Ohio-born, Robert Lowry has traveled widely through America and Europe. He has contributed many stories to magazines, and his previous books include: Casualty, The Big Cage, Find Me in Fire, The Violent Wedding. What's Left of April, as well as four volumes of short stories-Happy New Year, Kameradesl, The Last Party, and The Wolf That Fed Us. Of this last, Ray B. West, Jr., of the University of Iowa has said in his book, The Short Story in America 1900-1950, that it " ... combines the sentimentality of Anderson with the toughness of Hemingway or of Anderson at his best."
All of Mr. Lowry's books have been published in soft-cover editions by Popular Library.
Dedication
TO IVAN AND TO ANNE
Acknowledgment and thanks are due the editors and publishers of the following American periodicals, in whose pages portions of this volume were originally published: New Horizons, Story, Pinpoints, The Western Review, Collier's, Direction, Pacific, Mademoiselle, The Harvard Advocate, Rocky Mountain Review, The Little Man, Trend, The Sign, The American Mercury, Flair and Now.
Both my editor, Ken McCormick of Doubleday, and my agent, Harold Ober Associates, Incorporated, deserve a note of thanks for their help in assembling this volume for publication.
For other reasons no less valid I want to thank my sister Ruth, and my parents, Mr. and 'Mrs. B. C. Lowry.
INTRODUCTION
A Parade of Stories
Short stories, like people, have a life all their own, in time; and some of them make their fortunes and some of them just never seem to get anywhere. And some of them get nowhere fast at the beginning, when they've just been published, and then turn out to be the most successful stories of all before it's over.
Even an author forgets his stories, as I've forgotten some of those in this book. And then goes back and finds them again-rediscovers them and decides that they're a lot better than others which he's been reprinting all these years. That's the way it goes. I think, for instance, that "Artie Bell" in this volume is one of the best short stories I ever wrote. I think so now, I mean. But why didn't I ever reprint it in any of my other collections of stories?
I don't know. It took a lot of time-over fifteen years-for the author himself to get to appreciate it, I guess. And that's true of other stories in this collection, too.
All but a few of these short stories have been published in American magazines. Some of these magazines paid their writers nothing; other paid ten or twenty dollars for a short story. Still others paid more-a hundred dollars or even eight hundred dollars, which is the price that Collier's paid for "Floodwater! Floodwater!" some years ago. But whether they paid nothing or a little or a lot, these magazines, large and small, widely read or hardly read at all, were of paramount importance to me as a writer, and without them I might not have been able to be a writer at all; anyhow, not a published writer, back in the days when it meant everything to me just to have a story accepted by a magazine and set up in type.
The editors of these magazines that printed me were my cheering section. I needed them because I didn't write for money, I wrote for love-of words and of people and of life itself. And the mirror of my efforts was in the publication of my short stories-in Robert and Margaret Williams' New Horizons, in Ray B. West, Jr.'s Rocky Mountain Review and The Western Review, in Marguerite Tjader Harris' Direction, in Harvard University's The Harvard Advocate and in Whit Burnett's Story. And I got some money out of it too. After I got out of the Army in 1945 and went to New York to seek my fortune as a writer, George Davis, the associate editor or Mademoiselle, bought one short story of mine after another and published them in his magazine, thus making it possible for me to start calling myself a professional writer and to start living as one. As long as I live I shall never forget any of the editors who helped me by printing my work. And by casting my stories in type, they helped to make this volume possible; for many of these pages would have been lost or forgotten or perhaps never written at all without the encouragment of these editors.
Some of the stories in this book are brand-new, written only yesterday, while others have been slumbering these many years in the back issues of the magazines that originally printed them. But all of them seem strangely alive to me now, at this very moment, or I would not be including them in New York Call Girl. That's the only test for a short story after all, isn't it? I mean, if it's alive then it's the real thing and if it's dead then it seems like nothing. It doesn't really matter whether a story reports one incident in somebody's day or suggests a whole lifetime-whether it runs two pages or fifty. The important thing is, does it come alive in the indescribable way that only fiction can come alive? So my criterion for including each of these short stories has been just this one question, Is it alive? and I think that all twenty-nine of these stories are alive.
Now that you're in the book and ready to go, I just hope you like them, all of them, the short ones and the long ones and the medium-size ones-those that take place in the big cities and those that don't-the active ones and those that aren't so active-the whole gorgeous, galloping, grammar-defying conglomeration of them-here they are.
Robert Lowry
Cincinnati, Ohio 10 January, 1958
* * *
NEW YORK CALL GIRL
Whenever I hear somebody say that "so-and-so's face was red," I always think of my father's face, which was always red-red from his full-blooded Irishman's coloring and red from drink because he always drank a lot. Remembering that fleshy face with its firm aquiline nose now as I scribble down these words in the little grade-school copybook that I bought this afternoon with the intention of just starting in anywhere in my life and seeing what my "confessions" would look like, I think of red paint because the red on my father's cheekbones and his nose and across his forehead actually seemed to have been painted there. And then there was his breathing, too. As a child and later I was never in the Same room with him without being aware of his heavy breathing through his open mouth-I guess just because he was so big and heavy and did everything with more noise than thinner, smaller people; but I did not analyze it this way when I was a very small child and I remember that one night while lying alone in my little bed in the darkness I became convinced that my father's heavy breathing meant that he was dying-that he might be dying at this very moment-and in the middle of the night I ran screaming into my parents' bedroom. "Daddy, daddy, don't die!" I screamed, running into the side of their bed in the darkness and falling over them both.
I was no good then and I have never been any good since then-shall we just put it that way and get on with our story? Or at any rate, I felt completely no good, completely wrong, by the time my mother had finished with bawling me out for running into her room like that in the middle of the night "and scaring me to death, Eleanor. Now go on back to bed and don't you ever do anything like that again, do you hear?" My father, who was lying there in bed beside my mother, said nothing but his breathing in the silent darkness seemed even heavier than usual, and after I had gone back to bed in my little room next to their big one I could still hear his breathing and I knew that it was his breathing and nothing else that had awakened me and scared me and I actually had thought that he was dying. Now as I lay listening it grew quieter and I realized that a little while ago he had awakened me by breathing more heavily and quickly and urgently than usual and I wondered whether they had been doing that secret funny thing together again-that secret funny thing that I had seen them doing together one Sunday afternoon about a year ago when I had walked unexpectedly into their bedroom. My mother had screamed at me then, too. Oh yes, it was all right for them to be doing that but it was not all right for me to see them doing it; and so there must be something bad, something wrong about it, I thought. It was a bad, dirty, secret thing, I thought afterwards; and every time I thought about it I felt warm and nervous and my breath came quick and I longed to catch them at it again-to see what it was that they did and so be able to figure out why they did it and why it was such a secret.
And why didn't I do it too, I wondered; and one afternoon while I was playing with a little boy from down the street who was my same age, four or five, I did do it, or thought I did; and making him lie down on top of me on the grass while I tried to duplicate the quick, urgent panting that I remembered hearing really seemed rather fun and I made him lie on top of me many times that summer while I panted and squirmed under him and pretended that I was just like my parents, doing the same secret thing that I had heard and seen my parents doing. It seems silly and funny and even sort of cute now as I remember making that little boy, whatever his name was, go through all the motions of this act that I had no understanding of at all at the time, I suppose. But then he grew tired of doing it or thought that there was something wrong about doing it-I don't know what occurred to him because children don't have to give any explanations to each other about what they feel like playing at. I only know that he refused to do it any more and that soon we weren't playing together at all any longer. We had our clothes on all of the time, of course; and I suppose that it was a childish and harmless thing to do, after all. But isn't it curious that after the many much more serious things that I've done in my life-things which I suppose I should feel more guilty about and which sometimes got me into a great great deal of trouble-it is just these little incidents out of my earliest childhood that came into my mind when I started to write about my life a little while ago: my father's heavy breathing and then his still heavier breathing on that night that I thought he was dying and ran into his room; and then my feeling afterwards that my parents might have been "doing that secret thing" that night and not long afterwards my first "experiment"-even though I was fully clothed through it all-with that little redheaded boy from down the street who went along with me and my funny game for a while and then suddenly turned me down flat one day and didn't even come up to play with me any more. Yes, I remember now that he had red hair but I still can't remember his name and it serves him right. Prissy little prude! That's what I want to call him! I despise him, that prissy little prude; and anything that happened to him afterwards in life-anything bad or horrible or painful-just serves him right for leaving me alone, and don't think I don't mean it!
The simple truth is that I haven't the slightest idea what happened to him later on in life and care even less. And it seems to me now that I've wasted too much time even thinking about all of this, much less writing it down; and instead I ought to write about something like where I spent last night and wouldn't you like to know? Well just for that I'll tell you. I spent last night in a fifty-dollar-a-day suite (gorgeous!) in the best hotel in New York City-yes, that's the one I mean, that one on Park Avenue-and I came home this morning with a hundred dollars tucked in my purse and not at all tired for in spite of the nature of my work last night I spent most of it sleeping. My "employer"-and I want to say "ha-ha" as I write that word although, after all, that was what he really was, wasn't he?-my "employer," I say, was apparently a little more tired than he had thought he was going to be, for by midnight we were in bed and by twelve-thirty or so he was fast asleep. Not that I didn't earn my fee, oh I earned it. all right for he woke up early this morning and got his full money's worth. The newspapers would call me (and oh dear now that I think of it have called me a call-girl)-the parenthesis is in the wrong place but who cares! I don't suppose that anyone has ever called me a call-girl to my race but I confess that when I've been alone and standing in front of the mirror I've called myself one and gotten a funny kind of thrill out of it. I admit, however, that in public I like to think of myself as something else. Tonight I'll be a movie starlet and last night I was a glamorous wife married to a very wealthy man and tomorrow night I'll be a fashion model out on a date-but never a whore, my dear, or even a call-girl, in public-it's just not nice to be one and could even be dangerous. For a call-girl may occasionally get a great big black newspaper headline (and I've gotten mine) but who ever heard of her getting a word of praise from anyone except the flushed and eager gentleman sitting across the table from her on a certain evening?
Cliff gets half and I try to tell myself that his services are worth every penny of it. He digs up most of my customers, after all, and you would be surprised at how hard it is to dig up a customer sometimes, although on the other hand sometimes I've been a lot busier than I like to be, with four or five calls in an afternoon and evening. You hardly get time to catch your breath that way and also I don't think it's a good idea to be seen around that much in hotels and apartment houses during a single day. I'm a "friend" not a call-girl, and I wouldn't want it to appear to the police that I'm being too friendly.
In all fairness I ought to add that Cliff feels the same way about this, although it's sometimes pretty hard for him to pass up his half of a fifty-dollar fee for something that takes an hour or so of my time and I'm not really doing anything anyhow. But last month I had to put my foot down when he booked me for six dates during a single day and since then he's been a little more considerate. Like today for instance; I don't have a single call or appointment or whatever you want to call it to make all day today, although there may be something this evening because I'm meeting Cliff at the Bowwow Club and giving him his fifty in a nice clean white envelope (he likes to get his cut but immediately! and he spends it like water); the reason for my day off being that I thought I'd be all tired out after my all-night date last night but I feel wonderful really! I did practically nothing except sleep except for a little while this morning. Dear Mr. Pierce: how nice of you to work so hard all day so that I would not have to work so hard all night!
Dear Mr. Pierce-but to tell you the truth, little copybook, he was a horrible, horrible bore and no kidding I earned my fee before we even got up to the room, I mean suite, because all through dinner last night he talked and talked and talked and I thought he'd never stop talking-about how much better the steaks are up in Canada and the trouble he's had with the tenants in a house he owns in Toronto and his eldest son's speech defect and I don't know what all-not to mention a long parade of off-color stories most of which I had heard before but smiled at in the appropriate places nevertheless. Ah well, he'll finish his little round or lawyer's chores here today and be taking the plane back to Toronto this afternoon and I'll probably never see or hear of him again. It's usually that way, especially with men from out of town, and I like it better that way. I don't really want to get to know any of them, for it's then that what I'm doing begins to seem wrong. Isn't that odd? But it's so. And when they tell me a lot about themselves, as Mr. Pierce did last night, I think of myself as bored but it probably isn't that at all. What happens actually is that I sort of freeze up. They're telling me all of these personal things, but I don't want to get to know them personally at all. I don't want to know about their business, their family, their troubles and all the rest of it. Of course I smile, I'm friendly, I might even slip my hand over theirs and turn my head a little to one side and look oh terribly interested in everything they're saying; while at the same time I'm getting cooler and cooler inside and keeping all of my emotions and sympathies in check; for it seems to me that the more familiar I get with them, the more what I'm doing becomes-a sin!-and as long as it's completely impersonal, then it isn't anything. Is that hard to understand? It is for me.
It's tomorrow now. I mean a whole day has passed since I wrote everything you've read and I had a date last night. He was sitting there at the bar with Cliff when I got there and I could tell in just the way that Cliff introduced us that some arrangements had been made. You always can. And while he-I mean the fellow who was with Cliff-was away from the bar for a minute I gave Cliff the envelope with his money and Cliff said that he was going to leave in a few minutes and that "Larry is okay."
We ate there at the Bowwow-I mean Cliff's "friend" and I did after Cliff left-and then we went across town to a Times Square nightclub and I was glad to see that he wasn't drinking too fast-Cliff's "friend" I mean-and then we went to a hotel. I sort of enjoyed the evening, I guess because he was sort of impersonal but polite, and I stayed with him a lot longer than I usually do since it was only a straight fifty-dollar date and an hour is as long as I usually like to stay. He gave me five dollars extra for cab fare home, but he didn't come down and find a cab for me. That was how impersonal he was!
I don't know why but I suddenly feel like writing about myself-and isn't that the reason that I'm writing all of this down in the first place, to write about myself? But I mean the past and everything and I suddenly think of myself when I was fifteen and my mother was already dead by then and my father had long since lost his hardware store and his savings and the house that we lived in in a certain little New Jersey town just across the river; and I don't even want to write down the name of that town because just the mention of it always makes me sort of sad. It was the depression then, I mean during the early part of my childhood, and my father lost everything when he had to sell his store-I mean, we were dn relief for a long time and he worked at all sorts of jobs, hard manual jobs, for the rest of his life.
"For the rest of his life"-how dismal that sounds and how sad and dismal my father's life was after he lost his store. He lost his hair; and then he had all of his teeth taken out; and then my mother died. And if I had ever hated my father for hitting me when I was little or for getting drunk and fighting with my mother-and I guess I did-well anyhow I couldn't hate him any more after my mother died. He was just such a sad, bloated old man by that time-a tired and disappointed old man with broken veins in his nose and an uncertain look in his weary old watery eyes; and though I couldn't love him, at least I didn't hate him any more. Too many awful things had happened to him and I felt sorry for him. All of those awful things couldn't have been his fault, I thought when I was fifteen. Wasn't it understandable that he would try to drown them all with a lot of beer?
His life was all just a lot of beer and there was always the sour smell of beer in that little apartment where the two of us went on living after my mother died. He drank at the bar down the street too, but he always brought home a couple of quarts and that seemed to be all that he had in life, that beer of his that he poured into himself by the glassful. And I despised it-that beery smell in the apartment day and night and that bleary look in his eyes. Sometimes it seemed that that beer-smell had a color, a sickeningly pale-yellowish color that colored not only everything in that apartment but everything else in my life too-the streets outside, the kids at school, the very sky above me-everything in my life was tinted and tainted by the sour smell of my father's beer which hung over it all like a yellow fog-of beer and urine (and I remember how often he went to the bathroom and the constant flushing of the toilet in the evening sometimes made me want to run out into the streets screaming-or no, not just into the streets of our little town but into the streets of another city far from the yellow and sour smell of his beer).
It was in the middle of fall when I left him and I am sorry yet that I had to do it but I had to. He thought that I was still going to high school every day when what I was really doing was looking for a job across the river in New York and I found one and then I had to tell my father and he was mad. I guess that I had really built it up in my mind that he would be glad if I found a job-he wasn't working steadily and we didn't have much money. But no, he was mad, and didn't even really explain why. I guess he just hated for anything in his life to change. He just took it for granted that I would go on going to school forever, I guess. And he never had to worry about me because I never ran around with a gang or boys or stayed out late. I wasn't like some girls. I didn't even like boys when I was that age. They were all just thirty or forty or fifty year younger versions of my father, as I saw them, and they would all grow old to be like him and come stumbling home from their corner bars in the evening lugging their quarts of beer-their endless, endless quarts of beer-in dirty old paper bags, the same kind of mussed, used, brown paper bags that the people at the bar up at the corner always put my father's beer in for him to carry home. That's how I saw the neighborhood boys and so my father didn't have anything to worry about as far as they were concerned. And yet when I told my father about my job that day, it suddenly seemed to me that he had been saving up over the years-saving up all of his anger so that he could be good and mad at me all at once. And though I remembered that he had sometimes gotten mad at my mother and would sulk and not speak to her for days on end, I hardly knew what to think when I found him treating me that way. And I got mad too, and looked for a room near the restaurant where I worked, and found one and moved out of my father's apartment one Saturday while he was away at work. "Daddy, I've moved out and found a place of my own and I'll be over to see you tomorrow and hope that you'll be speaking to me by that time. Love, Eleanor" was what I wrote in the note that I left for him. But when I went over there the next afternoon, he wasn't at home, and I waited and waited for him, all afternoon until after dark, and even went out once and walked past the bar up at the corner, but he wasn't there either. I guessed that he was mad at me and didn't want to see me, and so finally I walked up to the bus stop and that was the night that I met Dick.
It has been three weeks now since I wrote anything and I stopped where I did because the telephone rang and it was Cliff telling me that I had a date and I had to get dressed. And I don't know, I locked up this book in the drawer and did not take it out until just today because, well, I don't know, I guess thinking about my life and everything made me feel sort of sad and so I did not want to write any more for a while. Because I thought of Dick? Yes, I guess so-and everything else too. My father and mother and leaving home and the beer and everything. And on top of it all, Dick, because my life was never the same after I met him on the bus that night going back to New York.
There were plenty of other places, seats I mean, that he could have sat on the bus but he sat down next to me; Dick did, I mean; and said "Beautiful night" because it was raining. "Are you kidding," I said without even looking at him, and I thought that that would be the end of it but it wasn't.
You know how it rains in bucketfuls sometimes? Well it began to rain like this now, in bucketfuls, as the bus drove on toward the tunnel and New York. Neither of us had a raincoat or even an umbrella-I mean me and this fellow who sat down beside me-and as we were going through the tunnel he said, "Do you want to hear some music?" and I didn't know what he meant and glanced over to see if he had a little transistor radio with him or something but he didn't; and I liked his looks; he was young; and I said, "What do you mean?"
When I woke up the next morning I could hear the tap-tapping of his typewriter in the next room and thought, That's right because he told me he was a writer. And I lived with him for a year or I guess that it was actually a little less than that, and he wanted to go to Europe but I wouldn't go. I was afraid to go, I guess-not of him but of Europe and everything. Because I knew that he didn't have much money and I was afraid of going 'way over there and then not having any money in some foreign country. Oh I know that this sounds silly especially when I tell you that I really did love him. And I should have married him-he wanted to marry me, I mean there was one period when he wanted to marry me, but I don't know why, I just didn't want to get married at all and he was a writer and it was all different from anything I knew because he worked in his apartment and had a lot of time or at least he could always take time; I mean he could work when he wanted to, in the early morning or the evening or during the day. And to tell you the truth I had a lot of time too because I never slept in that room I rented again and I quit my job and brought my things down to his apartment.
I guess I should have said that the music he meant was bop music at a place he knew and we drove down there from the bus terminal in a taxicab in the rain; and after we were there for a while he said that they weren't the best tonight and come on over to his place and he would show me how good they could be. So he played some records for me when we got there-I mean to his apartment-and he kissed me and we had some more drinks and he made me, the first time I ever did that really, and I stayed with him-not just that night but for almost a year.
The trial-I just remembered. They made me say his name at the trial and tell some of the other things I've just mentioned because they wanted to show that I led a bad life and couldn't be relied on as a witness. And I had to answer because the judge overruled the defense attorney's objection-or no, it was the prosecutor's objection to the defense attorney's question-or something. Anyhow, I wasn't on trial, not as a call-girl or anything else although you would have thought I was from the newspapers. They made me come and testify and if I wouldn't they mentioned income tax and everything-I mean that they would see that I was investigated in every way they could think of. So of course I testified and I had to admit that I knew girls who worked for Nick Nolton and so forth and so on. He was on trial and I wasn't even one of his girls-I was with Cliff even then-but you would have thought that I was on trial the way they put my picture on the front page and my name in the headlines, calling me by my first name right on the front of the Daily News. ELEANOR TELLS ALL TODAY, I remember one headline said. Well, at least they didn't treat me like merchandise but the truth is that that's what I am. I am merchandise for sale and I am sold by Cliff one or two or even three times a day almost every day or sometimes I sell myself when I go out to a bar like the Bowwow, usually, or sometimes the Tip Club; but I do not like to because how do you know what the deal is or whether they're a detective if you're on your own and just pick them up-how can you tell? And Cliff has never gotten me into any trouble except that some of them drink too much but I usually just leave them then and that's the end of it. And I have been merchandise for sale ever since I was eighteen.
He left me the apartment and the furniture, Dick did I mean, when he went to Europe. The rent was paid for that month and he got the landlord to transfer the apartment over into my name and he also gave me two hundred dollars cash. I admit that was nice of him and I guess he did it because he felt kind of guilty about leaving me. He would have taken me along-I just couldn't go-I guess because I knew how'little he had and I was real young and, well, just afraid of going any farther than New York, I guess, at that time. But the way he gave me everything when he left-well, you would have thought that he was going over there to die or something. He had been over there as a soldier and he had been planning to go back even before he met me, so I guess it was just something that he had to go through with whether I wanted to go along or not. It was that important to him-partly because he was a writer, I think, and he wanted to know more about the other side. And he wrote to me from over there, at first a lot but then not so much after a few months and maybe it was me-I guess I stopped writing and so did he. But I always thought that maybe someday he would turn up as one of my "friends"-I mean, Cliff would introduce me to somebody or send me over to some hotel and there he would be.
I don't use it any more, but I still have his old record-player to remember him by. He even left me that when he went to Europe. I guess writers aren't like other people-just giving everything away like that and never coming back. Or actually he did finally come back-I think. I mean I see his name all the time. But that doesn't necessarily mean that he came back, does it?
Anyhow, it doesn't matter. I've thought a lot about him but it doesn't matter. After Dick went away I met somebody else and this guy was the beginning of the end for me, I guess, because he had a lot of money to spend and he showed me that there were places to spend it besides the Village and Times Square, meaning that through him I got to know the Upper East Side area which he said was the exclusive part for residential and clubs both. You might have met me at Lily's or the Dalmatian Club or the Three Palms or any of the exclusive clubs in the East Fifties etcetera in those days when I was going around with Bart. Oh dear, there goes the phone again-
I dreamed last night of a sea of pearls from which Bart's head appeared as big as a mountain and dripping pearls-and a sailboat with great big sails all made of pearls that somehow came sailing towards me out of the distance over that sea of pearls. And at first it was Bart but then it was Dick-I mean they were like the same person in the dream, the way dreams are-anyhow, I was sitting there on all those pearls and Bart or Dick or whoever it was came wading toward me with pearls running down his face and calling "Eleanor! Eleanor!"-in my dream of pearls last night. Isn't that sort of a crazy dream? And I don't even know whether he was Dick or Bart. He seemed to change from one into the other and I don't know what it all means or whether it means anything. But Bart did once give me pearls....
I met him at an art show, that's the truth, although you're probably wondering what I was doing at an art show. Well, I used to go to art shows with Dick and he knew a lot about art. Some of the painters he knew personally, and he bought their paintings, too. That was how I knew about the art galleries in Greenwich Village and on Fifty-seventh Street. And you'll never know how lonely I was after he went to Europe. The minute he was gone I wished that I had married him; I wished that I had gone along. But I had never gone anywhere before, much less to foreign countries like that; and how were we going to live when he had so little? I guess it must have hurt him when I asked him how the two of us were going to live over there; because he had already told me that he was going to go on writing over there and would sell his short stories, and he had a small advance from a publisher on his novel. Anyhow, he didn't say anything and he didn't ask me to go along any more, he just proceeded to give me everything-his paintings and his record-player and his furniture and the apartment and the money-and as I think of it now it all sounds like a consolation prize that he gave me because I didn't have the daring or the imagination to go along with him. I don't know-but now that I think of it it was a big hard decision for him to make too, and I'll always remember how thin and pale and lost but somehow heroic he looked as he stood up there on the deck of the Queen Mary, waving to me down on the dock. Oh I should have gone along! He'll never come back, I thought.
But it was only after he was gone that I could see what a mistake I'd made; and I had planned td look for another job but somehow I just couldn't get started. I had a little money and the apartment and I cried and all I knew to do was what we had done together. Why, I even read the book-review section of the Times on Sunday because he had always read it; and could sometimes almost hear the tapping of his typewriter when I woke up in the morning. And I even felt like going to art shows because we had gone to art shows. So in the paper one Sunday I saw an advertisement that said "Ian Bock, new paintings" at this art gallery uptown on Fifty-seventh Street where I had gone a couple of times with Dick and I knew Ian Bock because he had come to a party that Dick had given the winter before-one of those parties where there were too many people and not enough chairs and by midnight everybody was sitting in a circle on the floor and in the middle of the circle Dick had put whiskey and ice and water-everybody talking about the ballet and Existentialism and Dick's first novel, and I felt awfully dumb because I didn't know anything about intellectual and artistic things; though it didn't matter, I guess, because Dick loved me and I was pretty-wearing my tight slacks and with my hair drawn back so tight from my face that it hurt when I did it. And this Ian Bock had a beard and a real deep voice and when I saw that ad for his paintings I thought that I would go and see them.
I felt so good going there, it was such a pretty day and I don't know what happened to me but after I got off the bus and was walking along Fifty-seventh Street towards the building where the gallery was, past all the big bright store windows with expensive things in them, I suddenly felt so lost, like a stranger to everything and everybody. What did I know about art or the expensive things for sale around here-or these sort of smug-looking people all of them with the cut and flair of fashion to their clothes? And I had gone to this art gallery with Dick, because he knew about such things. But did I really have any right to go back to it alone? I was out of things-out of everything-and maybe that was why this strange thing happened to me as I started up the stairs and a man was coming down the stairs. I thought, That's Dick. He didn't go to Europe at all. That's Dick. He went up to see Ian Bock's paintings too. And for a moment, without even having seen the man clearly, I really believed that it was Dick. But of course it wasn't. The man who passed me on the stairs wasn't anything like Dick, and I tried to laugh it off, my mistake, but I was panting and my heart was beating so that I had to stop for a moment there in the middle of the stairs, before I went on up to the gallery.
Nobody at all inside, although I could hear the manager talking on the phone in his office; and I started around the room, looking at the paintings. Gee, they weren't like anything I'd ever seen before, even in the Village-the paint laid on with a trowel or something, that's the way it looked, and then splashed with sand or studded with twinkling bits of coal or small stones. Sometimes these stones would be the eyes in a face or windows in a house, and the sand was in a picture of a rainy day with trees and a sort of small indefinite figure of a man. Gee, they were unusual and I didn't know whether they were good or not but they made me feel better after the way I had just been feeling; and the whole bright, clean, empty gallery with just those new paintings of Ian Bock's on the walls smelled wonderfully of turpentine and oil paint and the new wood of the frames, and I was so taken up with everything that I hadn't realized that someone else had come into the room.
"Have you seen this painting?" he said.
I was so startled, I guess I actually jumped. And when I looked around at him he was standing there holding an empty frame in front of him as a kind of joke or a way of starting a conversation, I guess-it was a frame that he must have bought somewhere and brought into the gallery with him. Well it was kind of funny after looking at all of those paintings and then turning around and seeing a living man in a frame.
"That's a new one," I said, and I lowered my eyes because I was a lot shyer in those days than lam now.
"Dreadful, aren't they," he said, lowering the frame.
"No, I like them," I said. "I think he's good."
We looked at the rest of them together and my hands were trembling because I knew that he was picking me up. And we left the gallery together. He invited me for a drink.
I can hardly go on writing because by going with him I really "believe that I changed my life and I was never quite the same again from that day on. I accepted his invitation to have the drink because he was young and polite and well-dressed and I was lonely and alone and not so well-dressed and I had nowhere in particular to go that afternoon. How could I know what Bart was capable of? He looked like a man out of high society to me-for really I was still very innocent that afternoon as I went down the stairs from the gallery and without a word got into a taxicab with Bart. I hadn't even known that we would have to take a taxi. He simply hailed it and I got in. I want to shout out a warning now as I see myself getting into that cab with him: "Don't go, Eleanor! Don't go!"-but of course I went.
I can't remember now whether the major was at the bar when we went in or whether he came in later-I guess he was there when we went in-anyhow he was sitting on the other side of Bart and Bart was talking to him and introduced him to me but I didn't catch his name and don't know it to this day. Then when we left the bar, he went with us, and I remember sitting between them in the .cab and we were going somewhere else. I was-drunk. It had been so dark and smooth and cool in that dark, smooth, cool little East Fifties bar after the bright-hot glare of that summer afternoon and the major had bought drinks and then Bart and then the major again, the two of them talking to each other but hardly at all to me so that I felt out of things and alone and drank more than I should have I guess-feeling like nobody, "nobody from New Jersey," with no make-up on and wearing just a blouse and a skirt and loafers.
"Nobody" -that's what I looked like in comparison with everybody else. And I was suddenly so hungry! "I'm hungry," I said.
"We'll get something to eat," Bart said, but didn't really mean it because although the three of us sat at a table at the next place we went to, Bart just ordered more drinks and then I said, "I've got to he down," and I meant to say it to Bart but I was looking at the major in his tan summer uniform and his gold leaves and ribbons and he was smiling at me as if I had just said something funny .and I couldn't take my eyes off him because he had such a good suntan. "Good-by, I've got to go home," I remember saying next, and I remember standing up and starting to walk out of the place and I remember that Bart came with me but not the major. And yet-it was the major who was with me when I woke up the next morning in a room I had never seen before-it was a hotel room and he was almost dressed, standing there buttoning up the brass buttons of his tunic when I opened my eyes and said, "Where am I? Who are you?"
"Oh good morning," the major said. "I've got to run but your boy friend has your purse and he wants you to call him."
"My-boy friend?"
He smiled and pointed to a piece of paper on the bedside table. And then he picked up his cap and left.
There was a telephone number on the piece of paper. That fellow-Bart's? And how had I gotten here?
I "had a terrible headache and an odd thick feeling all through my body when I got up-meaning I had the worst hangover I guess I ever had in my whole life. And I wasn't wearing anything, but I couldn't remember undressing-I couldn't even remember coming up here. Where was this room? What avenue was that down there? What had I done?
"I'll get you a hotel room and you can sleep there for a while and join us later"-while I was dressing I remembered Bart saying that in the cab. And then I saw the picture frame that Bart had had yesterday-it was leaning against the wall-and I wasn't going to take it with me but then at the last minute took it along for him because he had my purse.
I had never been in a hotel in my life before, that's the truth, and I didn't look at anyone as I went down on the elevator and walked out through the lobby. But nobody said anything to me and it wasn't until I was out on the street that I realized that I didn't have any money at all-not even subway fare. I was away up on the East Side and how was I going to get home? And I mention this now because it was like a miracle, for at that moment I saw a dollar there on the pavement and I picked it up and that was how I got home.
The phone rang and it was Bart. "How did you get my telephone number?" I asked him.
"Why, it was in your purse," he said in that smooth, easy, casual way he had. "Are you all right, Eleanor?"
"All right. You should ask me if I'm all right!"
"Well, I am asking yott," he said. "And I'd like to return your purse. You forgot it when you left the bar, you know.
"No, I don't know. I hardly remember anything about last night and you've got some explaining to do."
"All right. I'll bring your purse down to you."
"And you can have your old picture frame too. I've got it here."
"Oh. How nice of you."
But it was not my purse that he handed me when he arrived-it was a small package and I said, "What's this?"
But he didn't answer, only smiled, and I unwrapped it and found an evening bag all covered with pearls. And I looked inside and there were my things.
"Is this supposed to be a present or something?" I asked. "What happened to my purse?"
Well, he gave me my purse; he had had it in his pocket all the time; and then I started in asking him what had happened last night and how that soldier got in my room.
'Why, you asked for him, Eleanor," he said with that sort of amused look. "After I helped you up to your room, you asked for him."
"That's a likely story. I might have asked about him or something but I certainly didn't ask for him to come up there and spend the night with me. You and him must have thought of that."
