The water hissed about the old lion cages.
I quickened. I seized the rail of the bridge.
For in one cage, directly below me, a dim phosphorescence bumped the inside of the bars.
A hand gestured from within the cage.
Some old lion-tamer, gone to sleep, had just wakened to find himself in a strange place.
An arm outstretched within the cage, behind the bars, languidly. The lion-tamer was coming full awake.
The water fell and rose again.
And a ghost pressed to the bars.
Bent over the rail, I could not believe.
But now the spirit-light took shape. Not only a hand, an arm, but an entire body sagged and loosely gesticulated, like an immense marionette, trapped in iron.
A pale face, with empty eyes which took light from the moon, and showed nothing else, was there like a silver mask.
Then the tide shrugged and sank. The body vanished.
Somewhere inside my head, the vast trolley rounded a curve of rusted track, choked brakes, threw sparks, screamed to a halt as somewhere an unseen man jolted out those words with every run, jump, rush.
“Death is a lonely business.”
No.
The tide rose again in a gesture like a seance remembered from some other night.
And the ghost shape rose again within the cage.
It was a dead man wanting out.
Somebody gave a terrible yell.
I knew it was me, when a dozen lights flashed on in the little houses along the rim of the dark canal.
“All right, stand back, stand back!”
More cars were arriving, more police, more lights going on, more people wandering out in their bathrobes, stunned with sleep, to stand with me, stunned with more than sleep. We looked like a mob of miserable clowns abandoned on the bridge, looking down at our drowned circus.
I stood shivering, staring at the cage, thinking, why didn’t I look back? Why didn’t I see that man who knew all about the man down there in the circus wagon?
My God, I thought, what if the man on the train had actually shoved this dead man into the cage?
Proof? None. All I had was five words repeated on a night train an hour after midnight. All I had was rain dripping on the high wire repeating those words. All I had was the way the cold water came like death along the canal to wash the cages and go back out colder than when it had arrived.
More strange clowns came out of the old bungalows.
“All right, folks, it’s three in the morning. Clear away!”
It had begun to rain again, and the police when they had arrived had looked at me as if to say, why didn’t you mind your own business? or wait until morning and phone it in, anonymous?
One of the policemen stood on the edge of the canal in a pair of black swim trunks, looking at the water with distaste.
His body was white from not having been in the sun for a long while. He stood watching the tide move into the cage and lift the sleeper there, beckoning. A face showed behind the bars. The face was so gone-far-off-away it was sad. There was a terrible wrenching in my chest. I had to back off, because I heard the first trembling cough of grief start up in my throat.
And then the white flesh of the policeman cut the water. He sank.
I thought he had drowned, too. The rain fell on the oily surface of the canal.
And then the officer appeared, inside the cage, his face to the bars, gagging.
It shocked me, for I thought it was the dead man come there for a last in-sucked gasp of life.
A moment later, I saw the swimmer thrashing out of the far side of the cage, pulling a long ghost shape like a funeral streamer of pale seaweed.
Someone was mourning. Dear Jesus, it can’t be me!
They had the body out on the canal bank now, and the swimmer was toweling himself. The lights were blinking off in the patrol cars. Three policemen bent over the body with flashlights, talking in low voices.
“…I’d say about twenty-four hours.”
“…Where’s the coroner?”
“…Phone’s off the hook. Tom went to get him.”
“Any wallet, I.D.?”
“He’s clean. Probably a transient.”
They started turning the pockets inside out.
“No, not a transient,” I said, and stopped.
One of the policemen had turned to flash his light in my face. With great curiosity he examined my eyes, and heard the sounds buried in my throat.
“You know him?”
“No.”
“Then why…?”
“Why am I feeling lousy? Because. He’s dead, forever. Christ. And I found him.”
My mind jumped.
On a brighter summer day years back I had rounded a corner to find a man sprawled under a braked car. The driver was leaping from the car to stand over the body. I stepped forward, then stopped.
Something pink lay on the sidewalk near my shoe.
