The Doll

 

1.

Reynolds was waiting out a girl.  He assumed that if he lingered long enough she would invite him to bed if only to get rid of him.  This wasn’t so much a strategy as an instinct.  But instincts are often wrong: a little after midnight, Reynolds found himself on the sidewalk in front of her apartment.  He checked the watch on his cell-phone and saw that he would have to run several blocks to reach the last train to the suburbs where he lived.  He put his head down and jogged along the gloomy side-street toward the boulevard.

That train was never on time and, so, Reynolds expected to make it to the light-rail platform before it was too late.  At the corner, he saw the station, a raised concrete pier under a metal awning standing between the lanes of the boulevard, a chain-link fence wrapped around the site. A stop light interrupted his dash and, when he jaywalked in the middle of the block, Reynolds found himself trapped against the mesh fence protecting the train-stop with vehicles zooming past him on the right-of way.  Beyond the fence, he saw the train skim over the tracks and slide to a stop next to the landing, the passengers standing in the compartments to exit, bracing for the slight recoil when the cars stopped.  People waiting under the metal awning got onto the train while others departed, some walking decisively to the exit, others blinking a little as they looked around and took stock of their surroundings.  Reynolds was dashing up the steps to the platform when the train shuddered, and, then, departed from the landing.  The doors were closed and the train was a series of brightly lit capsules hermetically sealed against the warm and humid night.

The boulevard was a central thoroughfare to this part of the city and the road, split by the light rail, ran between lakes and over a deep river gorge and through commercial and industrial districts for many miles.  There were disturbances a half-dozen miles away in a dilapidated neighborhood where poor people rented houses with ruinous roofs and broken chimneys over drooping zinc rain gutters, old ragged homes amidst shaggy unkempt trees and hedges.  Reynolds cursed under his breath and looked in the direction of the rioting, wondering if he could perceive some trace of the protests in the air or traffic rushing by on both sides of the light rail stop.  The sky was aglow with orange-amber light cast upward into the sky by the innumerable streetlamps.  This illumination was diffuse and didn’t come to any kind of discernible point and Reynolds couldn’t see any flame reflected against the clouds.  Sirens whined in the distance.  The cars and trucks zipped past, driving purposefully, Reynolds thought, as if under some kind of deadline rushing them either toward or away from the calamity.  He had felt imperilled as he skittered sideways between the live lanes of traffic and the steel fence.  But whether it was the civil unrest at the end of the boulevard and in another district of the city, or just the fact that most people on the roads this time of night were drunk or under of the influence, Reynolds couldn’t determine.  He wondered whether he would have noticed, in the passing vehicles, anything different at all if he hadn’t seen the rioting on the girl’s TV, the set turned to the local news, but without sound:  slow-moving crowds of people shadowy in the dim light made gestures of defiance and a store front spilled gouts of flame outward to shine in the broken glass on the sidewalk and a police car was burning next to tire-scuffed curb.  The camera kept showing the fiery police car as if it were the key necessary to unlock the secrets of the night.  

“No trains after this at all,” a voice said.  “The city’s under a curfew.”  

Reynolds was returning his unused public transportation card to his wallet.  He looked up.  A man about his age wearing a pale blue surgical mask was standing between two vertical girders that supported the metal awning.  He wore red sneakers that were conspicuously untied, jeans with frayed cuffs (too long for him), and a black tee-shirt with a slogan written across his chest: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.  

“I guess I’ll just have to hoof it,” Reynolds said.

As a matter of etiquette, Reynolds dug in his pant’s pocket and removed his mask.  It was butterfly-shaped and black with elastic ear-bands.  As he was putting the mask over the lower half of his face, the man on the light rail landing said: “I think I know you.”

As Reynolds arranged his mask, the man in the black tee-shirt pulled his face-covering down below his chin.  Reynolds saw that he was sweating and his chin, pointed and a little protuberant, glistened with moisture.

“You look familiar too,” Reynolds said.