And I felt so ashamed that I turned my back on him and just wanted to run somewhere, anywhere, away from it all. But of course I didn't. He was such a smooth talker-he made the whole evening seem all right, as if I had especially asked for everything that had happened to me. And before I knew it I was in the next room getting dressed to go out for a drink with him, only this time I put on my best dress and high heels and make-up because I didn't want to feel like nobody again.
His girl? No, I was never Bart's girl or at least not in any ordinary sense of the word. I went around with him for months before I met Cliff, but I was more his friends' girl than his and sometimes I would even sleep with them in his apartment. I don't know what was wrong with him, but he didn't want me in that way at all-and maybe I ought to add that he could afford what he wanted because he had a lot of money; he had inherited part of a tobacco fortune; and he didn't have to work and for a long time I was his pastime and he took me everywhere, theater and dinner and everywhere, and gave me expensive gifts and even went along to the stores to buy me clothes. And I'll tell you why-because he liked for me to sleep with other men. He got some kind of enjoyment out of it; I don't know what; but he liked to be in the same room when I was with one of the men that we picked up and that's the truth. But then one of the other men turned out to be Cliff and Cliff went along with what Bart had in mind but then when we were alone Cliff said, "What are you getting out of this, baby? Dinner?" And Cliff talked me into being his girl-he meant his call-girl-and he got me an apartment and set up dates for me. It seemed cleaner to me. I was glad to be rid of Bart and making money. Him sitting over there smoking a cigarette and watching it all-it got to be a little too spooky.
ADVERTISEMENT.
Found-in Central Park-a notebook containing a fragment of a young woman's autobiography. Author would like to elaborate the story. Will owner please contact him?
THE CONSPIRACY
They had seen her the moment they both reached the landing, Chris a little in the lead. She was stretched flat on her stomach right in front of their apartment door, her rather cheap-looking blue dress pushed up high, exposing thin, fish-white thighs and varicose veins, her soiled little white hat with pink berries crushed under her head. They climbed the remaining stairs and stood looking down at her.
"She seems to be asleep," Paul said. "Maybe she was at a party in the building."
"I think she's drunk," Chris said.
"Hmm," said Paul, and gave her a long look that was not altogether humorous in intention since he was still pretty irritated about several things that she had said between drinks at the Samuelsons' this evening. He put a hand on the woman's shoulder as he leaned over her. "I beg your pardon, but are you all right?"
Chris started to laugh at that, it seemed such an inadequate thing to say to someone parked prone in front of your door at one in the morning. Paul was such a polite fellow to have for a husband.
The woman grunted something when Paul pushed her shoulder a little.
"What was that?" Paul asked. "This is no place to sleep, you know."
The woman grunted something else. But did not open her eyes.
"I can't understand a thing she's saying," Paul said. He looked very serious as he straightened up, and Chris laughed again. "I wonder if I got her awake and on her feet whether she'd be able to navigate....And incidentally, dearest dumpling, this is not a joke. We can't just leave her here for Reilly to find when he collects the garbage in the morning."
"Try to make her stand up," Chris said, the drinks that she had had adding emphasis to the sprightly, naughty little girl that she always seemed to be just under the surface-as if all of life's minor disasters were little acts in a Punch and Judy show put on just for her amusement. "If you make her stand up, she'll have to do something
"Yes," Paul said. "How true. Although what she may do is to fall right back down again." He pulled at the woman's shoulders. "Come on now-upsy-daisy. Get up." The woman remained limp. "You've got to try to stand up. You can't sleep here"
"Apparently she can," Chris said.
"I guess we could call someone. The police? A doctor? Do you think she's ill? How did she get into the building anyhow if the front door was locked? She doesn't live in the building, does she?"
"No. You know she doesn't. I never saw her before in my life." Chris thought a moment. "But there was a party somewhere in the building tonight. Upstairs. I saw the delivery boy carrying up the liquor and I heard a lot of people going up before you came home. Were you upstairs at a party?" Chris asked the woman.
She didn't answer.
Paul unlocked the apartment door and snapped on the living-room light.
"Oh this is fun," Chris said, lifting her legs high to step over the woman. "You're just not anyone on the East Side any more unless you have one of these to step over when you get home."
"We could just close the door and forget her," Paul said. "Does that seem too unkind?"
The woman on the floor grunted.
"What was that?" He leaned over and listened. She grunted again. "I think she said 'Coffee,'" he said, straightening up. He looked around at the apartment as if to see whether it might be presentable to their guest. "So-shall we give her some coffee?"
"Yes, by all means," Chris said. "Let's give her some coffee."
She watched admiringly as Paul, a fairly slight man, picked up the woman in his arms, carried her (stumbling over the edge of the rug) to the couch, and deposited her there in a more or less sitting position.
"Pull down her dress," Chris said, picking up the little white hat from the doorsill and putting it on the mantel. "She seems to lack even the essentials in underwear."
"It was like carrying a skeleton," Paul said. "Just, bones." He looked over at Chris with a frown and his face always reminded her of a dignified little boy pondering his first arithmetic when he frowned this way. "Are you sure you've never seen her before, Chris? Doesn't she-vaguely remind you of someone? I admit that I can't think who, but...."
Chris had started to take off the jacket of her suit but then remembering that they had company, kept it on. At his question she turned and studied the grey, angular heap of fifty-year-old womanhood that Paul had deposited there on the couch. The face had a pinched, bony, Irish look and something primeval about the eyes that Chris remembered seeing in pictures and reconstructions of early man. What color would her eyes be when she opened them? Her hair had apparently been dyed a bright red but it had almost all grown out into a dull grey now and it was bobbed and curled in a way that had been the fashion fifteen or twenty years ago.
"Well, no, Paul, I don't think that I've ever seen her before. I'm sure that I don't know her. And who could she remind you of?" But his question had made her doubtful and she went over and stood above the woman. "Paul, her dress is ripped there at the neck. Do you think that someone attacked her or something? Maybe hurt her? And oh, Paul, look at her arms and legs, they're so thin."
"I don't think that she weighs more than ninety pounds," Paul said, coming over and standing beside Chris. "I'll make some instant coffee and we'll bring her around. That's what she asked for."
"But maybe she has been hurt," Chris said. She was completely sober now or at least the surface of her mind was alerted enough to make her seem sober. Her father was a professor of English out in Indiana, and Paul always saw something of him reflected in her face in these determinedly sober moments. "And maybe you were right when you said that we ought to call the police or a doctor or somebody."
But Paul was out in the kitchen, running water into a pan, and he was not there to see the woman's small blue eyes pop open at that moment. Chris saw them, however, and Chris was transfixed; for the eyes opened so abruptly and absolutely that Chris had the feeling that the woman had been conscious all the time and had only been keeping her eyes closed so that she could listen to what was being said-or perhaps as a ruse to get them to bring her inside their apartment.
"Oh, we're glad that you're awake," Chris said. "We didn't know what to think."
Their guest, however, did not answer, but her eyes remained wide-open and staring at Chris or more accurately through Chris and beyond her at some point in infinity, it seemed. Chris shivered. "Do you know where you are?" Chris asked.
Paul came in from the kitchen at that moment and stood silently beside Chris, also waiting for the woman's answer. But she gave none.
"You know that you were lying outside our apartment door, don't you?" Paul said. "We'd like to know whether you're all right."
SO
"All right?" she said flatly as if she were repeating a phrase out of a foreign tongue. And Chris had to repress a strange trill of laughter trying to escape her, perhaps at the fact that their guest's lipstick, which was orange, was smudged over her upper hp and cheek to give her a huge, lopsided comic mouth that moved imperceptibly when she spoke.
"What Paul means," Chris said as she felt the trill of laughter ebbing, "is are you hurt or anything?"
"Or anything what?"
Chris heard herself panting with the effort to repress her laughter. She glanced hopelessly at Paul, wondering whether he was having to control something like this too. And those eyes! Those eyes never blinked, never focused, they just stared on and on and on!
"Were you at a party in the building?" Paul asked, his even tone telling Chris, even as she had to turn her head away to repress a new surge of humor, that he was taking all of this quite seriously. "The party upstairs?"
The woman answered to Chris instead of to Paul, saying "No" in that flat way and never removing her eyes from Chris's.
"Then how did you get into the building?" Paul persisted. "Were you visiting someone in the building?"
"I live here," the woman said.
Chris and Paul exchanged a look. It was a small walk-up apartment building, four floors with two apartments on each floor and a dry-cleaning shop on the street level, and in the more than two years that they had been living here they had gotten to know pretty well everybody who went in and out. But they had certainly never seen her in the building before-had they? Chris had an inspiration.
"Did you just move in?" Chris asked. "Because we've never seen you before."
"I've been living here for over two years," the woman said.
It seemed preposterous. "But how could that be? What apartment do you live in?"
The woman looked from Chris to Paul and back to Chris again.
"This one," she said.
They stood gazing at her with their mouths open.
"But we live here," Chris said finally. "And neither of us has ever seen you before. You must have gotten into the wrong building by mistake."
"Is this the Folkstone Apartments?" the woman asked. "Yes," Chris said, "but-"
"Apartment D?"
"Yes."
"Well, honey, that's where I live." Chris looked hopelessly at Paul. It was really all too-too insane!
"Let's have the coffee," Chris said. "I need it."
As they sat around the coffee table with their cups, Paul said quite sternly to the woman, "I'm afraid that you'll have to leave after we drink this because you don't live here, you know."
There was a faint trace of alcoholic mockery in her worn face as the woman stared back at him. Oh why didn't she just get up and walk out? Chris wondered. It wasn't funny any more.
"Do you want me to go down to the street with you and help you find a cab?" Paul asked, putting down his cup.
"'Help me find a cab,'" she quoted. "That's what you want to do-'help me find a cab'?"
"That's entirely up to you," Paul said. "The point is that you don't live here and you can't stay here. Are you feeling better now? Can you walk?" And he tried to help her up by taking her arm, but she pushed him away.
"I'll walk," she announced. "Just leave me be and I'll walk."
And she got up and did, but none too steadily, Chris noticed.
"Oh dear-your hat." Chris brought the hat from the mantel, but the woman, instead of putting it on her head, carried it wadded up in her hand, like a rag.
"I'm going with you," Chris said. "I hope we'll be able to find a cab at this hour."
On the way down the stairs the woman stumbled a couple of times, but Paul was watchful and caught her. And outside in a neighborhood barren of people and cars at this hour, they looked hopelessly up and down the avenue for a cab, and saw none, and then like a miracle one turned a corner three blocks away and headed toward them.
"You do know where you're going, don't you?" Paul asked the woman. "You can give the driver an address, can't you?"
"I've got an address," the woman said with such assurance that their conversation upstairs might never have taken place. "Just don't you worry your little heads about me. I've got an address."
Paul looked wonderingly at her for a moment, then turned away to hail the cab. As it veered in toward the curb he brought a dollar bill out of his pocket and put it into the woman's hand. Then he opened the cab door, she stumbled in, and he closed it behind her. Even her wide-open eyes were lost in the dark box of the cab.
"I certainly hope that we did the right thing," Chris said as they stood watching the cab whine away down the avenue. "I'm actually trembling, Paul. It was one of the strangest experiences I ever had and I don't know why. Maybe we shouldn't have made her leave. Maybe we should have called a doctor or questioned her further or something. We don't even know whether she knew where she was going."
Paul was unlocking the front door of their apartment building, and as he straightened up to open the door for Chris he said, "Can we afford to care?"
"Afford to care?" Chris repeated.
"Yes," Paul said. "Because after we got her inside I think it was obvious what she was."
"What was she?"
"Why," Paul said, "she was just another one of the mixed-up drunks that you can see every day over on Third Avenue, stumbling along from one bar to another, drinking themselves senseless. The city is full of middle-aged alcoholic women like her, Chris; and that's why she looked so familiar at first. Alcohol makes them all look alike."
"Yes," Chris said as she passed by him into the vestibule. "Maybe that was the reason."
"And she wasn't even willing to tell a straight story," Paul went on as he closed the door firmly behind him and heard the lock snap. "That is, if she had one that would bear telling, which I doubt. Trying to say that she lived in our apartment!"
"I'm just glad that you were with me when we found her." They were going up the stairs now. "I don't know why it all seemed so funny to me at first-"
Chris was a little in the lead as they reached the second-floor landing and it was she who cried out when they saw the crumpled figure there at their apartment door.
The woman lay in exactly the same position in which they had found her the first time-flat on her stomach, her rather cheap-looking blue dress pulled up high, exposing thin, fish-white thighs and varicose veins, her soiled little white hat with pink berries crushed under her head.
"But, Paul, we just saw her drive away in that cab!" Chris said.
Paul, who was down on one knee examining the woman, looked up at Chris and put a finger to his lips. Then he stood up.
"Let's get inside." He was unlocking the apartment door now. "Not another word." He pointed to the ceiling and then to the floor, meaning, Chris decided, that he did not want her to say anything more that the neighbors might overhear. "I'm going to call the police," he said after he had 'closed the door behind them. "And you wash up the cups and put them away."
"But what's going on here?" Chris asked. "I feel-weird! Wasn't that woman out there the one that we just now saw drive away in the cab?"
"Yes," Paul said. "You know it's the same one. And she's dead."
"Dead?"
"Yes," Paul said. "Dead. And I'm going to call the police now."
"But-" Chris glanced toward the door. "What kind of story are we going to tell the police, Paul? How in the world can we ever explain-" and she gestured toward the door-"her?"
Their eyes met, and locked, holding each other across that wide room in the beginning of an understanding that they must carry in secret to their graves. Then Paul came walking toward her, and took her hand.
"We just got home, this minute," Paul said. "Is that clear?"
"Yes."
"And we found-her-in front of our door. All right?"
"Yes. Yes, all right."
"I could see immediately that she was dead and so I called them. Nothing else happened this evening, Chris. Nothing. That's the whole story."
"Yes," Chris said. "That's all that happened. I understand."
"I'll smooth out these cushions where she sat," Paul said, "and you put the cups away."
"All right."
"And, Chris-"
Chris turned in the doorway to the kitchen, the cups and saucers in her hands.
"Chris, wouldn't they be clever if they could show that we are lying?"
Chris heard the coffee cups move and rattle, and she steadied herself. "Yes, they would be, Paul," she said. "They certainly would be." She glanced toward the apartment door. "What's that?"
Paul held up his hand in silence and now there was no mistaking it. Someone had knocked again-at their door.
Paul came across the room and, standing close to the door, said, "Who is it?"
There was not a sound in response.
He fastened the chain-guard and opened the door a few inches-then looked around at Chris.
"She's gone," he said. "There's nobody here."
He closed the door, took off the chain-guard, and opened the door wide.
Side by side they stood looking out at the empty hallway. And then, without another word, Paul drew Chris back inside, and closed the door, and locked it. And as she turned and saw the woman sitting there, the bright sword of her scream pierced the terrible silence and the room closed down around her like a great black hand.
ARTIE BELl.
The guy we're talking about in this story had his troubles in life, what with a club foot and a grandmother that lived in the same house with him to always watch what time he got home, whether it was ten-twenty or ten-twenty and a half. He had a mother ready to jump on him and tell him what a Christian boy ought to do, a father who wanted him in before going to work at ten-thirty every night on the railroad, a married sister who lived down the street and agreed strenuously on every point her mother made. Sometimes, when you think of it like I'm telling it now, you can't figure how our Artie ever had a chance, and you want to cry, that poor guy.
It was his mother got him to start teaching in the Sunday School, she talked to the minister whenever she got a chance, and one time the subject came up, so poor Artie had to start right in the next Sunday with the twelve-year-old class, telling them about Moses, and the Sermon on the Mount, and many other interesting things that he got out of the Sunday School Teachers' Abbreviated Manual they gave him at the church. He did that for his whole nineteenth year on earth, and he was doing it now in his twentieth when this story is starting, but you take it from me, that guy was made of finer stuff, he never should really have been a Sunday School teacher, believe, me.
Artie Bell was a guy who liked to have a lot of jerks on the string to try and shove around, and so in a way I guess his Sunday School class just suited him. Every Saturday afternoon around one o'clock he would get them all together in front of the church and then he would talk to them, just like a general does to his army.
"Well, we're going to walk out in the country today, we're going out through Twin Roads, then we're going to come back along Duck Creek," Artie Bell would be saying, while all the kids were taking socks and double socks off the arms of each other, and giving each other special samples of the backward dive, and pulling each other's fly open, and old Artie would be standing there a little lower on one side than on the other because of his club foot, glowering at all the kids, getting a hold on the arm of one or the other with one of his big hands. He had a dark-red worried set look to his face, and he would be wanting to take out a cigar and smoke it, only he remembered what an example that would set. So finally he would try lining them all up by two's, like he dimly remembered from the second grade or sometime 'way back, and he would walk all around the big bunch of twelve or fourteen of them and throw orders all over the place, wishing he could get down to some good cussing because that was how he felt, only you never knew what they'd tell their mothers. The worst thing that could ever happen in his life would be for somebody to tell the minister and get him in some real dutch, because he knew how the minister had told his mother once how everybody around the church always respected him so much.
"All right, you guys," General Artie Bell said. "Get lined up," he'd say, pushing them all around, "what's wrong with you guys, come on, get lined up."
He'd march the whole crew of them, two by two, out to the street, where he'd stop them again. He would hobble around them, looking at them. Then after about five minutes of waiting around, and taking socks at all the guys who ran out of line (in spite of the deep respect he had for their mothers), they'd start down the street towards the country.
Everything old Artie belonged to was connected with the church. He was in the Christian Endeavor, the choir, he carried bats off the field for the Softball team, he helped dig the new cellar in the church, he was the guy that the minister got to talk everybody else into going around the neighborhood with their kid. brother's wagon gathering up old papers for the paper drive twice a year. His mother and grandma and father and married sister Mary Lou all put the pressure on him because they wanted him to be the finest kind of boy that you could find anywhere in the entire United States, and they just about had what they wanted in old Artie.
Now everything went along beautiful in this big loud wonderful guy's life until he was twenty and a half years old. Up till that eventful time he'd never had a date, but he used to always like to run around the streets of our neighborhood after dark with me and Cokie and maybe some of the other juniors of the neighborhood, talking to the girls we could find on the street. Only he was a shy guy, a very restraining influence, because while he always wanted to find the women, he never wanted to stick around awhile for the fireworks or whatever there was going to be. You of to talk, I say, you got to entertain, what is the use of rushing off if you don't want to entertain a little? I say, yes, buy her an ice-cream cone. But with Artie it was no, come on you guys, let's go. He was very restraining indeed.
He'd gone to printing trade-school to learn to become a printer, but he had that club foot and it was hard getting him a job. Finally the school got him a job in a print shop as errand boy. That company broke up and he started running a press off Colerain Avenue for a quarter an hour. He kept getting hotter and hotter under the collar, hating everything about that print shop, till one day when they told him he'd have to speed up to two thousand feeds an hour, old Artie just said, "Give me my money," took his cap and left.
All right, so he was out of a job, so his mamma was doing housework for some people out in Clifton, and his papa was working on the railroad, so Artie had to stay home with his grandma and do most of the housework. What's a guy to do when he has that kind of life? You would go around and Artie never could come out, he always had to stay in with his grandma. He always managed to take part in all the church affairs still though, and make his Sunday School kids go on hikes come Saturday afternoon.
Then when he was twenty-one there started something burning up in old Artie, he started getting crankier and crankier, and even his grandma didn't know how to handle him any more. He talked to his pop so nasty one night about ten o'clock, his pop said he'd knock all his, teeth down his throat. He got madder at his father than he had ever been before, and all his sudden anger even surprised old Artie. His old man told him to get back in his room and stay there till he thought he knew how to talk to somebody.
One Friday evening, it was getting late, everybody was sitting around in the little booths in Ray's bar-b-q and the nickelodeon had a Glenn Miller on, and Artie was back there sucking up a Pepsi-Cola, when Jeanie came in. She was a slim girl, like a willow reed, a face not pretty but sort of innocent, and a couple boys had picked her up with a car one night and come back to give her a reputation all over Turkey Bottoms. She was a nervous sort of dumb little girl, always running in and out of Ray's Place, standing for a second in front of the nickelodeon, going into the women's room then coming out. Whenever anybody kidded her a little from the booths, somebody always said, "Hey, lay off that stuff, do you want to land in the jug? Jail bait," they said. But this night Artie did not say anything as she came and went all over the place, I don't know whether he had ever even noticed her before, only this night he sure was looking at her, sort of out of the corner of his eye. "What's the matter, Artie, yearning for a little of that?" Cokie Myers said, and that made him plenty mad and he got up and went into his punch-drunk boxer's stance and started socking everybody in the booths as if we all had said it. And from then on we had something on him and we wouldn't let up and every time he was in Ray's Place and she came in he turned real red but he couldn't help looking at her, all burning like that. And sometimes when he wasn't around we used to talk about him always looking at this girl like that and it was pretty much fun thinking about what Artie wouldn't like to do; we never kept any of this stuff to ourselves, and used to kid him and duck and run.
One night he came walking down to Ray's Place, it was a Monday night and the gang wasn't around. Then all of a sudden just as Artie is going in the door, this little blond kid with the one-night-stand reputation comes dashing out. Artie is all stuffed up this night and feels no chance like this will ever come his way again, so he says, "Did you see any of the guys around?"
She stops and says, "What? What did you say?"
Artie blurts out, "Did you see Cokie or any of them guys?"
Jeanie is looking at him with those sort of dumb confused eyes of hers, then she smiles and says, "Oh ... oh no, I didn't see any of them around, uh-uh."
So Artie turns and starts walking up the street and she walks along beside him. And when they are crossing the railroad tracks, where it's dark, he gets ahold of her hand and she isn't the girl to resist a friendly hand.
That was most of all that happened that night. When they came to her house on the avenue she said, "Oh, good night, I got to go now," and went inside and closed the door.
You could see what was happening inside Artie Bell. He had fallen in love-oh, secretly, silently within himself, pressing her image against his heart and murmuring her name only when he knew that everyone else was in bed and asleep. It was not the kind of love a man enjoys, and seeing him this way I felt sorry for him, and the other guys who suspected it felt sorry for him too, but kidded him about it till he was red as a beet and ready to crush bones in his two hands.
She was always out on the avenue in the evening waiting around for the boys to come along and pick her up, and I suppose that Artie met her there a couple of times, and I suppose that she talked with him a little bit, in a motherly sort of way, you know. We knew all about this, and some of the stories that the guys took it upon themselves to tell Axtie-stories about her and her car rides and everything-were enough to break your heart, seeing how much hearing these things hurt him. You noticed that he didn't swing on you in the old hearty way that he had when there wasn't so much bothering him, and there was something gone out of the way he talked. He didn't talk like a general any more. He didn't go into his punch-drunk boxer's stance. There were a lot of evenings when we never even saw him at the bar-b-q.
One night a bunch of us were riding around in Eddie Miller's old Dodge-I-don't-know-what-year, shouting at people we saw on the street and in general raising a hell of a noise and keeping people awake who liked to go to bed early. When we happened to pass two people, boy and girl, standing under a tree, somebody said, "Wasn't that old Artie? Turn this thing around. If it is we'll have something on him he'll pay for for the rest of his life."
Eddie got the bus turned around, and sure enough, it was him and her, the first time all of us together had come on them together like this. Caught them together, that was what we felt we had done. And Cokie Myers had an idea.
"Come on for a ride, Jeanie," Cokie Myers said, ignoring Artie, who was standing there, his face all red, looking a little ill-balanced on his club foot, almost fainting with anger and shame and many other things, and probably wondering whether anybody would tell his mother or his grandmother or his married sister or his old man that he was keeping company with her-not knowing whether to say hello to the gang, or walk away and let them have her, or jump in and begin swinging just like in the good old days, saying, "Did I hear the bell?"
He didn't have to make a decision, though, because she jumped right in the car with us, and there he was standing out there on the pavement all alone and she was in the car with us. "Come on and get in, Artie. Yeah, come on, get in," the guys said. "We're going for a ride."
But he had already turned his back and was hobbling up the street.
This wasn't the way it was supposed to work, it was supposed to be a good old joke on old Artie and he was not supposed to have his feelings hurt, so we followed along after him slowly in the car, yelling out at him, "Hey, come on, what's the trouble, Artie, don't you want to go for a little ride, eh? Come on, Artie kid."
But he didn't look around and he didn't say anything at all, just went hobbling on up the street in his pitiful sort of way, moving like some prehistoric thing, a turtle or something, which never quite gets along with the world.
Jeanie was saying, "Where you going to drive to, fellows?" in that stupid, foolish voice of hers, and we were all sorry we'd picked her up.
Somebody said to her, "Hey, honey, did you know we just did old Artie Bell a favor? A mighty big favor."
"Where you fellows taking me?" she said in that peculiar whining voice of hers. "Maybe I don't want to go."
Nobody answered and she didn't talk any more either.
Maybe we were a little mad at her because of the way we'd treated Artie.
Hell, she was a bitch, no girl for him to get serious over, and we wanted more than anything else for him to see that. I guess that was the reason, though there was a kind of cruelty in what we did too, and we did it just because we knew he would suffer from it.
He must have gone right to the railroad tracks after leaving us, and waited there for the eleven-thirty freight to East St. Louis to come through. And he got the freight all right, when it slowed up for a signal probably, and he must have rode for a while boiling over with his thoughts of what life was. And who knows what went through his mind as he hung on the cold rungs of the boxcar ladder, watching the dark ground slip along under him, and maybe knowing what he was going to do all the while?
What happened to Jeanie? Well, nothing. We just rode her around for a little while, asked her how she liked old Artie Bell which she didn't even answer, then brought her back to the streets of Turkey Bottoms and let her out. Then we scouted around looking for Artie, wanting to kid him a little about how we took his beautiful blond girl friend right away from him, but we couldn't find him and pretty soon gave it up, deciding he'd gone home.
The next day it was in the paper. How he'd been found beside. the railroad track, killed by the twelve-fifteen flyer from Chicago.
I knew how everybody felt. Even those who still thought of Artie Bell with humor had the feeling that something big and terrible had just happened in their lives and that they had been responsible for it.
And in all of our minds when we got together in the booths at Ray's Place with a Glenn Miller on, drinking our Pepsi-Colas, there was a strange antipathy to talk about Artie Bell.
As for the Woman in the Case, she went on being picked up, and when she became pregnant her father sent her to relatives down in Kentucky, and she never did come back.
But in a way, though, old Artie Bell did, because the guys began to loosen up about him finally, and talk about him, remembering what a guy he'd been. And somebody like Cokie Myers would say:
"Hey, hey you, remember how old Artie used to go, like an old punch-drunk fighter, like this," he'd say, bobbing and weaving and swinging hard at the air. "Boy, he was nuts," somebody like Cokie Myers would say about him, and everybody would laugh looking at Cokie Myers doing the imitation. But then the conversation would turn to the Reds' chances for the year and we would begin discussing Derringer's pitching arm, whether he was losing his grip or not, and stuff like that that didn't hurt us.
LONG FOR THIS WORLD
Gottfried von Schlupp, Petty Herrigan and Birdie Tee-son had in common chiefly the fact that their three apartments sat one on top the other in the same building (it was a walk-up) on Lexington Avenue in New York City. Three steps down from street-level on the ground floor there was the entrance to a shoe-repair shop and the entrance to the building, and Gottfried's door was at the top of the first rather dark, rather narrow flight of stairs. For three years now since she had moved into the apartment above him, he had been now more, now less, but always somewhat aware of the kind of life that Petty Herrigan was leading. She was noisy. Her high heels banged back and forth across the floor above Gottfried at all hours of the night and morning. She played her radio, and sometimes her record-player, loud. And sometimes the whir of her sewing machine kept up all night long. It was only when she went out that the traffic noise from Lexington Avenue seemed to move in. In the same way, Petty knew something about the life of Birdie Teeson on the third floor. She heard Birdie get up in the morning, she heard the door slam when Birdie went off to work, and she heard her come home in the late afternoon. If she was rather quiet most of the time, partly because she was out a good deal of the time, she made up for this by throwing a loud and rowdy party about once a month-a party that came laughing and bellowing and coughing down the air-shaft into the bathroom windows of both Petty's and Gottfried's apartments.
He was a squarish, florid, heavy-set man in his middle forties who had been living quite alone ever since his wife and child had been killed in an airplane accident a dozen years ago. He wore double-breasted suits, squarish-looking shoes, and his square head and the squareness of his other features, including his hands, gave him a rather square look all around. He worked for a lithograph company at a pretty good salary and he patronized the bar across the street from his apartment house. Occasionally in the evening or on week-ends he worked in oils on canvas for his own amusement, and it sometimes took him six months or even a year to finish a painting since he was doing it purely for amusement and as a relief from the technical work that he did on other people's artwork at the lithography house. Certainly if the two ladies who lived above him had been able to vote on what kind of man they wanted to share that narrow old building on Lexington Avenue with them, they might well have chosen Gottfried von Schlupp. But he had been living at that address for over ten years, a longer time than either of them. And since Petty Herrigan was the noisiest woman (or man, for that matter) who had ever lived upstairs, it was he who had reason for complaint. But he made none. He let her thump and bang around up there, and if the whir of her sewing machine sometimes awoke him in the middle of the night, he let that go by too, just as he made nary a grumble about Birdie Tee-son's parties.
Gottfried knew his two neighbors by sight and of course by name since their names were on their mailboxes downstairs in the vestibule; but otherwise his knowledge of them was limited to what was thrust on him through the ceiling or down the air-shaft. Occasionally he passed one or the other of the women on the stairs or in the vestibule or on the street in front of the building and he always raised his hat and said, "How do you do" or "Good afternoon." Petty Herrigan gave out with a most terrific smile every time; her upstairs neighbor was apt to be more solemn and seldom did more than nod to Gottfried's greeting. He thought that perhaps she was more restrained because she was the only Negro living on a white block-or at least the only one that he ever saw around here-and her solemnity and aloofness troubled him a little, making him feel that he should do something more in the way of neighborliness to show that she was welcome to live here as far as he was concerned. And she was. Her parties and the people who came to them did not bother him. He lived his own quiet, contained life of work, bar and home; and satisfied with the memory of his wife and child, wanting nothing beyond what he had or had had, he gave himself up to the routine of his years, with an occasional beer at the bar now and then to relieve whatever tension or boredom that he might feel.
"Dear Mr. Schlupp," said the note that Gottfried found shoved under his door one evening when he came home from work, "We have only a nodding acquaintance but we have been neighbors for a long time now and I thought that it would be nice if now during the Christmas season you and Miss Teeson (upstairs) and I got to know each other better. After all, we all share the same address! So I am inviting you and Miss Teeson to my apartment for cocktails this coining Saturday, the 29th, at fivish. Please do come! Sincerely, Petty Herrigan (2nd floor)."
Gottfried decided that he would go. As a matter-of-fact, it was the first invitation that he had received since his married sister in New Jersey had had him over for Thanksgiving Day dinner, and he thought how thoughtful it was of Miss Herrigan to invite him. He was not too sure about Miss Teeson, but he supposed that the three of them would get along, as neighbors, in a polite little conversation for an hour and that would be that. No harm to it all certainly. On the contrary-how nice! And so on Saturday afternoon Gottfried slicked back his thinning, dark-blond hair with pomade, shaved his pink jowls carefully and close, polished up his square tan shoes and put on his grey, double-breasted suit which he had bought two years ago and which was his newest.
"I believe you two know each other," Petty Herrigan said as she led Gottfried into her apartment and there was Miss Teeson, already there. She stood up and gave Gottfried's hand a squeeze and he noticed for the first time that she was a little taller than he-a fine-looking brown woman with jet-black hair and large, handsome black eyes. The tight taffeta dress that she was wearing was. a play of lavender lights as she sat down.
Gottfried sat down too, and accepted the Martini cocktail that Petty Herrigan gave him.
"Now isn't this nice?" Petty said. "I just thought it would be nice for us to say hello to each other during Christmas week since we all really know each other anyhow-or at least I feel that I know both of you, just saying hello when I see you in the hall." She smiled brightly at both of them and with an odd, quivery-eyed grimace blew a strand of red hair off her forehead. "I hope-I hope that I don't make too much noise, Mr. Schlupp. I do sometimes work at night and I hope you don't hear me. I mean I hope I don't keep you awake or anything."
"No, there's a lot of noise from the avenue," Gottfried said, "so noise isn't important anyway."
"Most of my friends are in the theatrical profession," Birdie Teeson said, "and I suppose that we are quite a noisy group when we get together. I hope that my parties don't make too much noise occasionally-especially for you, Miss Herrigan, because you're right underneath me."
"Call me Petty," Miss Herrigan said. "I know it's a kind of a funny first name but it was my mother's last name and so that's the way I got it. And no, I sure can't complain about noise, Miss Teeson-"
"Birdie."
"Birdie. I make enough of it myself. Oh, and so then you're in the theatrical profession then too, Birdie?"
"Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. I'm the secretary for the By-By Boys. I mean I don't travel with them but we have an office here in New York."
