The Witch's Key Read online

  “What do you mean?”

  He turned from the window and laid a look on me like I was from another world. In a way, I guess I was. “Signing,” he said. “You know, pictures and symbols.”

  I shook my head.

  “We drew them on curbstones, mailboxes, in alleyways, on the sides of buildings and even on the trains themselves.”

  “Oh, like stick figure drawings? I’ve seen them before when I was younger. I never really knew what they were. I thought kids drew them.”

  “That’s because they were meant to be simple, but the message was always important. For instance,” he leaned toward me as if sharing a secret, “one symbol might let you know if the police in town were hostile towards hobos. Another if a homeowner had a gun or a bad dog, or both. And, of course, you had others still that let you know good things, like where you might cop a hot meal just by giving some old woman a sob story or by talking religion.”

  “Handy,” I said.

  “Yes. Oh, but then there was my favorite: the upside-down crown. That one let you know that a shop owner would give you something just to get rid of you.”

  “So, there was a symbol for everything?”

  “Just about. At one time, I personally could identify over six hundred. Of course, a lot of them meant duplicate things. It’s like a dialect. You had to learn the nuances from place to place.”

  “It’s like an accent, I guess.”

  “Exactly. But, like I said, that was the old days. It’s not like that anymore.”

  I watched his gaze turn toward the window again. Though he looked out over the train yard, I suspected that his thoughts were much, much further away. It made me sad to think that this old veteran of the rails was quickly approaching the end of his tracks. A dying breed, both literally and figuratively, and he had no one to see him off at the platform.

  “Mister Marcella?” I said. He turned to me sharply. “I mean, Pops. I want to ask you about a few men, to see if you knew them.”

  “They’s hobos?”

  “Yeah, they were.”

  “Then I might,” he said, smiling thinly. “I’ve known a few.”

  I smiled back. “I’m sure. I have a list here.” I broke out the list that Carlos gave me, unfolded it and allowed the sunlight to spill over my shoulder to better see it. “I want to read some names to you. Stop me if you hear one you recognize. All right?”

  He nodded.

  “Fine, I’ll start now: Jim Taylor, Fred Long, Theodore Bishop, Christopher Jennings, Raymond Kosinski, George Wagner, Terrence Forman, Peter Corey. Any of these names ring a bell to you?”

  He shook his head, emphatically. “No, none of `em. Those ain’t hobo names. Hobos use monikers. That way the bulls can’t learn who they are. Ask me `bout guys like Stretch Tweets, Reno Ricky, Blind eye Eddy, Boston Bill, or Skins Mackenzie. Thems are hobo names.”

  “I’m sorry, but these guys don’t have hobo names.”

  “Then they ain’t hobos,” he said, almost indignant. “They must be young guys—all of them.”

  “They are.”

  “That figures. Angellinas, they don’t have what it takes to be a hobo these days. They can’t appreciate the thirst for adventure it requires.” He looked into my eyes, and for just a moment, I got the strangest feeling that he recognized me. “You know, when I was your age,” his demeanor softening considerably. The disapproving tone in his voice seemed to melt with the incoming tide of memories. “A young man like you could own the world,” he said. “You could travel free as a bird with just a bindle on your back and a nickel in your pocket.”

  Outside the window, somewhere beyond the yard at Minor’s Point, a train whistle blew, almost magically. It called to Pops, and he answered it unconsciously. I saw his eyes roll to the window on tracks of steel, his mouth agape in frozen call. From where I sat, I could see no train, but I knew that Pops could see it. In his mind, he was already on that train, the wind in his hair, the smell of axle grease filling his senses. That young man with the bindle on his back and a nickel in his pocket was free again. I reached out and touched his hand, and before I could ask him if he was all right, he spoke.

  “She loved me,” he said, his words muted, barely above a whisper. I assumed he meant the rails, a metaphoric expression of endearment for that which he loved. But I quickly realized otherwise. “The most beautiful woman in the world loved me, and oh, how I loved her.”