“Pufahl,” the man said.  “We were in High School together, at Washington.”

Eight years had passed.  Reynolds remembered the name but not the face.  Pufahl had been a bully, a swaggering kid older than the other students with long sideburns and a nasty disposition.  He came from a large family of ruffians, was ignorant and proud of it.  Reynolds seemed to recall that Pufahl worked after school in an auto salvage yard and had a car cobbled together from wrecks, a big loud vehicle scabrous with peeling paint-primer.  In order to impress a girl, Pufahl had once tried to head-butt Reynolds, unsuccessfully as it happened – he had closed his eyes as he tried to slam his forehead into Reynolds and missed him entirely.  This embarrassed the bully and, so, after calling Reynolds a name, he just pushed him backward with both hands punching at the other kid’s shoulders blades.  Reynolds didn’t recall whether the blow had knocked his down – possibly he had fallen with the girl giggling at him, but this wasn’t clear.  He remembered that Pufahl’s hands and wrists were all scabbed over welding burns.

“Yes, I know you too,” Reynolds told Pufahl.  

“It’s good to see you, dude,” Pufahl said.  

Reynolds looked around for some exit other than the crosswalk where Pufahl was leading him.  There was no other way to leave the train stop.

On the sidewalk, Pufahl said: “Crazy night.  They got half the city burning out there.”  He gestured vaguely down the boulevard.  

“I saw it on the news,” Reynolds said.

“Crazy night,” Pufahl said.  “We gotta stick together.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah,” Pufahl replied.  “Roving bands of looters.”  

Reynolds noticed that Pufahl’s surgical mask was stained with some irregular brownish spots under the cone of his nose.  The lower edge of the mask seemed to be moist.  On the sidewalk, he stooped to tie his tennis shoes.

“May have to run,” Pufahl said, “And I don’t want these mothers trippin’ me up.”    

2.

The window air-conditioner in the girl’s apartment chugged and sputtered and Reynolds could hear water trickling inside the unit, drizzling down the brownstone wall of the building.  She lived in two rooms with a closet-sized toilet four flights of steps above the sidewalk.  On ground level, the entrance was crowded with bicycles, a half dozen of them chained to a steel pole that anchored the cast-iron banisters on the steps leading to the apartments.  The bikes were parked together so that it was hard to navigate a way between them and Reynolds had wondered if this obstacle constituted a fire-hazard.  The steps and landings were filthy, black with grit tracked into building in the winter-time, and, as he climbed the stairs, Reynolds’ encountered beer cans strewn in the way and some empty plastic grocery sacks flitting underfoot like pale moths.  The windows in the stairwell were protected by metal mesh and were so dirty that the twilight outside penetrated only as a smudged faint glow.  Reynolds noticed that most of the lights in the sockets along the steps and at the landings were broken.

The girl was unconventional, at least, so it seemed to Reynolds.  He knew her from a convenience store down the street from the office block where he worked.  Her earlobes were deformed and droopy from large gage piercings and she had a kind of steel clip driven through her right eyebrow.  She had painted her hair orange and green, a fuzzy tangle teased up to stand in columns over her skull.  The walls of her place were decorated with posters for local bands, tattered placards that were scarred with staple marks where the cardboard had once been fixed to utility poles or the bulletin boards in record shops.  A small TV was set on her kitchen counter, beneath some old white-washed cupboards.  The TV was tuned to the news with the sound muted: protests and riots, ambulances escaping down long avenues, broken glass and people merrily looting while others in the crowd held up their cell-phones like badges to film the chaos.  

Reynolds had come at the girl’s invitation.  She said that he could visit her and that they would “hang out” together.  Reynolds had brought a four-pack of hard Seltzer.  On the table between them, the girl had set a single candle sprouting from a wax-smeared wine bottle.  She had opened another bottle of wine set next to the candle.