"Oh yes, I have some of their records," Petty said. "They're good. You know the By-By Boys, don't you, Mr. Schlupp?"
"Singers?"
"They're a quartet, aren't they, Birdie?"
"A trio," Birdie answered, and glanced with considerable dignity at an ashtray on her left, where she dropped the ash from her cigarette. "You are right in a way though. There used to be a fourth member of the group but he dropped out and I think it's a much better group now, to tell you the truth."
"Oh I think that they're just wonderful," Petty said enthusiastically. "Here, now don't say you don't want it because I made all of these." And she was filling their glasses again from the Martini mixer. "Well, this is nice, isn't it? I mean especially finding out you're in the theatrical profession, Miss-Birdie, because I am too but in a very small and humble way I've got to admit. I mean we have a group-theater group I mean-off-Broadway of course-well, this year we put on three plays, I mean this fall, and I made a lot of the costumes." She glanced at Gottfried. "You've probably heard me up here making some of the costumes. The only time I have is at night, of course, or on week-ends, and usually I have to be learning my part too. Are you in anything like the theater or singing, Mr. Schlupp?"
"Lithography," Gottfried said. He glanced at both Miss Herrigan and Miss Teeson to see whether they understood and apparently both did. He tasted the Martini again. It had been a long time since he had had a Martini and these tasted, well, perfumed-unless he was somehow mixing up the taste with the perfume that was emanating from the two ladies. Perhaps that was it. And perhaps it was the effect of the alcohol to make so shy a man as Gottfried von Schlupp say with a not-at-all-habitual little smile, "I admire your dress, Miss Teeson. It's very pretty."
"Oh," Miss Teeson said. "Thank you." She put the shoulder-strap back in place with a long brown finger. "It's taffeta," she added, and reached over for her drink.
"The color," Gottfried said, glancing at Petty Herrigan for confirmation.
"Well, don't you like my dress?" Petty Herrigan said. "I'm jealous, Gottfried."
It was the first time that either of the women had used his first name, and he felt himself blushing-or was this too somehow the effect of the Martinis? It had been a long time since he had been alone in a room with women, at least on a social occasion-or on any occasion for that matter. "Very nice. Very nice indeed," Gottfried mumbled through his sudden shyness and confusion. And almost immediately he said something about having to go, stuttered his good-bys to the two women, and went downstairs to his own apartment.
There he lay down on the bed and wondered at what had come over him. Was it the alcohol which even now seemed to be singing dimly in his ears? Or was it the muddle of desire that he had felt in himself upstairs after so many years of abstinence? But whom had he desired? Both or them, that was the truth. It was not so much the women themselves, he thought, as the atmosphere of strong feminine contrast that they had created. The lively and enthusiastic little redhead and the tall, handsome, dignified Negress had, with the help of the cocktails and their perfume, stirred up somewhere deep within him a whole lifetime of submerged desire. Petty Herrigan's high heels tapped across the floor above him. He got up and went into the bathroom to wash his face and hands, and through the air-shaft window he could hear the voices of the two women upstairs but could not make out what they were saying.
Gottfried had been sleeping for almost two hours when a tapping at his door awakened him. When he opened it, there was Birdie Teeson wearing a fur coat that completely covered the taffeta dress that Gottfried had admired this afternoon.
"Hello," Birdie said, and Gottfried was surprised at her smile. "I meant to invite you to my New Year's Eve party this afternoon but you left so quick that I didn't have a chance to. Will you come? It will be upstairs in my apartment and you can come at any time you want to-nine-ten-"
"New Year's Eve?" Gottfried said, his mind still blurred with sleep and his thoughts busily adjusting themselves around the fact that he now had more than a nodding acquaintance with Miss Teeson. "Yes, well, thank you very much," he said. "How nice of you to ask me." And then he found himself remembering the lustful thoughts that he had had about Miss Teeson earlier this evening, and he felt himself blushing again.
As Birdie smiled and turned away to go' down the stairs, Gottfried closed the door and stood for a few moments with his hand still on the knob. He was actually panting, and he wondered in dumb amazement at the change in his thoughts and in his whole physical being as well that those two women had brought about-perhaps through no conscious effort on their part, he couldn't say about that. He only knew that after leading a very lonely and orderly and almost Spartan sort of existence for so many years, he was now the recipient of two invitations within a single week; and his mind was choked with lustful thoughts as if a sudden spring had cracked the ice of his interior world.
While he was spooning up some soup at the kitchen table, the telephone rang.
"Hello."
"Gottfried?" It was a woman's voice but he did not recognize it.
"Yes, this is Gottfried."
"Well, this is Petty. You know. Upstairs."
"Oh yes-Petty." Gottfried felt a trembling all through him. "What can I do for you?"
"Well, can you come upstairs for a minute? I want to talk to you about something."
"Yes, all right," Gottfried said, though with a deep feeling of reluctance. "I'll come up."
Her dark eyes were dancing and glittering almost fiendishly when she opened the door for him, and she smiled hugely at him.
"Yes, come in," she said, "and we've got to keep our voices low because she might come back and be up there and I certainly don't want her to overhear us."
"Who?" Gottfried said, keeping his voice low.
"The woman who calls herself Birdie Teeson."
"Why, isn't that her name?"
"Sit down there! I've got so much to tell you." And Gottfried did as she told him and sat down, but Petty remained standing directly in front of him. "No, Gottfried, that isn't her name. I don't know her real name, but it isn't Birdie Teeson. And she doesn't work for the By-By Boys."
"She doesn't? But she said that she did."
"No, she doesn't! She just says that-just like she says that her name is Birdie Teeson. And she isn't colored. She only pretends to be colored."
"But she looks-"
"She uses make-up," Petty said excitedly. "It isn't hard to do if you dye your hair that way. I know all of those tricks. I've been around the theater long enough. Anyhow, I thought that I should tell you now that we know each other better. I thought that you should see for yourself."
"See what for myself?"
"Birdie Teeson. Or I mean the woman who calls herself Birdie Teeson."
"I see." Gottfried felt a vague sense of alarm but no inclination whatever to get up and go. "Did she invite you to her New Year's party?" he asked.
"Oh do you really believe it?" Petty asked.
"Believe it?"
"That she's going to have one?"
"Why-she just told me that she was, that's all that I know about it," Gottfried said innocently, and his heart was pounding.
"She's moving tomorrow-I mean Monday," Petty said, "so how can she be giving a New Year's party upstairs like she says? How can she?"
"I didn't know about that," Gottfried said. "She didn't say anything about moving. Is that what she told you after I left this afternoon?"
"She told me many things this evening," Petty said. "Many, many things."
"Well, it sometimes takes a long time to get to know your neighbors," Gottfried said, feeling as he said it that this observation sounded strangely inadequate in the light of all that Petty had been telling him.
"She's a psychiatrist and she gets money from the Spanish government," Petty said. "I'll fix us a drink."
"Not for-"
"Not for me" was what Gottfried had started to say, but Petty had quickly disappeared into the other room before he could get the words out. Minutes went by; she did not reappear; and he thought it strange that to fix drinks she had gone not into the kitchen but into another room. What could she be doing in there all of this time? Should he call out, "Good-by, Miss Herrigan," and leave? Yet she seemed to have cast a spell over him with all of the extraordinary things that she had just been saying about the lady on the top floor and he found himself actually anxious to hear more.
"Here I am, Gottfried."
Gottfried looked up and she was standing in the doorway with her arms folded in front of her, wearing a tan leather coat that reached just below her knees. Her legs and feet were bare. She came on into the room and stood in front of him just a few feet away.
"She has a big fur coat but I have a tan leather coat," Petty said with a huge smile.
"Yes," Gottfried said with a kind of gulp. "So I see."
"With buttons on it, leather buttons," Petty Herrigan said as she began to unbutton the buttons from the top, one by one.
Gottfried was already rising from the chair as she opened the leather coat, and head down like a bull, he headed for the door without a word. Far into a sleepless night downstairs he was troubled with the blurry vision of pink-and-white flesh and red hair that Petty Herrigan had given him when she opened the coat.
A sensible man, he took the following Monday off from work and looked for and found a new apartment. This one was far uptown on the West Side and quite a distance from his work, but he liked it especially because it was removed completely from the neighborhood where he had been living for so long. As for the New Year's Eve party given by the woman known as Birdie Teeson, he telephoned her and excused himself from going to it. He likes his new apartment, which is high up in an elevator building, and occasionally he thinks and wonders about his old neighbors. But he has nothing at all to do with his new ones. Better that way.
THE BLAZE BEYOND THE TOWN
The town was small and new and full of restlessness. Beyond the town, eight miles out into the endless desert, was the blaze the smelter made. The smelter's big stacks gushed black smoke which, when the wind was wrong, strangled the town's straight short streets with clouds of sulphur.
Main Street was G Avenue: it looked innocent and dormant in the daytime, with its Chamber of Commerce and Mines, its drugstore, its shops, its ancient, angular fire-engine sitting on solid-rubber tires in the brick firehouse. But let darkness fall on that street of that Arizona border-town and it changed. A sinister something, a restlessness, set in. The bright-eyed, black-haired border town girls fluttered in and out of the cafes, and cowboys and smelter workers sat with their women in the booths and spat on the floor and ate hamburgers with pepper sauce and drank beer. The jukeboxes belching loud Mexican music jangled the air, beat down on all the customers' heads till everybody just sat there with his blank Arizona look. The lean cowboy in his boots looked at his lean wife. The wife looked back at him. It was Saturday night. Two hours went by. Jody jody oh jody jody went the jukebox. Then a fight would start. A drunk would come in who knew the cowboy and tell him just what he thought. There would be the fight, and if it wasn't too violent the cowboy would come back to the table and drink his beer and look at his frozen-faced wife. She would look back at him. Nobody ever took his big cowboy hat off in the cafes, just as though there might be someplace to go in a hurry any minute.
It was the war and now the soldiers were here. They were air cadets and they lived at a big airfield five miles out. Every second month the old class graduated and went off to the real war, and a new class came in. But it was really always the same class and always the same thing happened to it-always one plane and two men were missing when the class returned from the long night-flight through the treacherous mountains that was the final flight of the training.
All of them understood that perhaps they would die soon, and when they came on the main street of the town at night they added something to the restlessness of the town. There was a need in them for something more than they were. Perhaps they wanted most of all violence and life such as they had never known before-the war a red passion in their souls that filled them with fear and hunger. Classes and calculations and calisthenics were what they had at the airfield. But after dark, there was the town.
One of the places you could go in the town was the Coney Island, open till I a.m. A scabby place, one story high, made of clapboard painted yellow like a grocery store and called simply Coney Island. Beside the door, listings in chalk on a blackboard of what you could have: Hamburgers, Coney Islands, Hot Tamales, Beer, Wine, Whiskey, No Credit. Inside, the place jammed with Mexicans and cowboys and whores and soldiers. The proprietor was a drowsy-faced fellow with a huge jaw who seemed to see nothing that went on in that small stinking madhouse room, and usually sat looking with a bored expression out of the window.
Saturday night, almost closing time, when Ray came in with his friends. Arthur, Phil and Buck and Ray, here came the cadets, and they were feeling restless and lost and they had had many drinks. Nothing in that town for them except alcohol and dirty women. But they felt that the town promised them something it never gave.
Didn't think about the war, didn't talk about the war, Ray and his three friends didn't. Going to war? Fly big planes in the war? Okay. But we're not there yet. Ray and his three friends took a booth.
"Hamburgers. Beer," Ray said. "Right, men?"
"Right."
"Right."
"Right, sir."
The drowsy-faced Mexican proprietor did not see who it was he brought the hamburgers for. He saw the money he took, but only to see it was all there.
Ray and his friends bit deep into their hamburgers and each devoured three, with hot-pepper sauce that made them open their mouths wide and breathe hard and smile.
Over and over and over the jukebox played "San Antonio Rose" and there was a little Mexican slumped over the table nearest the jukebox, looking dead to the world, but when "San Antonio Rose" hit a certain very loud part at the end he would lift up his head and whoop and holler and then "San Antonio Rose" would get softer at the finale and he would put his head back down in his arms, altogether dead again. He did this every time the song was played-Ray and his three friends were watching him. They were also watching two Mexican whores at the next table. One was very large and had big breasts which she rested on the table and the other was thin with a great mass of black hair and a gold tooth that flashed in her smile.
"Friends!" Ray said to his friends, and immediately they sat up as straight as they could and answered, "Sir!" which was the ritual they had established among them and which was very military and even militant. They meant business. "Friends!" Ray said. "I propose that we declare a state of emergency in this lousy town and give it a taste of what it's aching for."
"This town makes me nervous," said Arthur, who was perhaps closest to Ray and who, in spite of what he had gotten himself involved in during the past year, really was a quite small and quite harmless person who wanted nothing more out of life than to get married to another quite small and quite harmless person and live a small and harmless life in a little white harmless house in the suburbs of some big city.
"Me too," said Buck. Buck was the handsome one of the four and "Me too" was just about all he ever said. It was not necessary to say more when you had worked on a lion farm in California and seen what life can be among lions.
"I object only in part," said Phil, who had graduated in law from the College of the City of New York and had spent practically his father's whole savings on an office to sit in and have a pretty secretary among other women in and who now was training to be a pilot and die in the war some violent death far from his office and his pretty secretary, who had been just out of business school when he hired her and had not yet learned what he later taught her.
Ray himself felt very pleased with his three friends and with the answers they had chosen to give him. He was hardly harmless, had never graduated from any college and had worked on very few women and no lion farms, but nevertheless he felt it was quite all right and proper to feel very pleased with his three friends, who were all sitting there staring hard at one another.
At that moment the little Mexican once more woke up and shouted and yodeled for the loud part of "San Antonio Rose," and then once more went back to sleep in his own arms. Three women dark as the night outside, or just about, came in, and the two women, one fat and one thin, went out followed by soldiers. But these occurrences did not keep Ray from being extremely gratified with his three friends and their answers. The three women sat down in the booth which had been occupied by the two women, and except for this incident there was no change in the Coney Island. The proprietor interested himself in picking his nose with quiet determination and staring out through the front window, beyond which he could see nothing except the night.
"Friends!" Ray said to his friends, and brought his fist down on the table. "One question only remains, friends. Shall we begin here, or shall we begin outside?"
Arthur suddenly remembered a very small and harmless girl with an eighteen (or was it a twenty?) inch waist whom he had known in high school, and his eyes grew slightly moist. Phil was looking at a droopy-eyed burro and some cactus painted all over one wall in red and blue, and giving some thought to how his young and pretty secretary had broken out a window-pane in his office the first night that he had fed her wine there. The night watchman, he remembered, had come on the run, wanting to know what was up. And Buck was recalling that piercing scream the female lion always gave when the male lion tired her out and finally got her good-so not one of the four, Ray with his "Friends!" and Arthur with his small and harmless girl and Phil with his broken window-pane and Buck with his lioness, not one of them noticed what was standing by their table.
It had come over very quietly with a beer in its hand and it had been standing there for a full seven minutes. Looking at them. Ray, as a matter-of-fact, was the first to notice it, and he stopped in the middle of a new "Friends!" and looked up at it very hard.
It looked down at him very hard.
It was very small and dark and had an uncertain sort of mouth twisted over to one side of its very long, very dark face.
It hiccuped (once).
Ray transferred his gaze to the gaze of his three friends and "San Antonio Rose" reached that especially loud part and the little Mexican at the table jumped clean off his seat this time, yodeled once and dashed for the street, slamming the door so hard behind him that the whole room shuddered. The three dark young ladies in the booth took no notice of this but instead went on conversing loudly in the Spanish language. Two military policemen looked in through the front window and then passed on by.
And there was no denying it-it had taken a step forward and was even swaying a little, with one delicate dark hand on the table and the other around the glass of beer which it held right under its chin and grinned over.
Phil looked up and grinned under his large nose.
"Hello," Phil said.
It smiled again, twisting its mouth even farther over to one side, and then sat down. And gave Ray and his three friends, each one individually, a nod.
"Do you think it's alive?" Phil said.
"Maybe we should touch it with a stick and see," Arthur said.
"Me too," Buck said.
They were all waiting now for Ray to say something but he said nothing and just sat glaring straight ahead. Until finally he did speak.
"You understand, friends, that it has insulted us. You understand that, don't you?"
So now they all began to frown at it and point fingers at it, and Arthur even poked it timidly and Buck got up and made a loud unseemly noise and sat back down again. And Ray who had started it all did not even deign to look at it but just stared straight ahead with a face of stone.
"Friends!" Ray said. "I don't think we should let this insult go by unnoticed, friends."
Then Ray's three friends just to show their approval all did the same things over again, Buck standing up and making the loud unseemly noise twice this time instead of once.
The smile had now completely left its face but the mouth still stayed a little on one side and the eyes, which you were not ever sure were looking at you or away from you, became altogether confused.
Ray said, "You understand, friends, to have justice in the world and live a good clean life we will have to wipe this town off the face of the earth and we will have to start with whatever has sat down here."
Arthur and Buck and Phil sat staring hard at Ray, waiting for their cue. They did not notice that the slightest pucker of a frown had gathered between its two uncertain centerless eyes.
And then with no sign of warning except the little frown it leaped halfway out of its seat and struck Arthur a solid blow on the side of the head and started pummeling away furiously at Ray's chest. And now it was screaming and shouting in Spanish in its piping little voice and pushing and pummeling and upsetting all their beer. And of course Buck and Phil got into action and began hitting it on the back and the head. Arms and legs and heads bobbed up and down over the top of the booth and then the whole fight as if thrown out by a spring came wham-bo right out in the middle of the floor and it was neither on top nor on the bottom but holding its own somewhere in the middle and the proprietor walked over, quite calmly, and shouted at the working mass of legs and arms and the jukebox hit the loud part of "San Antonio Rose" though nobody heard it to shout and the three whores sipped their beer and looked on quite calmly until suddenly the three of them leaped out of their booth and started screaming and running around and a tall cowboy who worked in the smelter by day and owned one cow came running into the fray and promptly got his big white hat knocked off.
And when the two military policemen came in with their clubs raised to take care of Ray and his three friends, there were the three whores down on the floor screaming and biting and scratching one another, but no other fight.
The cowboy was gone.
Arthur and Phil both had black left eyes and sat on the floor with their backs against the bar, white as ghosts.
Buck had been laid low with a beer bottle by the proprietor and was sitting unconscious in a-booth, looking haphazardly over his left shoulder with a frozen grin.
Ray was drinking a glass of beer at the bar, his back turned on the whole scene.
And it was stretched under the pinball game, knocked out.
The proprietor was nice enough to point out Ray and his three friends to the empees and then stooped over and began picking up the pieces of glass, very slowly and with considerable pride in his work-while the empees took Ray and his three friends out to the street to wait for the paddy wagon.
The sky was a blaze in the distance, eight miles beyond the town.
Behind them, in the Coney Island, "San Antonio Rose" came on again.
Ray did not look at his three friends, and Ray's three friends did not look at Ray.
The two empees did not look at Ray or his three friends. They had their own thoughts to think.
Finally Ray said, "Friends, we may as well admit our mistake."
Ray's three sad friends did not say a word.
It was a rough, new town, full of restlessness. They had done it and now it was done.
In five more weeks they would have their wings. Soon after that they would die in the war-or not die, who knew?
Their lives and the restless little bordertown had promised them something they never found. There was the blazing sky out there and here were the dark whores who wandered by and the stinking little cafes. There was also the war, somewhere soon in their future, and beyond the war they could not see anything.
Ray did not want to talk. He felt rotten and he knew the other three felt rotten in the same way.
But he pulled himself together and said it.
"Friends, we may as well admit it. He was the best man. He brought all his friendliness to us and asked for hospitality and a little friendship in return.
"He was the best man," Ray said, and he could already see the paddy wagon turning the corner at the top of the street. "He brought us everything and we brought him exactly nothing.
"All of us," Ray said, "all of us ought to get killed in the war for this."
Ray's three friends did not answer.
"Humanity," Ray said, raising his voice now. "We forgot our humanity, fellows. That's what we forgot."
THE BAMBINO
"Caramella," screamed the bambino, squinting into the sun to see the three soldiers.
They stood at the second-story window of the bombed-out schoolhouse, looking down on the bambino but taking no notice of him.
"... that was in 1939," Halden was saying, fingering the armored corps insignia on his left sleeve. "Four years ago. I was twenty then and she was nineteen. I met her in the grocery store. I told you I worked in a grocery store for a year, didn't I?"
"No," said Grossi, "I thought you said you was a shipping clerk." Grossi was built like one of the light tanks he drove-stocky and close to the ground, with a nose almost big enough to be a .50-caliber machine gun. He looked out at the world through long slits of eyes, and his big hatch of a mouth was continually open as if that helped him to see and hear, for he seldom used it for speaking. He was of Italian descent and the natives were always stopping him on the street, thinking they'd find a friend in a G.I. who was also obviously an Italian.
The truth was that he couldn't speak a word of the language except "buono" and "quanto costo," and he sometimes wished he'd been sent to the Pacific, where the people he'd be fighting wouldn't take him for a blood brother. He didn't feel like an Italian, that was the point. It might be different if he felt like one.
He was going to talk about this to Halden, but Halden was going on.
"At first I sized her up the way you'd size up any other girl who was stacked. She'd just moved into the neighborhood, you know, so I figgered I'd try dating her and if she'd give, why buono, and if, not I'd give her the air."
"Caramella! Caramella!" screamed the bambino below them. Now he was stomping his bare feet, for the pavement was very hot and it was beginning to dawn on him that not one of the three soldiers was paying any attention to him and his urgent needs.
The third soldier, Smith, was a tall lean fellow whose badly fitted uniform somehow seemed to announce the fact that he had been a civilian once and would be one again. He smoked his cigarette nervously, oblivious both to Halden's life story and the bambino's request. His pale blue, close-set eyes looked out over the shattered city and he thought again of Cap Bon and the battle. He thought: Harry telling me to go and see his mother, like something right out of a movie. What the hell, it didn't seem like anything more than a flesh wound-I even smiled at him, thinking I'd kid him about it in a day or two. I'm an insensitive fool, I guess. A dumb, insensitive fool. Him laying there on the ground dying and asking me to see his mother when I get home and me laughing in his face because it sounded like something out of a movie. But he hardly seemed hurt at all....Smith took a big final drag on the butt. He was a damned good tank-jockey, Smith thought-and sent the cigarette butt spinning far out over the bambino's head.
The bambino was waving his arms now. "Amico! Amico!" he called. "Una caramella! Amico!" The bambino's face and hands and feet were very dirty, but his big eyes looked out of all the dirt attractively. The little one-piece shift he wore did not in any way disguise the fact that he had no underwear on, for this little one-piece shift barely covered his belly-button. And it was obvious that he wanted only one caramella very badly-obvious, that is, to just about anyone except the three tank men standing at the window of the big bomb-shattered schoolhouse that Mussolini had built ten years before to make good soldiers out of bambinos like the little dirty ragged one now stating his request so clearly down on the sidewalk. But the three soldiers had heard the word caramella so much since they'd been in Italy that it no longer caught their attention at all.
"... but she was different," Halden was saying. "I mean, I been out with plenty of girls and I always knew what I wanted out of 'em, but Jean was different. I guess it was just one of them funny things, you know ... where you don't want to touch a girl even unless you know she wants to be touched. Jesus, we had a lot of fun together that summer. I never will forget that orange flivver I had and how we used to go on picnics or swimming. I guess it sounds pretty corny, but with Jean it was different. One time she found-"
Thirty American Flying Fortress B-17's roaring overhead made the three soldiers" look up simultaneously, but it was only a quick glance; and the bambino down on the street looked up too, but he too was used to planes and in a moment he was shouting louder than ever, "Caramella! Caramella!"-not understanding how there could be three soldiers at a window without at least one caramella in the crowd.
But when you come right down to it, Smith was thinking, it's all like something that happens in the movies. The whole damned business. I wonder if I'll ever get used to seeing soldiers without thinking they're maybe Hollywood extras at ten bucks a day....He laughed. And laughing made him think of Harry again and laughing at what Harry had said. So he concentrated on looking out over the bombed city of Foggia, doing his best not to have a thought in his mind.
"... and that's how we got married," Halden was saying, not looking at Grossi but out over the city too. "Jesus, we had fun. Rented a three-room apartment and that's when I went out and got the job at Gorman's Department Store. Shipping clerk. I thought we needed more money, but actually money didn't make any difference. Nothing did. We didn't even want to go anywhere that first year. You know how it was?"
Grossi was bored and his mouth hung open wider than ever. He wondered what they could pick up if they took a stroll uptown. He wasn't listening to Halden now, any more than he was listening to the bambino screaming for a caramella. If I was with other kinds of guys, he thought, we could pick us up some girls. This damned studious Smitty always thinking of some deep damned thing and Halden with his wife. What about his wife? Suddenly curious, he began to listen again.
"... carried her upstairs and she was really game. The doctor said she'd be all right if she just took it easy but she didn't want to take it easy. She wanted us to have as much fun as possible because she said after the baby came we'd have our hands full. So we went on just as if everything was the same as the day we got married. Only she was too cheerful-it scared me. You ever had that feeling?"
"No, I ain't," Grossi said, irritated. "I ain't never had any of this wedded bliss. What do you say we pull out of here. It'll be chow time soon."
But Halden hadn't heard him. "When they told me she was dead I wanted to say they were kidding. I wanted to. laugh-have you ever felt that way? I'm just a yardbird in this outfit so I wouldn't know how you guys feel about seeing somebody die over here, but when she died it didn't seem like she was dead at all. And when I laughed, they put the baby in my arms, like they wanted to prove to me that Jean was really dead. You understand what I mean?"
Grossi didn't answer. For the first time he'd noticed the bambino down there screaming his head off. "Amico! Amico!"
"Hey, look down there," Grossi said. "Look at him."
All three of them looked down on the little bambino, who was waving his arms and screaming caramella and stomping his feet on the pavement all at the same time.
"Hey, look at his little peter naked as hell!" Grossi laughed, and reached into his shirt pocket and brought out a package of Life Savers.
When the bambino caught sight of the Life Savers, of which he had eaten more than any single G.I. in Italy, he began to scream and yell in Italian. And Grossi tossed them and the bambino missed them and ran around in a circle looking for them before any more bambinos came to help him. And somehow the sight of the bambino shoving the bits of caramella into his mouth made all three of the soldiers come suddenly to life. It made them think suddenly that they were pretty hungry themselves, and Smitty looked at his watch.
"Let's blow," he said. "It's chow time in ten minutes."
They went down out of the deserted building and started across the road toward their tents, the bambino right on their heels and shouting as hard as he could through a mouthful of Life Savers, "Caramella! Amico! Caramella!"
But they didn't pay any attention to him any more. They were too hungry themselves now.
ITS DARK IN HERE
As Jimmy Tripp turned off Fourth Street and started downhill toward the river and home, a fat breeze came bounding out from around a corner and hit him a breathtaking smack like a two-ten tackle-knocked his felt hat off and skipped it back into Lytle Park, where he caught up with it the other side of a bench and bent his ears with it again, noticing how the scrawny black park trees creaked in the wind, their last few brown leaves hanging on for dear life while waves and whirlpools of, leaves already dead swirled around the iron benches, scampered up the steps of the little bandstand or twinkled out into the freedom of the street, scattered and lost in the grey drafty alleys of the city.
They could shut off all this airconditioning and I wouldn't complain, Jimmy Tripp thought. One hand on his hat, the other in his pocket, he bucked the wind like a foolhardy quarterback bucking the line, got to the stoop, he knew as home without any breath left to help him up the three lopsided flights to his own door but made it anyhow, and by the time he was knocking and hearing Lo-retta coming to let him in he felt soaked in the vapors of cabbage that clogged the stairwell.
"Hi," Loretta said.
"Hey, you got bigger since this morning," Jimmy said.
"Come on in here and don't tell all the neighbors," Loretta said, and when she'd closed the door behind him she added, "I can't get much bigger or I'll pop."
"Look, I have to stand two feet away from you now. I can't even kiss you any more."
"If you wanted to kiss me," Loretta said, "I guess you could."
So he guessed he could too, and kissed her, and said, "Merry Christmas."
"Yeah, we got a notice today they're going to cut off our electricity if we don't hurry up and pay. Everything's getting cut off. You sure we're going to be merry on Christmas?"
"We're gonna be merry," Jimmy said. "I got a job."
"What kind of a job?"
"A job." He went over to the sideboard and opened his guitar case. "I sell shirts now," he said. "Ties, sweaters, socks, belts, underwear. What kind of underwear you want, long legs or short legs? You want the drop seat?"
"Where? Don't start plunking on that thing, tell me where."
"Mergenthaler's," Jimmy said. "The basement men's department."
"You mean you got a permanent job there?"
He was looking earnestly at the fingers of his left hand to see that they were in position three for his first chord. Then, standing there across the dismal yellow-wallpapered room from her in his hat and overcoat, his dreamy little German-Irish face still marked from the slap of the December wind outside, he sang: "I am worrr-king there ... tern-po-RAR-ily-" and he studied his fingers as he switched into position five-"for the Christmas-rush-season!" He gave two strums in C chord to sign off, put the guitar down, and sailed his hat across the room.
"I'm hungry," Jimmy said, peeling off his overcoat. "I thought I never was going to get out of there. They had like a class there-all the extra clerks for the whole store they hired today sitting in a room listening to a guy tell about what was expected of you, how to fill out the charge book and everything."
"Do you know how?"
"Sure, I know how now." He was being pretty cocky but yesterday and last week and the week before he hadn't been so cocky when he'd come home every day from making the rounds of employment agencies, stores and factories looking about ten years older than his twenty-two years, looking as if he'd been out letting the whole world take swats at him all day. "And maybe the first of the year Tool and Die will take me on the way they promised. They said as soon as they were sure the draft wasn't going to get me."
"How can the draft get you now with the baby?"
"I guess they just said that. Keep me coming around in case they need somebody. Hey, let's eat."
So she fried porkchops and opened a can of applesauce and they sat at the chipped, blistered blue table by the window, looking down on bleak Ludlow Street and across at the somber red-brick wall of a tenement behind the cheery curtained windows of which other husbands and wives, most of them with twenty times as many arguments, suppers and nights in bed behind them as Loretta and Jimmy, sat at their supper tables too. They ate good that night. Jimmy Tripp, master of his flat, felt so good after he ate that he got fresh with her the way she halfway liked him to get fresh and knew when he did he was feeling good.
"What's that you got there?"
"What do you mean?"
"Right there-aren't you hiding something?"
"All right, Jimmy, quit making fun of me! You know what that is, all right-I guess you put it there."
"You guess? You mean you're not sure? Here, let me listen, I can tell if it's mine just by listening."
She started as he actually slipped down from his chair and kneeled at her feet, his ear pressed up against her belly.
"Can you really hear something?" she asked, and winced. "Oh! he kicked me. Did you feel that?"
"He kicked me in the ear," Jimmy said.
"Sometimes he turns a complete somersault-anyway, it feels like it. Do you really hear something?"
"Shut up, he's telling me something." Jimmy listened in silence, and Loretta stared down at the back of his neck, noting that he needed a haircut.
"What's he say?"
Jimmy looked at her. "He says, 'So's your old man.'" He bent down again. "Wait a minute." Then he looked up again. "Says, 'Let me out-it's dark in here.' "
He stood up.
"Hey, what's the matter?"
But she couldn't tell him-she was choked with tears. "Because I did that?"
"Oh no." She had moved to a chair on the other side of the room and she was drying her eyes and feeling very foolish. "Really, I loved you when I saw you down there like that. You looked so silly."
She was really all right now, and she came back to the table. "I don't know why I did that," she said. "I just remembered the baby and Christmas and everything."
Jimmy said, "I could hear it, all right. And I felt it too. Like a knot."
"That's his foot."
"Does he sleep?" he asked.
She stared at him. "What do you mean?"
"Well, I mean-is he like an ordinary human being? Does he sleep at night and wake up in the morning the way we do?"
She thought about that, fiddling with the middle button on the green maternity jacket. "Well-sometimes he wakes up before we do. Sometimes he kicks me and wakes me up."
"So he does sleep then?"
"I don't know," she said. "Sometimes he's quiet-maybe he's sleeping then."
They found themselves staring into each other's eyes. It was a funny kind of moment for Jimmy because it was like he could feel somebody else here already-a third person floating around the room, something like a ghost, but a ghost was dead and this third person hadn't even been born yet. It was really something strange, not to have been born yet, not to know whether it was day or night, not to have laughed or cried or spit against the wind.
After a long time he said, "I'll bet he'll be born on Christmas."
"He might be, you know." Some of Loretta's eyelashes were stuck together and stood up very straight, the way they did on people in the funny paper. "That would be some Christmas present, wouldn't it."
"That's one Christmas present I can't open till Christmas," Jimmy said.
