Body and Soul

His first view of the outside was through the small, fan-shaped window of the basement apartment. He would climb up on the table and spend hours peering through the bars at the legs and feet of people passing by on the sidewalk, his child's mind falling still in contemplation of the ever-changing rhythms and tempos of legs and feet moving across his field of vision. An old woman with thin calves, a kid in sneakers, men in wingtips, women in high heels, the shiny brown shoes of soldiers. If anyone paused he could see detail - straps, eyelets, a worn heel, or cracked leather with the sock showing through - but it was the movement that he liked, the passing parade of color and motion. No thoughts in his head as he stood or knelt at the window, but rather, from the images of motion, a pure impression of purposefulness. Something was going on outside. People were going places. Often, as he turned away from the window, he would muse on dimly sensed concepts of direction, volition, change, and the existence of the unseen. He was six years old, and much of his thinking, especially when he was alone, went on without words, went on beneath the level of language. The apartment was small and dark, and he was locked inside until that terrific moment each day when his mother came home with her taxicab. He understood about the cab. There were passengers. She picked them up in the street and took them from one place to another (as the people walking outside were going from one place to another), but she herself had no destination. She went where the passengers told her to go, and remained, in a sense, a witness, like himself. The cab started out in front of the apartment in the morning and returned at night. It appeared to him to be going around in circles. Usually he would hear her coming down the iron stairs to the door. She was big, and moved slowly, the entire iron structure clanging with each step. Then a moment's silence, the sound of the key opening the locks, and the door would swing open. In the dimness he could see her shift her six-foot-tall, three-hundred-pound body to come through. He could hear the sound of her breathing, a steady, laborious sighing, as she entered the room. "Claude!" Her voice was clear and musical. He stepped into her field of vision. "There you are," she said. "Get me some beer." He went to the kitchenette, took a quart of Pabst Blue Ribbon out of the refrigerator, pried off the cap, got a glass, and returned to the front room. He placed the beer on the low table in front of the couch and backed off a step. She sat down and put her change maker and a roll of bills next to the beer, along with a folded copy of the newspaper PM from her hip pocket. "I don't care if the Nazis win," she said. "It couldn't be worse than this." She poured a glass of beer, drank it in one go, and refilled. "He gives me a two dollar ticket! What for? Too far from the curb, he says, the dumb mick. Too far from the curb! Are you kidding? You don't have anything else to do but persecute the working class?" She poured again. Claude sat down on the floor. He was attentive to her mood, to its direction, in case escape was necessary. Sometimes when he ran around the couch or slipped under her arm she would lose interest. He knew that almost always when she hit him, she held back. He'd seen her open the door once to find a drunk pissing in the small area at the foot of the iron stairs. She'd felled the man with one blow to his chest, methodically kicking his ass and then his head until he lost consciousness, and then pulled him slowly up the stairs by his collar, step by step, to the street. There had been blood on the stairs, red spots on the black. Now she worked the levers and emptied the change maker, stacking the coins neatly, counting them, and making notes on a scrap of paper. She counted the bills - mostly ones,O'Keefe, Robert is the author of 'Body and Soul', published 1997 under ISBN 9780517195192 and ISBN 0517195194.