They talked about local bands.  She was very knowledgeable and dropped names.  It seemed that she knew some of the musicians.  The apartment, despite its tiny size was warm.  He could see her bed shoved up against the wall beyond the opening into the next room.  She kept her garments neatly folded in cardboard boxes that had once contained bottles of liquor.  In the dark crack next to her refrigerator, Reynolds glimpsed a mouse-trap baited with a gobbet of peanut butter.  When he went to the toilet, the sound of his urine splashing in the bowl was loud, echoing through the tiny apartment.  The bathtub was hidden behind an opaque plastic curtain.  A hamper of dirty clothes, mostly underwear it seemed, was pushed under the little porcelain sink hanging from the wall.

The conversation turned to the protests.  “Enough is enough,” the girl said.  “If the cops stop you, they have all the power and you have none.  That’s just the way it is.”  Reynolds nodded.  “You have to do what they tell you,” she added.  “What kind of idiot resists the police and gets killed for it.”  Reynolds nodded again.  “You’d have to be a fucking idiot,” she said.  She stood up and opened a drawer in the cupboard beside her kitchen sink.  Sharp blades glittered there, catching on their edges the flickering yellow light from the candle.  She lifted out a small pistol.  “I know how to use it,” she said.  “My dad taught me.”  She put the pistol up to her heart, pressing it against her left breast – she was wearing a black tank top.  Then, she set the gun back among the knives and pushed shut the drawer.  

She had a small CD player wired to a black Bose speaker.  She played some of her favorite tunes for him.  Notwithstanding the small size of the stereo equipment, the sound filled the apartment and reverberated in the walls and Reynolds thought that the volume might even upset the mousetrap and trigger it into snapping shut.  On the last song, she stood up and danced a little, swaying her hips and shaking her breasts.  She invited Reynolds to dance with her.  They had only enough space to slowly turn themselves around in circles.  When he reached for her shoulders to draw him to her, the girl pushed him away, giggling a little and opening her eyes very wide.  Reynolds thought that she had beautiful eyes, big and bright and staring like those embedded in the head of a doll. 

It didn’t seem that things were advancing.  Reynolds suggested that they go out and walk along the lake.  A big oval lake stood in the middle of the neighborhood about four blocks from her apartment.  The air conditioner wasn’t keeping up with the heat in the apartment and Reynolds knew that it would be cooler outside.  The little flare of the candle made an orb of heat at the level of their faces on the table between them and they were both sweating.

“I used to like to go walking in the cemetery,” the girl said.  A narrow one-way lane encircled the lake.  A big Victorian-era cemetery full of weeping angels and small marble mausoleums with stained glass transoms occupied the near shore of the lake, stretching back from the beacg and the terrace where the road ran toward wooded heights.  Reynolds knew that there was a chapel with a dome like an Arabian mosque standing among the graves.  Many famous people were buried there – governors of the State and senators and local artists and musicians.  

“We should go there,” Reynolds said.  “No,” she replied, “the gates are all padlocked shut.  They close the place even before the sun sets.  It’s because of that thing that happened.”

Reynolds was in the mood for a spooky story.  He asked her what had happened.

“It was awful,” she said.  “A little girl from a very wealthy family drowned in the lake.  I think it was last summer.  They buried her in the family mausoleum overlooking the water.  But someone broke into the grave and took her body.  They haven’t found it yet.”

“That’s terrible,” Reynolds said.

“The mother went crazy.  She had to be hospitalized because the body was stolen.”

“Who do you suppose would do such a thing?”

“I can’t imagine,” the girl said. “It’s terrible and it ruins the cemetery for me.  If I go jogging down there, on the sidewalk around the lake, I think about that little girl and her mom and it just makes me so sad.”

“It’s a terrible thing,” Reynolds repeated.