They turned on their radio and there was dance music. He said, "Okay, you talked me into it," and did the dishes for her.
It was awful for her in bed. She lay flat on her back like a whale washed ashore. The baby in her raised a terrible fuss, not liking this new position: he churned and knotted and fussed and kicked; and she suffered with him, her two hands on her stomach; and then, suddenly, she was asleep. And Jimmy was asleep too, far over on his own side of the bed.
But he woke up three hours later. There was a street-lamp across the street so that it was fairly light in the room at night, but he kept his eyes tight-closed against the light and tried thinking about how to fill out a charge book-that had made him plenty drowsy earlier in the day but now he twisted and turned and couldn't go back to sleep. He was like the child inside her, twisting and turning, and finally he got out of bed, the unbending springs squeaking, and went into the kitchen. He lit the gas under the coffeepot and waited till he heard it boil, only to find that there was only a dribble of coffee, thick with grounds, but he poured it into a cup and sipped at it anyway.
Then he heard the pad of her feet.
"Jimmy, what's the matter?"
"You better put on your slippers," he said, "you'll catch cold."
She put on slippers and came back.
"I couldn't sleep," he said.
"I wish you'd come on back to bed though."
"You know why I couldn't sleep? I kept thinking, Is he awake now? Is he feeling something? I kept thinking about what he was doing."
"Who?"
"Why, the baby," he said.
She smiled, then looked down at herself as if she had forgotten about the baby.
"The Christmas present," he said.
She sat down. "But I guess he's not worrying about us-he never even saw us."
"We never saw him either. But we worry about him."
"And it might not be a him," she said. "We keep calling it a him."
"I don't care which it is. I like girls."
"Still I guess it does sort of feel what we're doing. I mean when we go to bed and sleep it knows we're not up and moving around. And then when we get up in the morning and when I go out to the store. It gets bounced then."
He shoved the cup away. "I'll go nuts if I think about it. I never thought about how really funny it was before. I mean-people being born. I never thought I'd care about it ... just kind of curious to see what it looked like, that's all. But now suddenly just tonight it's different. It's suddenly sort of like getting a chance to live all over again." He looked at her. "It's like Christmas," he said. "It feels like Christmas, the baby coming and everything."
"He might even be born a little before Christmas," Loretta said. "I'm not real sure."
"Just so he gets born," Jimmy Tripp said. He got up and took her hand and led her back into the bedroom. "He could be born April Fool's Day, I wouldn't care. Just so he gets born. But it better be soon." And now he was watching her climb back into bed, maneuvering cum-brously like an ocean liner entering port. "It better be soon," Jimmy Tripp said. "You both hear me?"
"We both hear you," Loretta said. "Now come on in here yourself, Jimmy. It's the middle of the night."
FLOODWATER! FLOODWATER!
She called me Mr. Black. "And how is Mr. Black this morning?" she'd ask, and laugh that rich, low laugh of hers, half taunting, half appealing, getting no answer at all from me. I was struck dumb-I could do nothing but sit there in my seat with swollen throat and pounding heart, not daring to look around at her.
I'd never seen Virginia Gelden or three-fourths of the other students in these classrooms before I came to Joblin High School. By some freak of city zoning, kids from my sooty, lowlands neighborhood, Turkey Bottoms, were loaded into buses every morning and carted five miles over the hill for their secondary-school education to Hyde Park, a section of Cincinnati that boasted houses surrounded by big, carefully trimmed lawns and a vine-covered high school that looked like a country club. I never knew on what street Virginia Gelden lived, but I did know that she came from the hilltop neighborhood and not from mine.
I'd noticed her from my first days at Joblin, and when I found her sitting next to me in French II, I fell wildly, "hopelessly" in love with her. And as though the devil himself were arranging my schedule, she turned up the next year in two classes, sitting in front of me in English and beside me in solid geometry. Going into that math class every morning at ten o'clock, I practically fainted with the anticipation of sitting so near to her, of being able to touch her if only I could find the nerve to reach out a hand.
In the past few months she'd taken to traveling around with a little group of three or four rowdy girls who made odd noises in the study hall to annoy the old-maid teachers and who spent most of their time, both in and out of class, entertaining one another with dirty stories. Well, Virginia Gelden must have told these chums of hers about my crush on her, or perhaps they'd seen for themselves and had begun to tease her about it. At any rate, they weren't going to let the whole thing pass without comment. Walking down the hall one afternoon, I looked around and saw this little gang of girls, Virginia among them, coming along behind me. I felt all the blood drain from my face at the sight of her-hoped they hadn't noticed and I began walking faster. Then I heard my name-one of the girls was calling my name in a tiny falsetto voice:
"Oh, Di-ick!"
They all tittered; they were walking faster too, determined to catch up. Half the hall had to be covered before I could reach the steps, and I wanted to run, to melt into the floor, to die quick.
"Oh, Di-ick!" the voice said again, much closer now. "Dick, look who's back here with us, it's Vir-"
"Shut up!" Virginia Gelden whispered urgently. But the girls only giggled more, and the falsetto voice was practically at my ear now: "Oh, Di-"
I was at the end of the hall: I ran down the steps two at a time, my heart pounding and my mouth cursing myself. But at least I'd escaped-they couldn't see me any more. I'm a fool, I thought, going out the front door into the gloomy, overcast November day. I've made an absolute fool of myself in front of everyone. I've got to get over this crazy thing.
Over a long period of time I thought seriously about killing myself, but in the end I gave up the idea-I was too interested in what was finally going to happen to me to take that way out. So I decided I'd do something about her: screw up my courage and ask for a date-that was it. We'd go to a dimly lit restaurant with music playing behind potted palms and talk, and stare for hours at each other. Then, afterward, we could take in some sort of entertainment.
I got out the evening paper and pored over the amusemerits page. And I found the most un-likely sort of entertainment imaginable. At the town's art theater a puppet show was playing next Saturday night. Other guys had had dates with Virginia Gelden, but I was sure none had ever taken her to a puppet show. So the whole thing was decided; we'd go there.
It was a decision of monumental proportions. Sitting in my room that evening, I made an oath that, no matter what happened, tomorrow during math class I'd ask her. I'd ask her, and that would be that. I'd ask her even if it killed me-I'd force the words out. I wrote the oath on a piece of paper and signed it.
And when she came into that classroom the next morning, my blood froze. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her sit down and open her compact to inspect her face. She brushed a streak of powder off her nose. "Good morning, Mr. Black," she said, snapping the compact shut without looking at me.
"Hello," I said, and to have something to do I took today's problems, still unsolved, out of my math book.
"Oh-ho!" she said, leaning across the aisle and looking at my paper. "So somebody else is gadding around nights instead or doing his homework!" She seemed to be having trouble getting comfortable in her seat: she moved her full haunches around and hunched her shoulders once or twice as though all her clothes were too tight. "And here I was depending on you," she said. "I didn't get in till three o'clock this morning!" I'd have preferred being hit by a sledge hammer. "And boy, what a week-end I've got ahead of me! Tomorrow night the Thanksgiving prom; Sunday my sister's wedding. Can you imagine, I've got a date with a senior to the prom! I'm going to sleep all afternoon tomorrow so I'll be able to keep my eyes open."
"What senior?" I asked, staring at her so intently that she returned my gaze curiously.
"Jack Hollister. Do you know him?"
"No," I said. "No, I don't know him." But what I did know in that moment was that I'd never ask her to go out with me-not with a dozen oaths to back me up. Her eyes were too innocent, too unassuming, too incapable of understanding what tortures I'd just been through.
And so I went on, from that day forward, making no more decisions but merely letting the thought of her, the sight of her, the sound of her voice, fill me with hopeless torment. I put my case in the hands of fate; only a great event could overturn the tub of sentimental slop that I'd become.
The miracle was that the great event actually came along-out of nowhere, and through no fault of either Virginia Gelden or myself. The great event was the flood.
Every year, of course, a very small and harmless flood paid a visit to Gorker Street. But it never did much more than lap at the tail end of the street, down where the cornfields started, before retreating quietly back into the confines of Duck Creek, which remained proudly swollen for a few more weeks until it became again the piddling little stream it was meant to be. The Little Miami River carried the water away from Duck Creek and presented it to the Ohio, which went its way and left people in peace. These yearly floods always caused comment on Gorker Street; they were watched, measured and frowned at until they began to shrink and let people forget all about them until the next year.
One family, however, was more concerned about the floods than any other: the Mundys. The Mundys' house, last on the street, sat on the bottomlands side, where the ground fell sharply away into the cornfields. From the front it looked like a tiny one-story shack, but from the rear you could see it was a three-story house, tallest on the street. And because the Mundys-the seven kids and lean, nervous Mr. Mundy and roly-poly Mrs. Mundy-lived in this ridiculous triangular house, they were more conditioned to disaster than anyone else on Gorker Street. Disaster had become their yearly dish, as a matter-of-fact. They waited for it every winter and they did what had to be done without complaint.
Mr. Mundy was by profession a railroad brakeman, but because he was raising a big family he had to engage in other work too. He always put in a large garden, for instance, and his back yard contained an enormous chicken run to supply his family with eggs and poultry. There were often rabbits too; and, for the past several years, a goat. When winter began to break and the Mundys saw the brown water rising out of the bottom land, they all went down to rescue the livestock.
Mr. Mundy would fence off his napkin-size front lawn and put the chickens and the rabbits and the goat, and whatever else was alive and had to be rescued, into this pen. The chickens always seemed to be happy enough with their new home, and scratched around vigorously in the dirt; and the rabbits ate the grass and lived a normal life, disturbed only by the dogs that made special trips down the street to bark at them.
This January the same thing happened. People saw the Mundys carrying their livestock up to the pen on the front lawn and thought nothing of it. The bottoms were going to have their flood again, that was all; and in a week the water would retreat, leaving the rich topsoil that made the corn grow tall in July. The Mundys themselves, stacking their living-room furniture on the front porch, were resigned. They knew that the water would stay in their back yard and kitchen and living room for a week and then go away, leaving the usual collection of logs and mud and old shoes and dead chickens behind.
But this was a different kind of year, and not until the calamity was upon them did people stop to think that the weeks that had led up to the flood were different from other years.
December had been ice-locked, and even the Ohio had frozen solid. Then January brought a quick thaw, with days of grey rain.
Looking out of their windows every morning when they woke up, people saw the rain still beating down relentlessly, pouring off the roofs' in miniature waterfalls, rushing along the street in small tidal waves. Would it never stop raining? It seemed too early for the yearly flood, yet already the bottoms were filling up; already when you walked down to the end of the street and stood by Mundy's house, looking out across the bottoms, you could see only the branches of trees sticking out, beaded with birds, and the lopsided roof of a barn which had floated down from some farm lost under water.
Andy Malfitch, who made his home on the mud path that Gorker Street became after it passed Mundy's house, had been smart this year. The voting booth in which he lived-one of those old red wooden shacks on wheels that used to be towed to the various precincts of the city on Election Day-had almost always been caught in the flood in other years.
Andy would make plans to move it, but then at the last minute he'd be too drunk, or too busy, or not in the mood, and so in the spring he'd always have to go wandering out through the bottoms looking for it, and have it dragged, or carried by some of his friends, up to the rent-free spot he'd staked out for himself ten years before.
This year, though, was different. This year he had used a chain and George Foltz's car and towed his booth up to the end of the street proper; this year he wasn't going to have to go gallivanting around all over creation looking for his home after the damned flood had had its day.
So that now, during those first days of the rising water, he walked in and out of his house just as though he were a regular citizen of the community, used to dry land twelve months out of the year. He went on doing his little odd jobs, cooking dinner on his coal stove, and getting plastered every night. And even Mrs. Makin, next to whose house he had suddenly camped, couldn't object to his being there, since it was obvious he didn't have gills with which to survive down in the cornfield like some of the carp that had recently taken up residence there.
Several days later something happened that sent a real shiver of fright up Gorker Street. Around ten in the evening the Mundy family, our trusty, high-water gauge, shocked everybody by beginning to move out of their house completely. They toted some of their things-tables and chairs and barrels and boxes and lamps and footstools-up the street to our house and stored them in the garage. Then a nephew arrived with a half-ton truck and started carting the rest of the furniture away to some other part of the city. People stood in a little wet group in the street, watching this and wondering.
But as the minutes ticked away, fewer and fewer of them found any time to wonder, and more and more of them had to start working frantically, carrying stuff up from their basements. One house after another along Gorker Street came to life with electric lights and scampering about as the water at last reached it, backing up from the sewers and drains, running through the cellar windows off the saturated lawns.
Rain-soaked, I stood down there at the end of the street with a funny kind of excitement buzzing inside me as I looked at the water already standing several inches deep in the Mundy front yard and heard the bustle going on in all those houses. People's voices sounded strident and curiously awe-stricken as they called across the street to one another: "Has it got you yet? We're getting the stuff out of the cellar-I don't know what's happening, we never had it before!"
Going back up to my house, I heard the radio, which my sister Judy had turned up loud, telling of the water rising faster and faster every hour. My mom was getting worried, but my dad, who, like Mr. Mundy, worked on the railroad, shoved a handful of kitchen matches into his work pants and said he thought it would level off pretty soon.
"It can't raise very much now," he said. "The more territory that's covered, the more water it'll take to raise it even a foot." He'd hardly been gone an hour when I started struggling up the cellar stairs with whatever iunk down there was portable-ironing board, sled, wash boilers and tools. The water was rushing up through the drain, rising by the minute. When I reached the top of the stairs from my final trip, I heard my mom say something. She was standing on the front porch with the light on. I went out and saw that she'd called across the street to Harvey Buddman. "What are you doing back here, Harvey?" my mom was saying. "I thought you were a Hyde Park aristocrat now!"
Harvey, who'd gotten a promotion in the Gas & Electric Company and moved away from Gorker Street several years before, sloshed across the street toward us in his new hip boots. His red, meaty face was all smiles above his shiny black raincoat. "Are you people all right?" he asked. "I heard the news and came back to give you a hand."
When he learned that the heavy stuff was still in the cellar, he said wait a minute, and hurried off down the street. Ten minutes later he arrived with his brother Tony, who still lived on Gorker Street, and Ned Daugherty. The four of us had everything up and out of the cellar in twenty minutes-the washing machine, the long bench that my dad had once used to line up his hundred home-brew bottles for filling, and even the ashes, though why the ashes had to be saved I didn't know.
And after that we were a team. We went to other houses; we were joined by other men. We did what the owners of the furniture wanted us to do. Carry it up to the attic? Into the attic it would go-whole floors of furniture disappearing in the blinking of an eye. Up the street to a neighbor's house? Heave-ho, boys.
Cokie Myers had joined us by now, and so had Mr. Hedderley. But the loudest of our crew was Mr. Tell-macher, the butcher from across the street. The flood had been a good excuse for him to put down a pint of bourbon in celebration, and now instead of the quiet, soft-spoken little man with the accent who came home from work smelling of blood every night he suddenly bloomed out as a Leader of Men.
His voice was like a loud-speaker blaring at us as he Took Charge in a big way all over the place. "Watch it, Dick-okay, Ned, a little more on your end and we'll have it around the corner-get set, men, we're all going to heave together now!" He wasn't heaving himself; he was standing a few feet behind us, viewing the situation with detachment as we struggled up the stairs with a china closet or a buffet. "Don't tilt it, Pop! Easy does it there, Cokie!"
From house to house we went, with Mr. Tellmacher calling the plays; and nobody said anything to him or even minded. It was somehow taken for granted that we'd all assume new roles in the face of this disaster, and if Mr. Tellmacher was metamorphosing into a section-gang boss, that was all right with us.
When I woke up the next morning after only a few hours' sleep, I looked outside to see that the worst was happening. It was still raining; the water had already covered the sidewalk in front of Aimsley's house next door. , My dad came home from work, and with the help of a couple of the neighbors-but not Mr. Tellmacher, who'd drunk too much the night before and was still asleep-we went through the back-breaking work of moving our own furniture, and what the Mundys had left in the garage, up to the attic. Whatever wouldn't fit in the attic, we put on the second floor. And whatever couldn't be lugged to the second floor, we built rough wooden platforms for and left-a few inches might make a lot of difference. The piano was scaffolded smack up against the ceiling on its back.
My mom and sister deserted Gorker Street-went up to Dave Barker's house to stay. But I kept on working away with the gang, this self-styled Gorker Street Salvage Squad that at last had gotten its hands on some flatboats and skiffs and could whip around the neighborhood easily, rescuing people and animals from second-story windows, ferrying furniture up to dry land, doing its heroic bit at this critical moment. Gorker Street was in a sad state for sure. Now that the flood had covered Summer Street, there was no way out of the place by automobile, for the new footbridge over the railroad track blocked the old way out to Eastern Avenue.
People felt like rejected applicants for berths on Noah's Ark as they watched the muddy water coming closer hour by hour. A good many of them grew stubborn and wouldn't leave their houses, even after the first floor was completely submerged. Mrs. Making who lived at the corner of Lark Street and Gorker, refused absolutely to budge, though her house looked like a boat, only the top floor and the roof showing.
"You don't think I'm leaving all this stuff here where somebody can take it, do you?" she demanded when we came by with a skiff to help her out. Nothing to do but leave her be. And of course by evening she was screaming and hollering down there, wanting help fast.
Our squad went down and took her aboard; and when she finally set foot on the tiny island of dry land still left up near the railroad track, she became very self-assertive again, refused to leave the street, and demanded that we go back and bring up her furniture. The next morning we did. We went down with boats and brought out whatever was still worth saving, and as we neared dry land with the stuff loaded five feet high, almost sinking us, she began to dance up and down the shore, screaming: "What's the idea, leaving that stuff uncovered? You'll get it all scratched up! You scratch that fifty-nine-dollar vanity, you'll have to pay!"
That night on our little island we built a bonfire, and when we weren't making special-mission trips down dark Gorker Street, we sat around the fire talking. That was me there with the rest of these Turkey Bottoms men-the husky paleface, who for two years had been hurrying home from school every day and closeting himself in his room with books and dreams and the love of his life. Only the biggest flood Cincinnati had ever known was potent enough to rout me out of my hideaway, send me back into the clutter and clamor or reality.
"Somebody's coming," Cokie Myers said. "We got to keep people out of here while there's an emergency on."
I saw three people coming across the footbridge. When they got to the bottom of the steps, I knew that one of them was a girl because she stepped into a foot of water and squealed. One of the men picked her up and carried her over to our island. The other man came forward, and the fire let us see his face sharp and ill-humored behind glasses that seemed slightly too big for it. All I could make out of the man and girl behind him were the white Red Cross bands around their arms. Mr. Timpkins, wearing his cop's uniform, got up from our circle and said, "Sorry, no sightseers down here."
"I'm not a sightseer," the man with the glasses said curtly. "I'm from the Red Cross." He cast a disapproving eye over our grubby circle. "My name," he said, "is Libby."
"My name is Timpkins," Mr. Timpkins said. "Are those people with you?"
Mr. Libby looked over his shoulder. "These are two volunteer workers from Hyde Park-Miss Gelden and Mr. Holiister."
Somebody might have built a quick hot fire under me, the way I sat up straight and peered at Virginia Gelden's face as she and her boy friend came forward. She looked different-older; maybe it was the kerchief she wore around her head. And she looked cleaner than anything I'd seen in forty-eight hours. Jack Holiister looked clean too-tall and thin and clean, with that kind of vacant, gape-mouthed expression on his face which, combined with regularity of features, makes-teen-age girls tremble with adoration.
Mr. Timpkins had a well-trained eye for pretty girls. "Well, what do you think of our flood?" he asked Virginia Gelden.
And I heard that rich low laugh-the same one that had been driving me out of my mind for the last couple of years. "I've never had so much fun!" she laughed.
I looked at her with such disappointment that her eyes fell on me, and she raised her brows in a well-look-who's-here way, but didn't say a word.
"I heard you men were working independently down here," Mr. Libby piped, "and I've come to see about bringing you all under the jurisdiction of the Red Cross."
"I don't think I understand you," Mr. Timpkins said.
"I mean simply that the Red Cross will direct all rescue and salvage work," Mr. Libby said impatiently. "My associate, Mr. Boyd, will be here in the morning to take charge of this crew. You'll work in shifts, of course, and though I'd prefer that you find your own places to sleep, you could try to make room for yourselves at the rescue station we've set up at the school. You'll have to sleep on the floor, I'm afraid-there aren't even enough cots for the women and children. Now-"
"Hold on a minute." Mr. Timpkins was pulling at his lumpy old pock-marked nose. "We've got this area pretty well taken care of as it is, without any directors giving orders. Where were all you Red Cross people when we could of used you to carry some of this furniture out?"
The little man got very flustered at finding himself talked to like that. "Need I remind you that Turkey Bottoms isn't the only area in the city under water? At any rate, I'm sure you won't object to having a little organization brought into your efforts now. We'll be able to put every man here to work. Arm bands will be issued, and instructions-"
"You can just stop right there with the arm bands," Mr. Timpkins said. "We don't want any arm bands and we don't want any directors nosing around down here. All these men are experienced river men-" I noticed a slight movement as each tried to feel like an experienced river man-"and we'll take charge of this side of the railroad tracks if you take care of the women and children up there on the avenue. Is that fair enough?"
The Red Cross man didn't really think it was fair enough, that was obvious, but being confronted down here at midnight by this silent crew of men wasn't conducive to argument. "Well, we'll see," he said. "At any rate, I'll send some sandwiches down for you, and we'll see about all this tomorrow."
As they turned to go, I looked at Virginia Gelden, but she was too busy saying something to Jack Hollister to notice me. Her laugh came out of the darkness as her boy friend picked her up and carried her back through the water to the bridge. And her voice slapped at me like a mean little wave. "I've never had so much fun!"
None of us slept that night. We kept the fire going, talked, stomped around when our feet went to sleep, and did patrol duty to see that no looting was going on. At nine the next morning a box of rather stale peanut-butter sandwiches arrived, and that was the last we ever heard from Mr. Libby or volunteers Gelden and Hollister.
A few of our crew had to go off to their jobs, but the rest of us went ahead doing whatever could be done. A boat with a newsreel cameraman in it came rowing up Gorker Street around noontime, and our crew did a little posing for the movies by pretending to rescue Ella Jean Mundy from her attic window. Everybody was pretty well relaxed now; too tired to feel heroic any more. I went up to the Barkers' house for supper, and around eight o'clock I came back to hear that the flood seemed to be leveling off-we might not have to desert our island and take to the hills after all.
What people would remember as Black Sunday for the rest of their lives came and went, and two days later, about a week after its initial threat, the water reached its eighty-foot crest and began to fall slightly-only an inch or two during the first hours, then faster, more noticeably. Everybody immediately got busy cutting notches into houses and telephone poles to record this mighty event for posterity. And afterward we all just stood around staring dumbly at the soaked, bloated earth which the water left behind.
It left other things behind too, as it receded down Gorker Street, exposing one sad wet house after another. Oil drums, crates, a wooden wagon and a dead hog came slowly into view-items that nobody in the neighborhood could claim. And Mrs. Makin got the most curious present of all-a little single-seater outhouse was left standing in her side yard with the door ajar. The Gorker Street Salvage Squad sranchly converted itself into the Gorker Street Cleanup Squad. With buckets and hoses and brooms we got busy and scrubbed out the houses as best we could.
But there were only a few of us faithful to the muddy end-a good many men had gone back to work-and we weren't in the same adventurous humor any more. No newsreel photographers came around now to add a touch of glory to the business, and no crowds of people journeyed out to Gorker Street to watch us as before. One thing was certain, though: if this Ohio River mud were ever allowed to dry in the houses, it would harden like concrete; nobody'd ever be able to get it off. So we went ahead, sloshing and scrubbing and panting and shouting orders at one another.
A few days later my mom and dad and sister Judy came down to Gorker Street to look at our house. Their faces were very grave, and perhaps for the first time in their lives words failed them as they tried to pull open swollen cupboard doors or identify some twisted flood-soaked piece of furniture. The wallpaper hung in long sheets from the walls, the floor boards were sprung up like fixtures in a Fun House, some windows were broken. And, worst of all, the mud continued to seep out of the cracks in the wood and even out of the plaster itself; scrubbing did no good.
"It smells in here," my dad said. "Smells like catfish. It'll take a year to get the stink and damp out of this house."
"Well, we just won't move back!" my mom said. "At least we live m rent and don't have to move back."
But my dad wasn't in a hurry to decide; he said it would be better to wait and see. So we went on living upstairs at the Barkers', and waiting and not "seeing" very much one way or the other. But then, leaving a house you have lived in for fifteen years is a big step.
During the next month, however, things began to brighten up on Gorker Street; things began to look more like themselves. Though the mud continued to seep out of the walls even after the houses had been cleaned and painted, people stayed; they had nowhere else to go. Mud-caked upright pianos were a common sight in back yards that month; many weeks passed before they were all chopped up or hauled away. Mrs. Powell cleaned out the concrete fishpond in her. yard and put the goldfish back. The Mundys went out into the bottoms and towed in their chicken coop, and when the flood had finally forsaken the bottoms, fixed their chickens up-in the same old place.
Andy Malfitch, who hadn't been so smart after all, located his voting booth about a mile south of Eastern Avenue, and he brought it back with a team of mules and set up his bachelor life again. So that before a month had gone by, it was clear that Gorker Street had survived the flood; spring was coming and life was moving on.
Red Cross workers arrived, went from door to door asking questions about losses, and gave a few people requisition orders for items that had disappeared or been ruined. Mrs. Mack received a new cedar chest for an old chest of drawers that had floated away, and she immediately sold this to Mrs. Aimsley. Pop Mundy's position as the flood's worst victim was recognized when his house was painted free of charge-the first paint job it had had in ten years.
But perhaps the strangest thing to come out of the flood was my dad's action. He came home to the Barkers' house one evening and said, "Well, I told Timpkins I'd buy the house off him."
'What house?" my mom asked.
"Our house," my dad said.
"But we decided we weren't even going to move back into it! Even on a month-to-month basis!"
My dad's face had that very set look it took on when he'd made a big decision and was standing on pretty soggy ground. "I can't help what we decided; we've got to live somewhere. Anyhow, I got it cheap and I'm going to borrow the money and pay him cash for it."
"Borrowing money," my mom said to nobody in particular. "He talks about borrowing money when we've just lost half our belongings. And how are you going to fix up the place? That'll cost hundreds-maybe thousands!"
"It'll cost about five hundred dollars," my dad said, "and I'm going to borrow that too. I'll see the Building & Loan tomorrow."
So that was how we moved back to Gorker Street, and that was how, for the first time in his life, my dad became the owner of a house-the one house in all the world we didn't want to live in any more. It turned out, though, that he wasn't wrong after all. The waters never rose so high again, and with the years even the memory of that grim January faded into something vague and faraway, like the First World War or the tornado of 1917-merely a historical division in time by which personal events could be calendared.
I never found out whether the flood changed anyone else on Gorker Street. But it changed me. It made a slight crack in the terrible shell of isolation I'd been building so carefully around myself for years; it threw me for a few days into the rough-and-ready world of action, and I'd amazed myself by being capable of living in that world.
More than anything else, though, it freed me from Virginia Gelden. When I went back to high school after two weeks' absence, I saw her again and I didn't love her any more. It wasn't only her ridiculous remark that alienated me. For a little while I'd found a real world which needed and accepted me, and I'd seen, in one stark moment at midnight on Gorker Street, that Virginia Gelden belonged to another world, a more frivolous one that no longer attracted me.
She had become only a pretty, empty-headed little girl to me now, but even so my silent love left echoes of pain, like some prized possession that had been lost forever in those hectic, water-soaked days. Sometimes I studied her with the old intensity, but not with passion in my look-only with regret, and bewilderment at how she could once have seemed so important.
LITTLE CAR IN VIRGINIA
It was a day lost somewhere midway between 1930 and 1940, one day amid all those lost eventful days of the thirties. Summer was almost here, and the Virginia highways were alive with automobiles rushing across the nation, crisscrossed to north and south, east and west; official cars rushing out of Washington, carrying senators from the Congress which had just adjourned, and their secretaries, glum-looking men in their early thirties who had studied too hard at Harvard, their wives and children. The coupes of salesmen coming up from the South now that summer was in the North, the long cars of vacationists from Miami, the little rickety wreck of the patent-medicine man, the toot-toot of all the horseless buggies of America,-flooding over the fast highways through Virginia, on their way to all their destinies, to the great hot sweltering grandeur of New York, to the buzz and blare and officialdom of Washington, to rambling summer homes in Vermont and New Hampshire, to Michigan and to the great Southwest. What does this great traffic of American highways not include-schoolteachers determined to enjoy themselves this year for sure, headed for something educational in Mexico and the straw slippers and cheap beaded bags; reporters rushing home after Congress' adjournment; magazine crew cars stuffed with their load of twenty-year-olds, each with one aim in life, to make it fast, each with his cheap "working-through-college" story slippery on his tongue; advance booking agents for circuses dragging long at that bottle in the compartment to cover over the long dreary hours ahead. And then the big trucks, the long hauls of produce up from Carolina, the long-haul loads of manufactured stuffs out of New York City and Jersey and Boston and Baltimore, a never-ending stream over the never-ending highways of America. Round and round go the wheels of tomorrow, over the never-ending roads, deals made, friends lost, stuffs and foods and human cargoes from the far corners of this land, through Virginia on a day in late spring.
On this same day on that broad white highway up from Carolina a little car came chugging, banging fiercely now and then and slowing up as if it were about to stop altogether, then changing its mind to make a final assault on the long journey ahead. It was a 1923 Ford coup6 and the two men inside of it were dressed in ragged clothes: those tall gaunt stary-eyed men you so often see looking out of little black huts in the center of mud fields deep in the South. The one was stockier than the other, perhaps a little older too, though both were about forty-five or fifty; he was driving, this short one, and since the job of driving a '23 Ford coupe which is going at the rate of ten miles an hour and shows signs of exploding any minute is an arduous one, he leaned over the steering wheel, his face all puckered up, and stared at the road. His friend sitting on the imitation-leather seat beside him from which the stuffing had all been pulled also kept staring straight ahead at the road. You could see that they were not out for either pleasure or business, for their faces were strained and worried as though they'd just taken the greatest step in their whole lives and were not sure how awful it was, but were expecting the worst to happen any minute now.
"We oughtta be mighty near there by now," says the short one, who is driving. He takes his hands off the steering wheel for a moment and wipes them on the dirty bib of his overalls, then glances around at his friend. "Where in hell are we, do you know where we are?" He looks back at the road, they are going around a bend in the long white highway through Virginia.
The tall gaunt fellow tries to look at the map, following the highway with his finger, then looks off into space again. "I don't know exactly where we are, Mo," he says. He seems to have just seen the face of death. The road map has got all unfolded and lies all over the floor of the car. "I don't think we'd ever know'd just where we was going."
"Why we're going to Wilkes-Borry, that's where we're going. We never said we was going anyplace else, did we? We're going to see Wilkes-Borry, that's where we're going. That's where I'm going anyhow," he says, looking hard-boiled straight ahead. "I'm not sure any more where in hell you're going."
"You don't know where you're going, either," says Andy. "You know damn well you don't."
"I'm going to Wilkes-Borry. You know where I'm going! Where d I start out to go in the first place? Sure, Wilkes-Borry....Here, let's stop." He leans down and pulls on the emergency brake or the car since that is the only kind of brake the little car has these days.
A tall, lanky kid about seventeen is standing by the road carrying a dusty black bag and he comes forward all eager because he has been waiting a long time for a ride. The door swings open and he squeezes in and slams the door. The little car wheezes and jumps, trying to start again, then slowly it pulls itself together and makes the supreme effort, and once more they are riding along.
The two guys do not say anything to the kid, and he glances around at them. They fill up the whole inside of the car with a pungent odor of old overall crotches, dirt and sweat.
It is getting late in the afternoon. Mo says, "You know what time it is, kid?" and the kid, very startled at being addressed, looks around and says, "No ... no, I don't know what time it is, I haven't seen a clock in days."
"It must be about six-thirty," says Andy, trying to find the sun somewhere in the sky.
"The time ain't the same up here as it is down where we come from. You can't tell the time up here by the same signs as you can down in Uba."
"Do you think maybe we'd better be turning back?" Andy says. "It's going to be dark pretty soon and we ain't going to be home anyhow till morning."
"What do you mean, turn back? We ain't never going to turn back."
"Where are we going, we don't know where we're going, do we?"
"We don't know where we're going, but we're going to get there."
"How far are you going?" the kid says.
"We're going to Wilkes-Borry," the driver says. He says it in a low voice, between his teeth, then he spits vigorously out of the window.
"Where you goin', kid?" says Andy, glancing at the dusty black leather bag the kid holds on his knees.
"New York," the kid says. "We're goin' to Wilkes-Borry," the man says. "Yeah, Wilkes-Barre," the kid says. "I been there already."
