The Shelter.

Gildner, Gary

Come sundown at The Shelter, Hector, lean and burning, slides deeper and deeper into his buttery trombone. Miss Wulf, tilting on her short leg, saws and taps the glitter-coated baton she resurrected from home against the triangle she found at City Pawn--saws and taps, her chin bunched, as if determined this time to lead them, heads high, shoulders back, down Salmon Avenue and across lush bright turf to glory. But listen to the music, mon. No matter where the world might be watching for them, or how--flower in the buttonhole or buttoned up tight--until he, Hector Romero Guterrez Lopez, and she, Miss Hannah Mannaheim Wulf, are fully together, their song "Green Eyes" will always end up moaning, lonesome, and longing, as if they are huddled yet again beside a smoky oil drum fire at the ash pile edges of a cold junkyard.

In their cages the strays, the foundlings and misbegotten, howl at Hector's syrupy-turned-dirgelike notes, and when they are full of happiness, curl into their private heaps and lick their chops schlup schlup to sleep. That's how it goes, night after night.

When the performance--no, get it right, their inalienable declaration--is finished, Hector slowly unpeels the red silk wrapping his neck and wipes his eyes with this abundant handkerchief that Hannah gave him last Christmas. To Angel, it is nearly the size of a flag, though the country it might fly over is anybody's guess: painted dead-center is an image, both realistic and surreal, both sacred and profane, of The Virgin encircled by a lasso of nasty black barbed wire not quite touching her, and floating above where her head would be is a halo of thick cruel yellow rope. Where her head would be resides a perfect full moon, and clinging to it is a miniature leggy female in tight white short-shorts seen from the back.

This female climbing The Virgin's moon-head has, okay, a nice ass, but you know what else Hector is made to think about? Huh? Jack Teagarden singing and blowin' his 'bone on "After You've Gone." After you've gone and left me crying. Like that. Like walking home alone in the moonlight to a dull room. And maybe he thinks of Tommy D., too, yeah, the Dorsey brother, because square as he was he hit it perfecto, in Hector's humble opinion, on that "Song of India" number, how he goes round and round following something real fine--not just a nice piece of tail--using the mute. You think that's easy to pull off? Hector's all-time man, though, is Trummy. J.J. Johnson, Dicky Wells, Frank Rosolino, Willie Wilson, Vic Dickenson--they all good, or he wouldn't search the dusty bins of used record shops or those moldy boxes at St. Vincent de Paul's to find them. But Trummy Young is satisfaction, period. "On the Sunny Side of the Street," baby. He wants to be there, hot and happy, with his main man and his one true love. Never mind that her ear has a lotta tin. She got bounce, mon, she got heart and soul and can draw pictures like a regular Picasso. Because she's an artist, plain and simple. How many care, huh? Okay, she got a nice ass too, and put it on this hanky for him, but only he suppose to know about that, okay?

"She hangs on like a spider," Hannah said, presenting her gift. He gazed at the image a long time, holding the hanky up by two corners, then he gazed at the giver. "She doan look like no spider to me, mi amore." Which brought total shine to her pearly eyes, which of course are green.

Hannah gave him his gift early because she couldn't see him on Christmas or even the day before. It breaks Angel's heart how the girl's parents, especially the father, do not cotton--big time--to Hector and how much she yearns for him and vice versa. Look, an impartial witness who has been around, as Angel has, would admit that neither one is exactly a prize. She's got the short leg, his ears stick out like warnings, her lips look almost thin enough to cut when she kisses, he has no extra flesh on his frame, none, in case he gets sick. But so what? These flaws, if flaws is the word, mean nothing. Nor does it matter that both went through high school dateless, she on the snooty East side and he over on the dusty, dangerous West. The real point is that they are lovers, doomed forever to the steamy core. Face facts, or nature, is Angel's view, and let them live, for God's sake--they are twenty-six this year, going on forty!

How they first met--when they first noticed each other--is their favorite story. Told and retold in soft breaths like maybe they're privately into religion, star-gazing even when the sky is blue or cloudy or hosting a whipping rain from the ocean an hour away, though they don't mind letting Angel listen in. "Hey," Angel drawls, "I just work here--I still work here--please explain to me why."

