everything is shattered in the night

That spreads its legs on the terraces.

-Garcia Lorca

****

Chapter 1

Ezra Charles, pinching the crippled hinge of his reading glasses, removed them from their precarious perch on his nose as delicately as he could, placed them on his lap, leaned back in his chair and stared at the loose pile of yellowed pages on the desk in front of him. Dead leaves, he mused, blighted autumn leaves that somebody should burn. He congratulated his imagination for bending prosaic geometries into something ragged. He was a cop, had been a cop, was trying not to be a cop; but he was mostly uncomfortable letting his thoughts roam too far off their leashes. As if acting on its own, his large left hand groped for the glasses as he tilted back toward the desk, guiding his right hand to the pile of pages. He lifted and fitted the black spectacles to their familiar roost halfway down his face, happy not to have mangled them further, pulled the top page of the manuscript toward him, hoisted it to within range of the sorry specs, and then, to shift the metaphorical onus to where it belonged, read for the fourth time the page in front of him:

It seems my young friend is now in a hurry, Ezra. He’s exhausted our scant amusements. He misses civilization apparently. My company no longer intrigues him, I suppose, and the natives, well, who can blame him for wanting to flee them. I’m pretty sick of them myself. So a last few words then he’ll rip my toothless babe from my breast and, oh shit, I really must wrap this up.

"I didn’t expect to end up here, Ezra. I didn’t expect to end up anywhere, in fact. Actually, I don’t exactly know where here is, someplace in Mexico, I know that much, unless I’ve somehow crossed over into Guatemala, somewhere, though, a good distance from the postmark that will, if my puny prayers are answered, eventually be tattooed on this package, this over-sized letter. Call it a letter, a bit of information personally shared, assuming my young, intrepid backpacker finds his way back, assuming he doesn’t take the money I gave him, all my money, good old U.S. currency that I had tucked away like a miser, and blow it on whatever vices may have already crept into his tender blood. But he doesn’t seem like the type to do that, still innocent, still idealistic, from what I’ve gathered from our talks, which we have lavishly pursued over the last several, delectable weeks. Besides, there should be plenty left after paying for postage, unless, of course the bottom’s dropped out entirely of our beloved dollar, compliments of your resident madmen, those fairly and squarely appointed protectors of our sanctified way of life.

But really, I’ve no taste for global economics, spilling blood for oil and all that. And what had I been hoarding all that cash for? Did I think I was going to return some day and live it up in the wasteland of the free, as that snippy songwriter put it. I don’t have the luxury to contemplate that right now. He wants to go. He’s hanging over me like a piñata tossing in the wind. He’s anxious, I suppose, to get back home, to TV’s and fast cars and clean food wrapped up in transparent plastic. And why not? He’s grown weary of me already, eyeing me warily now as if I’m some kind of Caliban, some creature who’s just invented a crude language, repeating three words over and over, chewing on them like tough meat. I’m not the talker I used to be. I confess that. What with the rivers of native rotgut coursing through me and lack of practice in any tongue, well, I’ve forgotten a lot. And the writing, it took a lot out of me, left me with just enough word ammo to hold his attention for a couple of weeks. Well, maybe he’ll read this before he mails it off."

Caliban? I don’t think so. He wants to go, though, and I’m still crabbed over this page, still unable to leave off, what is it I need to say? What last desperate plea, excuse, can I now make? Forgive me? Nope, that’s not it. How did the old story go? When wishing still helped. Yeah, when wishing… In olden times. But these aren’t olden times, are they? Look at him, swaying above me, his large pack humping, an old crone now, impatient over her vile brew.

It’s probably ten miles to the next village. There he can get a bus; it stops once a week. He thinks tomorrow. He’s keeping better track of the days and hours than I am. He’s not that much younger than I am, in calendar years, but even he can calculate my age in real years. And behind him, also waiting, scratching in the dust with the chickens, the children, their burnished copper skin glistening, their big brown eyes fixed on him, the circus come to town, again.