"You been there?" Mo says, still not looking away from the road and holding onto the steering wheel hard and adjusting the throttle up and down, trying to make the little car go faster.
"I been all over," the lanky, pale-faced kid says. He is looking out of the window at the hills of Virginia going by, guarding their well-kept farmhouses, crowned with their prim white fences. "I been to the coast and up in New England. I been in Texas and Louisiana the past three months. I worked in a slaughterhouse in Texas for fifty cents a day. I picked berries in Louisiana. I washed dishes in a joint on San Jacinta Street in Houston. I had a job on a boat from New York to New Orleans this winter, but in New Orleans they had a strike and I lost my job....I been all over," the kid says, looking out of the slow-moving little car. "I seen a lot of things." He tapped nervously on the window with his long fingers. "Where you men comin' from?"
Andy looked for Mo to answer, but he didn't, so Andy said, "We're coming from Ilba, South Carolina. We're going to Wilkes-Borry. We're going to get jobs there."
"Jobs are scarce," the kid says. He begins to roll himself a cigarette. "I would like to get a job myself. I need everything bad. Clothes and everything. There ain't nothing I don't need. What do you guys do?"
The two guys in overalls remained silent, looking at the road. Suddenly the little car nosed into a gas station and jolted to a halt. "How far into Wilkes-Borry?" says Mo at the wheel. The attendant squints up his eyes and takes his cigarette out of his mouth. "Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania?" he says. "Good God, that must be three hundred miles or more. You're on the right road all right....I can give you a road map."
"Do you have candy bars here? Give me a nickel candy bar....No, we got a road map." The attendant ran inside his gas station and came out with a Baby Ruth. Mo paid him with five pennies. He handled the pennies in a way that showed you he was not used to handling anything much but pennies, holding them in his hand and looking at them and then pouring them into the attendant's hand.
The little car jumped forward, backfired in protest a couple of times, then got onto the highway again, chugging along and squeaking weakly as all the big, fast, low-squatting cars hurried past.
"We been to Chattanooga once when I got married, that's the farthest from home I've ever been," said Andy. He was chewing on his half of the candy bar, which they had not offered the kid. "I never been to a big city before. We just got in the car this morning and just started out. We ain't going to plant any spring crops this year. There ain't any money in it. We're going to try to get jobs in the city, laborers or something. We don't want to be no croppers any more. We're sick of workin' that way."
"How you goin' to get work in Wilkes-Barre? Know somebody there?"
"My wife's nephew is there," Mo said.
"Yeah, his wife's nephew is there."
"Only I don't know his last name. Jerry is his first name."
"You know his address?"
"No, I don't know his address."
The kid looked over at Mo.
"You don't know his address or his last name?" he asked right at the little squat sharecropper with the sleepy-looking eyes. "How in hell you going to find him?"
"We'll find him," Mo said.
"Yeah," Andy said bitterly, looking at the white road. "We sure will find him."
"Oh, what the hell you bitchin' about? You didn't have to come along."
"We was both drunk," Andy says. "I admit I was drunk. That's why I came along. I admit it."
"Yeah, you're bitchin' now. Why didn't you do your bitchin' before it was too late to turn back?"
"We can still turn around."
"I'm not goin' back to those goddamn fields. There's nothin' in 'em any more. I don't want to have any part of that goddamn place."
"What's goin' to happen to Emma and your three kids?"
"They can take care of themselves till I get a place for 'em in Wilkes-Borry. I'll get a place. The charities can take care of them."
The little car rattled and banged over the hills and through the valleys of old Virginia, passed by and honked at by every other kind of car in the world, run off the road several times, stopped by tough cops, shouted at by farm kids on their way home from school, barked at by dogs along the road, mooed at by cows.
When it began to get dark they had to find a place to park because the car had no lights, and they started looking out for a likely-looking field. The kid had no use for sleeping in fields, but he said nothing. They were looking for an open gate, with a field they could drive up into. They were many miles away from everything, riding through the Virginia countryside, and you could already tell, by the sharp breeze, that it was going to be very cold at night. When it was almost dark, they found a field and with much coaxing the little Ford pulled up in it and parked.
It was one night in the road kid's life he never forgot, that night he got picked up by the two sharecroppers riding away from all the life they'd ever known to find a relative in Wilkes-Borry whose last name they couldn't even remember. Why he didn't get out on the road right away and try to get another ride, he never could figure out, but he felt a kind of loyalty to them, and after they'd parked the car in the Virginia cornfield he hunted around trying to find enough dead wood to build a fire with. All three of them hunted for wood; down in the ditch beside the road they found a big rotten log and they dragged it, bruising and running splinters into their hands, up beside the car. Finally they got the fire started and tha kid sat on his suitcase and Mo, the short one, curled on the seat of the little car and the other one put a burlap sack around himself beside the fire. The wind blew so fiercely over that Virginia landscape they all almost froze, and their flesh turned into ice and snow.
In the middle of the night Mo got out of the car and began staggering around the fire, rubbing his eyes and cursing. He was almost frozen and could hardly walk, staggering, all bent over to one side, his knee stiff.
"What the hell, what the hell, what the hell," he kept saying, rubbing his hands weakly before the fire which had died down. The kid got up off his suitcase and threw some brush on the fire. The Virginia sky was dark up above them, and they could not even see the highway. No car passed. They were like a lost patrol in the desert.
None of them knew exactly where he was going or how he was going to get there.
They did not talk very much, but perhaps the kid understood them and they understood the kid. The kid could see all the sorry years of their background, as kids on the same Carolina earth no longer fertile, then marriage to some square-dance girl and a little piece of earth for themselves at half-profits to the owner, always in debt, eating bread that was not paid for, planting crops that could not grow. He could see in his mind the whole great crew of their ancestors on the same earth in the same miserable little existence that only ended with rheumatism on a cabin dirt floor, overworked and forgotten. Then last night when these two old men, bitten by sun and ticks like their little piece of land, had had the nerve to get into this stupid little car and head for an unknown land called Wilkes-Borry, for the fabulous city, where you could dream of something even if it never came true, where sometime or other you could at least find a nickel on the pavement, yours alone; where at least there was money, even though none of it ever came your way....And in him they saw perhaps a kid who would someday get a job at eighteen a week, a real place in life, and they envied him.
After that cold night, when the first splinters of dawn came into the cold grey morning sky, the two men talked to each other a moment and then got into their car. The kid had been brushing off his pants, and when he saw them in the car with the motor running he came over to them.
"You don't want to go with us, kid," Mo said.
"We're going to turn around," Andy said. "We're going back where we can at least sleep in a bed."
The motor made a great roar and the little car started down out of the cornfield onto the highway and away ... back where it had come from, to the South, to the worn-out land and the little worn-out people.
The long, lanky kid with the leather bag waited four hours that morning by the side of the road before he got picked up by an automobile salesman in a new Cadil-ac, who bought him ham and eggs for breakfast in Roanoke and took him swift in the car along faster to where he was going, the great city with its piles of concrete and of steel, its multitude and its loneliness....
THE DUCK AND THE RABBIT
Rabbits and ducks are supposed to be wild animals you have to keep fenced up and watch carefully. They're supposed to want to run away, in all directions.
But this duck and this rabbit were different.
It was true there was the pretense of a fence. But what's a fence if it has holes in it? And this fence even fell over completely in one place.
Even a dumb rabbit could have gotten out. And the duck right after him.
But not that rabbit. He stayed inside, always close to the duck, and slept.
The duck slept too.
The yard they were in was big and bare, the rabbit having eaten all the grass away and even gnawed on the fence posts a little. There was a pan of water in one corner and a little wooden box, but that was all.
The bare yard even without its occupants would have looked strange on that street. All the rest of the lots, on both sides, were occupied by big brick apartment buildings or large frame houses with signs outside them announcing Rooms for Rent.
People used to pass by in the morning on their way to work, most of them yawning and only half awake. They'd glance up sleepily: the sight never changed. There was that rabbit and that duck sitting together in the yard.
They'd come dashing home at night, having learned during the day at some office the full and official meaning of life, profit and expansion. There was that rabbit and that duck, as before, the rabbit nodding a little in sleep, the duck with its head tucked under its wing, standing on one leg.
Or even late at night, when they'd been out on some sort of bender with bright lights and horns blowing and paper caps, they'd come up the street feeling a little unreal anyhow and happen to glance into that yard, and there they were: those two. The big eyes of the rabbit looking at you, and the duck with its head in full view at last.
They scorned questions, that was what! How did they happen to get there? Who owned them? Because ducks and rabbits sitting in yards are supposed to be owned. The vacant lot itself seemed to belong neither to the big apartment house on one side nor to the rather shabby rooming house on the other. Neither seemed to want to take credit for those two living creatures who sat in the yard all day.
Mr. Hopple was a lawyer who lived with his wife Clarice in Apartment 14 of the big apartment house.
A tall loose-jointed man who knew half the people in the city, Mr. Hopple was inquisitive by nature and not one to take the mystery about the rabbit and the duck lying down.
He was a man who was liable to talk to anybody he happened to see on the street, in a rather offhand manner, and get an answer.
So he started making inquiries about the two yard-companions.
He would stop a minute on his way to the streetcar (he had never gotten out of the habit of riding the trolley to work, even with his big automobile going to waste in the garage) and just look at the rabbit and the duck.
That they always sat so close together (as if for warmth), always in a different part of the yard, fascinated Mr. Hopple.
He did not know much about animals, he admitted that, but he had never heard of anything like a duck and a rabbit being friends.
And friends under such circumstances.
The rabbit seemed to be positively bored.
"You'd think he'd jump out," Mr. Hopple said to a small fat man who wore a bowler hat.
"I don't know-you'd think so, wouldn't you. Maybe he's too old," the bowler hat said.
"Why, do you know anything about these two?" Mr. Hopple asked, looking at the fellow closely.
The bowler hat started, said quickly, "No-no, I don't know a thing about them," waited a second only for propriety's sake, then bustled off quickly to the streetcar stop, as if the rabbit and the duck might implicate him in something.
That didn't keep Mr. Hopple, who was an open, inquisitive, happy-go-lucky man with a long sharp nose and little eyes pushed close together and deep-set in his rather jawy face, from asking anybody else who happened to stop and look at the pair in the yard what this was all about, whom they belonged to, and why they sat there like that.
He wasn't one to criticize other people's rights, except when there was something to be gained by doing so, but it seemed to him almost indecent, or perhaps weird was the word, for the two animals to sit there in that big vacant and barren yard, in rain and shine and snow, making no sound and almost never even moving about a little bit.
While the rest of the world ran this way and that way by them.
When he got on the streetcar he'd forgotten them already, of course. And during the day, with all his important legal affairs, he never even gave them a thought.
But there they were when he came home in the evening, still sitting. Still with no evidence of any attention from anyone, not a bit of food in the yard, not a footprint.
Just as though they were something special and separate and apart, and very politely unaware of the world. It was enough for any hardworking man who'd been slapped around enough in his day to resent.
He even got a little crazy on the subject, and talked about the duck and the rabbit at the supper table.
His wife, a faded woman with dyed blond hair who spent a good part of her week in the beauty parlors and movies, did not know what he was talking about and said so, and asked him if he didn't like her new shade of nail polish.
He answered that if they were a child's pets or something he could understand why they were there. But they seemed to have no good reason for being there at all, and although they were both plump and well fed, he'd never seen any evidence that anybody fed them.
When he dwelled on the subject like this his wife just looked at him in amazement, then down at her fingernails. He might be smarter than she and gone to college and everything but he sure didn't sound like it sometimes.
The next morning Mr. Hopple left his apartment ten minutes earlier than usual, and when he got to the lot, there they were. Though the rabbit had one eye half open, which was unusual.
Mr. Hopple reached into his pocket and pulled out a long bright orange carrot. He offered it to the rabbit, leaning over the fence rather ridiculously as he did so.
Just at this moment the short fat man with the bowler hat hurried by, not stopping, as though he were afraid of being questioned.
Mr. Hopple didn't even notice him, so intent was he on the rabbit.
But the rabbit just sat there, about two feet from Mr. Hopple, and the duck sat right beside him.
The rabbit didn't even open his eye any wider.
So Mr. Hopple, in thorough business-like fashion, reached into his other pocket and pulled out two But-ter-Delite Crackers, which he had always understood were the kind of thing ducks went in for, and held them as near as he could to the duck's bill.
The duck didn't even sniff.
Mr. Hopple, in disgust, threw the crackers and the carrot down beside the haughty pair and stalked off.
They'll eat 'em before evening, he thought. They're just proud.
He found himself curiously anxious to get home that evening and he had no idea why until he came to the vacant lot.
The rabbit and the duck had moved to the far side of the yard, and were sitting all huddled up, like this morning.
Mr. Hopple's carrot and two crackers were lying on the near side of the yard. Untouched.
It may have been this that upset Mr. Hopple and changed his entire life.
For shortly afterward Mr. Hopple divorced his wife, whom he'd never very much liked anyhow, and moved his law firm to another city.
For all he cared, the rabbit and the duck could still be sitting there in that unnatural way.
He really never gave them another thought.
OVER HERE
At six-thirty they came out of their pyramidal tents like ghosts and filtered through the tortured Italian olive trees to the squat tufa-stone messhall building, where Whitie Carp, the special services corporal, had his projector set up for the nightly show. There Were six hundred soldiers in the camp with nothing to do in the evening and you had to get into the messhall a half-hour early to find a seat.
Joe had not been going to the show, but when he'd been left alone lying on his bunk in the tent for ten minutes, without any wood cut to make a fire, he changed his mind and put on his field jacket and made his way across the mud puddles with everybody else.
Inside, the messhall was already filled with smoke and all the benches up front, the only place you could see all of the screen, were full. He finally spied a space behind the projector, but there were lieutenants sitting on either side of it. He recognized them as the new group of lieuies who'd just come into the squadron-all of them just over from the States a couple of weeks ago. Two of them were assigned to the orderly room where he worked and they seemed like creatures from some other world, all girlish and giggly and humming the latest American tunes and talking back and forth about the little deals they'd had back in America: the two months they'd spent at Yale in the army, and the three months before that at Miami Beach becoming second lieuies. When they weren't describing their past trials and tribulations to each other, they were wondering when the war would be over so they could go home wearing their pinks and their second lieuie bars, real heroes.
"Is this bench reserved for officers, sir?" Joe asked the blond chubby one on the end.
"No," the blond chubby one said. He was working in the orderly room as the squadron's education officer, whatever that was.
Joe squeezed in and sat there silently cursing the damn place because there weren't any other seats but these. He felt uncomfortable between the two officers-as if he were in muddy overalls and they were in evening clothes.
He looked at the mud on the bottoms of his trouser legs and decided that it was just about like that.
Craning his neck, he found that he could see around the huge bulk of the redheaded guy who sat in front of him and bring most of the rectangle of white cloth at the head of the room in view. Twenty minutes till the movie started, so he settled back on the seat.
Up in front two guys were shouting across the room at each other, but the rest of the men were quiet, sitting docilely waiting for whatever movie the U. S. Army had billed for them tonight. It was a lot like death in here, Joe thought-a specially irritating kind of death that you couldn't get away from even if you wanted to. How many other guys were wishing they had enough life pumping in them to walk out of here and go to sleep in their bunks while they still had something individual left in themselves? He looked at the faces around him and wondered. He'd been living overseas with this bunch, in Africa first and now in Italy, for two years, doing all the outward things that they did, and yet he still could not be sure what most of them were really thinking. He knew he himself seldom said what was really important to him but went along with the army gags and gripes as if they were the only thing he had to offer to any conversation. The rest of these guys, who knew him as he knew them, were probably the same. Overseas life, even when there was no danger as there was no danger in this squadron, was a matter of endurance, and even conversation was stripped and simplified to a point where it required no thinking at all, just conformance to a preconceived formula. You could be sure almost nobody would try to interrupt your daydreams with any very startling statement or question. You became a character in the intimate life of the dreary camp, going through your days like an automatic man, looking forward to a moment that after two years overseas seemed fantastic.
"Cigarette?"
Joe looked down at the pack of cigarettes the chubby blond lieutenant was holding out for him.
"No, thanks," Joe said, "just finished one."
The new lieuie unbuttoned the scalloped pocket of his shirt, shoved in the package, then buttoned it again. Joe felt his stare and knew he would try to make an interesting remark. He doesn't know yet you're not supposed to stare at people overseas, Joe thought. He doesn't know either that you're not supposed to make interesting remarks.
"Crowded in "here, isn't it," the new lieuie said.
"It's usually like this," Joe said. He got a glimpse of the new lieuie's baby face with its round blue eyes and he had a sudden urge to bust out laughing. He d seen the lieuie's service record-right out of University of California and into the cadets. Eight months of it in the States and here he was overseas giggling with the other young lieuies about the wonderful times they'd had back in America, their girl friends, their apartments. And talking about the war as if it would be unfair to them if they weren't home in two or three months.
Joe watched Whitie Carp feed the film through his projector, then heard him yell "Lights out" to the fellows standing near the light switch.
A short on how to play expert pool was shown first. Joe had seen it twice before and closed his eyes in the middle of it. There were exactly two pool tables a mile away in the Foggia Red Cross to accommodate fifty thousand G.I.s in and around the town, but this short seemed to turn up about every other week preceding a feature. Our congressmen back home have probably termed it safe politically, Joe thought.
In the darkness before the screen, the G.I.s were beginning to come to life again. They began to talk back to the characters on the screen, began to have opinions again and voice them, just as if they were really alive in the world and permitted to have opinions. And then from away back in the rear of the hall came Croswell's rich and mimicking Southern accents: "Where's dat fat boy?" and everybody in the messhall laughed, and a couple took up the cry. "Where's dat fat boy?" It was one of the standing squadron jokes. The fat boy was a short, rather effeminate Italian from New York named Bugini-Private Tony Bugini-and the joke had no more point than its bare essentials. Tony Bugini was a fat boy, and a little effeminate, and so somebody like Cros-well always shouted it out at unexpected times and places: "Where's dat fat boy?"
Joe laughed, unwillingly, wondering how Bugini felt about it. But the new lieutenants did not laugh at all. They are probably trying to figure out why it's a joke, Joe thought. They wouldn't understand why it's a joke. They don't know yet that we make all our jokes out of our own idiosyncrasies, our fatness or our thinness, our different accents, our mistakes at work. He tried to remember how long it had been since he'd heard a civilian joke, one of the prepared kinds of stories that civilians passed around among themselves and laughed over. He could not remember ever having heard one in all his three years in the army-even back in the States.
He opened his eyes because the short was over and a newsreel, many months old, was starting. A new landing in the Philippines. The whole thing looking like every other newsreel of every other landing. An aerial shot of the convoy, a shot of the G.I.s in camouflaged helmets climbing down into their landing craft, then the trip ashore, the film bouncing around as the landing crafts gun went off, and finally the struggle up the beach and the taking up of first positions on an island that looked like nothing at all but which, in someone's mind, meant something in the complex, impossible scheme of human life.
"We're really going places in the Pacific," the education officer said at Joe's elbow.
Joe looked and saw that he was being spoken to. "Yeah," he said.
"We thought we were going to be shipped out there," the officer said. "That's what the rumor was at Shepherd Field, anyhow. It certainly was a relief to find out we were coming to Italy. Although I can't say that I particularly enjoy it."
"I see what you mean," Joe said. He tried to say it easily, but even while he was saying it he felt his insides draw up, his throat constrict, resenting talking to an officer, any officer, as an equal.
Whistles and shouts rose out of the darkened messhall as the next sequence in the newsreel came on. Bathing beauties somewhere in Florida, with Ted Husing's voice pointing up the shots of naked white thighs and bulging breasts and painted simpering smiles-ah, the plump, clean-washed American girls, here in film if not in fact. They posed, poised on the edge of a swimming pool-the G.I.s' eyes all fastened on their breathing, live, large-Americah-girl bodies-and then they dove.
"I'll take the blonde!" somebody yelled.
"I'll take all of them!" a squeaky voice from the rear put in.
While Ted Husing's voice from the screen was saying:
"In the clear and limpid pools of Mother Nature's wonderland, these twentieth-century mermaids enjoy themselves and keep those trim figures all at the same time. Mmm, the scenery's nice too, isn't it?"
"I'll take Via Tritone!" Croswell's Southern voice came through.
"I'll take Blanket Annie!" somebody else said, and that crack got a big laugh. Blanket Annie was the rugged little Italian bitch who came to the olive grove beside their camp every evening carrying a blanket and taking on the G.I.s and the South Africans from their camp down the road impartially, a hundred liras each for a mght's ration of love in the army.
Joe glanced at the cherub lieuie to see how he was taking all of this, and the lieuie asked him, "What are they talking about?"
"Via Tritone," Joe said, "is the street in Rome where all the twenty-dollar whores parade, and Blanket Annie is the whore who takes on the boys every night out in the olive grove. She's built like a Notre Dame tackle."
"You mean right here beside camp? Is that allowed?"
Joe laughed. He forgot to answer because the feature was coming on. The grunts and groans into which Whitie Carp's projector translated the sound track were filling the messhall as background for the dramatic moving-searchlights insignia of Twentieth Century-Fox. In Technicolor too. Home in Indiana, this one was called.
"Home in Indiana," the chubby lieuie mused. "I saw that in LA. on my last furlough home before I came overseas. Do you ever have new movies?"
"This is a new movie," Joe said.
"I mean really new movies," the lieuie said. "I heard you got them over here even before they come out in the States."
"I don't know," Joe said. "I don't keep up with the movies much."
Now there were horses capering around in green-and-brown Technicolor, and the plot of the story was already evident: it was going to be about a boy on a farm and his love for harness horses. When the blond siren finally came on the screen with her wildly un-likely Form-Fit Bra breasts and her photographically lengthened legs, a shout went up from all the hungry G.I.s in the dark messhall.
"Where have I seen you before, honey?"
"I wouldn't kick her out of bed."
"Take me back to the States!"
"Look at them wiggle!"
Joe glanced at the new lieuie to see how he was taking this. But the lieuie was looking intently at the screen-was he blushing? That was Joe's impression. A real greenhorn, in every sense; and Joe felt a little surge of sympathy for the "guy. He really wasn't a bad guy-and he was even somewhat democratically inclined after all the stuff the army had tried to fill him with on the treatment of G.I.s, the Attitude of Command, and so forth. A young guy just out of college who seemed about as confused by the army and overseas life as anybody could be.
"We act like a lot of barbarians, don't we," Joe said.
The new lieuie looked at him gratefully. "It is rather strange, the reactions you all have to pictures. I never saw, or rather heard an audience talk back to the screen like that before."
"We're all in our second childhood," Joe said. "We've been overseas two years and you get like this. Some guys come here every night and see the same picture over and over, just for one little scene where a girl's breasts are shown. And it's pretty damn funny to see scenes in which all the civilian characters talk American. We feel like talking back to them, jeering at them, laughing at all the fake stuff in it. The best time is when the picture is about a soldier, a second lieutenant or a staff sergeant or something. Then they really raise the roof in here, whooping and hollering."
"What about?" the innocent lieuie asked.
"I don't know," Joe said, letting the whole thing be mysterious. "It just makes them all jeer and laugh when they see a guy with rank pictured as some sort of hero. It's always a big fake, the way Hollywood does it. These guys here have been sitting on their tails doing photo lab work for two years in Africa and Italy with damn near no amusements. It makes them want to laugh and jeer when they see the whole thing made to look glamorous."
"Oh," the second lieuie said.
The guys were yelling again, for Twentieth Century was giving them the blond siren in a white bathing suit at a rustic swimming hole in Hollywood, Indiana. Every time the action of the story slowed up-and Twentieth Century was having a lot of trouble with nothing to go on but horses and a boy's love for them-another striking detail of the blonde's anatomy was enlarged on the screen for continuity's sake, and the G.I.s howled and stomped.
And then there was the clinch scene in which the boy horse-lover found out how superior a wife the plain (but well-breasted) brunette would make to the blond siren, and everybody in the messhall began to file up the aisle, blotting out the scene until Whitie Carp turned off his projector in disgust and put a loud blaring jazz record on the phonograph.
Outside under the cold clear sky again, Joe found the new lieuie right beside him.
"What section of the country are you from?" the lieuie asked.
"Chicago," Joe said.
"Were you a clerk in civilian life?"
"Newspaperman," Joe said.
"A newspaperman," the lieuie said. "Why, that's what I was going to be. I graduated from the University of California School of Journalism and went right into the cadets."
Joe looked at him. "Why did you do that?" he asked.
A perplexed frown came on the pink face. "Why, I was going to be drafted anyhow," he said, "so I became an officer."
They walked on past the messkit washing trough. Joe couldn't figure where the lieuie was going, because the officers' hut area was in the other direction from the enlisted men's rows of tents.
They were nearing the latrine and got full benefit of that latrine smell.
Maybe he's lost, Joe thought. Maybe he doesn't know his way home.
"Why didn't you become an officer?" the lieuie asked.
Joe looked at him, feeling the heaviness in his head that always preceded something that was hard to say.
"Because I didn't feel that I could take good enough care of my clothes," he said.
The lieuie looked at him.
"Got to make a latrine call," Joe said.
It was the enlisted men's latrine but the lieuie went on in with him.
"What is there to do around here in the evening?" the lieuie asked as they pissed into the metal trough. "Don't you fellows ever go up to Foggia? Aren't there any amusements except that picture show?"
"We've got the clubhouse to get drunk in," Joe said. "Some guys get a pass and go up to Foggia once in a while. But there's not much up there except M.P.s. The Red Cross doughnut shop is open till seven o'clock. Some guys look for girls but not many find any. You can go to the movie-I mean up in Foggia-if you wait an hour in line."
They buttoned their flies and groped their way out of the dark pungent place, passing the glowing red eyes that were the cigarettes of men sitting on the wooden latrine seats.
Outside, the lieuie hesitated, as if he wanted to hear more of what there was to do now that he was overseas. And Joe, looking at him, felt swollen with a kind of rage of passion that was steeled with an intellectual irony-against the army, and baby-face lieuies, and these best years of his life spent sitting in an Italian olive grove.
"Most of us," he said, "don't go anywhere. We just sit in our tents all evening and look at each other. Maybe we write a letter to some babe three thousand miles away and put it in an envelope for some lieutenant to read and approve the next day."
He stopped, looking at the lieuie's round eyes behind his glasses.
"Then," Joe said, "we climb into our bunks and get a good picture of the babe in our minds. That's what we've been doing for two years now," Joe said, "and it's beginning to tell on us. So we shout and scream in the movies every night when they show an Americana signorina. It's a great little life, isn't it, Lieutenant?"
The lieuie smiled, knowing he was supposed to smile. Then he looked at his shoes and said, "Yes ... yes, I suppose it is. It's certainly different than I thought it was going to be. I thought we'd be bombed and everything, and always be moving. And now I hear you've been here in this one spot for eleven months and not even one German plane turned up." He glanced' up at the sky. "Another thing I noticed," the lieuie said, is that the big dipper over here is upside down."
Joe looked up at the bright faraway stars in the Italian sky. "That's the way it looks to everybody their first month or two over here, Lieutenant," he said. "But by the time you go home, the one back in the States will be the upside-down one."
THE MAN WHO FOLLOWED GRANDMA
She was pretty but she didn't know it. She was only fifteen. When the guy followed her eight blocks down Vine Street, all the way home, she got scared and thought her last hour had come. She felt nothing but relief when she could throw herself into her own cold dark tenement hallway and climb the stairs two at a time to her grandmother's flat.
Her grandmother was sitting at the table in her usual place at three o'clock, dipping doughnuts in her afternoon cup of coffee.
"What's the matter with you?" Grandma said, a soggy doughnut poised in one hand. With a quick duck of her head Grandma nabbed the doughnut.
"Somebody followed me!" Edna was staring at the door as if he might come in at any moment. She went to the window-only a couple of dogs jumping at each other in the street-an old man puffing at a pipe and watching them in a bored way.
There was a long pause while Grandma stirred her coffee. She sipped it, looked at it and stirred it some more.
"Who followed you?" Grandma said. "Somebody you know?"
"I don't know who," Edna said. She still stared down at the dogs but stayed behind the curtain so that nobody would see her watching them. "I went downtown to get rour elastic and started home and didn't talk to anybody, think he was after me. I think he'd of got me if I hadn't hurried."
"You think he'd of got you," Grandma repeated, munching her doughnut.
"I read about men like that in the paper already," Edna said. She turned from the window and took off her bright red hat and her brown coat. "I was scared stiff, honest."
"Hang up your hat and coat," Grandma said, "and I'll tell you something."
Grandma watched how Edna hung up the hat and coat. She was a tall,, loose-jointed old woman, a good deal taller than average, with a narrow face and long jaw. This jaw was the thing about her, it kept moving around when she talked or ate and there were a few hairs growing out of it, and a mole. Her eyes were set high in her face, close together, and looked right at you like a double-barreled shotgun. Her hair was rather thin and light brown, not entirely grey yet, and pulled very tight to a knot at the back of her head.
"Get yourself a cup and saucer and sit down," Grandma said. "How old was he?"
"Was who?" Edna said, pouring some coffee for herself. "Oh. He was young, about seventeen or eighteen."
"Seventeen or eighteen?" Grandma said. "And you was scared of him? I thought he was a man. I thought he really scared you."
But Edna still looked at the window, and Grandma studied her. Edna's hair was black and soft, the continual marvel of Grandma, who didn't understand why Edna shouldn't have light-brown hair like her own. Edna's face was a disappointment too, not narrow but a regular oval, a very pretty face not yet touched with powder or lipstick. Her mouth was nicely shaped, yet a little large-still even this was pleasing. Sometimes she would let her mouth hang open slightly, when she was thinking, and people who saw her like this looked at her with the same awe they regarded a sunset or a baby deer or the Grand Canyon or any other natural marvel.
"Was he good-looking?" Grandma asked.
The girl thought a second. "Yeah, he was pretty good-looking. He wasn't real good-looking, you know, but he had wavy hair and blue eyes. Every time I'd stop and look in a store window, he'd stop and look in a store window. It was embarrassing."
"Didn't he say nothing? Grandma dipped another doughnut. "Didn't he even try to get you in a conversation?"
"He didn't say a word," Edna said. "I looked at him oncet and he jumped like he was shot."
"What a boy," said Grandma, munching. "The poor fool." And now Grandma also was looking at the window, as if she too expected him to come bursting in at any moment.
"I remember when I was your age," Grandma said. She looked back at the girl and then revised herself. "Or maybe a few months or a year older.
"There was a boy who fell in love with me ... I lived on Mulberry Street and your great-grandfather owned a bakery underneath us. I was helping out in the bakery when this fellow come in. He bought an apple pie and looked real hard at me and went out. The apple pie turned out to be just the start. After that he was always coming in that store. Always wanting bakery goods. What did he do with it all? I don't know. Hard rolls, cinnamon ring, lemon meringue pie. He would just look at me and gulp-the silliest thing. But I sort of liked him.
"As a matter-of-fact, I got to liking him real well, though I hadn't heard him say a word except something like 'six hot cross buns.' He always turned white if I even smiled at him.
"One Sunday morning after church I was out walking around. I was all dressed up fit to kill too, with them high-button shoes, all bustle and with a parasol. I guess I was looking about as well as a girl could look, and I walked all around, just glancing in the shop windows. Before long I began to think maybe somebody was following me, and so they was. This fellow. At a respectable distance, but he was following me all right.
"Now that's funny, I thought. If he's following me, why don't he catch up? That's what he was following me for, you'd think. But he just wouldn't. I slowed down and he slowed down. I stopped and looked at windows and he stopped and looked at windows. You'd think he was scared to death of me but I was like a magnet and couldn't help dragging him along. I wasn't near as pretty as you, but he kept following anyhow.
"And it started being a regular practice. He stopped coming in the store, instead he followed me when I went out, like a dying calf. And every Sunday morning especially. I used to go out on Sunday, some Sundays when I didn't want to especially, just so he could follow me and wouldn't be disappointed. It was like taking a little dog for a walk. I almost laughed when I saw him.
"But you know, I never told any of the other girls. Even after I found out who it was. It wasn't nobody much, just a young fellow named Harold Grogan from over on Pete Street. He was a barber, I saw him once in his barbershop.
"That following business went on for a month or two.
I felt sorry for him that he wouldn't catch up and talk, and it seemed pretty silly going on like that. So one Sunday I decided to do something. I turned a corner and instead of walking on I pressed up against the building and stayed there. I was going to ask him what the big idea following me like that was. So I waited and waited there and finally I got tired of waiting and peeped around the corner, and he was gone. I don t know why. Maybe he got mad at himself and realized how stupid it was and all. I don't know, to tell the truth. After several weeks I got curious about him and went past his barbershop."
"Was it still there?" Edna asked eagerly.
