Feelers by Brian M Wiprud Read Free Book Online

five minutes he was at the door to 901 East 109th Street.
    A man in thick glasses, a sleeveless T-shirt, and several days’ beard stubble came to the screen door suspiciously. “Who the hell are you?”
    “I’m sorry to disturb you, but I just called. My sister Clara used to live here, and I’m wondering if you know where she may have moved to.”
    The man stepped up to the screen. “What am I, the goddamn yellow pages? Get the fuck out of here, creep.”
    At first the owner of 901 East 109th Street thought that the stranger had punched him in the chest through the screen. As he staggered back, he looked down and saw blood soaking his T-shirt. When he lifted his hand from his chest, he saw the blood pumping out.
    “Fuck! You stabbed me!” His vision swam as he dropped to the floor, more from alarm than the wound. He didn’t know what else to say to the retreating stranger other than: “Asshole!”
    Danny looked back. “Sorry.” He had been conditioned not to allow himself to be talked down. In prison, where status is everything, it can amount to a demotion, especially by someone of a lower standing, like the rude man who lived in his sister’s house. If you let yourself be talked down, the prisoners sense weakness and take advantage. Take food. Take you.
    As he walked back to the avenue, Danny knew he should not have killed the man. Then again, there was no reason the man at 901 East 109th Street had to be so rude and hostile. Well, there was nothing to do about it, and probably no consequences. The man didn’t know him, he didn’t know the man, and Danny knew he’d got a good shot in, right into the aorta, the major artery sticking down from the heart. Rude Man would be dead in a minute or so. Danny dropped ice pick number three down a drainage basin.
    The sun was getting low. Danny needed a place to stay, so hewalked over near the highway where he knew there used to be a motel on the service road. It was still there, a bump and thump called the Luna Motel. They call this kind of motel a bump and thump because those are the sounds you hear through the wall from the other rooms. I’m told some call them Motel No-tell. So the desk clerk was not surprised that Danny had no luggage, just that there was no woman in tow.
    The place was cleaner than Danny remembered. Yes, he’d been there with the woman who ruined him, with Delores, and even the girlfriend before that. In Brooklyn, most kids live in pretty close quarters with their family in row houses, apartments, or small houses with several kids to a room. It’s hard to make love to your woman with any privacy, and it becomes tiresome doing it in the park on the picnic tables. So once in a while you spring for a bump and thump.
    The clerk was actually a polite teenager with close-shaven scalp who looked like he was chewing an entire pack of gum.
    “OK, Mr. Roberts, here you go.” He handed Danny a plastic card. “Down there, up one flight, make a right, five or six doors on your left.”
    “Thank you.” Danny held up the card. “What about a key?”
    “That is the key, sir. Just slide it in the slot on the door.”
    “Thank you.”
    Danny managed to get into his room with the card. Then he called the front desk and said he wanted pizza and beer, and the nice kid at the desk dialed the number for him.
    Pizza and beer. Danny had dreamed of it for fifteen years as though it were pure ambrosia. When it came, it was.
    It was nice to flip the channels by himself and watch anything on TV that he wanted. After drinking all six beers, he slowly reclined on the bed and dozed.
    Mostly, though, Danny lay awake, listening to the bumps and thumps, remembering the times he’d been there before. Remembering sex, the female kind. And it struck him how those muted sounds were not much different from those in prison, where he’d been just the night before, unable to sleep. In Sing Sing, there are all sorts of subtle sounds at night of men doing things they shouldn’t,