The girl stood up and shook herself a little as if to unravel the bad thoughts that had suddenly entangled her.  She put on another song and danced for a while.  She closed her eyes and seemed sealed within herself.  Seated at the little round table, Reynolds watched her sway back and forth.  Her lean body cast a tall, wobbling shadow on the walls.  On the TV, the protesters had attached iron cables to a statue of the Swedish Nightingale, Jenny Lind, and they were tugging at the bronze woman who stood upright on a plinth of pale stone, her mouth open as she were singing or crying out in pain.  Apparently, the people in the crowd were under the impression that Jenny Lind had been a slave owner.

Reynolds looks at this watch.  Things weren’t progressing.  And it was warm in the apartment and smelled of wine and curdled butter.  Making love in this kind of humidity would be repulsive, Reynolds thought.  But he was willing to make an effort and so he thought about whether he should move from the rigid steel folding chair where he sat to embrace her.  Some force held him back, pinned to the chair.

“We should go out for a walk,” Reynolds said.

The girl opened her eyes as if she had been in a trance.  She put on another CD, something more mellow.

“Do you want to smooch?” she asked.

Reynolds said: “If it’s okay with you.”

She came to his side and sat on his lap.  They kissed for awhile.  Her breath was faintly foul.

When he tried to slip his hand under her tank top, the girl pushed him away.

“Not yet,” she whispered.  She went to her refrigerator, opened the freezer compartment, and put a couple of cubes of ice in her styrofoam cup of red wine.

The girl wanted to talk to him about the difference between men and women and a relationship that she had ended with a musician that she admired.  Reynolds indulged her.  When she went to the toilet, Reynolds quickly put on another CD so that he would not have to hear what she was doing in the bathroom.  She came out with her hands dripping wet.  She danced by herself again.

Reynolds looked at his watch.  “If I don’t leave now,” he said, “I’ll miss my train and, then, I’ll have to hike out to the suburbs.”

He expected her to tell him not to worry about leaving and that he could stay the night.

“You had better go,” she said.  “It’s a quarantine you know.  And if you stay, you may have to hunker down with me for the next two weeks. I don’t think either one of us wants that.”

Reynolds looked around the tiny apartment.  “I’d best he going,” he said.  He kissed her on the cheek and, then, rushed to the door and bounded down the steps.  

3.

It was, in fact, much cooler outside.  Pufahl said that he would shake Reynold’s hand but that this was not allowed due to the virus.  A faint smell of burning excited the breeze.  Sometimes, when the leaves in the trees on the side-streets rustled, Reynolds thought he could smell the nearby lake, green with algae, a heavy wet odor like fish or earthworms on the sidewalk after a thunderstorm.  

They walked together in the direction of another avenue on which Reynolds could hike to his apartment about four miles away.

Reynolds asked Pufahl what he was doing for a living.

“I work at an auto body place,” Pufahl said.  “Go out to clubs a lot at night, partying all the time, dude.”

“That sounds great,” Reynolds said.

“How far do you have to go?” Pufahl asked him.

Reynolds said that he lived across town.

“You’ll never make it,” Pufahl said.  “It’s a curfew.  The cops are out and picking people up.  Or you’ll run into some Black Lives Matter dudes.  That would be a bad thing.”

“I’ll be careful,” Reynolds told him.

“No, dude, you gotta crash at my place,” Pufahl said.  “It’s just a block away.  I can give you a ride tomorrow.”

“How about tonight?”

“No can do,” Pufahl said.  “I got some problems with my license and if I venture out and get pulled-over...well, man, I’m fucked.  Really fucked.  Tomorrow, things will settle down and I’ll drive you home first thing.”

“Can’t we make it tonight?”

“Not with this curfew,” Pufahl said.  “It’s too risky.”

“It’s okay,” Reynolds said.  “I’ll just walk.”

“No, you gotta go through some sketchy neighborhoods.  The tribes are all out tonight.  You’ll never make it.”

“It seems pretty peaceful to me,” Reynolds said.

“Peaceful here,” Pufahl told him.  “But the brothers are pulling down the whole city.  You best stay at my place tonight.”

Reynolds thought of the long dark streets and the shadowy parks and the bridge over the deep black gorge that he would have to traverse.

