Luck has bad breath.
 
That's what the Schwartzbear said, before they carried him out feet first. Billy was still on his feet the day he got out. He'd done hard time and more solitary than most and had no luck. Why think about it now? But he did. He thought about luck and the panther he'd been dreaming about.
 
He stood squinting outside Dannemora. Billy’s out, he told the panther patrolling his mind, Billy's out. Too late, he heard poor Schwartzbear say. Get it? Schwartzbear asked. Now he got it—the panther is blind.
 
He no more knew why he stood there menacing a blind figment than he knew about luck. It just felt okay on a day better than most.
 
Then he slipped between pale June blocs of Franklin County light and was gone. 
 
Big deal. No sweat. He was out of something more impregnable than Dannemora: the bestiary of childhood, and now he walked clean out of that rabid zoo towards the southern lights, a twisted communicant of roaches.
 
Maybe it was his dolphin's humor that did it—ask the merchant seamen who play their boom boxes for them to tell you how dolphins look and smile, hold your eye, show their tricks.
 
Sure Billy thought of animals, he'd been one, tanked with insects, cetaceans, raptors, reptiles, bottom feeders and alien species. One of them, the estimable black man Franklin Jones, had parked a conundrum in his head. "Lookitum," he'd said, "an'mal crackers, know what I'm sayin'?"
 
"Ya gonna tell me, arncha?"
 
"People be like an'mals, only dey an'mal crackers."
 
"Crazy?"
 
"Yeah, but dey crazy like differn' an'mals."
 
He had on his mind something more vivid. A dream. A recurring dream. He kept changing. He was a panther, then he was watching the panther. He could smell this panther, share its hunger, its rage and frustration. And one other thing, he couldn't remember when he awoke that he saw anything when he was a panther.
 
"I'm tellin' ya, Franklin, this panther is blind."
 
"What differns it make, Billy Boy? When this panther smell you, he be eatin' you. You not gonna care he be blind. Panther, all he know you be food."
 
Billy read the library out of panthers. He charmed the librarian into luring panthera pardus from the county library.
 
It became his meditation. As the yogi banks his eyes up in his head in his quest for samadhi, Billy contemplated his dream, and finally he saw the panther pacing, twitching its tail, behind the barred eye of his mother Frankie and the barred eyes of all his other keepers, and at that moment he could no longer be counted among the nations of predators licking their chops in their childhood zoos. He'd figured out there's no difference to them between food and keeper, between food and you. The most perfect animal shits. Despite our beautiful faces and elegant minds, we shit and die.
 
Billy once had a dolphin's spirit, the spirit of amusement, before it was beaten and cowed, but by the time he was eleven he had the sardonic eye of an elephant, dour, fixed.
 
In Dannemora—Billy's file called him a violent psychotic—a psychiatrist gave him a metaphor for his predicament.
 
"Think of your childhood, in fact think of everything up to now as a burning, smoke-filled movie house. What do you do? Figure out where the exits are, right?"
 
Dannemora certainly convinced him only the observant survive. "One thing more," the shrink told him, "imagine yourself as if you were nine or ten. You have to get that kid out of the burning building, that's your job. Understand?"
 
"What's playing?" Billy asked.
 
What can I say to any of these guys that will make a difference? Herschel Schwartz thought. He was by the time he met Billy sick of the question and the questioner. Maybe he'd have stuck around if he'd known the next thing he would say would make a difference. But by the time it did Herschel Schwartz had blown the roof of his head off.
 
"It's your question."
 
"Dumbo," Billy said.
 
"It's your life, asshole, not mine! Think! See if you can think for the first time in your life."
 
"Frankenstein?"
 
"Come over here to the window. Yes, I think I may see the light of an intelligence in your eyes. You think you're wising off, but let me tell you something, Mister Wisenheimer, you just put your money where your mouth is, d'you realize that?"
 
This tired old Schwartzbear interested Billy. What the hell was he talking about?
 
"Horror shows. You got it, smart ass. Horror shows. So ask yourself who showed you these horror shows. Whuh, you just naturally like to see people tortured? Or maybe somebody taught you how to like to see people tortured? Including maybe yourself. Got it? No? Well, think about it. You got lotsa time."
 
The stinking panther lodged in Billy's brain long before Frankie began her autoerotic visits. What a crock she was he knew but suppressed until one day in the fifth year of his confinement as he walked back to his cell block he heard a mocking in his brain.
 
Are you awright, Mom? I'm gonna take care of you when I get out, don't worry.
 
That's what he said, but what he heard in the choir stalls of the damned was please love me, Mom. "Please!"
 
"Please what?" the guard said.
 
"Please shit!" 
 
So the next time Frankie came and said she couldn't stay long because Larry-What's-His-Face was waiting outside, Billy looked. And he looked. And the words came to him. Panther shit. And he laughed and looked some more until it seemed to him it was the first time he had ever looked, and he saw that it wasn't his cage he was looking through, it was hers. He saw the panther, the stinking panther pacing behind the bars in her eye. He heard her talk—she didn't hear him talk. Ever. It was her soap opera. And while she looked over her shoulder into the tarmac distance where Tom, Dick or Larry stood, Billy picked the lock of his childhood bestiary, the door swung open and he was free. 
 
Right there in Dannemora.
 
"Get outta my face!"
 
"Hey, izzat any way to talk to yer mudder?" the guard said.
 
"You wanner, you kin' have 'er," Billy said. "Cheap."
 