I’ve got to dash this off, stuff this last page in with the others, the ones I figured would never leave this shit hole, would never get their chance to flex and strut on a grander stage. I’m being optimistic. What a relief that, before fleeing our city, yours and mine, Ezra, I jotted down your address. And, thank the gods for young German backpackers. What is it about these Germans, some weird magnetic force, maybe, that flings them so far from their comfortable homes?

Ezra paused, put down the grimy, weathered page and reached for the large, crude envelope, fibrous, like a cornhusk, a huge, desiccated seedpod. The German stamps and postmarks smudged on it didn’t quite rescue it from the sense that it had swaddled a content of dubious origin and repute. Mailed from Germany five months ago, it had arrived only a few weeks ago, as if it had traveled along a dark, circuitous route of its own design, a reluctant arrival. Had this young German backpacker read the contents? When had he been given these pages? Ezra felt a twinge of jealousy, a prickly sense of propriety. Why? Were there other copies out there, translated into German, passed around, a dark, literary game? Was this a game, a joke? He willed cessation of these thoughts. They had so many tributaries, all of them disappearing into blank mists of time and distance. It was useless to think about it, solved no mysteries.

He had glanced through these pages earlier, quickly, furtively, had at most a general idea what they were about. Now he would peruse them at leisure, satisfy the unknown itch that the initial, cursory investigation had inflamed. He flipped the envelope aside, sought and found the beginning of the narrative, words written long before the German adventurer had shown up. He picked up the first page of an old tale and resumed his reading:

I’ve been here for over a year, I think, an eternity, a moment, it doesn’t matter what calculation one uses, since one day, one hour, one minute is precisely the same as the next. Will I return, eventually head north to the Coca Cola and chrome, the sinless, empty stupidity as someone once said, someone being sued by Shirley Temple’s lawyers for suggesting she was a child porn star? Sinless? He didn’t give us Norte Americanos enough credit. Return? Doubtful. I’m actually pretty comfortable here, comfortable with my fate, I mean. I don’t think the word comfort exists in the language employed in these parts. Return? To what? For what? Let’s ask this worm, this amazing creature inhabiting the bottom of this bottle of mescal that I am saving for a rainy day. ‘No’, he is roaring, like the dragon he has become inside his little glass cell, his jaws quivering, a huge, infernal ‘No’.

Nothing to return for except to tell the story I am about to tell you, Ezra. Better to do it this way. Safer this way. Enough time to stick in all the details that might otherwise be overlooked. But you can see that I’m concerned, worried that my words (protected for now, freshly hatched, jealously tended like the old mother hen I am) will end up, jesus, I don’t know, the image I’m getting is black rain, a ditch, a barranca, a sewer in Mexico City, the pages scattered, all sailing off on their own little journeys, the ink dissolving, mixing with mud and shit and toxins, hapless sperm connecting with nothing, lost and drowning, a Mariachi band playing drunkenly somewhere in the shadows. But I can’t think about that. I have to believe that, as I scribble away, some day you, Ezra, will be on the other end, lovingly?, professionally?, amusedly?, digging this. We’ll call it a confession, if that’s alright with you.

It’s been two years, I think, since I crossed the late night border heading irrevocably south, my birdbrain afire with escape. I do my best now to keep track of time down here, noting the more obvious celestial rotations, the sun certainly, but one loses count so quickly, so the moon especially, one perfect luminous coin per month, but even that requires more concentration than I can usually muster. Besides, there isn’t time here, as you know it, as I once knew it. Birth, death, and a weary tolerance for whatever comes between those ragged poles are about as far as the reckoning goes.

Ezra hesitated before reaching for the next page. He wanted to examine a little his fascination with what was obviously the creation of a sick mind; as if self-analysis might rescue him from the uneasy sense of complicity he was already feeling. He knew the author’s crimes, tangentially at the police department, but mostly from the newspaper, radio, and TV accounts, a flurry of hysteria that lasted a few months and then was pushed from the stage by something else, something fresher, bloodier. He lit a cigarette; thought about closing the door to his study, leaned back in the chair instead, and took a large, soothing drag.