  “Your wife?” I asked.

  He looked at me, shook his head and then turned away again. “Not by law,” he answered. “But I would have married her in a heartbeat if I could. Things might have been different then.” Outside the window, the whistle called to him once more, this time he answered with a vacant stare, as though the train had left without him.

  “Her name was Gypsy,” he said, “the prettiest thing this side of heaven’s tracks. She had the face of a Goddess, the body of a gymnast and the temper of a rattlesnake. Her wit was so sharp it could cut you, and if you let it, she’d probably laugh in your face. You never met anyone like her in your life, son, I promise you that.”

  “Really?” I said, and I wanted to tell him that he had obviously never met Lilith. But then, from his description, I could not be so sure that he was not talking about her anyway. “Gypsy, huh? Was that her real name?”

  He shook his head. “We didn’t have real names, only real love and adventures. Man, did we have some adventures? You have no idea how romantic riding the rails at night under a clear summer’s sky can be.”

  “I can imagine,” I said. “It sounds nice.” In my mind, I had formed a keen image of what Gypsy probably looked like based on my comparison of her to Lilith. I pictured her long black hair, teased by the rushing wind and flirting about her face and neck. I imagined her eyes like big black pearls, glistening in the moonlight so brightly that I might see my own reflection in them. I even fantasized about making love with the rumbling of steel wheels below us, tapping in rhythmic time to our quivering inclinations. But then the thought hit me, the sudden realization that he could be talking about (and I romanticizing over) my own mother. I quickly shook the image from my mind and mentally washed it out with soap.

  “Yes,” he said, unaware of my incestuous mentations. “It is nice, and it was.”

  I scooted my chair in closer. “Tell me about her, won’t you? About Gypsy, how did you two meet?”

  He smiled at that, so much so that his eyes pinched themselves closed and the lines beside them dimpled at his temples like tiny pushpins. I knew then that his feelings for Gypsy were real and everlasting. His scrawny pigeon chest gave rise below the blankets in a savory breath that seemed to fill him with her love. He exhaled in a bout of coughing, though, his tumor-filled lungs unwilling to grant him such liberties. I pulled some tissues from a nearby box and handed them to him. Then I stood, conceding that I had overstayed my welcome, and awaited the chance to say goodbye. But Pops would have none of that. A scrapper, as I supposed all Marcellas were, he flagged me down into my seat and insisted I remain.

  Within minutes, and without help from Melissa, India or anyone else who maybe should have been around to assist him in his possible final moments, Pops pulled himself together and was ready to tell his story.

  “I met Gypsy on Christmas Eve at a homeless shelter run by the mission. It’s always a good time for hobos, the holidays, I mean. People are more tolerant and giving then. Shame they can’t hold that disposition all year. But they don’t, and I ain’t one to complain.

  “So it’s Christmas. I get my soup and I stake out a little corner by the nativity scene, complete with woodcarvings of Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus and two of the three wise men. I guess the third hadn’t yet arrived. I can’t say I blame him though. It was frightfully cold that night. Anyway, I’m sipping my soup, minding my own business, when I hear this blasted disturbance behind me. I look over my shoulder to check out what’s going on and I see Gypsy. It seems some yegg tried to lift her bindle, or maybe he was just riffling
through it, I don’t really know. It didn’t matter much to her, either. She turned like a cobra and pitched that hot soup right in the guy’s face. Then she commenced to pounding on him somethin` awful. The next thing I know, this preacher and a couple of burly bouncer types grab her from behind. They start hauling her off into the back room somewhere, which in them days meant that she was in for a righteous beating.

  “Well, I tell you, I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I had to do somethin`. So I dropped my soup, picked up the baby Jesus and clobbered the first bouncer right over the head. He dropped like a stone. Then, when the second bouncer turned to see what happened, I clobbered him, too. The preacher, who was no slouch himself, grabbed the baby Jesus and started wrestling it away from me. That’s when Gypsy hauled off and kicked him in the most unholiest of places. Ooh, how I shudder every time I think about that.”