“I don’t know...” he said.

“I insist, dude,” Pufahl replied.  “You know, I insist.  I didn’t treat you so good in High School and I feel I sort of owe you.”

“Don’t mention it,” Reynolds said.

Pufahl turned and they walked along an alleyway between fragrant lilac bushes.  Old garages and sheds squatted next to the rough asphalt underfoot.  Somewhere a dog barked.  

4.

Pufahl lived in the basement of an old house near a tiny park.  Across the street, Reynolds could see a swing set with chains chattering a little in the wind and the metal blade of a slide.  A single lamp illumined a statue of a man in bronze coattails playing a violin over an intersection where three sidewalks met.

Concrete steps led down to a private entrance on the side of the house.  Along the front curb, two old cars were parked, one of them missing a wheel and supported on a cement block.  Big sepulchral stone urns flanked both sides of the sidewalk leading toward the porch and the upper levels of the house 

Dead leaves filled the groove leading to the basement door.  Their feet crushed them.  Pufahl unlocked the steel door and they went inside.

A stack of pizza delivery boxes, almost waist high, stood next to the entrance.  The apartment was cluttered with various sorts of tools, drills and torque wrenches in black plastic cases and a big battery charger on wheels with electrodes trailing on the floor.  Some heavy coats hung from hooks and there was a huge plasma TV screen set against the window wells opening to the outside of these rooms.  Heavy rubber boots lined one wall and there was a latex cape and some work gloves piled in an alcove above the footwear.  The kitchen was disorderly, stacked with dishes in the sink, and another column of pizza delivery boxes piled up on the floor, tilted sideways as if about to come tumbling down.

It smelled as if a bird had died and been mummified on a windowsill or as if there was a mouse petrified somewhere in a mouse-trap.  Reynolds thought about the mousetrap next to the girl’s refrigerator and he shuddered a little.

Through an open door, Reynolds saw Pufahl’s bed unmade, a rickety contraption of metal posts and sagging wire.  A doll, about half life-size, was sprawled across a rocking chair next to the bed.  On the wall, there were a couple of posters advertising horror films.  

“Nice place,” Reynolds said.

Pufahl opened the refrigerator.  On a plate painted with a blue Chinese scene, Reynolds saw some wedges of pizza.

“You want a beer, dude?”

“Okay,” Reynolds said.

Pufahl handed him a beer.  “You can have a slice of cold ‘za,” Pufahl said.

“I’ll pass on that,” Reynolds said.

“We can have that tomorrow,” Pufahl said.  “Breakfast of champions.”

Pufahl asked Reynolds if he wanted to smoke some weed.  “Okay,” Reynolds said.

Pufahl went into the bedroom and rummaged around in a little cabinet between the doll and his bed.  He brought a small wooden casket into the room where Reynolds was sitting on a threadbare davenport facing the big TV.  Pufahl retrieved a remote from between the cushions on the sofa and turned on the TV.  The police precinct building near the protests was on fire.  Shadowy figures staggered through smashed storefront carrying booty in their hands.

“It’s wild, isn’t it?” Pufahl said.

He rolled a joint and they smoked.

Time dilated.  Long silences intervened between words.  The colors on the TV set seemed blinding.  Reynolds thought that the riot was now being broadcast in three-dimensions and the chaos and looting seemed to be invading the living room.  The bonfires lit the mob in strange ways.  People seemed to be darting to and fro with their heads on fire.

Reynolds’ belly cramped-up.  He said he had to use the toilet.  Pufahl showed him through the bedroom to a little stall behind a old wooden door.  It was all white in the toilet and the tiles sprayed clinical light in Reynold’s eyes so that he looked monstrous in the smeared mirror.  He pulled the door shut and barely got his pants down in time.

As he sat on the toilet, Reynolds saw a kitty litter box, clean and raked, under the sink.  The bathtub looked like a sarcophagus and there was a grimy ring around its edges.