He hadn’t been ready to absorb this tale properly when it arrived, peeking at it, hiding it from his wife, as if it were pornography or a love letter, skimming through it the first time only to ascertain its broadest sweep, pure lucky chance that he had retrieved the mail that day instead of her. Now he would extract and chew on the details. He tried to think back in order to discover the reasons he was now ready to do this, and could only come up with the fact that he had started smoking again, after an itchy twenty-year hiatus. For some reason he didn’t adequately grasp, his old habit and the manuscript were connected. The cigarette again found its way to his lips and he sucked the smoke from it with an almost mystical pleasure. He placed the square, opaque glass ashtray on his lap, smoked the entire cigarette with his eyes closed, flicking the ash blindly.

When he opened his eyes he was ready to read again. As he brushed ashes off and into the fibers of his dark slacks, he heard the indistinct sounds of his wife’s voice. Without hearing the actual words, he knew exactly what she was saying: ‘You know what your doctor told you about those cigarettes.’ If the voice had continued there would have been the mention of his thoughtlessness, of her widowhood, but the voice ceased suddenly. In the pocket of silence he enjoyed the musky aftertaste of smoke on lips and tongue, as a cannibal might enjoy the taste of human flesh, he inadvertently reflected. He wasn’t as distressed with this whimsy as he should have been. He waited for his conscience to stir. Nothing. His African ancestry asserting itself, his humping, masticating, fevered tribe speaking to him through smoke and blood, he supposed. But again, cautious of these exaggerated sentiments, he picked up the scattered pages, which had taken up a too comfortable residency on his desk, and placed the burden of forbidden thoughts on their nameless author.

There’s very little shade here, so if you’re wondering about those stains: the sweat of my brow. I do my best to angle myself properly, but sometimes I forget and lean out over my labor, my creation, my only solace. I’m actually under a tree, sitting at an ancient picnic table, the kind you see under the cottonwood trees in those ragged little city parks of places like Helper, Utah, or Lovelock, Nevada when you’re driving across our great American desert. My tree (nobody here seems real fussy about property rights), unlike those sturdy specimens in Helper or Lovelock, is really a disgrace to its cousins, a poor excuse of nature’s botanical handicraft; its gray, ragged leaves hang from it like dead, withered mice, lousy protection from the insistent sun, still a fierce yellow thistle snarling through the puny branches.

My neighbors don’t seem to mind the heat, though if they’re complaining, I wouldn’t know. They don’t speak Spanish here, some kind of voodoo language, from the wheedling sound of it, nothing I’m ever going, or would want to learn. We manage our affairs with the ten or so words I think I know, plus a lot of grins, shrugs, and avoidance. I’m guessing they appreciate my presence on some level. Certainly I’m some kind of a spectacle, a welcome distraction from their blunt, unvaried routine. Who knows, to them I may be the demented fruit of some ancient prophecy, the ghostly avatar recklessly promised by some wag of a witch doctor eons ago, himself a dandy with jungle bird plumage attached to every part of his august person. At least my neighbors will have the exquisite pleasure of watching me drink myself to death on their backyard hooch, the sacrifice of their adolescent god. The wagers are already down, a lively betting pool that contains the guesses of my demise, in moon time, most likely.

Sorry, Ezra, I don’t mean to sound morbid. I’m not, really, if you consider that I really don’t mind checking out. It’s not as if I have anything to live for, with the wondrous exception of penning this over-sized note to you (I have at least fifty pens, cheap plastic ones I had the foresight to purchase in Mexico City, and this wonderful peasant paper, Zapatista paper, I’ll call it, a ton of it). I hope I don’t run out of ink. I’m not keen on using the local liquid substitutes. It’s a slow, chicken-shit way out, drinking oneself to death; I’ll admit that, not like my friend’s exit, so clean and precise. But, as old Gizors remarked about each of us being suited for a peculiar chemical balm (his specific injunction, if I remember correctly, was: don’t be washing your sins with alcohol when your soul is demanding opium), this is the poison that fits me nicely, that really suits my personality.