"Oh, the barbershop was open all right. But there was another man doing the barbering. I never did see that boy again. I got sort of fond of him too. That is, what I made up in my mind about him. I had other fellows sort of halfhearted follow me but I never had one like him, who almost made a business out of it. He'd have made a good husband too, maybe not as good as your grandfather was, but reliable. I sort of liked that boy. I sometimes wish he'd of been more talkative."
They both became silent after this confession. Grandma felt somehow she'd said too much. She studied the girl, wondering what was going through her head.
"Still," she said finally, out of her vast experience, "I wouldn't advise taking any other course than just letting them follow. Let them follow you as much as they want, like I did those first weeks. Don't say a word to them. Don't even slow up too much.
"You don't have to worry," Grandma added consolingly. "You're young and pretty. One of them is going to get up nerve and speak to you sooner or later, you can be sure."
THE BRIDGE
It's about this dinky footbridge they built at the top of Gorker Street. People have to crawl over it. Old people too. Even dogs have a hard enough time of it, stopping on the landing for breath.
The steps are so narrow only one and one half people can walk up them, so when a guy is taking his girl home he has to let her walk a little bit m front while he keeps a protecting hand on her elbow, and old people with many bundles have to hold them above their heads, and little kids have to raise their knees high to make it.
Who did it to us? That is what they clench their hands about every evening when they all come riding home on the streetcar and get off at the crazy Gorker Street footbridge and start over it.
You cannot crawl under it. It is all fenced in.
You cannot go another way.
You have to go up the steps and over it.
You have to do it in silence, because any wasted breath and you may not make it.
There is a saloon right there on the corner before you have to go over the bridge. People go into the saloon before trying the bridge, just to talk it over. It's a good thing to talk the bridge over before trying it, also to pour a glass of beer or two down in you just for luck. Then maybe another subject, like baseball or the way the weather looks. You look out the door, up and down Eastern Avenue, at a blue automobile passing, or a new girl. Then another glass of beer or two, for good luck before starting.
The poor women with armies of kids coming home from town loaded up with bundles, say at Christmas time or any time, they have got no choice. They assemble everything at the bottom of the steps, gather their families about them, and start. Corsets and tight dresses stretch and pull but these women make it, looking first on one side of their pile of bundles, then on the other.
Old ladies sometimes just give up even trying to climb those steps when there's ice and snow, and go visit a friend or back to town to take in a double feature.
But hear this and know it's true. That bridge got paid off proper in the end.
Everybody wanted that bridge paid off and it got paid off all right, finally.
There was a small violent woman named Mrs. Going who had built herself a little bungalow on the corner of Gorker Street and Clemens Terrace just one year before the railroad company and the city got together and built the bridge. Mrs. Going was a small, nervous sort of woman, always talking loud and shouting at her husband, who never seemed to be in the same room with her, because she was either in the basement and him in the yard, or him in the basement and her on the first floor (Hubert, bring me up the broom; Hubert, curse your hide, I could beat you for not putting new water in the fishbowl, I never saw a man like that). Her husband worked at night, and the boys of the neighborhood used to like to scare her. She would keep all the lights in her house burning, but in the fall the boys would throw corn on her porch, or ring the doorbell or sneak around in her yard and knock on the window. She had a hard time of it. And she was having her troubles in other ways too, partly because there were a couple of rumors floating around that when she was a little younger, before she was married, she had been pretty wild and a little free and easy too, and now she was having her troubles with her conscience and suspecting all sorts of things about her husband, who did very, little except work all night on the railroad and sleep all day when she wasn't bawling him out about something. She suspected him of having all sorts of affairs with other women who had kept their looks better than she had (because her face was getting a little pinched up in recent years and she wore glasses now and squinted somewhat); and she even got her sister's husband, who was a sort of detective or guard at a soap factory, to follow Hubert one night when all he was going to was a Brotherhood union meeting, and the sort of detective got bored waiting outside for him, in the rain, too, and seemed very unfriendly toward her afterwards.
So you must get the background of this little nervous and even violent lady who lived on the corner of Gorker and Clemens streets in the little bungalow she had supervised the building of (keeping the kids from playing robbers in the new-dug cellar, and afterwards away from the new house itself). You should understand that Mrs. Going is a small and violent woman, loud-talking and rather ignorant about everything in the world except her Rights. You must understand, for instance, why she kept a BB gun behind her kitchen door and made it hard for neighbors' dogs who came in her yard involved in nothing but natural processes. That Mrs. Going, she was at war with the world, and she got her own licks in, as you can see.
Now Mrs. Going had one friend on Gorker Street whose name was Mrs. Mack. Mrs. Mack was a widow who owned a big house two doors down the street and was very old and pretended she was blind. She was trying to get a pension from the Associated Charities and it was important that she be totally blind. It was true one of her eyes was bad but the other was very good and this was her misfortune. You never saw her she wasn't wearing bedroom slippers and an old red kimono it was rumored she never took off even to sleep, except when the life insurance nurse came to give her a bath once a month. Twice a day she had to come out on Gorker Street from her house, all dressed up in her red kimono and her bedroom slippers. She would look all around to see if anybody was looking, then start on her way up the street to Mrs. Garfield's boardinghouse, where she ate her meals. But the minute she saw anybody coming or standing on a porch shaking a rug, or just innocently peeping out from behind a curtain at her, she would start bumping into telephone poles and feeling her way around trees and walking haphazardly out into the street. She wanted witnesses. It was true she was old, she was seventy-four years old, and her one big misfortune was she wasn't blind. Once a month or so she used to get the whole street in an uproar with a fit of some kind, neighbors running in and out with broth and tapioca, doctors from the life insurance company and her own doctor coming and going. Helen Smith sitting up all night with her. Once they thought she was a goner sure, and they called the ambulance, which backed up to the door, and a couple of attendants came in the side entrance to get Mrs. Mack. Little kids and dogs and neighbors young and old were standing all around the house and in the front hall, and doctors and nurses were parked out in front, their cars were that is, but Mrs. Mack wasn't going. No, no, no, she screamed in her weak voice. Her own doctor talked to her first. He was a man who thought he understood her completely. "Listen," he said, "you're going of your own free will or will we strap you down?" And every two or three minutes she would pass out and wake up moaning and nobody really could figure out what was wrong with her, even the doctors, although she was obviously very weak, but she ate pretty good at Mrs. Garfield's and she had money, she collected rent from the two tenants in her house, and nobody could understand why she was undernourished. And finally with four men holding her they got her on a stretcher and carried her out to the ambulance and put her in still moaning very loud, with all the little kids trying to get a peep at her. She wasn't gone long; just a few days; and when she came back to Gorker Street from the hospital this Mrs. Garfield, a gaunt old lady who'd lost her husband and had to support five children with her boardinghouse, felt bad about it all and wouldn't even charge her any more for her meals. That was Mrs. Going's one friend on Gorker Street, Mrs. Mack.
That bridge they built irritated almost everybody on the street but it was Mrs. Going who really took it to heart. Mrs. Going would get angry every time she had to walk over it. She didn't have to walk over it nearly as much as other people because most of the time she went out the back way in an automobile and in those days most people didn't have automobiles. But she would get mad nevertheless. As an American citizen she knew her Rights all right, and she lived there in her little brown-and-yellow shingle bungalow which she had protected from a hole to a house, with her big fat railroader husband Hubert, knowing her Rights from A to Z and ready to fight to the last stand for them. She knew a couple of county commissioners and other fabled people through roundabout friend's friend ways, and she had even managed to get Mrs. Mack's house papered and a new chest of drawers and a stove thrown in after a flood one year, just by calling up one of these commissioners who was also a Community Chest man. So she was a woman of power and she knew what was what, but most of all she was a woman who needed something to do-just something to do-anything to do. When she was thirty-eight or so things began to go wrong inside her and she bothered her doctor so much that finally he began cutting her open at regular intervals through the years. Her doctor's name was Jiminy and first he took out her appendix, then something else, she wasn't quite sure what; and then he took more X-rays and ended up taking out gallstones. She felt better after this but the payments on the house and the automobile were overdue and something had to be done. That bridge! Every time she walked over it now she got madder-it seemed to stand so arrogantly tall and ugly up there at the top of the street. "Did you ever see the big cracks in that thing; why, it's dangerous!" she would say to Mrs. Mack. And although she felt just like a daughter to her doctor, this feeling did not keep him from sending her little handwritten reminders at the bottom of his monthly bill. Then-she broke her glasses. And to top everything off, she had to go and bruise her knee when she slipped in the basement.
"I simply caught my heel in that bridge at the top of the street, that's what happened," she told this same Dr. Jiminy, whom of course she hurried over to see immediately. "And they haven't heard the last of this, either, you can believe me." Old Lady Mack, when she heard about it, was all for suing right away and offered herself as a witness. So Mrs. Going got hold of a lawyer who had formerly been a railroader and he was to get one third if he collected, so the trial was on.
Anybody could see who was in the right. Why would anybody he about a thing like that? Besides, a property owner, a good taxpaying citizen, and somebody who knew the county commissioner who "will be glad to vouch for me because I happen to know him personally," as she proclaimed from the witness stand. Dr. Jiminy came on the stand and testified too-he'd seen the bruises all right. And then Old Lady Mack came limping up the aisle to give her all for her friend. She looked around at everybody with a pitiful look on her face, and when they asked her what she had seen she acted very confused but finally got out that "Mrs. Going's heel was caught in the big crack, and that knocked Mrs. Going down and broke her glasses and tore her stockings and bruised her up" and poor Mrs. Mack had to help her home.
Mrs. Going stood her ground, talked in a loud voice to the judge, saying, "I'm a good woman and I have to work dern hard for my money, if I do have to say it myself," so it was only four hundred dollars she wanted so they gave it to her because why would the woman he about it? Besides, she had a material witness.
It was all in the morning paper and the evening paper too, how Mrs. Going got four hundred dollars from the city all on account of the footbridge at the top of Gorker Street that nobody liked anyhow, and how Old Lady Mack was the material witness of the fall and bruising. Nobody else has caught a heel or anything else in the crack in the bridge floor since then, and nobody ever caught anything in there before. Still, justice is justice and a verdict was handed down-although it's true that everybody on Gorker Street knew just how everything had come about. The part about Old Lady Mack helping Mrs. Going down Gorker Street after the fall particularly pleased them; and they also enjoyed the part about twelve jurors coming out to Gorker Street to examine the footbridge for flaws. Over something else they might have been a little angry and a little jealous, but because it was the footbridge they felt pretty good. They figured that the city and the railroad owed somebody on Gorker Street something for putting up that bridge and making everybody walk over it no matter what hour of the day or night it was, snow or hailstones.
So that was how Mrs. Going collected tribute for everybody on Gorker Street, from the city and the railroad for putting up such a contraption for everybody to walk over. A white edifice of concrete, a monument of vituperation, something to curse and get drunk over, blackened with coal soot and littered with candy wrappers and cinders.
THE BUS DRIVER
Even a big city like Chicago begins to look deserted around twelve o'clock at night and that's why it's always a surprise to walk into the main bus station at that hour to get your bus-because you're bowled over by the noise and the light and everybody's wide awake and hilarious for leave-taking, in a "one for the money" kind of mood. Maybe a sleepy soldier or two, but usually even the doughboys and the G.I.s seem excited and well lit up, and you get jumpy and anxious too: you thought only of finding your bus here, all tuned up and waiting for you, and instead you find dozens of buses, off to everywhere! You thought you were going to the big important city of Cincinnati, someplace big, but comparing Cincinnati with these other far and glittering names, twin cities, los angeles, FLORIDA limited, new york, makes your old town seem just a step across the street, no place at all, a stone's throw, a suburb.
And the sudden clusters at each gate as each new bus is announced-nobody really talking very much, everybody just clutching the long strips of tickets and searching eagerly for the porter with valises and grips and satchels and boxes tied with string, or dragging them along somehow. Everybody knows about God in a bus station, everybody gets helpless there, a little child to be led. Even a young smart guy who's read several books and can say "Where am I?" in French and Latin can look pretty helpless trying to find his bus in a big bustling bus station at twelve o'clock at night when the place is jammed and packed with people pushing for the last buses out to everywhere.
Of course old ladies and drunks are the most helpless, and children the least. Kids know their stuff and stick to staring at wheels and pretending they're buses too. But old ladies get red in the face and tremble and haven't enough sense to take a nip, while the drunks have taken a nip all right, one for the road and one for the old ladies too.
This evening the drunks for the midnight buses were out in crowds. At least one was before every gate, and big crowded gates like those to New York and St. Louis had three or four. The Cincinnati gate had two, two prize specimens. One was a lolling, tottering drunk, a thin, small, greyish man about forty who couldn't stand on his two legs and held onto a post. Kept talking to someone, wanted to know how to get to all sorts of places. Mentioned something about buying a ticket to the Bijou Theatre, "then the bastard had to back out." He felt pretty awful about any number of things and wanted just everyone to know, and if not everyone, well then the thin air was good enough for him, to listen to his troubles, by God! You could tell he was really drunk because he talked to old women, ugly women, all the women indiscriminately and impersonally, and not just to the lookers in the crowd, the way a young guy does who isn't really drunk but knows that a stagger and a hiccup are always good for a laugh to get acquainted.
The other drunk wasn't so easy to tell. He stood all alone, all by himself in that big crowd of excited people, and he stood very straight, too. His face was white, stark-white pale from all the alcohol he'd recently put away, and he talked to absolutely no one but instead was concentrating on practicing great self-control-betraying himself only once when he stepped forward and almost lost his balance, but caught an arm and got himself totally upright and dignified again. He had a white gardenia in his buttonhole and earned a zipper briefcase. His "bags" had obviously "gone on ahead, he was that kind of guy. The way he achieved his upright position though pickled was simply through what he gave up, and what he gave up was simply everything, all movement and all effort, even smoking or a glance around, as he marshaled all his forces for the supreme effort of getting through the gate and onto the bus. He was poised for that big moment.
The loud-speaker in this depot was as hard to understand as in every other, and especially for drunks and old ladies, who, immediately a new conglomeration of cities was announced as "leaving at gate so-and-so," rushed around to everyone (especially uniformed men, whether belonging to the army, the navy, the bus depot in some capacity or another, or merely the broom brigade that swept up cigarette butts and Baby Ruth wrappers) asking what had just been said, was it the bus to Altoona that had been announced or not, where would they get it, wasn't it late, and so on. But our one drunk did not do that; he was concentrating on himself, he knew he was in front of Gate 3 and he was only waiting for the crowd to move forward to get on his bus to Cincinnati. That was his bus, he was in the right place, and he was concentrating, now or never.
When his bus was finally announced he merely became a little tauter, then moved with the crowd forward, through the gate, and out into the drive, where dozens of the large blue streamliners were assembled, loading and unloading. All he had to do now was to keep with his own crowd and not get lost. If he got lost and had to try to find his bus all by himself, God knew what would happen to him. All he had to do was be with his own crowd and he would get on the bus and tilt back the seat to sleeping position, hopelessly drunk at last.
Suddenly the crowd stopped and began handing tickets to its driver and getting on the bus. The side of the bus was opened and a Negro porter put the grips in. The people were getting even more excited now and trying to see up into the bus at the number of seats left. But nobody pushed, nobody shoved. "Don't crowd, please," the driver had said so loud and so authoritatively that nobody crowded.
By some chance the two drunken men were right together, though neither noticed the other. The falling-apart drunk ("stinking drunk" was how somebody in the crowd put it) had given up trying to talk to anybody and was simply talking to the air now-nor did he bother to use words any more, the air wouldn't know the difference. The tight drunk, however, still held himself very erect and took no notice of the stinking drunk, nor of anybody else for that matter. Didn't try to peer in at the number of choice seats left, either. Was concentrating. Was determined. Would make it all right if only he kept his mouth shut and his eyes straight ahead.
The driver was a short broad-shouldered man with big, black, burning eyes and heavy eyebrows drawn down over them. He was not saying anything to his passengers, but he was looking every one of them in the eye as he punched the ticket. This big bus was all his, he was going to drive it to Indianapolis all by himself, and he was carefully looking over every passenger he might have to take with him there.
When it was the stinking drunk's turn the black-eyed driver, the sweat rolling down his fat face, didn't even take the ticket.
"You're not riding on the bus tonight," he says, loud.
Right away the stinking drunk jumped back to the present world, with a snarl too. "The hell I'm not," the stinking drunk said, his loose lips making a last stand to stick out and look tough, his pale eyes searching for focus. "The hell I'm not!" the stinking drunk repeated. A tough guy all right, if only somebody could tell him who he was. The women behind him were trying to look as though they hadn't heard, or at most didn't know the drunk even existed. But people inside the bus, attracted by the fuss, were already sticking their heads out of opened windows, or trying desperately to open jammed ones. Two of these were young women off to see their boy friends in Cincinnati, another was a man who till then had been thinking of his sick Pomeranian back in Montana. Now everybody in the bus was thinking of nothing but the stinking drunk and hoping a fight would start.
"Go on now, git out of here," the little fat beetle-eyed bus driver said, and started to punch long tickets belonging to two small children about eleven.
But the stinking drunk wouldn't move a step. He waved his arm vaguely, his mouth pursed and his eyes fading upwards into his head. He got out something about "driver" but nobody could understand and people in the bus turned to each other asking what he'd said. The crowd had spread in around the two like schoolboys at a playground fight, and all the while the little fat bus driver tried to concern himself with helping the two little girls onto the bus. The starter came up in the meantime and took hold of the stinking drunk, who was pulling at the bus driver's arm, and the bus driver looked around ill with a jerk and shouted, "Get your goddamn hand off my arm before I beat you to a pulp!" This had no effect at all on the stinking drunk, but the starter tried to pull him back to save him.
Then from out of the crowd the cautious, neatly dressed drunk came before the bus driver with his ticket, and as the driver was looking down at it and tearing off a portion, the cautious drunk, perhaps himself hardly knowing that he was going to open his mouth, said, "You haven't got any reason to keep anybody off this bus."
"I've got a right to keep anybody I want off this bus," the little fat driver said loudly, for his entire audience to hear. And his tone attracted people who were just getting off other buses, or waiting to get on, and some were leaning forward to hear better and some were jostling one another to get a closer view.
"Oh, I don't know that you have," the cautious drunk said, and every word was precisely uttered, as if he were afraid of lisping or couldn't hear himself talk but hoped to be understood even so.
The driver looked up at the cautious drunk now and realized for the first time that this man was drunk too. But the cautious drunk was still holding himself together and, perhaps realizing now that he'd veered from his "say nothing, do nothing" program for boarding the bus, he clamped his mouth shut tight and pushed past the little fat driver, stumbling slightly on the bus step. The driver didn't take his arm as he had the other passengers' but was staring at the drunk's back, his big black eyes alive with anger, amazed that he, the driver and director of this big bus, had been questioned by this guy, who wasn't even as big as he was in the first place. Then he turned and began to tear off a portion of an old lady's ticket, but suddenly he stiffened.
"Just a minute!" he said, turning around and almost knocking the old lady down. "Just a minute there you!"
But the cautious drunk was hurrying a little more now, trying to shove his way down the narrow aisle of the bus. And the driver was a fat man but he leaped into the bus quick as a flash and came out with the drunk like a rabbit out of a hat.
"You're not riding on this bus, bud," he said.
The cautious drunk was ashen, his hands were trembling, he was falling apart, now he would never get on the bus, never!
"Here's your ticket," the driver said, thumbing through his packet of tickets and then realizing he'd have to have the drunk's stub to find the right one. "Give me your stub!" he said, and grabbed the stub out of the cautious drunk's hand, then began comparing numbers to find the right ticket for the stub. He had to go through twice to find it, then he thrust it out to the drunk. But the drunk wouldn't take it, backed away, even tried to get around the driver and climb on the bus again. "Watch out there, bud!" the driver said, pushing him away.
"I'm getting on this bus!" the cautious drunk announced. "You get out of my way or I'll take your number!"
This amazed the little fat bus driver. "You'll take my number!" he said, looking around at the crowd for sympathy. "You'll take my number!" Then he turned back to the cautious drunk. "You'll get out of here. There's no drunks riding tonight. I'm the driver of this bus."
"I'm not drunk!" the man said, he was really trembling now and as white as snow, and with trembling hands he pulled a pencil and a scrap of paper out of his pockets and asked, "What's your number, there?"
"You're drunk to me," the driver said, "now get out of here, bud! I'm getting mad!"
"I'm a member of Congress," the drunk said. "I'm a member of the Congress of the United States!" He began to search around in his breast pocket for his papers and finally brought out a comb, a large wallet and several letters. He tried to show the driver an address on an old envelope but the driver said, "I don't give a good goddamn whether you're President of the United States, all I say is you're drunk to me, and you'll not ride tonight!" And all the Representative could do was to show the address on the used envelope to several people in the crowd, who didn't give him any consolation and only stared at it as if it didn't mean anything at all.
Now the driver was back to collecting more tickets and helping more people into the bus. But his neck was still red and he was still mad. The Representative, however, did not go away, but stood there and looked at the driver, trying to appeal silently to the driver's conscience in particular and to blind justice in general. He thought that perhaps finally the great news that he had just let out, that he was the Elected Representative of the People of the United States, would sink into this driver's dome
-this driver, a nobody! A fool who hadn't even gotten one vote in the last election while he'd polled 76,341! All he had was a repulsive wife and two or three repulsive brats somewhere in a couple of stinking rooms, probably in Indianapolis, which was a crummy city anyhow, and here he was thinking he was a big shot, throwing you off his bus like this and on top of it that bus was a public conveyance that absolutely came under the interstate commerce laws of the United States and he, he was the lawmaker!
He came up behind the driver, who was still tearing off the stubs, and the driver said nothing, nor even looked around until the Representative said, "One of the two, I'm riding or-I'll take your number. One of the two! I'm a member of the House of Representatives!"
"You said that once," the little driver said, giving a jerk on his belt because his pants were always settling down on his hips. Then he pushed the Representative, lightly it seemed, but enough to cause the Representative to fall back against the wall of the bus station.
The Representative remained there and waited until the driver turned away to tear off more ticket stubs, then said, but not loudly, "Why, you tinhat bus driver." He tried to laugh and look around at the crowd, tried to get a lot of scorn into his laugh but it didn't work and so he took to calling out again, "Tinhat bus driver! You're nothing but a tinhat bus driver, that's all you are, you!"
A kid standing near the Representative motioned with a downward movement of his hand. "Better cut it out," he advised. "He's got a right to keep anybody off the bus he wants, so you better watch out."
Inside the bus the whole thing was a joke by now and everyone had loosened up. A group of five men up in the front seats, the lot of them dressed to the ears in bright-colored clothes and on their way to the Kentucky Derby, kept kidding one another and asking one another, "Did you get your breath smelled on your way in?"-asking the same thing of each new man who got on the bus, stopping him and saying, "Did you get your breath smelled? It's the rule, you know!"
And even after the driver had come on into the bus himself, adjusted various gadgets, plumped himself down in the seat, looked all around at his passengers, counted them, checked his figures against the number of stubs he had, and started the motor, the Representative was still standing out there, still holding his wallet and his comb and his letters in his hand, still staring at the bus driver to beat the band.
Already most of the buses had left and the terminal was growing empty. As the Cincinnati bus pulled out, the Representative was still standing back there on the platform all alone except for a porter who was walking rapidly away from him.
The racing fans behind the driver began to kid him now, saying, "A Representative of Congress, too, pal! Your life ain't worth two cents now, he'll probably send the G men after you! Now you're in for it!"
The driver was nosing the big bus forward in short sudden whines, through the back alleys of Chicago, looking down side streets and turning quickly and closely around corners. But occasionally he would look around at his ladders with a smile on his face, a little ashamed and at the same time proud of what he'd done. And after a while out on the open road, he even began to kid with them, and the subject turned to the Derby and he got a tip from one of the slickest-looking of the outfit, the one with the brown-and-white shoes and the brown soft-straw hat with the purple band.
Though at first the driver had been a little ashamed of himself, now out on the open road he began to be proud of himself, he began to take a harder grip with his stubby hairy hands on the big steering wheel and really drive that bus. He began to hold it steady-on at sixty-five going down the broad smooth highway, and he loved the way the tires sang. While he was driving this bus this was his bus, and the people sleeping and staring out the window and talking behind him were his people, and he was taking them places, wherever he damn well pleased, he'd take them a trip to Niagara Falls. Anybody he didn't like wouldn't come along, that was the way he stood. He lessened the speed as they went around a bend, then he picked it up again, evenly, with expert care, knowing each bit of pressure to tease the accelerator with. This was his bus and his world, Congress or no Congress, God or no God, and he was driving this bus the way he wanted to!
MARIE
People first started peeping out of their windows as she went by when they heard how she let the boys crowd round her and kiss her in the schoolyard during recess. And then the time Miss Graham, the principal, found her necking Joe Loomis behind the curtain in the school auditorium when there wasn't even a performance going on-that swept through the Mothers' Club at their Tuesday-afternoon meeting and even got around to the old maidrand widows who lived on Marie's street; even Mrs. Mack was shocked at the news and she didn't have any children to be contaminated.
She seemed different to everybody, and the smaller kids used to make fun of her. Most of all they made fun of the way she walked-too straight, too stuck-up, moving no more of her body than was absolutely necessary and letting her arms hang straight down at her sides. On Gorker Street you were supposed to walk so that everything was as relaxed as possible; you were supposed to duck your head and move your shoulders and swing your arms a little. So the kids would sometimes walk down the street behind Marie, mocking her, and if she saw them she wouldn't even chase them-just grow red and walk on.
It was true she didn't get along very well in school and stuck in the eighth grade, but that was partly because she was out sick for a while and partly because the teacher didn't like her and she didn't like the teacher. During class she'd talk to Joe Loomis or Tommy Gordon in the back of the room, and the teacher would say, "Marie, I think you can wait a few years before you start worrying about the boys," and Marie would answer back, loud, "I didn't say anything-I just asked him about the night-work." So the teacher would say, "Marie, would you mind stepping down to Miss Graham's office?" and write her out a note to take along. "No, I wouldn't mind," Marie would answer loudly, getting up and walking in that straight way out of the room, all the kids snickering behind her.
And then Mrs. Snobek would get hold of this information from her boy Jim and pass it right on down the street till everybody knew and everybody talked. Everybody knew from the beginning how Marie Foltz was going to turn out.
Marie lived in a little unpainted house in the middle of Gorker Street with her brother Eddie-who was feebleminded, could hardly feed himself-and her brother Henry. Her brother Henry paid no attention at all to her-he was too busy impressing people. He was a big shot in everything that went on around the neighborhood: president of the Young People's Society at the Baptist Church, a moving force behind the softball team in their drive for funds to buy uniforms and bats, the guy all the older people in the church and neighborhood always con-Suited when they wanted "the young people's viewpoint." He was twenty-five, not even a young person any more, but he still represented their viewpoint and could talk seriously and at length whenever you asked him something. Marie's mother was a fat, pleasant lady with a strange, sort of vacant look in her eye who hired out as a cleaning woman around Turkey Bottoms. Her father, like her brother Henry, did odd carpentry jobs, with a little haphazard masonry thrown in, and used to sit up at the corner bar all hours of the day with his hat on, talking to anybody who happened by.
Mrs. Snobek lived next door to the Foltzes and had a husband who worked at the post office, plus three daughters and a son, all homeloving people. It was Mrs. Snobek who kept closest watch over Marie in Turkey Bottoms, and it was Mrs. Snobek who could always supply the latest news on what Marie was up to now. People took it for granted that she'd always be up to something-running around the way she did with boys till late at night, walking so straight on the street and hardly talking to anyone, as if she had a red-hot secret. Mrs. Snobek did a good job of seasoning up the news and keeping it moving-Mrs. Snobek with her son Jim and her daughters gathered round her, watching Marie out of the dining-room window.
It wasn't the boys from the neighborhood who went out with her; not after she'd gratuated from Turkey Bottoms Public School, anyhow. The neighborhood guys were banded together tight in a little group that hung around Ray's Place, drinking Cokes and playing the pin-ball game and holding opinions about each of the girls in the neighborhood. Even though some of them liked Marie's looks, they didn't dare take the chance of going around with her because of the razzing they'd have gotten from the other guys-a mortifying prospect.
So Marie ran with boys a few years older than herself from the lower East End-those tough lean boys who did nothing conspicuous for a living and drove ancient, brightly painted Dodge or Oldsmobile or Buick coupes. One of these defiant, battered little cars would come whirling around the corner of Clemens Terrace in the evening and screech to a stop in front of her house,, and Marie would come running out and jump in before her date had time to blow his horn-wanting to cause as little commotion as possible. Then with a whoofing and a roaring of the motor, the coupe would go tearing off down Gorker Street, Mrs. Snobek peering out of the window after it.
Marie started in going to high school, only she didn't know why. And at night Slim Edmunds, a hard-looking boy with small, expressionless green eyes and a cigarette always dangling from the side of his pale mouth, would come around and get her in his combination Dodge-Buick coupe, made from two old cars that wouldn't run separately. Slim worked as a relief bartender in the daytime, so he had change to buy gas with and cruise around looking for girls. Since that night when he'd seen her walking home alone down Eastern Avenue after a movie at the Jackson Theater and zoomed into the curb to pick her up, he'd never left her with any doubt about what she was created for: he prided himself on being a fast worker and if they don't like it, dump them. But he'd found the right girl in Marie, for there was something in her that really didn't care. He had the car and some change in his pocket and she wanted him-wanted him to come back every night and stop in front of her house-show everybody on Gorker Street that she could have a steady like any other girl-show Mrs. Snobek and the rest of them. Though at the same time she was always a little embarrassed at the last minute, and would disappear into the car with such a rush that many thought she was ashamed of what she was doing.
But now people around the neighborhood were beginning to forget about Marie, not from lack of interest in her career but simply because she was going half a dozen miles across the city to high school and news was harder to get. They saw her go out in the evening with this boy they didn't know, in his combination Dodge-Buick, but though they had some interesting theories about what that meant, still there was nothing very tangible to roll around on the tongue.
And then, at the very moment when all talk about her seemed to have stopped almost completely, the really big news about our heroine broke and engulfed the neighborhood-that big news being Marie's "condition." It seems that at high school Marie's home-room teacher had been noticing this "condition" for several weeks, and one morning this same home-room teacher took it upon herself to call Marie up to her desk and have a little talk with her. After the little talk, this same home-room teacher escorted Marie down to the school nurse, who immediately decided that it was nothing for the school to worry its head about and sent her home.
Alert there behind the curtain of her dining-room window, Mrs. Snobek grew suspicious when Marie didn't leave for school any more, and pretty soon her observations made her as certain as she felt she needed to be about the reason. So she passed the news right on down the street, and before the week was out it had spread all over Turkey Bottoms that Marie Foltz was really on the spot now, all right. The guys sat around Ray's bar-b-q feeling very happy about the whole affair and saying over and over again that at least they weren't to blame and then, to vary their song-and-dance, accusing one another suddenly of doing it to poor Marie. "What'd you want to do a thing like that to the girl for, Cokie?" somebody would say. "Couldn't you wait till you was married to her?" And Cokie would shake his head slowly from side to side and answer, "Boy, that's one thing you can't accuse me of! I wouldn't of touched her with a ten-foot pole."
But what Mrs. Snobek and everybody else in the neighborhood couldn't figure out was: what would Marie do about it? You had to make plans when you were in her condition, that was for sure; and rumors flew around everywhere about how she'd "taken something" or "done something" about it. There were dozens of explanations passed back and forth between the learned and the ignorant about what you could do in such a case-about the doctors and the long needles and the hot baths and all the rest. Some mothers even took their daughters aside and discussed the whole matter very seriously with them, so that they'd know how awful the thing was that had befallen Marie and never commit the same sin themselves. But nobody could say for certain what Marie was going to do.
Summer was almost here and windows were open wide. Sometimes Marie would stand in the back yard and hear Mrs. Snobek talking about her at the supper table. She could see Mrs. Snobek's eyes everywhere, watching her. Mrs. Snobek would always be standing at the front door when Marie went to the grocery store; Mrs. Snobek would still just happen to be standing there when Marie came back. She really hated Mrs. Snobek now, and feared her too. She told her only girl friends, the Murphy kids-she told them she'd be willing to go through anything, if only Mrs. Snobek wouldn't be on hand to gloat over it.
Slim Edmunds never came to get her again after the night she told him the news, and she never tried to find him, to ask him for anything. At home, only her mother talked to her about her condition; some said her brother Henry didn't even know about it. But when her time was drawing near, her mother wrote to a sister down in Indiana and told her what had happened, asking whether it would be all right if Marie came there. It would be all right, the answer came back.