I remembered it from some high school laboratory vat. A lonely bit of brain tissue.
A woman, passing, a stranger, stood for a long time staring at the body under the car. Then she did an impulsive thing she could not have anticipated. She bent slowly to kneel by the body. She patted his shoulder, touched him gently as if to say, oh there, there, there, oh, oh, there.
“Was he killed?” I heard myself say.
The policeman turned. “What made you say that?”
“How would, I mean, how would he get in that cage, underwater, if someone didn’t, stuff him there?”
The flashlight switched on again and touched over my face like a doctor’s hand, probing for symptoms.
“You the one who phoned the call in?”
“No.” I shivered. “I’m the one who yelled and made all the lights come on.”
“Hey,” someone whispered.
A plainclothes detective, short, balding, kneeled by the body and turned out the coat pockets. From them tumbled wads and clots of what looked like wet snowflakes, papier-mâché.
“What in hell’s that?” someone said.
I know, I thought, but didn’t say.
My hand trembling, I bent near the detective to pick up some of the wet paper mash. He was busy emptying the other pockets of more of the junk. I kept some of it in my palm and, as I rose, shoved it in my pocket, as the detective glanced up.
“You’re soaked,” he said. “Give your name and address to that officer over there and get home. Dry off.”
It was beginning to rain again and I was shivering. I turned, gave the officer my name and address, and hurried away toward my apartment.
I had jogged along for about a block when a car pulled up and the door swung open. The short detective with the balding head blinked out at me.
“Christ, you look awful,” he said.
“Someone else said that to me, just an hour ago.”
“Get in.”
“I only live another block…”
“Get in!”
I climbed in, shuddering, and he drove me the last two blocks to my thirty-dollar-a-month, stale, crackerbox flat. I almost fell, getting out, I was so weak with trembling.
“Crumley,” said the detective. “Elmo Crumley. Call me when you figure out what that paper junk is you stuck in your pocket.”
I started guiltily. My hand went to that pocket. I nodded. “Sure.”
“And stop worrying and looking sick,” said Crumley. “He wasn’t anybody…” He stopped, ashamed of what he had said, and ducked his head to start over.
“Why do I think he was somebody?” I said. “When I remember who, I’ll call.”
I stood frozen. I was afraid more terrible things were waiting just behind me. When I opened my apartment door, would black canal waters flood out?
“Jump!” and Elmo Crumley slammed his door.
His car was just two dots of red light going away in a fresh downpour that beat my eyelids shut.
I glanced across the street at the gas station phone booth which I used as my office to call editors who never phoned back. I rummaged my pockets for change, thinking, I’ll call Mexico City, wake Peg, reverse the charges, tell her about the cage, the man, and, Christ, scare her to death!
Listen to the detective, I thought.
Jump.
I was shaking so violently now that I couldn’t get the damn key in the lock.
Rain followed me inside.
Inside, waiting for me was . . .
An empty twenty-by-twenty studio apartment with a body-damaged sofa, a bookcase with fourteen books in it and lots of waiting space, an easy chair bought on the cheap from Goodwill Industries, a Sears, Roebuck unpainted pinewood desk with an unoiled 1934 Underwood Standard typewriter on it, as big as a player piano and as loud as wooden clogs on a carpetless floor.
In the typewriter was an anticipatory sheet of paper. In a wood box on one side was my collected literary output, all in one stack. There were copies of Dime Detective, Detective Tales, and Black Mask, each of which had paid me thirty or forty dollars per story. On the other side was another wooden box, waiting to be filled with manuscript. In it was a single page of a book that refused to begin.
UNTITLED NOVEL.
With my name under that. And the date, July 1, 1949.
Which was three months ago.
I shivered, stripped down, toweled myself off, got into a bathrobe, and came back to stand staring at my desk.
I touched the typewriter, wondering if it was a lost friend or a man or a mean mistress.
Somewhere back a few weeks it had made noises vaguely resembling the Muse. Now, more often than not, I sat at the damned machine as if someone had cut my hands off at the wrists. Three or four times a day I sat here and