We had our fun, my friend Rufus and I. I’ll call him Rufus, if you don’t mind, even though he wasn’t black. And, if truth be told, it wasn’t a friendship at all, given that most of the affection, the adoration, was a one-way street. But, of course, he had no affection to give. It had all been wrung out of him. I’ll get to that, Ezra.

I’ll tell you the entire story, every bloody detail of it. It’s funny, because I don’t now remember his real name. This rotgut I’m drowning in isn’t helping my memory. I can’t untangle him from Baldwin’s character, the one who jumped to his death from the Brooklyn Bridge. So that makes me Vitaly, doesn’t it? Do you know the book? I’ve forgotten it, mostly. Just the dark river below the bridge, flowing endlessly back on itself, flowing nowhere.

And you, Ezra Charles, where on earth did that come from? Your daddy finding a needle of expression in the dull routine haystack of his churchgoing domesticity? But how would I know about your daddy? I don’t. I’m only guessing, your mama a prim, no nonsense black woman, a kindergarten teacher maybe, a proud woman who knew right from wrong, raised her son proper, your old man a mailman, maybe a bus driver, a sinful predilection for bebop and cigars, a nice little stucco place out in the Excelsior, trying to ignore the crackle of gunfire, or maybe over in Berkeley, getting along with the white folk, keeping the grass low, the fence painted. They raised a good son, I just know they did, poet, boxer, jazzman, old testament shill. Man, what was your old man thinking?

Ezra broke off here. The riff went on for a while. Not racist exactly, but having too much fun. Too much of that way south of the border moonshine maybe, nudging the author off track, if there was a track. He lit another cigarette, picked a couple of tobacco flakes off his lower lip, and inhaled deeply, took in with that inhalation a lifetime of taunts, humiliations, held them inside for as long as he could, then blew them toward the ceiling in a long battalion of pale smoke, a ghostly army marching to oblivion. He glanced down at the insouciant camel and the Hollywood prop palm tree, read the Surgeon General’s warning. Smoking kills. I don’t give a goddamn, he thought, spraying a cheap perfume of bravado over the composting smell of sickness and death. I enjoy smoking. And what other pleasures are now available at my age? He read the warning again, thought of other warnings.

The cigarette package was now a book, on which he could make out the letters, Another Country, another warning, a caution against faggot black writers, traitors to their country, intellectual perverts. He had come across that book before, a long time ago in an English class at City College, one of a list of black writers, Ralph Ellison, Eldridge Cleaver, Richard Wright. He hadn’t gotten much more from Invisible Man or Soul on Ice than he had The Great Gatsby and wasted little time wondering why. He hadn’t read Baldwin then, although he might now. He just might. A strange passion for words was gestating. A faggot black writer, who had hightailed it to France. A black man who refused to be a black man according to any definition, white or black. Ezra was still living at home that first year of college, that year of hesitant literary awakening. Had his mother warned him away from that book, had she seen it among his school paraphernalia? Or had he just not gotten around to reading it? There had been so much to read. He riffled through the loose pages in front of him, jumping past the rant.

None of this would have happened to me without that trip to the dentist. That declaration seems less absurd thinking back on it, the way that monstrous event stamped everything that came after it. Anyway, we have to blame all the mayhem on something, don’t we? I didn’t have a dentist. I’d never had any problems with my teeth. But something was wrong. I was in a world of pain that wouldn’t go away, and even though I did my best to wait it out with my incredibly naïve optimism, I knew that eventually I’d need to see a professional. Months went by without relief. My skull felt brittle, like a little clay jar baking from the inside. One day, I was certain, it would jut crack, break into pieces. "