The evening before Marie was to go away she sat on the front porch staring at the street. It was growing dark and she felt unreal and lonely. She didn't doze off, she just let her imagination run free in the sultry summer evening, and suddenly she imagined that Slim Edmunds drove up in his Dodge-Buick combination and came running up the walk to her. "Hello, kid, how are you feeling?" Slim asked, that tight little smile creasing his cheeks. Then he held her close and kissed her. "I never thought you was serious about it, kid, I thought you was just tryin' to get me to marry you," he said. "But now I know it's true and you've got to come away with me."
"Where, Slim?" she said in her daydream. "Where are we going? My Aunt Jane's expecting me-I've got to go down to her house tomorrow."
"Forget your Aunt Jane, you're comin' away with Slim," Slim said, and then, picking her up bodily, he carried her tenderly out to his car. She sat there on the torn leather seat beside him, and he held her hand while he drove-just like he used to. And she didn't ask any more where they were going, because she didn't care, just as she didn't used to care at all....
As though moved by some will outside herself, she rose from her chair suddenly and went around to the back yard. It was so dark by now that she could hardly see her way, and she almost stumbled over a great pile of rocks which her father had had delivered weeks ago for a job he hadn't gotten around to starting yet. Hardly knowing what she was doing, she picked up a whole armload of the rocks and carried them into Mrs. Snobek's yard. Trip after trip she made, not caring about the noise, piling those rocks up in front of Mrs. Snobek's back door. Panting and grunting, running back and forth faster and faster, she piled up the rocks until they were as high as her waist-as high as her shoulders! A light flashed on in Mrs. Snolick's kitchen just as she was stacking on more rocks, and Mrs. Snobek's head appeared above them, amazed, that big mouth open in amazement! "Why, you nasty girl, what do you think you're doing?" She tried to get the screen door open but couldn't-could only bang the screen door repeatedly against Marie's rock pile, shouting, "You nasty thing, you! Drop those rocks this minute and start carrying these away! Why, what do you think you're doing in my yard, Marie Foltz?"
Marie dropped the rocks then, and with them herself. She lay there on the damp ground as heavy as a stone, dead to the world ... and awoke it seemed a thousand years later and she was in her own house, in bed, and her mother was sitting there beside her, looking at her.
Some said she'd never come back to Turkey Bottoms, and the weeks went by and she didn't come back. But rumors about her were as thick as the soot from the trains that went by on the railroad tracks; rumors in a wild, cheap assortment, like the display of dusty penny candies in Mrs. Zimm's candy store. She'd gotten married down in Indiana to a farmboy! She wasn't going to have a baby at all-she'd just gone away for her health! She wasn't in Indiana, she was in Kentucky, and a doctor there was going to "do something to her" so she wouldn't have a baby after all! Or no, she'd had the baby and had "given it away" to some people who wanted it...! But nobody knew for sure. And summer was passing, the leaves were turning, and fall came around again and the turning leaves drifted toward the ground as the children of the neighborhood walked their way to school again. And one fall day without warning, without even a rumor about her return to precede her, Marie appeared on Gorker Street again-walking as straight as ever too, and holding her chin very high so that no one could look into her eyes. She was, people noticed, much slimmer now, and perhaps even prettier than before. Mothers were shocked at Marie's nerve in coming back-and looking so healthy too.
She still saw the "Murphy girls, and she'd go over to their house or they'd come to hers. But no Slim Edmunds came around to see her now-he'd gone off and joined the navy and he wasn't coming back.
Then one night a fellow who'd bummed around with Slim Edmunds stopped in front of her house with an automobile he'd borrowed and she came out and went riding with him. Not long after that this fellow, Billy Wyatt, a short, freckle-faced boy with a slight stutter who was famous for having smoked cigarettes in the fifth grade, got a job in a lumber yard, and bought a secondhand Ford roadster and painted her name on the spare-tire cover. And before Mrs. Snobek even had time to get a few more good rumors started about the direction Marie was headed now, bang! there was a big glittering $26.50 Kraus Kredit Stores engagement ring on Marie's third-finger-of-the-left-hand, and she appeared completely changed-smiling at people on the street, looking them right in the eye, saying hello whether they answered or not.
Cokie Myers brought the news to the guys at Ray's Place. "There I was standing there at the car stop yest-day morning waiting for the streetcar when all of a sudden I notice this babe coming down Eastern Avenue. I couldn't make out who she was because she was walkin' different than I ever saw her before. Then I reckunize her-it's Marie Foltz, only I could still hardly reckunize her, you know how she use to walk, nose in the air like she was stuck-up or something, and here she comes looking happy as anything and kicking her legs way out and smiling! And she never did say anything to me before except maybe hi or something, but now she walks right up to me and stops and says, 'Hi, Cokie, look what's hap-penin' to me,' and she showed me this big ring on her finger, she says it's an engagement ring and she's going to get married Saturday night. Then she started babbling on about her sister-in-law or somebody, all about how she's crazy about her and she likes her mother-in-law too.
Christ, I didn't know what to say," Cokie Myers said. "Here she never said two words to me before, and now she's telling me all this stuff just like I was the greatest friend she ever had or something."
"Go on!" the guys sitting there in the booth around him all said, nudging him. "You're not putting anything over on us. We knew all about you and her all along. Now everybody says she's give you the air because you sold your car and don't have anyplace to do it with her any more."
"No," said Cokie, very serious. "Honest to God, it was funny, I mean the way she's changed like a different person, cornin' up to me at eight-thirty in the morning like that."
It was true, too, the whole story. Marie got married to the freckle-faced guy who stuttered and often she and her husband would drive over to her mother's house in the yellow Ford roadster. Whenever they stepped out of the car, Marie would take hold of her husband s arm, even for the short walk to the front door, and she would smile up into her husband's face like a good wife. And the baby? Why, she has the baby. And there's another baby on the way, people say.
THE GUYS FROM RAY'S PLACE
The Neighborhood Girls
They leaned against the front of Ray's Place and spat in the gutter, Augie and Weepie and Cokie Myers and Andy Pellam. Cars were parked on both sides of the street and Patsy and Ray's wife kept running in and out of Ray's with fish sandwiches and bottled beer and cokes in answer to the toots of the horns. There were some good-looking girls in the cars waiting to eat the sandwiches. Ruth Gordon and Sarah Ann Mullaney passed, walking up to Ruth's house on the avenue.
"Where you going, girls?" Cokie Myers says.
"Can we go along?" puts in Andy Pellam. He is a tall nervous boy with glowing eyes, taller but a couple of years younger than the others, and he likes saying daring things like this.
But they didn't get an answer-girls both had steadies with cars and didn't have to say a word, just go on walking up the street like they didn't hear nothing.
And they smoked their cigarettes and watched them go with bright eyes. Cars kept speeding down off the viaduct and hitting out over the levee. Across the levee were the airport and the playground with bicycle paths and lighted tennis courts.
"Let's go over to the airport," said Augie. "There's plenty of girls over there now."
"There was some good ones over there Sunday afternoon," Andy said, trying to get in on the conversation. "Boy, there was a little short one over there riding around on a bicycle."
The others didn't say anything, just went on looking dreamily out along the levee at the cars going by.
Suddenly Cokie grabbed Weepie's arm and said, "Look, look over there."
They all looked.
"Who is it?" said Andy.
"Come on, let's get your car, Weepie."
They went around the' corner fast and got into Weepie's two-thousand-year-old Ford sedan, Andy Pel-lam sitting in back with Augie. The car was pretty bad inside, straw coming out of all the seats and all sorts of bottles and rugs and papers on the floor. But the motor still sounded powerful except you couldn't tell any more exactly where it was located because when Weepie started it things in the ceiling and floor and everywhere responded and then Weepie pulled out into the street and took them around a corner.
"You think they'll be gone?" Cokie said, already looking anxiously out at the levee.
They waited a minute at Summer Street to get into the traffic, then they turned out onto the levee.
"There they are! Cokie said.
Weepie pulled the car out of the traffic and parked it right alongside the two girls. They came walking up and the guys all had their heads sticking out looking at them, with smiles on their faces.
"Hello, goils," Cokie said, tilting his hat forward on his head.
"Gee, real girls!" Andy said.
Betty Sue came up smiling; she was a short, sort of starry-eyed girl, well bosomed and well hipped, somebody it was good to look at. Jeanie was with her, a thin wisp of a kid with dumb blue eyes. Jeanie stood a step behind Betty Sue, a little half-smile on her face, as if she didn't know whether to run or to come up and be real friendly.
"Who's your friend?" says Cokie.
"Quit being funny, Cokie," Betty Sue said.
"Well, come on and get in," Cokie said. "You want me to hold this door open all night?"
Betty Sue looked at Jeanie. Jeanie was looking at the car. "Oh, we was just out walkin'," Betty Sue said.
"Well, why not ride?"
"Oh ... we're just out for a little walk," Betty Sue said, looking at Jeanie. But the guys all noticed she didn't move on.
Cokie got out of the car. "Now look, Betty Sue," he said, taking his hat off and holding it over his chest, "do I have to get down on my knee and beg you to get in?"
Betty Sue stepped back a step and started giggling and Jeanie started laughing too. "Ye-es!" Betty Sue giggled, holding onto Jeanie's hand.
Now Cokie got down on one knee, right there in the dirt beside the levee, still holding his hat over his heart, and said, "Please! Ladies, please! will you let us ride you around?"
"Oh, all right," said Betty Sue, and pulled Jeanie with her. Betty Sue got in front and Jeanie in back, and Weepie started the powerful motor and swung the car out into traffic again.
"Where we going?" said Betty Sue.
"Wouldn't you like to know!" Cokie told her, putting his arm around her.
She moved her shoulders in a little squirm but he didn't take his arm away.
Weepie ran the car over the Little Miami Bridge and turned right, up Mount Washington hill. The motor started to cut-cut-cut and he shifted into second and the car slowed down, pulling at the hill.
In the back seat Augie got his arm around Jeanie but she did not change her position or try to shake him off, just sat there. And Andy also sat there straight, his whole attitude changed now the girls were in.
"Come on now, where are we going?" Betty Sue asked.
"That's what we want to know," Cokie said. "Where were you going?"
"Just walking," she said. "We was going down to the airport, to ride bikes."
"You mean to say you got a quarter apiece?" Weepie asked.
"Sure," Betty Sue said, laughing. "We don't need anybody to take us anywhere."
"Ah now, Betty Sue," Cokie said. All the guys felt kind of embarrassed.
The wind came through the windows and smelled good, of the airport grass below them and the smoke from the railroad yards half a mile away.
They got on top of the hill and ran down the main street of Mount Washington. Weepie stopped the car in front of the Flamingo Inn.
"Are we going in here?" Betty Sue asked, suddenly impressed. They all just sat there for a minute. "Well, let's get out if we are," she said.
Weepie turned around to Augie. "How about you and Andy going in and seeing if Gus Edwards is there, I want to see him. We'll stop back for you in a little while."
"What the hell-" Augie began to say, then he saw Weepie's quick wink and he got out and Andy Pellam climbed over Jeanie's knees and got out too.
"Ain't we going in there?" Betty Sue asked as the car shot up the street.
Cokie climbed over the front seat and put his arm around Jeanie.
"Why ain't we going in there?" Betty Sue asked, not being funny now. "I guess I should have known better than to think you'd take us in there."
"We ain't got no money," Cokie said from behind her. "How do you expect us to take you in a place like that? A coke costs a dime in there."
"Where you taking us then?" Betty Sue asked, her voice getting louder.
"What's wrong with you, anyhow?" Cokie said. "We never did take you anyplace."
"No, you never did, did you!" she said, turning around on the seat and looking at him. He felt much smaller all of a sudden and loosened his hold on Jeanie.
Weepie drove the car down a dark street and parked it at the end. He touched Betty Sue on the hand but she jerked her hand away. "You jist want to take us out here like this, don't you, and then take us back to East End and dump us out, that's all you want to do, ain't it?"
Neither of the boys spoke but they were both looking at her almost obediently.
"Well, what the devil," said Cokie suddenly, "we can't help we don't have no jobs. If we had jobs, we'd take you anyplace." t
"Come on, Jeanie, let's get out, we don't have to stay in here with boys like these, we kin ride back on the bus."
"You don't have to ride back on any bus," Cokie said. "We'll take you back." And Weepie started the car, backed out or the dead-end street, and drove back to the Flamingo Inn. Andy and Augie were standing in front and came and jumped in.
Things seemed altogether different now in the car and Andy looked all around trying to find out what was the matter.
But nobody said anything all the way down Mount Washington hill.
Weepie let the girls out right where he'd picked them up: And the four guys sat in the car and watched the two of them walk away.
Then suddenly Betty Sue turned around, that small robust girl with the starry eyes, and yelled, "You can think whatever you want to think about us!" and turned and walked on, holding onto Jeanie's hand.
The boys sat there and watched them walk away.
Nobody said anything until suddenly Weepie got plenty mad too, and started the car. "Let s go back over to Ray's Place," he says plenty mad, pulling into traffic. "We'll go back to Ray's. What the hell, they don't have to take that attitude."
At the Gravel Pit
They were walking fast down Eastern Avenue in the direction Mary Alice Murphy and Peggy had taken. Joe felt good like he always felt good when it was a warm summer night in Turkey Bottoms and he was hurrying along to talk to girls. Andy Pellam was still thinking of the game he'd just played on the marble game in Ridler's. Cokie was swinging his gold-plated knife on its chain, whistling something, and Weepie was chewing on gum.
"I don't see them," Joe said when they got to Turkey Bottoms Public School and he didn't see them.
"They turned up already," Cokie said. "I wonder if they saw us coming."
They looked up Sherwood Avenue but there was nothing there but a dog sniffing in a hedge and three firemen leaning against the fire house in straight chairs, smoking.
The four guys hurried down the avenue all the way to the end of the car line. But no girls. They circled around looking up all the side streets but no girls, so they crossed the railroad tracks and went down to Ray's Place. Waitresses kept hurrying in and out of Ray's feeding people in the parked cars. Inside Ray's, in the booths with the nickelodeon music, there were girls with their dates, selecting the numbers on the record selector while the guy sat waiting ready with the nickel; eating sandwiches and trying to be delicate about it all, smiling over their Pepsi-Cola straws. Some of the girls looked okay to Joe, especially a small dark-eyed one with curls on top her head, sitting near the door.
But there was nobody in there they knew, so they went on up, the street, crossing the railroad tracks to Eastern Avenue again. It was a hot night, a very hot night in mid-August, and there was something burning in the world, a mystery, a romance in the world reserved for these midsummer nights.
They did not feel like going into Ridler's drugstore so they walked on down the avenue toward Duck Creek Bridge again. They were all thinking maybe they would run into the girls. They were all hoping.
Up from the bottomland, across the creek, a breeze brought the smell of open spaces and the corn growing for miles in the rich earth the flood left each year. Down the railroad track running parallel with Eastern Avenue, the Chicago freight tooted twice, steam up and waiting in Undercliff Yard with its one hundred and twenty cars. They crossed Duck Creek Bridge, dropped stones in the water, and went on.
Now they were getting farther out into the country, walking toward the paper mill and the gravel pit. Now the houses were spaced farther apart, and behind the houses were no other streets, only the open fields where corn grew. It got discouraging, and they knew there wasn't even a place they could stop in out here, and there would be no girls walking on this dark road. There is nothing more discouraging than the urgency of a hot summer night without girls, when you are still young. They tried all kinds of stuff, pushing one another into the gutter, seeing how far up the road they could throw rocks (but one rock Cokie threw hit an old Ford with a loud clatter and a man came out of a house and looked up and down the street). But it was a thing never to admit, that you were bored or even thinking about being bored. It was all a sort of interdependency on one another, to keep the general morale up. You have got to have plenty of morale when you are a young guy hunting girls for no particular reason, with ten cents in your pocket, in Turkey Bottoms on a summer night. It's to talk to them, that's what you're out for, even though it's rougher stuff you want if somebody asks you.
"Let's go swimming," Cokie said.
That meant defeat.
"That's a hell of a long walk though, Cokie," Joe said.
But they crossed the road and went down a long dark mud path that went to the gravel pit. The gravel pit was filled with backed-up water and you could swim in it if you were healthy and had good resistance to germs.
The water was cold. The sand felt good coming up between their toes. They all jumped on Andy Pellam and held him under so long he swallowed water and came up flaying the water. Joe liked to swim and he swam out away from the others. Cokie and Weepie and Andy liked to splash around. Joe swam all around the pit with long strong strokes.
The other guys got tired of splashing one another and taking stationary drives off the bank and floating, so they stood around and watched Joe swim. Suddenly Cokie said, "Let's duck Joe....You go around that way, Andy, and, Weepie, you get him from the left and I'll go straight ahead."
But Joe was getting out of the water onto the wooden diving board. He dove nicely, went down and down through the warmer surface water down into the biting-cold water deep and hit-
"Duck him when he comes up," Cokie yelled.
They stood around waiting. But Joe didn't come up.
"He's trying to trick us," Cokie said. "We'll wait him out."
They waited minutes that seemed like hours. Weepie was chewing on his gum. Andy Pellam was not enjoying the water, it was cold and he was shivering. "Jesus Christ," Cokie said when Joe didn't come up. "Where is he?" And they began looking all around, hoping to catch some sign of Joe in the darkness.
Maybe he swam through us under water and got out and is hiding, Cokie thought.
But he didn't really believe that, and an awful fear got hold of him and made him feel turned inside out. He dove and swam under water, feeling along the sand. A rock covered with soft scum made his heart jump. Then he came up for air. And there were Andy and Weepie dragging Joe over to the bank, and Cokie swam over.
"Jesus Christ," he said.
They turned Joe over onto his face and Cokie began working on him. Joe was breathing and a little water ran out of his mouth.
"He's okay," Cokie said, breathing hard from the exertion.
The other guys, naked, were kneeling beside Joe, looking at him. The four naked guys on the bank beside the gravel pit. A wind blew and made them shiver. Crickets kept chirping and Andy was looking close at Joe's face. Joe's eyes were open.
They were dressed, walking along the dirt road. Joe had his arm around Cokie's shoulder. He felt cold. The boys could think of nothing to say.
They were cooled off now. It was still summer, a warm sticky night in summer, but it was not the same night any more. They did not think of girls.
They took Joe home and joked for a minute at the door. "We thought you was a goner there for a minute. Jesus Christ, when you didn't never come up!" Then they Went on over to Ray's Place and, drinking Pepsi-Colas till eleven o'clock, they talked about what had happened, trying to make a joke out of it to hide their nervousness. They laughed easily at little things that weren't really funny. Somehow they had forgotten the girls altogether.
Game of Passion
Everything said three o'clock. Outside, the big brewery truck came down off the viaduct, bumped with a clatter of bottles at the bottom, and hit out over the levee with its Mount Washington load. Inside Ray's bar-b-q it was warm and the little coal stove gave off a burning radiance, inside here it was three o'clock too because Krampfie had just got himself seated over in the corner and was already on his second bottle of Falls City. He was drinking as usual with great expertness, knowing just how to let the beer run down the side of the glass, how to tilt the bottle up quickly at the end for just the right amount of foam, and how to sneak his hp over the edge of the glass so he wouldn't get a faceful of foam with the first sip. When the bottle was empty he would look at Marty and Marty would bring over another one.
It was later than quarter to three all right, because high school was out and over in the corner Andy Pellam was trying to beat the marble game, his body pressed against it and his two hands tilting it from side to side as the steel marble rolled down through the lighted bulbs. Bam! Bam! it went, and the numbers flashed back and forth across the scoreboard.
Old Andy, he was an expert too, in his own way. He would stop every once in a while and study his score and how the lights were lit up, and then he would hold back the shooter just so far and no farther, sometimes adjusting the amount of tension he was putting on the shooter spring while he looked all around with narrowed eyes at the numbers and lights and possibilities on the game and the scoreboard, then let her shoot, immediately going up on tiptoe as he carefully and painstakingly watched the ball making its way down the game, bumping the plastic toadstools and ping-bam-bam-bamming away toward a higher score on the board. Right now old Andy had two free games registered there on the board and he was feeling very happy about everything and taking his extra-special time about shooting, doing everything carefully and with narrowed eyes and sometimes on tiptoe.
Old Krampfie came over finally and stood by the machine watching. Andy got a full 10,000 with the first ball and he only needed 56,000 to win so he was very serious now studying the toadstools and the dead-ball holes and the lighted numbers on the scoreboard because you could win if you watched everything and were good. It was his second ball and he shot it with the shooter, just right, he thought, coming banging and skidding and backfiring down the game, and it got 900 on the board, that was all, and Krampfie said, "You don't hold your mouth right, Andy."
Andy did not say anything, he was studying his score, 10,900, and figuring his chances to make that 56,000 with the three balls he still had left. His hand was on the shooter but he did not pull it back yet, and the two men who came in and came over and stood by the game did not even make him turn his head, though he heard Marty from behind the bar say hello to them and heard the larger of the two men say howdy. Andy shot. He watched and the two men and Krampfie watched while his ball came down the game and he pressed hard against the game, jerking it ever so little to make the ball veer off the 2,000 knob and make the 5,000 but missed and the ball came on down into the dead slide. His score now was 15,000 but it was no good and he stood looking at the machine sadly shaking his head. "I can't win now," he said sadly.
"Hell, you can still win," the larger of the two men said. He kept putting his cigarette in his mouth and taking short puffs on it.
Andy shot the next ball and the next one in quick order, and then surveyed everything and his 28,000 and shot the last ball and the larger of the two men said, "Hell, that's pretty good, next time you'll hit."
"He's still got a free game," Marty said.
"Next time he'll make it," the man said.
But Andy did not do any better on the next game and the two men laughed and walked over to the bar and ordered bottled beer and drank quickly.
Andy was still standing by the marble game but with his back towards it now, looking out through the window at some girls going by on the street but hardly seeing the girls because he was filled with disappointment at having wasted the two games and all those guys standing around did not make him feel any better. He remembered last Sunday at Sunday School, Cokie Myers saying, "Boy, I saw Andy get forty games in Ridler's all the same evening."
"Oh sure," Weepie said. "Well, what's wrong with that? Forty games?" said Cokie. "It's all right," Weepie said, "but let's see him do it on the one in Ray's Place. You go getting forty games in one evening on that thing, then you'll have something."
"Yeah?" Cokie said. "Well, nobody ever got forty games before in one evening in Ridler's either." Cokie was his friend all right....One of the girls, Mary Alice, smiled at him, but he hardly smiled back at all, he was thinking too hard.
"What's the matter, it get you down?" the large man with the big overcoat on said, coming over to the game.
"No...." Andy said, and shoved the empty nickel slot in and pulled it out. Everything itched inside of him to see the game lit up again with himself playing and gauging things and running up a big score and everybody, including these two new guys, standing around watching.
"You can't let one of these things get you down," the man said, and he was looking at the boy with interest, as if such boys were his special subject. The others too were looking at Andy-all except Krampfie, who had gotten himself a new bottle of beer and was back at his table in the corner, pouring it expertly. The big new man in the big overcoat who puffed his cigarettes so fast often seemed to think it was some kind of joke to bait the boy. And it was true that the boy sort of invited this, perhaps, by being one of those nervous, tall, overgrown boys with glistening, almost burning eyes who at fifteen have got most of their height and look uneasy with it as they hunch and slouch back away from it. Anyhow, the big new man kept looking at Andy with a little smile of superiority all over his face, and in his eyes too. He pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and said, "Do you know you can go all the way up to sixty-five games on a machine like this, kid'?"
Andy had a nickel and two pennies in his pocket but he was saving them for tonight, that is the nickel. He wanted to come down here tonight, and when you come into Ray's Place at night you had to have a nickel to buy Pepsi-Cola or you couldn't sit at a table. Ray himself was here then and he was very particular about who sat down at the tables, you had to buy when Ray was here. But suddenly Andy felt himself take the nickel out of his pocket and put it in the coin slot and shove in the coin arm, and he heard that dull, satisfying clatter as the five marbles dropped into shooting position and the lights of the game winked on. They had all turned away, but after Andy shot his first ball the big new man came over again with his glass of beer and Krampfie at his table in the corner looked up. Then Krampfie, watching Andy's face, drank slowly and expertly. When he set his glass down he looked at Marty and Marty brought him another bottle of beer.
Marty was watching too now, as Andy leaned hard against the game. He had three lights lit on one side and only needed two more, and he had three more balls and 18,000 on the board. That wasn't 56,000 but it was 18,000 and he was holding onto the sides of the machine, jerking it a little to try to guide and coax the rolling steel ball toward the lighted high-score knobs. Bam! Bam! Bam! Ping! Bam! the game went. But on his fourth ball he missed everything and only had 41,000 and the fast smoker was saying, "Hell, you just about got it now, you oughtta make that easy. But he knew he could not make it because the 5,000 knob at the top was not lit and the ball could not score on it unless it came on and there wasn't any way now, with only one ball, to make it come on. It was all over but the shouting, that was the truth, and so was his nickel all over.
46,000-it wasn't bad, what he finished with, but it wasn't winning, and he stood looking at the game and at his score and wishing he had one more ball to shoot. Nervously he pushed and pulled on the coin arm but there was no use doing this or wishing anything because he had only the two pennies left in his pocket.
So he went over and sat down at the table with Krampfie and stared out of the window.
"Beer's a better deal, kid," Krampfie said. "At least you got something inside of you when you get done."
"I didn't do so bad," Andy said. "Forty-six thousand, that ain't so bad."
"You did all right," the big overcoat said from the bar. "Forty-six thousand, you haven't got anything to squawk about. Only you oughtn't to quit so soon."
Andy felt very cheap, quitting so soon, and didn't know what to answer.
"Well, let's get it, Tom," the big man said to the small redheaded man with him. They came over to the marble game and the big man unlocked it and the redheaded man held a grey sack while the big man emptied in the nickels from the coin trough.
Then the big man locked up the machine, and while the redheaded man was writing the total down on a little piece of paper, the big man said, "Here, kid, I'm not afraid to play this thing," and put in a nickel and started shooting.
It did not take him long to shoot, he hardly looked at the game. He shot one ball after another, fast. He did not get a high score, and he just laughed at the kid, as if he understood him completely and the whole thing made no difference.
Then the two men went out with the grey sackful of nickels and got into their Buick and drove away.
Andy stood looking out the door long after they were gone and when he turned back towards Krampfie's table Krampfie said, "Them two guys don't mind how much you want to beat that machine."
Andy was looking dreamily at the game. "I don't care," he said.
"Yeah but they get the money and what do you get? Nothin'," Krampfie said, and sipped his beer and wiped off his mouth with the back of his hand and looked hard at Andy. "What do you get?"
Andy didn't answer. He couldn't tell Krampfie what he got from the marble game machine. But playing it, with all the lights lit up and the numbers on the board jumping around going bam! bam! higher and higher, and everybody standing around watching, he felt good. And afterwards when the kids talked about some scores he made, the really big ones like that night at Ridler's, he felt good then too.
A man came in and took Krampfie away to fix his car, and Andy sat at the table alone now.
Andy kept looking at the game. He wished he had a nickel. He wished he even had a nickel he couldn't possibly afford to spend. He wished he could feel his hand going into his pocket and getting such a nickel and putting it in the slot. Then the whole machine would light up and he would proceed to shoot the balls, taking careful aim, with just the right amount of tension on the shooter when he shot them and then, leaning heavily on the machine, guide the marbles, each one in its turn down the sloping yellow field of lighted toadstools, jogging the machine a bit to bump the high-score bulbs and feeling his score going up and up until it all ended with two free games-or maybe even ten or more. You could be lucky! And nothing else gave him the feeling the game gave him when he was playing it and there was a chance to win.
There's always a chance to win, Andy thought belligerently in the face of his two pennies and the way he felt about the big man. Let them have their old nickels. You can win.
ALL AMERICAN
Spending several days in the suburbs doing nothing but reading and sleeping and eating and playing tennis and lying around on your back looking up at the blue sky gives you a clear idea of what you don't like at all about the city. What a blast of hurrying scurrying for dumb reasons the city seemed to me this morning. I came in by streetcar, and I had not been to town for several weeks, and the little gentle streetcar with its two long seats stretching along each side giving everybody a good look at everybody else, it seemed foolish but nice. I sat on the seat, being rocked from side to side. When the car stopped I had to lean to the back to keep from being thrown into an old man sitting beside me. He was munching on his beard or his rotten teeth or something, because you could hear it, and he kept jabbing himself between the legs. He had two little beady eyes that looked out of his yellow face, and he smelled of a mixture of chewing tobacco, urine, old sweat, and a sort of musty odor, as if he'd just been taken out of a box. Across the aisle from me a dark-eyed girl with high cheekbones and a little red bloodpuddle of a mouth was sitting, she was dressed fit to kill, with high heels on her tiny patent leather shoes, with long and supple silk-stockinged legs crossed tightly, and a pleated skirt worked up high enough to make your mouth water-all of this plus the pert little way she was sitting there like she just skipped down from heaven and I could see the suggestion of pointed little breasts beneath her white waist which had a white lace collar that gathered high around her throat and made her look queenly and wonderful. But her big eyes were either looking up toward the front of the car or back toward the rear of the car and never gave me a chance, and it being late in spring it was very hard on the heart and on the throat and hard just to sit there across from her in general, but of course I made no complaint to the motorman about her. Tried to get interested in the other people in the car-there was an old pedlarwoman sitting next to my queen and she had a big wicker basketful of coffee strainers, dishrags, toothbrushes, twine, paste, thimbles, razor blades, a regular assortment for door-to-door sale, and her dusty old cracked-leather shoes looked as though they'd walked a long mile. And there were plenty of other people on the car-laborers on their way to work, men with brown lined faces and heavy hands and eyes still liquor-bright from Saturday night. There were nice mamas with pleasant cow-like expressions-one such mama in particular I noticed because she was washing her little Mary's face by wetting a handkerchief with the tip of her tongue and dabbing and scrubbing away. And or course there were the little Marys and the little Johnnies themselves, a couple of whom sat on the seat across from me and kept looking at me, their little legs stuck straight out as if made of single bones without any joints at all-and that one little kid who knelt on the seat with his face to the window and kept asking his mother questions like what was that? and what was an oil drum? and was that a boat on the river? and why were we going up the hill now?
The car was hot and the way it went, stopping and starting at every block, it took a half an hour to get into the city. I walked up Main Street, from Fourth Street to Fifth Street. Noticed a crowd on Fountain Square, flags napping in the bit of breeze and several army cars drawn up. There was an exhibition of big guns, tanks, trucks, for Army Day. I walked around the square, from one thing to another. There was a soldier by each gun to explain how it worked and answer questions; he was generally a bored-looking fellow, a little too-well-scrubbed around the ears, his eyes still bleary and far-staring for it was only Monday and Monday is a very early day in the week. In the center of the square a group of people were crowding around an olive-green first-aid truck. A photographer was trying to make some sort of group of them and take a picture. He did take a picture. He wanted another. They all moved over to a .75-millimeter field gun. Why, it was our mayor I saw, the fat little rascal, out so early in the day.
It really was our mayor and he was standing around there just smiling at everybody and looking wise. A short bellicose man with a big jaw and two bright little eyes that jumped all around, this picture-taking was old stuff to him. He wore a dark topcoat and a grey hat and kept his chubby hands folded in front of him, standing there for the whole city to see. The army captain with him was a bristly grey-haired man who barked orders to any number of flunkies. "Point to the gun, Mayor," the photographer was saying. "Captain, you point to the gun too. Captain, you're supposed to be explaining the gun to the mayor. That's right, now hold it, gentlemen. That's right. There. Now once more, gentlemen. Just once more?" And once more the captain pretended to tell the little bellicose mayor how the gun worked and the camera shutter clicked. And all the people standing round did nothing but just look and look at their mayor. It was pretty apparent, however, that the mayor was worried about something, because between smiles he kept scanning the crowd as if expecting somebody of importance to jump out at him. I stuck around to see what was bothering him and before long all the mayor's worries were over when a tall man wearing a chauffeur's cap came up behind him and the mayor smiled and nodded and looked relieved and the chauffeur's cap said, "We're parked down on Government Square."
"I wondered what in hell happened to you," our mayor said, turning to shake somebody's hand.
A glass of beer in a cafe on Vine Street helped my spirits more than I can tell you, reader. Nothing like a glass of beer to help your spirits on a day of wandering through the springtime city. There were girls and all the girls were queens this day, and there were cars and all the cars were coaches for a king. There were dreams stacked and shelved away in the old public library that I passed-all the people that I loved were there and Monsieur de Maupassant among them. Washington Park and Lytle Park and a view of the river down Broadway Hill. Kentucky looked green over there. We were the city over here. City in the sun on a bend in the bored old Ohio where the boats and barges still plowed their way to Wheeling every day. I thought I'd buy some postage stamps and head out for home, and entered the post office with nothing on my mind but a dozen threes when I felt this tug on my arm and heard this cracked old voice say, "I wonder, young man, if you'd do me a favor."
"Sir," I said turning, "I will gladly do an old man a favor."
