Blood Music by Jessie Prichard Hunter Read Free Book Online Page B

Vanderbilt. A newsstand at the corner of Forty-Second and Madison. A newsstand next to the Forty-Second Street Library on Fifth Avenue. A newsstand down in the subway, or was there? John paid his fare but couldn’t find it. The city had taken out most of the subway newsstands because they were robbed so often. Cheryl had told him that the newsstands were good places to stand beside on the platform, because she felt safe there.
    There was a newsstand at Sixth Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street. A newsstand at Sixth and Thirty-seventh. John walked in a daze. It was lunchtime. He didn’t quite bump into anybody because New Yorkers have a kind of inborn radar coupled with an extreme dislike of being touched. Nobody turned to look at John when he almost bumped into them; there was nothing special in the vacant face, the thoughtless step. There was a newsstand at Thirty-fourth Street, at Thirty-second. John began to think that maybe he would not be able to stop walking, to stop asking. “Do you have—do you have—” “No.” “No.” He stopped at a street corner, not because he saw the light but because everybody else stopped. A woman standing next to him was carrying a copy of the Post.
    â€œExcuse me, is that the Metro edition of the paper?” he asked her.
    â€œI don’t know.” The paper was folded to the gossip on Page Six.
    â€œMay I look at it a moment?”
    â€œI guess so, sure.” The light changed but she did not move as the crowd flowed around them. Page three, John’s fingers fumbled and he stopped at the article. “—released last night from St. Vincent’s Hospital.” John looked at the woman waiting for him to give back her paper. About twenty-two. Pretty. Blond.
    â€œYou shouldn’t be talking to me,” he said roughly, shoving the paper into her hand. His fingers were black with ink. “I could be a murderer.” He turned his back on her shocked and frightened face.
    There had been so little hope, just one woman who had seen the man’s eyes, and now there was no hope at all.

9
    T he woman used to sing the boy songs from The Threepenny Opera. Her memory was prodigious, she sang from The Threepenny Opera and she sang “All the Pretty Little Horses” and Mother Goose rhymes and things he didn’t know what to call, la-la -ings from the music where they sang, there was one about a butterfly lady and one about a funny word that ended in “mouse.” And she read to him from all kinds of books; his favorites were stories from Finland about fat little animals called Moomintrolls. Sometimes in Finland it was night for months at a time.
    When he cut himself she would sing nonsense rhymes to him while she cleaned the wound and put a Band-Aid on. Seesaw, Margery Daw, which is the way to London Town? He couldn’t bear the sight of his own blood.
    The man hit the woman. He was afraid of the man. He knew he shouldn’t be: he should love him. But he didn’t.
    When it was just him and her alone together, she sang. “Und der Haifische, der hat Zahne, un die tragt er im Gesicht.” And they danced. (Her legs were covered with blue and yellow and purple bruises, and she danced so gracefully around the linoleum floor in her bare feet.) There was a piece of music she used to put on the record player when she didn’t feel like singing, he never could remember the name of it, it was harder than the Haifische even, but his mother told him it was the music the universe moved to.
    She taught him the names of the notes on the staff: E very G ood B oy D oes F ine. And, to make him laugh, how to tune a ukelele: M y D og H as F leas. (Sometimes there was a blue or purple bruise around the delicate skin of her eye.) He could say the major scale by the time he was four years old: Whole step, whole step, half step, whole, whole, whole, half. He thought of the notes going up the steps, they were wide stone steps