It was a bad time all the way around. Maybe it was my mood, but it seemed every day there were more and more big, black helicopters, monstrous locusts infesting the usually gray sky. And 9/11, well, jesus, that really perked everybody up, in a poisonous kind of way. We couldn’t even get the usual simple pleasures from the news anymore, like the dog mauling of Diane Whipple, that whole tawdry business with the dog’s owners, a lawyer couple, I’ve mixed their names up with the names of their dogs, Fred and Ginger, if I’m not mistaken, and their dog breeding pal who was doing hard time in Pelican Bay, and -as if the whole thing wasn’t already sordid enough- was having weird sex with the lawyer wife. We couldn’t really relish that kind of digestible news anymore. The war on terrorism changed all that, subsumed everything under its horrible spell, made life dark and sticky, anomalously cruel and scary, like it must have been in Russia under Stalin.

You’re accusing me of exaggerating, aren’t you? Well, it wasn’t really my take, except for those goddamn black helicopters. It was Rufus’ take, and who can blame him? He figured Operation Enduring Freedom was just the old, hard-wired blood lust, playing itself out so that most of us could just sit back and satisfy ourselves vicariously, the spiraling price of that participation being our current climate of fear and hatred. But we’ll discuss Rufus and his take on things in good time. "

And what about the news, that blizzard of noisy, useless information that connects us to all God’s children? I don’t miss it at all. In fact, I’m grateful for the utter monotony that exists here, every day just a casual strum across the loose strings of the gigantic bass fiddle of twenty-four hours, the same sloppy note played over and over. I do miss Dear Abby, though, and occasionally wonder what kind of advice she might offer me. Talk to my parson, I imagine she would suggest, get counseling, say your prayers. It would be something practical and solid, something worthy of Abby. Or have a chat with your neighborhood cop, she might advise. Why don’t you talk to a cop? Well, that’s what I’m doing, right? Where was I? Oh, yeah, I was telling you about my tooth, that little burning rock of pain lodged in my face."

Finally, I looked in the yellow pages and picked a name, an Armenian sounding name, which to my untrained ear made it seem more professional, I suppose, called and got an appointment that day. The office was in the 450 Sutter Building, that cheerless edifice, probably the design of a dying architect, visualizing his own bloated gravestone rather than an ordinary office building. The suite was on one of upper floors, a warren, a maze of oddly connected rooms whose functions were not obvious. The waiting room, the smallest of the rooms, was cluttered with miniature palms in clay urns; dark green wallpaper with brown patterns that could have been anything your imagination wanted it to be further shrunk the room’s dimensions.

It was like the inside a funeral parlor, where life and death blurred in a heaving, sopping anticipation. I was the only person there and I didn’t have to wait long in that dismal place. I was ushered to the back room, a chamber with a ridiculously high ceiling and large, dirty windows looking out over the jagged tableau of downtown. A root canal the technician told me after taking X-rays, a young thing, her large breasts straining against her tight, white uniform. She had thin, incongruous lips, which were unevenly painted, and through which she informed me of the severity of my case. At least she made it sound severe.

The doctor would see me in a moment, she said, grinning crookedly, of course revealing a vampirish speck of lipstick on a yellow bicuspid. By the time the doctor arrived I was manufacturing paranoid scenarios out of the chilled air and the gloomy views of ugly buildings outside of the large, dirty windows. I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t marshal enough energy to remove myself from the tilted chair, which had drained the blood and life from my feet.

I think I know now what those hapless souls, who are marched into an empty field, who, just before they are shot dead, crumpling into graves they themselves have just excavated, were thinking, or not thinking, the ones I used to scream at inside my head while watching old movies or newsreels, do something, swing a fist, stick out your tongue, anything but march into nothingness without so much as a peep. Any fucking thing besides just looking pathetic and dying like a dog.

