Serpent's kiss

'Yeah.'

'Bothers you, huh?'

'Yeah.'

In the rear-view the cabbie offered Dobyns a small white slice of grin. 'What're you, pal, some kind of vampire or something?'

The cab pulled away with the overhead light off, the cabbie's laughter trailing out the window. He seemed to find his vampire gag a major source of yuks.

In memory, the street was a perfect image from a song by Elvis early on, or Chuck Berry or Little Richard-a street where chopped and channelled '51 Mercs and '53 Oldsmobiles ferried dazzling ponytailed girls and carefully duck tailed boys up and down the avenue, where corner boys dangled Lucky Strikes from their lips and kept copies of The Amboy Dukes in back pockets of Levi's jeans from which the belt loops had been cut away with razor blades. The sounds: glas-pak mufflers rumbling; jukeboxes thundering Fats Domino's Ain't That a Shame (forget the white boy bullshit Pat Boone version); police sirens cutting the night and sounding somehow cool and threatening at the same time (like a sound effect from one of the juvenile delinquent movies that always played on the double bill at the State); Italian babies screaming from tiny apartments; Irish babies screaming; black babies screaming; an argument ending with 'Fuck you!' 'Well fuck you too!' as one corner boy walks away from another, not really wanting to get into it (unlike movie pain, real pain hurts); and talk talk talk, wives and husbands, lovers, little kids having just gluttoned themselves on Captain Video and imitating the Cap'n now, and old lonely ladies saying prayers for somebody in the parish, heart attack or cancer suddenly striking. And the smells. Evening in Paris on the girls and Wildroot on the boys and cigarette smoke and Doublemint gum and smoke autumn chill and cheeseburgers with lots of thick whorls of onion and night itself, the neon of it, and the vast harrowing potential of it, too (a guy could get laid; a guy could get knifed; a guy could find God; it was great giddy fun, the vast potential of this night, and it was scary as hell too).

What O'Sullivan wanted to know was how did you get from skinny, gangly corner boy looking good in his duck's ass and mandatory black leather jacket to now-to age-forty-three-thirty-pounds-overweight-worrier-TV- news-director?

How exactly did that happen anyway? Didn't you get to stay eighteen forever?

He stood now in the street of his youth, wondering about this. Sometimes he had the feeling that his life-the life he'd really been meant to lead-was like a bus that was always pulling away from the corner before he could quite get aboard. So instead of being a spy or assassin or lonely cowpoke he'd ended up a news director with corns on his feet, anxiety pains in his stomach, and this dim animal notion that given the dull life he'd led, his death would be anticlimactic.

He hadn't been back in this old neighbourhood in years and if Holland hadn't conned him into it, he'd never have come back, either. Too many memories of when he'd been a reasonably cool teenager unwittingly on his way to becoming a decidedly uncool middle-ager.

O'Sullivan crossed the street toward the address he was looking for.

It had all changed.

What had once been bright was now grimy; what had once been sturdy now leaned and sagged.

Long gone were the teenagers of his time. Now there was a new language, Vietnamese, and it coiled through the dark air like a twisting yellow snake, touching the shuffling frightened old man with his shopping bag as he hurried back to his social security hovel; and the wino on his knees in the alley vomiting; and the fat Irish cop beyond rage, beyond fear any longer, sitting lonely in his squad car eating doughnuts and trying not to think about the fact that he didn't have hard ons anymore, he had soft ons.

The janitor O'Sullivan was looking for lived at the opposite end of the street above a Laundromat. As he climbed the enclosed stairs on the side of the building, O'Sullivan could hear the thrum of big industrial sized washers threatening to tear from their mountings; and he smelled the high sour stench of dirty water washing even dirtier clothes. Even this late in the evening-suppertime-you could hear the sad wail of poor little two and three- year-olds running around on the filthy linoleum floor of the Laundromat while their ADC mothers smoked endless cigarettes and gossiped about their boyfriends, especially black boyfriends whom their social workers seemed to disapprove of on general principle ('Sharon, you shouldn't ought to let him wump on you like that, you know?').

The narrow passage upward smelled of fading sunlight and garbage. There was only one door at the top of the stairs and he discovered it was locked. He knocked three times before he heard something tapping on the other side of the door.

The sound was as regular and odd as a woodpecker's rapping. He wondered what it could be and-

— and then an image filled his mind.

Blind man with a cane.

Moving across a wooden floor.

Tapping.

The door opened up and there stood just such a man. Or at least O'Sullivan thought there stood just such a man. In the dusty gloom, he couldn't be sure.

All he could be sure of was the stench.

This apartment hadn't been cleaned since 1946 or something like that. It didn't say much for his janitorial skills.

'Are you Mr. Telfair?'

'Yes.'

'My name is O'Sullivan. I'm from Channel 3 news.'

'Channel 3 news?'

'Yes.'

'Is something wrong?'

'I'd just like to talk to you a few minutes.'

'About what?'

'Well, when you were employed at Hastings House.'

'Forty years.'

'Forty years?'

'That's how long I worked there.'

'Oh. I see. That's a long time.'

'A hell of a long time.' Then, at least as far as O'Sullivan could tell, Telfair turned back toward the interior of the dusty apartment.

The tapping started again.

In the darkness of the apartment, the tip of the cane against the wood tap-tapping had an eerie resonance.

O'Sullivan followed Telfair around the corner of the hallway and there lay the living room. Light from the street below painted it in various neon colours-blue-red-green; green-red-blue flashing alternately.

O'Sullivan got his first good look at the old bastard. He was blind all right, with eyes the colour of Milk of Magnesia. His head was impossibly small, like a head cannibals had shrunk, with wild strands of white hair jutting out spikelike. His slack mouth ran with silver spittle. He smelled unclean, like an animal that has been sick for a long time. The ragged white shirt he wore on his bony frame was stained as if from wounds that excreted not only blood but pus, too. He kept his knobbly hands on top of a knobbly black cane. When he turned to invite O'Sullivan to sit down, his breath almost literally knocked O'Sullivan over. The stink was incredible.

But what was most curious about Telfair was the fat animal crouching on his shoulder. At first, O'Sullivan had mistaken it for an odd-looking cat.

Now, its red eyes flaring, its teeth dripping hungrily, O'Sullivan saw it for what it was-a rat.

Telfair sat down in a ragged armchair set in front of the room's two windows. Backlit this way, Telfair was entirely in silhouette. The only detail O'Sullivan could pick out was Telfair's white useless eyes. And it was the same with the rat that sat on Telfair's shoulder watching O'Sullivan. All he could see was the rat's disturbingly red gaze.