Free Need by Nik Cohn Page B

inadequate, skimbleshanks, as he struggled with his jeans, and midway down his left thigh was a dark raised weal more or less in the shape of a bird with outspread wings and its throat upflung. “Lordamercy, what’s that?” Anna said.
    “A birthmark only. I’ve had it my whole life.”
    “Looks like a duck, no, a swan.”
    “What about the roof’s on fire?”
    “A black swan,” Anna said. Squatting by the bedside she scratched at the weal with her black nails, making sure that it didn’t come off, while her bottled red hair in the dimness glinted chestnut and roan, cinnabar, hellebore. “The mark of the beast,” she said. “Just fancy that.”
    Outside on the landing there was a ladder to the attic, where a man rolled up in a blanket lay mumbling, a man the colour of baked clay. “Don’t mind if I do,” he said, seeing Anna, and put in his teeth.
    “God curse you and castrate you, we could all have been pot roast in our beds by now and you still up here pig-happy, dreaming of free lunch.”
    “I thank you kindly,” said Crouch.
    In one corner was a sculpture of Marilyn Monroe with her dress raised to show her panties, and beyond a window looking onto the roof garden littered with dwarf pines, concrete deer, pots of lobelia and portulaca, a papier-mâché pagoda, and a wrought-iron brazier belching flames.
    From inside Crouch’s attic these flames seemed to leap high and wild against the night sky, but when John Joe clambered out for a closer look there was only cardboard, scrap paper, a charred pair of sneakers, one dead sparrow.
    “So piss on it, why don’t you?” Anna said.
    When the fire had sputtered and turned to smoke, she led him back down the ladder inside her own room, which looked more like a junkshop than any lady’s boudoir, stuffed to overflowing as it was with gewgaws and bibelots, old postcards and stuffed animals, Burmese scarves, Chinese slippers, ivory spice-pots from Nagaland, Claddagh rings,
fin de siècle
shoe-lasts for Parisian courtesans, gilt mirrors, vetivert-scented candles, Venetian fans, and many, many pictures of Anna Crow—as a cheerleader, as a Playboy bunny, in G-string and panties, in cherry-pink voile, in harem pants and veil, and almost lifesize in
Swan Lake
, languidly expiring at Mrs. Sweetwater’s. “Just turned seventeen, a slip of a girl, a Georgia peach, a royal pain,
Vain as the leaf upon the stream and fickle as a changeful dream
, Sir Walter Scott, that stale fart, I never could abide him,” she said. “But still and all, seventeen.”
    In this room the light was murky but strong enough for her to see John Joe whole—a sulphurous-looking party somewhere in his thirties, scant and spindling, with his hair croppedconvict-short, dabs of toilet paper stuck all over his chops, he must have butchered himself shaving. And something wrong with his right eye. The lid drooped half-shut, the muscles of the cheek were rigid, and the skin around the eye itself looked raw. “Heavens to Betsy,” Anna said. “What happened to your peeper?”
    “It was an accident.”
    “Of course it was.” As always in confusion, she assumed the position, her left foot angled out, knees braced, sway-backed. “Besides, you can hardly see it, you’d never hardly notice,” she said. “Almost hardly at all.”
    “I had this frog.”
    “No need to explain, no need at all, me and my big mouth with the foot in it, but it was the black swan, you see, it threw me for a loop. Not of course that that’s an excuse, only still.”
    “I used to jump him for pennies.”
    “Good for you,” Anna said. And she meant it, she really did. Though she’d scarcely met this man, he might be an axe murderer or some brain-dead New Ager for all she knew, there was something about him that soothed her. The pink circle around his eye made him look like a panda, well, no, not a panda exactly, more of a mongrel, a mutt. Which she’d always had a weakness for, a soft spot, and why the fuck not? Mutts