It was cold as hell in that dentist office, a metallic, softly radiating chill, like the frozen food aisle in a Safeway. I was wearing a sweater and was still freezing, and the doctor breezes in, wearing a sleeve-less smock, noisily yakking about something I can’t quite get, holds up the X-ray with a hairless pallid hand attached to a hairless, pallid arm, leans his rheumy blue eyes close to my face, re-clips the X-ray and… The rest is just a blur. My memory of it now is of a large insect hunched over me, preying on my inert, gaping form. A root canal. I don’t want to talk about it, Ezra.

I don’t know what happened. A month later the pain was more unbearable than before. I went down to the corner store, bought a fifth of Wild Turkey from Rasheed, the Palestinian who was still trying to have a son after six daughters with his nineteen year old wife, whom he had mail-ordered from home six years ago. I took my prize back to my apartment and set it on the floor next to a pair of channel locks, alternatively sipping the whiskey and picking up the tool, getting the feel of it, making it speak its lean, cold tongue, my stark little Senor Wences. Eventually, well, I put the talking fool in my mouth, clamped it on the offending tooth, curled into a fetal position, locking my elbows between my knees, held rigid, then yanked my head back. Amazing how easily it popped out. So you’re asking me, why didn’t I go back to the dentist, to the miniature palms and the dark, brooding wallpaper, that little waiting room to hell?

Ezra chucked lowly, bemused. That hadn’t, actually, occurred to him. Why hadn’t it? Why did the prospect of getting plastered and pulling one’s own tooth not seem odd to him. He didn’t try to answer the question and went on reading.

I guess I must have passed out immediately after that violent tug. I woke up to the shrill voice of the old woman downstairs, yelling at her dog, ‘Bob!’, ‘Bob!’, she was screaming in that Banshee voice of hers, a voice that usually had no difficulty penetrating her ceiling and my floor, but this time was sounding even more crazed than usual, like random shotgun blasts. I was sprawled on the worn carpet, a puddle of blood pooled from my mouth like a word balloon of a very serious comic strip.

’Bobbbeee!’, she was wailing at her dust mop dog, who was probably hiding somewhere, wishing desperately the old woman would just croak and leave it the fuck alone, and, as I lay there, one side of my face squashed on the beige carpet with the hideous comic strip scream issuing from my lips, I remembered once in an Italian train station, Milan, I think it was, a heavy set woman in a heavy fur coat, dragging a dog just like Bob across an acre of marble floor, the distraught, pained look on her face suggesting her inability to dust the that frozen acreage with such an inadequate, recalcitrant mop.

Then I must have again fainted, probably to avoid doing anything about the blood, to avoid the taste of it in my mouth, to escape the sense that I had broken a dam I couldn’t mend. By the time I awoke, the bleeding had stopped, but I must have donated about a pint to the carpet.

It never did wash out completely and I suppose the landlord must have had to replace it for the next tenant, which really wasn’t long after that incident, although I managed to cram enough in that next year or so to make it seem, looking back, like an eternity. Anyway, I got fired from my job, which wasn’t difficult because I had already missed a lot of work with my toothache, and though it sounds strange, my little Edith Piaff downstairs probably got me through my worst days after the extraction.

I needed the small distraction of her hollering, some vague hint that there was life beyond my apartment, even if it was just a shrill voice blasting up through my floor. Unforeseen was another distraction, something I hadn’t bargained for, my fat neighbor next door, barging in to cadge wine from me. It hadn’t taken her long to figure out I was, as she was, house bound. For a while, I pretended I wasn’t there. But her insistent banging at my back door was actually worse than admitting her (I was still showing healthy signs of guilt at that point). She’d show up, day or night, always clad in the same navy blue Gap sweats she had purchased around the new year to inaugurate her new life (she didn’t mind telling me in brain-numbing detail) as a sleek, slimmed-down go-getter, sporting a pair of pristine jogging shoes.

"She had yet to lose any weight and the sweats were getting pretty grungy, but the white shoes remained spotless. She could have worn them to the Prince’s ball, if only she could have dropped the hundred or so pounds she had resolved to shed. She had about as much zest for doing