Too bad Billy didn't see the guard quash a conspiratorial grin.
 
If anybody cared they might have said what made Billy dangerous by the time he checked into Arnie Besele's flophouse on Ninth Avenue was that he could do four hundred pushups a day or that he had taught himself a lot about electricity, but what made Billy dangerous was that he knew the only thing a panther knows is maul and eat. All your words, all your deeds, your care and willingness to love is nothing but meat and slop. The panther prowls the space between telephone calls, letters, obsessions, broken promises. You're fast food. Walk out. Some mother built that cage long ago of her inability to love. Once her little panther is your obsession you're its crank. Your sane moments merely threaten it with cold turkey. This is what Billy knew. Thank you, Frankie, thank you, Tom, Dick, Larry.
 
All in all, Dannemora straightened him out. He owed the poor dead Schwartzbear, Franklin Jones and the other fascinating basilisks, griffins, trolls, centaurs, Minotaurs, harpies, satyrs and rocs in their skulks, swarms, poufs, coveys, nests, pods, gams, nyes and gaggles, a big debt.
 
What he didn't owe them were his powers of concentration.
 
Dolphins look, elephants look, panthers gauge, but on the first free morning of his adult life, after seven years buffeted in the roaring night surf, Billy looked up from his nest of cockroaches to the fuming sun thrashing down Forty-Third Street and became the morning's namesake beast, a tiger. As to the difference between tigers and panthers, ask any game warden who has seen a tiger's immense solar face in his windshield.
 
God knows what some paid priest will prate over Billy's grave, but of all his deeds and misdeeds this signal accomplishment will go unsung. In the land of Mom, Old Glory and apple pie we don't hang people for kissing off rotten parents, but we don't hang medals on them either. Mostly, with any luck at all, we whomp up enough money for a shrink to tell us we're panther shit.
 
Drink plenty of water, take long walks, move to the other side of the country. Or the world. Otherwise, you, the one man in the world who can rescue her, will find yourself hand over hand in Rapunzel's tresses, and the next thing you know you're staring a ravening panther in the face. More seductive than all the sirens are the human beasties roving your childhood pleading with you to let them out: Rapunzels and panthers, sleeping beauties and frog princes, fairy godmothers and kingly brothers. All of you waiting for your fetid ships to come in, consider how many shrinks and shrunk have committed suicide trying to rescue you!
 
Herbie Goldberg was a trickster, a joker, a squat Clark Gable, altogether decent. A week after he hired Matt Pieto to the night shift at the three Goldberg brothers' cigar store at Forty-Fifth and Eighth Avenue he said to him, "So Matt, what're you, slummin'?"
 
"Nah, I'm comin' up in the world, Herbie." With a straight face, a sincere look even, he said it.
 
Disarmed, Herbie schlepped around in the deep sink saying, "Yeah, well, when ya get to the top remember me."
 
Disarming, Matt was disarming even then, nineteen years old, a junior at Saint John's. No, he didn't need the job. His grandfather thought it a distraction, like athletics, inimical to the purpose of college, which was to get smart. But Matt, who never took a test that didn't amuse him, saw Hell's Kitchen as advanced study. He loved it, not having to live there.
 
Billy had lived there all his life, knew the Goldbergs as an easy mark, knew all the other easy marks, and, when nine months after Matt started to work there and seven days out of Dannemora he showed up one night to ask for a job, he'd cased the scene, watched Matt from across the avenue and was drawn without knowing it to this quiet kid who seemed to listen to everybody's story. Why were they telling this kid their stories? The rum-dumb boxer who dashed out into the street to pop windshields, tetchy bag ladies, loonies and drunks of every stripe, even the sons of bitches in blue?
 
"So what kin' I do ya?"
 
"I need a job. I grew up around here."
 
"That's a recommendation?"
 
"I'll work hard. I need a break."
 
"Why do I think you been vacationin' upstate?"
 
"I'm an ex-con."
 
"Hey, I need an ex-con like I need another health inspector. You don' look like no soda jerk t'me."
 
"What's a soda jerk look like?"
 
A tall pale goombah with a pompadour and duck's ass, that's not what Matt saw when he looked up. He saw the blackest, most fixed gaze he'd ever seen. Fixed on him.
 
"He don' look like no wise guy."
 
Amused by his boss's innocent term of art, Matt looked down the marble counter past Herbie at Billy's adz-cut face, eerily handsome. Billy gave him a little crooked smile.
 
"I think you should hire him, Herbie."
 
"Y'know him?"
 
"I will."
 
"Yeah, well, just do what my father here tells ya," Herbie told Billy, liking Matt enough to take the chance.
 
They worked in relative silence for two months. Three hundred and sixty of the Daily News, three hundred and forty Mirrors, fifty of the Times, forty Tribunes, hundreds of eight-cent egg creams and big green five-dollar Cuban Cohiba cigars from the humidor, night after night. Herbie liked his boys, drew coins from their ears, told them raunchy jokes, learned he could leave early trusting them to lock up.
 
"Gentlemen Dagos," he would say, "goo' night, keep everythin' kosher, don' sell the place, have a cigar, goo' night, sweet prinzes." Then he would bow and exit to Fort Lee. Matt and Billy would reach for the Cubans and finish up in a haze of blue smoke.
 
 
© Djelloul Marbrook 2005
 
This story is an excerpt of the novella Saraceno by Djelloul Marbrook, Recital Publishing 2021