Anyway, there she was, Miss Hannah Wulf, eighteen, straight A's in Twirling and Getting Along since forever, waiting to lead the visiting Beavers' crack marching band onto the Trojans' pathetic weed-patch for their share of the halftime show, and there he was, same age, six-foot-four, straight A's in nothing, not even Music (where he alternated between brilliance and brooding), finishing his solo on the fifty-yard line, a wild sixty-four bar answer to the question asked by "How High the Moon?" His cheeks were aflame, his 'bone was aflame, the slide going in and out as if greased by a torrent of romantic torment nobody--not even dues-paying fellow-sufferers--could ever know. And yet she got the message, the agony, the ecstasy, as well as a serious case of prickly shivers running everywhere unrestrained, most hotly all the way down the back of her smoothly muscled good leg and the gimpy one, too. Whew!

Who was that guy?

Guy, he rock from side to side, he lean back on his heels and aim his axe at the full-tit moon exposed up there between two puny skinnyass banks of lights and blew his guts out, mon, blew his brains to a brand new constellation, blew like there was no next thing--no crummy West Side High, no Trojan asshole football players pushing him in the hall one time too many, so okay he push back, no Mister Punjay the principal sitting him down all afternoon on a stinking chair to think about it--what the hell he mean, that Indian faggot? I think every second, mon, every step I take. Anyway, this tall, tall guy, Number One Horn, come down with the 'bone after going round and round that perfect pearl of skin, mon, that dream titty, simmering down, to land his fire, and there she is looking at him from under that hoomongous white hat with sparkles on her nice pushed-up front and her mouth wide open, showing him those shiny gems, those choppers a la king, and here is the truth on his adopted mother's grave: he wanted to lick them one cool dish at a time. Slow. Like ice cream, mon.

And this was only one interpretation of their tale.

Ah, the sweet ache of love not truly consummated! And on it goes. Hannah will be running the vacuum, say, their eyes meet, and he has to pull the cord.

"Baby, baby, I got a crush on you."

"Me too, you."

"Night and day, you are the one."

"One plus one."

"The moment you speak, I wanna go play hide-and-seek."

"Been listening to Frank, Hector."

"Sinatra the boss, baby. He say I need to have you every day."

"Ole!"

"Baby, I tell you--"

"Tell me."

"I tell you when Frank is going 'I Got You Under My Skin' and the break comes, and then that great solo by Milt Bernhart working his 'bone, working, working, and then he explodes!--I mean I inside you, baby, I--"

"Hector, Hector," Angel pleads from her desk, "mon, let up a minute, you are making me wet."

Hannah will take her blush and return to sweeping. Hector grabs a bag of Young Dog Formula Number One and disappears into New Arrivals, the section of The Shelter devoted to abandoned puppies. He likes this part--it stands for his personal objective correlative (a term he learned from Angel, who is taking a poetry class and is so nutty crazy for her teacher who is old enough to be her grandfather almost she has busted out in hives twice now). Hector too was abandoned as a baby. Left in a stinking dumpster behind Safeway. Not even Hannah knows about this, only his saviors, Hector and Charmain Lopez. Why does she need that heavy stone on top of big-shot Doctor Ludwig Wulf? Hector could hear him snort, "Ya, ya, no surprise-a dumpster is vhere he vill end up too!" And delicate Mrs. Wulf would faint, boom. At least Hector wasn't the reason they sent her to that horsey women's college down south that Hannah, failing in her jodhpurs at getting polished up, limped away from one day and kept on limping until a truck full of migrant workers stopped and took her to a Greyhound station. But that lift is one reason, anyway, why Doctor Wulf doesn't invite him to sit down. His-pan-ic, you dig? If he had enough scratch, you know what might be fun some Halloween? To put on a false nose and glasses, like Groucho, and waltz into Wulf's office and sign up for a complete foot job. Podiatrist!

"Angel, how come they make so much bread, anyway?" he asked one morning before Hannah showed up. He didn't want to ask in front of her because, well, she was seeing a shrink about stuff like grinding her teeth at night, pretty soon they be gone, and the shrink kept asking did she hate her parents, and Hector, hurting at how Hannah's eyes would squeeze out such tears when she told him, did not want to get in the way of trying to fix all that. And cutting herself like she did. No more knife, he told her, making her promise on her knees, with him, come on, baby, and finally she did. He thanked Jesus three times, but to tell the truth he felt funny, hating to be a hypocrite.