It was hard to judge the passage of time.  Reynolds wasn’t sure if he was occupying the toilet for a very long time or just a matter of minutes.  The toilet paper wasn’t on the spool but sitting upright on the side of the sink.

When he came out of the toilet, Reynolds was facing Pufahl’s untidy bed and the doll slumped on the rocking chair.  The doll looked very old, an antique, and seemed to be in poor condition, parts of its waxen face had spalled away to reveal some black substance under the pale skin.  The doll’s eyes were shut and its head was haloed by a bonnet of pale, blonde hair.  It was dressed in a sort of pinafore and had tiny withered-looking hands.

Reynolds went into the room with the TV.

“You must have a cat?” Reynolds asked.

“I had one.  But I had to get rid of it when I got my doll,” Pufahl said.

“I see,” Reynold’s replied.

“You took a real royal shit in my lavatory,” Pufahl said.

“Sorry about that.”

“No problem.  None at all, Dude,” Pufahl said.

The flames and the looters danced on the TV screen.

“You know, I feel I should apologize to you,” Pufahl said.  “I mean I didn’t treat you that great when we were in High School.  It’s something I gotta make amends for.”

“Amends?”

“You know, like in AA, one of the twelve steps.  A man’s gotta make amends,” Pufahl said.

Reynolds nodded.

“I’ve don’t a lot of very bad things,” Pufahl said.  “I’m glad I met a friend tonight.”

“I’m glad too,” Reynolds said.

They watched TV is silence.  Pufahl went into the bedroom, stroked the hair on his doll, and, then, used the toilet.  He kept the door open as he urinated.

Returning to the living room, Pufahl said: “Man, it’s rank in there.”

“I’m sorry,” Reynolds said.

“No, dude, I’m the one who’s sorry.  So sorry.  Just so sorry,” Pufahl said.  

“It’s all forgotten,” Reynolds told him.

Pufahl had pulled his mask down to his bewhiskered throat.  His eyes looked wet.

“So you’ve sort of had a tour,” Pufahl said.

“Sort of,” Reynolds replied.

“Well, you’ve seen my toilet and my bedroom and the stuff in my bedroom and everything right,” Pufahl said.

“I guess so,” Reynolds said.

“Well I want you to know that I’m really sorry for what I’ve done,” Pufahl told him.  “I’m sorry for how I treated you in High School and I’m sorry about the rest of it too.”

“It’s okay,” Reynolds told him.

“There’s a reckoning,” Pufahl continued.  “There has to be a reckoning.  And you gotta make amends.  That’s what I learned in AA.”

“I understand,” Reynold’s said.

Pufahl reached behind his back with his big right hand and lifted a large shiny gun to his head.

“Just tell everyone I’m sorry,” he said.  Then, he pulled the trigger and fell over.  

Reynold’s yanked out his cell-phone but found that its battery was exhausted.  He couldn’t even call 911.  He looked around the house but didn’t see any sign of a land line.  Perhaps, Pufahl had a phone in one of his pockets but Reynolds was afraid to touch the body.

He stood up and walked briskly to the door.  Then, outside, he ran down the sidewalk toward an all-night convenience store about four blocks away.  The clerk blinked at him nervously.  Reynolds was without a mask and his cheeks were spattered with blood.

“There’s been a shooting,” Reynolds told the clerk.

The kid said: “You can take anything you want.”

“No, no,” Reynolds cried.  “Let me use a phone.”

He was on hold for a long time.  The dispatcher sounded weary and irritable.  “There’s been a shooting,” Reynolds said.

“What do you want me to do about it?” the dispatcher asked him.

“A shooting,” Reynold’s insisted.

“There’s been a lot of shootings,” the dispatcher said.

Reynolds put down the phone.  He went into the toilet and wiped the blood off his face.

He walked home through alleyways, hiding from the cops that sometimes roared around street corners heading toward the rioting.  Part of the way, Reynolds limped along under a pall of acrid black smoke.  The sky was brightening in the east when he came to his apartment.