  I saw Pops’ hands slide under the blankets to his nether region, accompanied by a genuine wince. If Gypsy had kicked that preacher as hard as I imagined Lilith kicking someone, then I supposed I’d have been shuddering, too. I asked Pops what happened next. He explained how he and Gypsy ran from the shelter and ended up under a bridge, sharing a bottle of cheap wine with a fella named Patches, and singing Christmas carols over a barrel fire. After the wine ran out, Patches climbed into one bedroll, Gypsy and Pops into another.

  “You and Gypsy in one bedroll?” I asked, though it came out more of a tease, really.

  He smiled bashfully. “Hobos are pragmatic, if nothing.”

  “Of course.” I said, and I left it at that.

  Outside, though more distant, another whistle blew. This one didn’t seem to grab him as the others did. I gave him a curious look, which he interpreted intuitively, and without being asked, he volunteered, “Passenger train.”

  “Oh. You don’t hop those?”

  He shrugged. “You can. If you can’t catch-out any other way, then it’s all right. Not as romantic, though.”

  “I see. Tell me, what happened next, after you and Gypsy…you know?”

  “We fell in love, simple as that. Then we spent the next couple of months riding freights up and down the entire northeast corridor. The girl was a natural. She could board a train on the fly better than any man, and she could hit the grit, too, if it came to that. It was a great time with great adventures. We used to liken ourselves to Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper in, To Whom the Bell Tolls. But then things changed.”

  “How so?”

  “She had a baby.”

  “Oh,” I said, and my heart dropped to my stomach. I had always tried to imagine the circumstances of my being. I never knew my real mother, and only vague memories of Pops existed in my mind. But they scattered like autumn leaves whenever I tried to put them together and build a lasting image that I can hold on to. So to compensate, when I was very young, I convinced myself that I came from a happy family, that I lived in a big house with lots of brothers and sisters, and we had a dog that romped in a yard bordered by a white picket fence. I built those memories from books and movies I had seen and I treasured them until my early teens when a stern, but kind couple adopted me and took me in. They gave me what I needed to become a man and an asset to my community. But what they could never give me was answers. And now, sixty years gone, I felt I might find them.

  I reached out, set my hand on Pops’ shoulder and patted it gently. “Is that when you lost Gypsy?” I said. “Did she die giving birth?”

  He looked at me strangely. “No! She didn’t die,” he said. “She ran off! Can you believe it?”

  I reeled back sharply. “Ran off? I don’t understand.”

  “And neither did I. Sure, you have to figure what a change in lifestyle having a baby can be for a couple of hobos, but I was willing to make a go at it.”

  “So, let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re telling me that my mother…I mean, that the child’s mother just picked up her bindle stick, tossed it over her shoulder and walked out?”

  “Pretty much. That is to say that she didn’t leave right away. She waited a couple of weeks. But in that time, oh-ho, man what a witch.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said, what a bitch. The woman was a total bitch, excuse my French. Damnedest thing, too. All through her pregnancy she was such a sweetheart, collecting little pink baby dresses, setting up a nursery in the little shack we were staying in. You would have thought she was about to give birth to the princess of Whales or somethin`. But then, after baby Anthony came—”

  “You named him Anthony.”

  “Sure, after his dad.”

  “Of, course. Please continue.”

  “After baby Anthony came, she flipped out. She became irritable, argumentative and unruly. She began throwing things and calling the baby names.”

  “Like what?”

  “God awful names, like Satan’s child and Devil Boy and…. Please, don’t make me go there.”

  “I won’t. Forgive me.”

  “Things got so bad,” Pops continued, “that one day I told her to leave. I had to. I thought she might hurt the boy.”

  “You did the right thing. You had no choice.”

  “I thought she’d come back after she calmed down, after the depression or whatever it was had passed. But she never did. And so little Anthony and I carried on without her.”

  “But you lost Anthony,” I said. “What happened?”