"Lots of bad feet out there," Angel said.

"I doan understand. This is the U.S.A. Good shoes, vitamins."

"Knew this bartender in Vegas, only forty, who called himself Mr. Bear. He had to sleep with wool socks on, feet were always cold."

"Hannah says my hands are cold sometimes. But only because"--he pressed a palm to his chest--"is warm."

"Lots of diabetes, Hector. Lots of corns and bunions, oh yes, and fungus, never-ending smelly socks, ingrown nails, fallen arches, scaly skin, but mainly lots of tubs who wake up one day like Mr. Bear and can't feel their feet. Tubs and tublets, Hector, not to mention the vain who want pretty all the way down. Oh, what gorgeous toes you have, let me suck them."

Then she told him she was a tublet-on-the-wagon.

"This is crazy," he said.

"No." And she explained that she became a tublet while shaking her naked body for money in a box in a place called Dream Your Dream. It didn't take long, she said, because like a good American she worked at it.

He looked at her wide-eyed.

"I'm in a bad mood today, Hector, don't listen to me."

"Something happen?"

"I saw him last night at Greens and Grains. Buying peppers, tomatoes, onions, garlic. He had to be planning a sauce. From scratch. My God, Hector, I choked. Why didn't I step forward and say something?"

"This puzzles me too, Angel. Like dancing naked in a box." He patted her shoulder.

"Forget the box--it's gone. I want to know what's wrong with my material."

"You mean everything?"

"I mean everything."

"You got good material, believe me."

"Tell the truth."

"Angel, Angel, you foxy, you sleek. Also--big ticket--you nice."

"So why am I waiting?"

"You can't wait."

"And you can't wait, either."

"Right. We can't die on the vine."

"We are dying."

"No, I doan buy it."

"Every night you play "Green Eyes" like a man so close to death I should order flowers."

"No, Angel. Listen, I am so alive I sometimes have to hit the wall with my fists."

"I hear ache when you play."

"Yes, ache. Ache everywhere. But no death. Never."

She regarded him. "Lift up your head, then."

"I lift it. See?"

"Is that s-i? Or s-e-e?"

He grinned. "Both," he said.

"Get outta here. Go feed somebody."

Angel became The Shelter's director the same day she slammed the lid on her box, got dressed and started walking. First, she had to walk off the memory of a drooling customer trying to bring up his pathetic noodle, and then she had to walk her tears away, and then she had to see if swinging her arms a little bit, and a little bit more, would bring anything to her face that felt like a smile. After a while she snuck a peek in a window where large dolls were covered with fur and saw that her face was trying. She needed to walk some more, including through a sudden downpour that got her soaked, and then she needed to fall on her knees in front of the most excited mutt she had ever seen: it stood on its hind legs and pawed at the plate glass that separated them, wagging its tail so fast and hard that the old gentleman who came into the scene wearing a black bowler couldn't grab hold.

They ended up whooping themselves loopy, Angel and the man, spurred on by the amazing tail. He finally waved her inside. His name was Winston Watson, not a Brit, he said right away, he just dressed, sounded and had a name like one. He couldn't help it: he'd fallen in love for life with Julie Christie after seeing her in "Darling," and, well, there you have it, he explained. But more to the point, he was A Man Who Believed in Signs. You see, he was in desperate need of someone to take charge of things here--he swept his arms round the room--because his poor aunts, Lucy and Darcy, well, they were dying and he was the only one who understood them, understood what they kept talking about.

"Their stories, you see. Someone needs to be there to listen. And now, suddenly, an angel has appeared to us. Look at how Luther loves you!"

"Fact is," she told him, "that's my name."

"Luther?"

"Angel."

"Oh, my. The signs are too ... "

"Yes," she said, "they seem to be."

Though she could not really see herself running a shelter for dogs, she said yes to the job, said she'd give it a try. The signs and all that. A year slipped by, two, and she was into this gig in a way her spic-and-span youth in a Dallas condo, where the only animals allowed had to live in water, had not prepared her for, though you could say that her one attempt at a pet, Puddles the goldfish, who went belly-up before Angel even got all the colored stones in the tank, was in keeping with the chanciness-of-life theme advertised daily at The Shelter. When Hector appeared, on the brink of belly-up himself, so thin, so hangdog (forgive her, but it's true), she took him in on the spot to stop his ribs, if she could, from exposing themselves. It seemed the natural thing to do.

"Dogs like me," he said. "Listen."

When he blew his axe, Luther emerged from under Angel's desk and liked to cut off the legs of her chair, his tail was so turned on. Some of the other dogs ambled over and stared, their jaws dropped. Soon all of them joined Luther in a howl that said they were hip, baby, to the music.

"'What Am I Here For?' " Hector said. "Big, big tune. On Ellington's great nineteen sixty-two wax, he had Buster Cooper and Leon Cox blowin' 'bones, so my little toot there just a sample, like a Ritz cracker, no cheese."

"You're starving!" Angel cried.

"Good for my art," Hector said.

"Please, don't scare me."

"Hey," he winked, "I doan do a thing to damage my chops."

And then, not long hence, Miss Wulf appeared on the sidewalk out front, looking in but pretending not to as she strolled by extra-slow, trying to hide behind her shades, under a big hat, wearing too much paint on those sharp lips. Angel noticed her first. After a colorful week of such peekaboo, Angel went out to her and said, "He wonders if he knows you, but is too shy to make the initial move."

Turns out he does know her, and she him, and they have been carrying each other's "picture" in their heads ever since that autumn night on the weedy gridiron of West Side High when he answered the question of how high the moon was in sixty-four kick-ass bars (the truth will set you free, he nailed the answer) and she about lost her hoomongous majorette's hat of fake beaver bleached white.

So, now, please tell Angel, is this too much, or what?

Okay, she hires Miss Wulf too, who, in return, gives The Shelter a nice check, compliments of Love.

As for her romance, such as it was, with professor Wannamaker, the widower who could be her grandfather almost, and who doesn't know about her heartbeats, she finally found the courage to make an appointment to see him in his office about her progress in Modern Poetry.

She appeared in a tweed skirt and heels and nylons that swished when she crossed her legs and a drop of Nights of Tunisia behind each knee, also her best bra.

He cleared his throat, consulting his old-fashioned grade book.

"You are doing very well, Miss Showers."

"But I don't sleep ... "

"Don't sleep?"

"I wake in the night."

"That happens. But, really, you are too young for ... for such--"

"I am not too young."

"Hmmm."

"Did your marinara sauce turn out okay?"

"Why ... yes. How--" He looked so handsome, surprised like that.

"I love to cook."

"I as well."

"Maybe ... "

"Maybe?"

"Maybe we can cook a meal together sometime, your place or mine. And Showers is not my real name. It's Stepp, with two p's."

He colored and turned to the window. He looked out for a long time, though not really out out, she could tell, just not looking at her, and not saying anything. Five minutes, it seemed, passed. He cleared his throat. But still no word. He closed his eyes. They were blue. His mustache was white, his hair still mostly blond. They sat like that for a long time. Like what? Two funny birds, maybe. A real bird came to the window ledge, a sparrow, and jerked its head a few times in their direction, as if to say, Hey, go now or go hungry.

"I am almost thirty-three," she said. "I grew up in Texas. My people got people elected to political office by finding dirt on the other side. They were never home. As soon as I could, I ran away to Las Vegas. I danced, dealt blackjack, stripped. Sometimes I went to this church when nothing was going on and just sat there. Didn't believe in anything. Just felt like being quiet for a while. Then I came out here, I guess because of the ocean. I stripped some more, I supposed you would call it that, until I couldn't do it any longer. I feel for J. Alfred Prufrock, it's my favorite poem we read--his love song, I mean, I mean T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Being lonely and afraid is awful, an awful thing. I think you are a sweet man. You are the reason I can't sleep through the night. I'm going to go now before I embarrass you more. And myself."