  He looked at me funny again, as though gauging my perception. “I never said that.”

  “Didn’t you?” I felt suddenly cornered. “I guess you implied it somewhere. I’m sorry if I—”

  “No, that’s okay. Perhaps I did. It doesn’t matter, though, that’s what happened. I raised Anthony until he was about five. Then with the war going so badly overseas, the defense department saw it fit to draft me to go fight in it. I left Anthony with a child welfare agency, but when I returned for him, well, he had been placed with a family.”

  “You couldn’t get him back?”

  “I didn’t know where to look. The building the agency was in, burned to the ground with all its records. He was gone.”

  “But I don’t get it. You still could have—”

  “That’s it, gentlemen, sorry. Visitation is over. You’ll have to go home Mister Spitelli.”

  I turned to the door and saw India standing there with a clean bedpan in one hand and a large wet towel in the other. I looked to Pops. His smile said it all. “Can I visit you again?” I asked.

  He nodded yes. I tapped my watch face and mouthed the words, “See you later.”

  Four

  On the drive back to my apartment, I found my head swimming in conflicting thoughts. For sixty-four years I had carried the name Anthony Marcella, never knowing what my namesake was like. Did I look like him? Was he a kind and caring individual? Did he really intend to drop me off on the doorstep of stranger’s and never return, or was he grief-stricken, frustrated and angered at the inadequacies of a post-war government bureaucracy? I heard a big part of me say that none of that mattered, that six decades has a way of reinventing people so that they are no longer who they once were. I knew that to become sentimentally attached to Pops at this stage could prove emotionally disastrous. Yet, a nostalgic thread within me made me realize realized what a blessing it was to have that chance.

  I pulled into my parking spot at the apartment feeling like I had driven across town in barely a blink. I do not remember walking through the door, but I am sure I did, as I learned later because I did not even shut it behind me. Lilith was in the bedroom. She called to me the moment I walked in. Finally, I thought, she has come to her senses. I hurried to her room, not wanting to keep her waiting, only to have her meet me at the threshold, still fully clothed and smiling suspiciously. She handed me an envelope, which had only my name on the outside of it.

  “What’s this?” I asked, my curiosity matched only by my disappointment.

  “It’s an envelope.”

  “I see that. Where
did it come from?”

  “I found it in the door after you dropped me off from the café. See.” She tapped the envelope. “It has your name on it.”

  “Yes, I see. Funny, but it looks like your handwriting.”

  “Does it? I hadn’t noticed.” She hit the envelope again. “Well, go on. Open it.” I turned and started off down the hall, when she grabbed me by the shirttail and pulled me back into the room. “No, in here. The light’s better.”

  I knew something was up, but I still had my mind so wrapped around the events of that morning that I did not invest much thought into worrying about it. I crossed the room, took a seat on the foot of her bed and shredded the top of the envelope. I held it to my lips and blew, drilling it open with a pop. I looked inside, not knowing what to expect, but not expecting to find it empty.

  “There’s nothing in it,” I said.

  She seemed less surprised. “Are you sure?”

  “Lilith, I can tell when an envelope is empty. It’s not like there’s a whole lot of places in there to look.”

  “Hmm, pity.” She walked over to the dresser and ran her hand along its leading edge, completing a sweep from right-to-left. “So, did you get to see your dad?”

  “Yes, I did.” I watched as she passed behind me, raking her fingers along the wall, this time from left-to-right.

  “How’d he look?”

  “Not good.” I got up and began sliding the dresser across the room to the spot that Lilith had just marked. “He’s dying of cancer. He can’t weigh but a hundred pounds.”

  “That’s too bad,” she said, though I did not sense any real empathy. As I stood there, catching my breath, she did it again. First she ran her fingertips down the length of the dresser, and then along the wall across the room. Without thinking, I started the exercise all over, pushing the confounded piece of furniture back to where I found it. I had almost fallen for it a third time after she drew her fingertips along a wall in the walk-in closet, when it hit me.