To Hector, life is sometimes like a good solo. Which Hannah doesn't like to hear because solo she says means nobody else. Not true. Look at all you put into a solo, where it comes from, how maybe it has had to fight for breath, and like that. The other night--perfect example--he is in his crummy dull room and quick and smooth as one, two, one, two, three, she is there with him, deep down, grinding her teeth. So he goes with that. He gently eases into a nice spoon against her back, reaching around to hug her, bring her and how she smells like all the flowers suddenly in bloom on all the trees--and the trees are everywhere!--close. She whispers, Thank you, baby, and the grinding is gone. From that moment, oh mon, they grow together. They marry, they go out holding hands better than ever, she works with kids on the East side to mix with kids on the West side, him too, teaching them all how to read music--unbelievable! One night, for her only, he plays "Bolero" on the playground. They smell the grapes, the pears, everything getting ripe! They sit Doctor Wulf down and say to him, We are happy, okay? We can even die before you and not feel cheated, that's how happy we are. And then, how lucky can you be, he gets all of this to flow out of his axe, under a big, big moon spotlight! He wakes totally wet, smiling.

To Hannah, when The Reverend Gracie Jackson Joyce comes bursting into The Shelter as if swooshed forward by a powerful wind on a sunny day--her flowing wrap of colors reminding Hannah of the story of Joseph's coat in the Bible, sort of--in order to study Luther up close, well, life is a lesson in the pursuit of happiness, no question. Angel is out rattling the can at a business lunch with local suits and Hector is answering an alarm about a stray hanging around Powell's Books--"getting fed cookies and other sugar crap and dashing into the street!" the angry anxious caller tells him--and so Hannah has to deal with this exuberance--"call me Gracie, honey," on her own. Which normally she doesn't like to do, one on one stuff, not unless it's Hector.

"This is really funny, Hannah. A long time ago when perhaps you were not even a gleam in your daddy's eye, there was a very corny tune called 'How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?' And now here I am, teased in by Luther scratching on the glass at me."

"Actually I do know that song," Hannah says, "because my boyfriend Hector is a musician. He says you can learn from the not-so-good stuff, just like in life."

"I am taken already by this man of yours, honey."

"He has so much talent but no one will give him steady work. Music work, I mean."

They get down on the floor with Luther--a corgi kind of dog, low-slung, with a handsome head of some size--and talk about how people can be frustrated and tested and hopeful and sad, and stroke Luther to a high shine. After half an hour Hannah's heart feels tremendously lighter.

She bursts out, "It's like Angel saying the other day--we are twenty-six going on forty! It's time for Hector and me to boogie."

She feels brave and sexy and clean saying "boogie" to this sympathetic woman, who used to be a nun, she said, which not many African-American women were back then, and left the Order for a couple of fierce feelings, one of them being how she needed to put her hands on a man in coolness and in heat in this imperfect but pretty world and by and by have a family, praise Him who made this heartache possible. And she found that man. An Irish cop who recited poems to her in such a way she came before he was even finished ... with that part!

The upshot of this frank talk brought about by a dog whose mid-section would push a penny along the floor as he walked is that Gracie Jackson Joyce will take Luther home and come back whenever Hannah and Hector choose to be legally joined.

"Nobody going on forty can be held back from trying to boogie, honey."

So that's where things stood when Hannah opened her notebook to sketch an idea for a new picture and Hector lunged into Burnside, right across from Powell's Books, trying to stop this Heinz-57 from getting hit by traffic and was himself struck by a car whose driver couldn't stop in time. She felt awful. Worse than awful, she told Hannah, "but what is that now?" Her name was Linda McLindle, a teacher. Hannah said, "He would have loved your name--the music in it." She didn't say this right away, she didn't say anything to anybody until weeks after the funeral, and only after Miss McLindle's fifth or sixth visit to The Shelter.

"What do you teach?" Hannah asked.

"Head Start."

"Is it hard?"

The woman began to cry. She was middle-aged, a little heavy, and the tissue she found in her purse fell apart as she used it. This was when Hannah said that Hector would have loved her name. Then she said that Linda McLindle didn't have to come anymore, it was okay to stop. When the teacher tried to say how bad she felt, Hannah gave her a hug and said goodbye to her.

Funny how things turn out. Linda McLindle returned to The Shelter many times, sometimes alone, to volunteer or just say hello, sometimes with her Head Start kids, and of course when Angel and Henry Wannamaker were married. They were married by The Reverend Gracie Jackson Joyce in front of the window on either side of which Angel and Luther and then Gracie and Luther first met. The sun was shining through it and into the faces of the guests, who couldn't help beaming when Henry began reciting from "The Song of Songs" and the Irish cop, Mike Joyce, joined in as if they were saying poems together like this for years.