His pale blue eyes were a little watery and I could see he was touched by my words. Yet he pulled himself together and went on, it's true with some difficulty, brushing across his large red nose with what looked like an index finger. "I am an old man," he said, and I nodded in agreement, leaning back against a post for comfort since I saw the old man had a lot in his soul and this first remark was only the beginning. "I have been an old man for a long time, ever since June 1932, the third of June, as a matter-of-fact...." (And at this point he mumbled something or other as he looked down at his black old fingernails, something the meaning of which I barely-caught and would therefore rather not print. But to go on:) "I was a milk-truck driver earning twenty-two fifty a week on the second of June of that year, and on the third of June they fired me and I became an old man. I had two children, one named Annie, the other Tom. Now I never said that Annie wasn't the right kind of girl, even though she liked to run around. I never could keep her in at night, the boys were always after her to go here and there, you never knew where she was. But she was just full of life, at least I guess she was full of life...." (And here once more his voice dropped to a mumble, and far be it from me to try to imagine what he said.) "But I never said she wasn't the right kind of girl, did I?"
"No, old man," I said, "not that I heard, but let me hear more."
"Well, Annie kept going out with some sinister-looking guy named Pat-the upholstery was bad but it had a new paint job on it and, besides, she seemed to like him. I don't know what he did for a living but I got my suspicions because nobody ever saw him do it. Was I right or was I wrong I ask you when I tell you that one day Annie disappeared with that guy and I haven't seen her from then to now. Just went out with him one night and never came back and how do you like that?"
"I'll need a little time to make up my mind," I said. "Well," the old man said, "we was living off some sort of insurance compensation you call it, about seven dollars a week it was, which would run out in ten weeks, and I was getting desperate and taking a cut at the bottle now and then and my boy Tom was seventeen in those days and not going back to school and not trying to get a job either. He was running all around and I'd watch him and I could see it wouldn't be long he'd end up in some sort of trouble. The first time they got him for stealing something, just a few yards of rubber hose from the back seat of a car, not worth anything hardly, and they let him go when it came to trial. The second time he held up a grocery and shot the grocer, just shot him right through the heart while the grocer stood there pleading for his life, at least that's the way the papers put it, right under a picture of him in jail gripping the bars and looking out at you like a monkey or something. I tell you it was heartbreaking. It broke my wife's heart. She got sick of lumbago but it really wasn't lumbago because right away she turned for the worst and in a week, just when they were sentencing Tom, why, she up and died." Here he was in danger of breaking down just about completely-kept brushing that black fingernail back and forth under that old red pitted nose. "And that's why I'm here today, young man," he rallied. "Because she died?" I said, trying to find meaning in it all-and got out my handkerchief and dabbed at some of those big tears that were running down his face. "I want," he said as I dabbed away, "to write a letter. Only I can't write and I wonder...."
"I'll be glad to," I said, and he said, "I got a piece of paper in my pocket," and started searching around in the pockets of that old brownish-green coat he was wearing-finally came out with a mussed old piece of yellow paper, filthy and spotted on one side but fair to middling on the other.
"I want to write a letter to Tom," the old man said. "Shoot," I said.
"It's his birthday," the old man said, and kept nodding his head up and down and staring off into space-looking like one time I saw a rag doll some kid threw against a wall. My pen unscrewed, I was ready for action, but he was having trouble with his thoughts and finally made it, "Just say ... hold on, Tom, and be a good boy."
I wrote that down on his piece of paper-no blots at all and my aitches and bees stood up straight as soldiers, if I do have to say it myself.
"Just begin it," he said, " 'Dear Tom,' and then just end it, 'Your loving old dad.' "
I did that and he stood there looking at me for a long time.
"Young man," he said at last, "you have been very kind."
"It's my nature," I answered modestly. "I'll even lick the stamp."
"If I only had a stamp to lick," he mumbled. "And an envelope to paste it on."
"No sooner said than done," I said, and bought the stamp and bought the envelope-there's munificence and magnificence still left in this world, you'll have to agree.
Tom's prison was in Tennessee, it seemed, and Tom's number was 88888842. He took it for granted that I could spell it all and, mumbling something or other I'd rather not print, he gripped my hand as warmly as his years would allow, dropped a tear or two to the floor in parting and turned and walked slowly out of the place without looking back.
So I mailed his letter and I went out too, by another door, onto Fifth Street, in the Year of Our Lord and the country of our birth, farewell.
JE NE COMPRENDS PAS
"I-" the sailor began, and then stopped. He had trouble focussing his round blue eyes. His eyes wandered to the window, to the scenery going by. There was the Mediterranean and out at sea two battleships were waiting. Close to shore a crane stood on one leg in the water. Arid everywhere on the shore was the heaped-up junk of Nazi planes. The soldiers and the rubble were all that was left of the war in this town.
The little French electric train, jammed with Arabs and Frenchmen and Allied soldiers, headed out of the town of Tunis toward La Marsa. The sailor did not know exactly why he was on the train. He had the vague idea of going to see a fellow he'd run into in a joint in Tunis the day before, but he did not remember very clearly what the fellow looked like. Dark and small-he remembered that much. And he talked broken English and ran a cafe in La Marsa. The sailor had been drunk yesterday and he was still drunk today. Getting on the train had been just the need to go somewhere. And the Frenchman or whatever he was had mentioned a cathouse at La Marsa and the sailor, felt that he had to find a woman, this was his second day on pass and soon he would be back up in Italy and he had to find a woman before the day was over, any woman would do.
Now he started to talk again, starting the way he had before but feeling that he was not saying what he'd intended to say before.
"I got to get a woman today, thas for sure," he heard himself say. "Got plastered yestday ... soldier took
... some ole bag away from me. Gotta find somethin today."
A G.I. wearing steel-rimmed glasses was sitting across from him. Beside the G.I. sat three Limeys, all being very polite by looking straight ahead and not at the drunken sailor. Limeys are so goddamn polite, the sailor thought. A moment later he wondered whether he'd said this out loud, but since the Limeys didn't look around he guessed he hadn't.
The conductor came through the train collecting tickets and finally got to the sailor and stopped. "S'il vous plait," he said. The sailor handed him a wad of yellow franc notes and the conductor sorted through them, put them in perfect order, and handed all but one back, together with the little ticket.
"What's thish?" the sailor said. The Limeys and the G.I. and the little ticket all swam around in front of him. His eyes came in focus on the G.I., and the G.I. said, "That's good for a round trip."
The sailor looked at the ticket for a long while. It was all French. "All French," he heard himself say, and he turned the ticket over. "Don't read French."
He looked up at the G.I. again. "Got a round-trip ticket," he said. "That means I'm comin back, right?
"Yeah, it usually means that," the G.I. said.
Means I'm comin back, the sailor thought. Damn nice, these round-trip tickets. Get you back sure.
"You been to Scotland?" he said to the Limey nearest him.
The Limey soldier was a thick-set fellow with an un-derlip that protruded. When he spoke he turned his head stiffly three inches in the sailor's direction. "As a matter-of-fact, I haven't," he said. "I'm a Londoner, you know."
The sailor looked at the Limey for a long time out of his round blue eyes. He said, "I been in London too. R. A.F. Been in the R.A.F."
"Really," the Limey said.
"With the Americans," the sailor said. "Only we was in the R.A.F. Before the U.S. got into it. Now I'm ... navy plane. Radio man."
"Transferred over," the Limey said.
"Had a friend," the sailor said, "shot down twenty-eight planes with the R.A.F."
The Limey didn't respond.
"Twenty-eight planes," the sailor said.
"Daring," said the Limey.
"Then transferred over to the U.S., made him like an ace in two countries."
"I think I see what you mean," the Limey said.
"Had three pals killed all in one month ... in Britain. Three pals," he said.
"I know how you feel," the Limey said.
"Three pals," said the round-eyed sailor. But he was losing interest in hearing himself talk. The train had stopped at a station. It was Carthage. The sailor saw Frenchmen with carriages waiting to grab sightseeing soldiers and haul them around among the ruins. Up above fifteen Forts roared over, heading for Rome.
"Give 'em hell," the sailor said. "You give 'em hell, I'll stay home take care the women." He heard himself snigger and he looked at the soldier with the glasses. "They can have it all," he said. "I'll stay home wash the dishes."
They would be at La Marsa very soon now. The sailor did not know why he was going there. He would never find the Frenchman or whatever he was. He couldn't remember the Frenchman's name, maybe wouldn't know him if he saw him on the street.
The train jolted forward, and that started him talking again. "I'm from Los Angeles, California," he heard himself saying to the G.I., and the G.I. replied by saying that he was from Little Rock. "Thas a great city," the sailor said. "Like Little Rock, it's a clean city. Never been a war in Little Rock. Don't give you any round-trip tickets, none of this French trash. Lots of girls ... knew one in L.A. from there, Hilda Higgins. Redhead, not bad. Give your money's worth, none of this coy stuff. You know Hilda?"
"I knew some Higginses but I didn't know Hilda."
"Shoulda met her," the sailor said. His tongue was loosening. "Them was the days. I'm goin back to the States one of these days, buy nine hundred gallons good cold beer and spend a month swimmin around in it. Then after it's all drunk I'm gonna get in bed with my wife for a month. Tell you I was married?"
"No," the G.I. said.
"Married to a girl sixteen years old. Norfolk, Virginia, girl. Know how long I lived with her? Nine and a half days. Married her on leave ... last one I got before I come over. Cute kid. Short, kind of light-brown hair.
Always up to somethin. Only knowed her a week before we got married, thas the way I am. Wanta know some-thin? That kid'll be there waitin for me when I get back. I know people. She'll be there waitin, won't even feel like I been away."
The sailor ran his tongue across his sandy mustache. He took off his hat and shoved his fingers through his short-cropped sandy hair. He felt uneasy, he wished the train wouldn't get to La Marsa so soon. What would he do when he got there? He belched; he was drunk, that's what he was. Shouldn't be this drunk and looking for a woman.
When the train pulled in at the station, everybody made a rush for the door. He was the last one out. Somebody bumped into him and said, "Pardonnez-moi," but he didn't bother to see who it was. He went down the station steps, shoved through the dirty Arab kids who clustered round him trying to shine his shoes and sell him almonds and candy. He headed for the bar across the street.
He had a vermouth and talked to some G.I.s there. He asked them if they knew where a cathouse was. They didn't know. He left the bar and walked along the street. It went downhill right into the Mediterranean.
He sat down on the beach and looked at the sea. Then he took off his clothes, everything but his underpants, and waded into the water and swam. The cold water sobered him. He came out and let himself dry in the sun.
Up above, gulls wheeled. An Arab was sitting on a rock out in the water, fishing. There-he caught a little fish and stuck it in his pocket. Hell, these people don't know what war is, the sailor thought. These people don't even want to know. They laid low while the Dutchman was here and now things are just like they always were-they're fishing and shining up shoes like there never was a war.
He dressed and walked up the hill to the main street again.
I know what war is, he thought. I know what a man looks like with his face shot off. But maybe I'm no better off for knowing how he looks. I guess it's nothing much to be proud of.
Now I wish I could go home, he thought. I'm ready to go home. A couple of months ago it didn't make any difference, but now I'm really ready to go home and I probably won't get there for months ... years. That little bitch don't write either. I'll beat the hell out of her, I catch her up to something.
I never want to get in an airplane again, he thought. Never want to get shot at again. They can have it.
He wasn't feeling drunk at all now. He felt light and transparent-the swim had straightened him out.
He went back into the bar and had two more vermouths. The stuff was new and raw. He cut his lip on the glass, which was made from the lower part of a bottle.
Afterward he stood on the street in front of the bar sucking his Up. An Arab woman, holding a veil in front of her face, passed by in loose white clothes. It depressed him to see a woman dressed up like that, hiding her face as if she were ashamed of something.
What was there to do now?
Then he remembered. He had a round-trip ticket. He took it out of his pocket and looked at it.
He went up on the station platform and waited for the train. The vermouth was working in him, he felt drunk in a new way. Sullen-drunk. Depressed.
There weren't any vacant seats in the train, he had to stand up. He could have started crying without much trouble. I've got to find me a woman somewhere, he thought.
The little French conductor came along and the sailor gave him the yellow ticket. The conductor punched it and handed it back.
"It's a round-trip ticket, ain't it," the sailor said to the conductor. "I've always got a round-trip ticket, I come back from everything. I'm comin back from this lousy war and see my wife and buy me a bungalow in Norfolk and live there the rest of my life. I'm never movin off my front porch again."
The little Frenchman stared at him in bewilderment. Then he said quickly, "Je ne comprends pas," and bustled down the aisle calling for tickets.
THE GLAD RAGS
She tried her best to act like she wasn't anxious at all, but they could see she was actually beaming she was so anxious. She tried to read the newspaper, but they just looked at her.
Even in the newspaper she could read nothing but fashions and styles, and secretly compared them with what she had bought today, much to their disadvantage.
So finally Papa said, "Okay now, Marge, go on up and put on your glad rags and let's see you."
And Annie wanted to see her mommie too, all dressed up.
She got rosier than ever and said, "Oh, it's so much trouble."
"Go on and put them on," Papa said. "And let's see what you look like."
"Yeah, we want to see what you look like," said the boy George, who was sitting on the floor turning the pages of the evening paper.
"Oh, you don't really want to see me," she said. "Do you?" she said. "I did bring home two coats I wanted to choose from. I wanted you to help me." She jumped up from the chair just like that and pounded upstairs. She was a short, rather round woman in her early forties, with a plump face, sharp nose, glasses, and an innocent, little-girl expression.
She had built up to getting the new outfit for a long time, a whole month of discussion and "watching the sales" in the newspaper, and now she'd got it at last. She'd spent the whole day in town going from store to store, and had come home just before supper piled high with bundles, tired but beaming. All through supper they'd not asked her anything about the bundles themselves, though she did open up the subject by saying how crowded town was and telling how she'd got into conversation with a woman on the way down on the streetcar. The woman's pet dog, fifteen years old, a poodle she said it was, had died only a week before, and it affected her so "I could see the tears come in her eyes. I felt so sorry for her."
But immediately after supper, when they were sitting in the living room, they started in on her, and she played it as a game, giving in only as if reluctantly-she'd have to put on that corset and that's lots of trouble.
She was upstairs perhaps fifteen minutes, and then they heard a step on the stairs, and here she came. She walked very straight, her chin up and her shoulders thrown back. She wore a black hat with a little red on it (it made a frame for her round face), and a black coat, rather severe but very classy-looking, with a collar that came up high in a military manner. The shoes were the thing, though; they were all straps, her first and second toes in plain view. She carried black gloves, and came walking into the living room, her head still thrown back, glancing around disdainfully like the models at fashion shows.
The three of them were all appropriately awed.
She didn't even look at them, and they were almost scared of her.
Finally Papa took his pipe out of his mouth and said, "Very nice, very nice."
Mama glanced down at him. "You like it? I've got another coat upstairs."
"Another coat?" he said in alarm.
"I brought two, like I said, so you could choose. The clerk said it was all right. She said I could take three if I wanted to."
The two children just looked and looked. Then Annie said, "Can I wear your scarf sometimes-on Sunday?"
But Mama didn't answer her. She was turning all around before the big mirror. "The lines of this coat are good," she said. "It makes me look thin."
"Yeah," Papa said, although the truth was the lines just emphasized Mama. Mama was big, with a Gay Nineties hourglass figure. Papa always kidded her about this, but he knew it was no time now to have his fun when she was parading before the mirror, hardly able to breathe in the new corset, thinking how wonderful she looked.
Of course she did look wonderful, and the children just stared at her. Then she went upstairs again to put on the other coat, saying, "It don't make me look as thin as this one."
Papa read the paper and puffed on his pipe till she came down. He was not much taller than Mama, and he had a potbelly and a strong-featured face, and liked life best at the supper table telling stories of his boyhood on a farm in the Tennessee mountains.
Mama came down as she had before, with the straight, hands-held-slightly-away-from-the-body promenade of a model, her eyes staring into space, a uttle smile on her face.
This coat was brown, with rabbit fur around the collar, at the cuffs, and around the bottom. When she saw herself in the mirror, she frowned.
"See, it makes me look big," she said. "But I wanted you to see them both." She turned all the way around in front of Papa. "Now," she said, "give me your honest opinion and don't let me influence you. Which coat do you like best?"
"Are they the same price?" Papa asked, seeing how wrong his answer could be.
"Now don't let that bother you. There isn't much difference in the prices. Just tell me. The saleslady tells me the other one makes me look thinner."
"Well, they're both nice coats," Papa said, feeling around. "You can't go wrong on either of them."
"Oh, they're both nice," Mama said, looking at herself straightaway now. "But I got to make up my mind. They'll want one of them back soon."
"Well, I guess I like the other. There's no sense in that fur around the bottom."
"You like the other better?" Mama said, turning around in front of the mirror again. "Of course, the buttons on this one could be let out a little bit. I admit it doesn't button very good. Now don't let that influence you, you really like the other better?"
"By far," Papa said, realizing he'd have to take a firm stand or she'd never make up her mind.
"What do you kids think?" Mama said, and they both voted in favor of the slick-looking black coat, so she immediately ran upstairs and came down, a little more eagerly this time, in the black one.
"Well, here it is," she said. "You better make up your minds quick, this is the last time I'm going to show it." She turned around in front of the three of them, but they weren't as awed this time, as they were used to seeing her in it. But she went on as if they hadn't voted yet: "Come on-say. I've got to know tonight."
"We told you once. That one," George said. He was a very bored-looking boy of ten. The most unusual thing about him was a blue-and-red baseball cap which he always wore, even now, and which was almost covered with pins, insignias, and lodge buttons.
"You still think it looks nice?" she asked Papa, looking at him eagerly.
"It looks fine," Papa said. "You look like a million dollars, kid."
She turned once more before the mirror, then said, "Well, I always did say the bunch of you have expensive tastes, and this proves it. You know what this coat costs? Sixty-five dollars. You know what that other one ran? Thirty-nine fifty. Well, you people can pick em." And with that she went off upstairs.
Papa went on turning the leaves of his newspaper, faster than before.
Upstairs Mama grunted and twisted, getting off the new corset. She put her new coat and her new dress and her new strap shoes and her crown hat away very carefully, knocking a little nap off with a flick of her finger. She felt all wonderful inside, and even after she had hung up the coat, she shoved the other clothes aside and stood gazing at it, feeling warm and excited.
Then she dressed in her old gingham housedress and turned off the light in the room and went downstairs.
But she could hardly read the evening paper-she kept running over the virtues of the two coats in her mind.
She began to think about what she would do in a day or two-she would get all dressed up in her new duds and go to town to the movies. And after the movies, she'd stop in Putnam's ice-cream parlor and order a chocolate Twin Delite banana sundae and eat it delicately with a long spoon. They had delicious ice cream, Putnam's had, and a nice class of people, too. She would sit there very straight, in her new hat and coat, and some people seeing her might think she was a traveler from some Eastern city, New York or Boston, and had just stopped off here in Ohio between trains and happened in this store and so ordered a little ice cream. They wouldn't know it was Mama all the time, in her new duds!
PASSING STAR
"Chick," she said, looking hard at his closed eyes as if he could see her.
He answered something that sounded like "Hog," his head rolling away from her. Still sleeping, he made himself comfortable by sticking his enormous rear over into her part of the seat.
"Okay," she said, "you jus go on an sleep. I'm going up in the club car and get me a drink."
She got up, stepped over his legs, and walked up the aisle. At the door she stopped and looked back down the car at him, batting her mascaraed eyelashes several times before pivoting on her high left heel and pushing at the door. Let him snore away there if he wants to, she thought as she crossed the grinding, shifting intersection of the cars. Anybody put as much away as him before we got on ought to sleep it off.
The club car was practically empty. She selected a seat halfway down, careful" to take the chair with the standing ashtray beside it, and noting too that there was one chair but only one between her and the redheaded fellow. She gave him a long look, then the instant he returned it, swept her eyes away to the corner where the other man was sitting. That one was all bulges and sweat-smoking a cigar like Chick always did and reading the New York paper. She wanted to run her eyes back down the length of the car to the Negro barman and the well-padded gal he was sitting next to down there by the little bar, but she restrained herself. She knew they were watching her, hitting her with their eyes, then saying something, then hitting her with their eyes again. She let her fox jacket (it was getting kind of sick-looking at the cuffs-this spring was the end) fall back off her hunched shoulders. Out of her peeling red leather bag she brought a cigarette-one that had slipped from the pack and gotten a little crushed among her compact, comb and letters.
"Thank you," she said as she saw the lighted match coming toward her. Her neighbor said, "Wait a minute, we missed it," as the match went out; he struck another. Her thin upper Up slid over her teeth into her so-nice-of-you-to-applaud smile. One tooth on the left, hidden unless she smiled all-out like this, was gold, the payoff in a smile that was like a badge shown briefly: she didn't want him or anybody else to think she was trying to start a conversation or something because she didn't have to start no conversations.
"Did you get on at Penn Station too?" he asked.
She raised the penciled lines she replaced her shaved eyebrows with and glanced suspiciously at him.
"That's right," she said.
And unexpectedly she yawned, forgetting that she ought to cover it with her hand.
"Too early to get tired," he said. "I mean, if you're going all the way to Cincinnati."
"That's where I'm goin," and she noticed that his eyes had darted suddenly to the corner where the barman and his buxom girl friend were still shooting sly glances this way, and panic rising in her chest made her say something quick to draw his attention back: "But trains don't bother me much. I guess I ought to be used to them by now."
"You travel a lot?"
She didn't know why his question brought him into focus for the first time. He looked pretty regular-redheaded, with a thin, high-cheekboned face and some very dim freckles across a nose that was too short. She liked his eyes, that was it, even though they did make her uncomfortable. He was dressed kind of sloppy-grey sports jacket, wrinkled grey wool trousers, and gum-soled shoes that could stand a shine. She answered, "I'm always travelin. That's my business."
"You mean traveling is part of your business?" he asked. "Or you mean it's none of my business?"
"I'm an artist." She squinted her eyes and showed him the back of her head-feeling that kind of tightness there at the hairline on her forehead. It had been just to tell somebody this that she'd left Chick to his snoring and come up to the club car. I'm an artist.
"How about a drink?"
She turned back to him and saw that he'd motioned the barman over. The barman had an extra-big grin on his shiny dark face-not only the four-inch one the Pennsylvania Railroad required of him, but a dividend of his own that she felt was meant for her.
"I drink Scotch and soda," she said.
"Make that one bourbon-and-soda and one Scotch-and-soda." He looked steadily at her after the barman went away. She saw the barman's girl friend smile as the barman went by her and into the bar alcove. "What kind of an artist do you mean?" the man asked. "Painter?"
"No," she said, and felt her forehead tighten again. "Musician."
"Yeah?" His eyes dropped momentarily to the soiled low-cut dress she was wearing. Hell, he didn't expect her to wear something good to sit up all night on the train in, did he? "Classical stuff, you mean? Or popular?"
"I do classical," she said defensively. Then added: "But I sing popular for a livin." She eyed him hard and direct for a minute, squinting a little, before she said, "I'm Kit-Kat Williams."
Those speckled, interested green eyes set wide apart in his bony face showed no recognition whatever. "My name is Jack Gibbons."
What was he trying to pull? She reached into her bag and brought out a little wallet. Opening it, she saw her name typed out under the shiny cellophane of the identification tag. "You don't believe I'm Kit-Kat Williams, do you? Well, there it is, you can see for yourself."
He reached across the empty chair between them and held the wallet long enough to read the name Catherine "Kit-Kat" Williams. "I'm not very much up on musical things," he said. "I guess I ought to recognize your name, but I don't."
"Well, that's no skin off my nose." She snapped the bag shut on her wallet and put it on the chair between them-just so he wouldn't try to move over. Then to avoid him she tilted up her head to look at the operation the barman was performing in front of them-taking the caps off the miniature bottles of whiskey and pouring the contents into their glasses. The barman wasn't pulling any of his funny business now that he was standing so close to her, or she'd have put him in his place good and proper. But his woman was staring over.
It was the act of paying that made her relent toward Jack Gibbons a little-after all he was laying out a buck more than he'd have had to otherwise. But he spoiled all her better feelings immediately by saying, "Are you a blues singer like Billie Holliday?"
Could he tell? Did that mean he could tell? The barman was keeping his eyes to himself, but she knew he'd heard the question and was liking it. She watched his dark-skinned hand pick up the change Jack Gibbons had left in the silver saucer; she watched his back retreating up the aisle toward his girl friend.
"Billie Holliday!" she said. "I'm not in that class, thank you!"
"What's the matter with Billie Holliday?" He drank. "I've got two of her albums-I think she's really good."
So she switched her prejudice. "I jus don't like her style of singing," she said, and punched out her cigarette in the big ashtray by her knee. "Did you ever hear a song called 'Moanin Baby'?"
"You mean by Billie Holliday?"
"Billie Holliday!" She squinted her eyes and looked away up the car angrily. "It's my song-I wrote it, words and music both. It was on the Hit Parade in 1939. You know how I come to name it 'Moanin Baby'?"
"No," he said, "I never even heard-"
"I was in Paris playin at the Boeuf Sur Le Toit and John Steinbeck came in one night, so I had this tune in my head and I didn't have any words yet. So I sat at his table and hummed this tune for him and asked him if he could suggest any words for a title or somethin. He thought a minute and suggested 'Moanin Baby,' and that's what I called it. It was on the Hit Parade in 1939."
"I guess I missed it," Jack Gibbons said. "Matter of fact, I only got interested in jazz lately. What's your style of singing?"
"My own," Kit-Kat said. "I do everything the way it comes natural to me, jazz or progressive or bop, you can call it anything you like but I do it my way."
"I guess that's the best way....You play your own accompaniment?"
"I'm an all-round entertainer," Kit-Kat said. "I can sing with a band or I can play my own piano." She thought a moment before she added a little hopefully, "I bet you don't even know who Ben Hecht is, do you?"
"Ben Hecht?"
"Wait a minute, I don't mean Ben Hecht, I mean John Steinbeck, I always get them mixed up."
"Sure, I know who Steinbeck is. He's an author. I've read some of his stuff."
"Yeah?" She looked away and let the silence drag out some. Finally she turned and asked, "You don't know anything about Cincinnati, do you?"
At that moment she heard the barman and his girl bust out in giggles, but she didn't take her eyes from Jack Gibbons'.
"I ought to," Jack said. "I was born and raised there."
She'd go down there and scratch out a couple of nigger eyes if she thought that bitch was laughing about her. "I was jus wonderin if you could inform me about a place called the Little Rooster. That's where I'm booked to play."
"The Little Rooster," Jack said. "I've been there a couple times-before the war. If it's the one I'm thinking of out on Reading Road."
"What kind of a place is it?"
"Small," he said, and she felt herself blink. "It's a nice enough place. You know-a cocktail lounge. They didn't have any entertainment the couple times I was there. Just a jukebox."
She shook her glass, made the ice clinkle. "I don't know what I'm gettin into this trip. Al's Chicago office booked it, so he couldn't tell me anything about it. All I know is I got confirmation. I don't go on any trip like this less I get confirmation."
"Who's Al?"
"My agent-Al Klein. You ought to know him; why, he's one of the biggest theatrical agents in the country. When he says do something, I do it." The car began to rock drunkenly on a rough piece of track. "I had enough of agents before I got him; now I'm satisfied. You know I don't even have to pay for my ticket? He's got an account with the Pennsylvania Railroad-every railroad. So all I got to do is ask for my ticket and tell them to put it on his account. How do you like that?"
She thought his not answering showed scepticism, so she added, "Course he's supposed to hand me the bill for it at the end of the year. Only sometimes he forgets part of it. How do you like that?"
"Must be a pretty generous guy," he mumbled, and drank up.
"That's what he is, a real generous guy. He's a Jew, and I hope you don't think I am, but what do I care what he is, long as he treats me right." The neck of her dress had sUpped down to expose the top of her brassiere; she pulled it up. "He says this is going to be my big year. Columbia told him they might reissue both my albums again this summer. And Capitol keeps callin him up trying to sign me. Only he says we got plenty of time to be particular."
"How about another drink?" Jack asked.
"I still got some." But she thought: I'll show that black number down there which one of us is gettin the drinks bought, and added quickly: "On the other hand, I guess I'll be needin one by the time he brings them."
The barman got up out of his comfortable seat in the corner when he saw Jack's two up-pointed fingers. After the drinks had come, Kit-Kat said, "What are you in?"
"What?"
"What do you do for a livin?"
"For a living," he said, "I go to school." She stared hard at him. Was he trying to make fun of somebody? "I don't get it," she said. "If you think-"
"I'm going to art school on the G.I. Bill of Rights.
Ninety bucks a month-so I call it going to school for a living."
"You a painter then?"
"Yeah. I hope so."
She considered him, squinting. Didn't look like no painter to her. She wondered maybe he was trying to say he was a painter because she'd proved who she was. Kit-Kat Williams. An artist. So now he got the idea to be an artist too. More likely a clerk or something like that.
"You were a soldier then, I guess," she said.
"Almost four years."
"You been abroad-Paris or London?"
"Both."
"I been in both too. Before the war. I played the Boeuf Sur Le Toit in Paris-you ever hear of that? The Ivy Club in London."
"I heard Josephine Baker in Africa," he said. "You know her?"
"How would I know anybody like that?" she demanded indignantly. A quick glance at the barman and his girl showed her they weren't paying attention. "Matter of fact, I do know her slightly-professionally, I mean. One night at the Boeuf she came in to catch my act and thought she was pretty smart-talked all the way through it. You know what I did? I stopped right in the middle of a song and stood up and told her to get out since she couldn't keep quiet. How do you like that?"
"Did she get out?"
"Sure she got out. I just stood there-what else could she do? Her and her friends both. I don't have to take anything like that from her kind." Her voice had grown shrill; now she added more calmly: "She can't sing anyhow. She's through."
"I thought she was pretty good," Jack said.
"She's through," Kit-Kat Williams said. "She was through years ago. She never did have a voice."
"I'd like to hear you," he said. "When are you starting at the Little Rooster?"
"Tonight."
"Tonight? How are you going to do that when you're on the train? Oh, you mean because it's after twelve." He glanced at his wristwatch. "But it's only eleven-thirty."
"Okay, then, tomorrow night." She liked to catch people on that gag when it was after midnight. "Sure thing, you come over and catch my act. I don't know anything about when I go on, but you'll find it in the paper. They better put it in the paper."
"Anyhow, I can call up," he said. "Maybe we could have a drink together after you're through."
"May-be," she said, and gave him her profile, the way people in Paris did. "Then when you come back to New York you can see me at the Polkadot Club. You know where that is? Fulton Street in Brooklyn."
"I'll look it up," he said.
She wrinkled her forehead and put on a tight, amused face for him. "You thought I was kiddin when I said I was Kit-Kat Williams, didn't you? Maybe you still think I'm kiddin."
"Oh no," he said. But he seemed a little uncomfortable, downing his drink. A big white man like him uncomfortable! And trying to tie her in with people like Holiday and Josephine Baker! She guessed she'd straightened him out on that subject; she could always work the trick when she wanted to. Two things gave her a big bitter thrill: telling people her name, Kit-Kat Williams, and letting them know which side of the line she was on.
"If you're from Cincinnati," she said, reaching into her bag for a cigarette and waiting for his light, "maybe you heard me when I got my start. I started singing on WFBE-it was called then. Now it's WCPO. Didn't you ever hear me?"
"I probably did, I don't remember. But then your home's in Cincinnati too, isn't it?"
"My home's in Norwood-or use to be. My mother moved up to New York a long, long time ago when I first got popular, and I haven't been back in over ten years. I don't know anybody there. You know what I mean? I keep strickly to myself."
"How come you don't know the Little Rooster then, if you're from Norwood?"
She hesitated, sensing that the answer was the giveaway; and while she did, a funny look came on his face. He knew! The bastard was guessing something! She answered quick: "Look, you don't think my mother was letting me go round to nightclubs when I was only thirteen, do you? That's when I started singing on the radio-thirteen years old."
"Pretty young," he said, and was going to say something else when the conductor came in. This was a new conductor. Must have got on at that last stop, Altoona. He took a seat two chairs away from the fat man on the other side, glanced at Kit-Kat and her companion, then began checking over his tickets. But he didn't ask for anybody's ticket receipts; he'd probably seen them stuck in the seats.
Wasn't he awful young for a conductor? The one out of New York had been old as Methuselah. Now he looked at her again, giving her the old eye. Lady-killing white man sizing her up; heavy lips and wicked around the eyes. But there was one answer he wasn't getting, she could tell that.
"Could you inform me what time we get into Cincinnati?"
He cracked his face in a smile, as if he thought she was joking. His eyes on their way down to look at the watch he took from his vest pocket brushed over her skinny legs. "We're twenty minutes late now," he said, "but you'll probably make up the time out of Pittsburgh and get there on schedule. Eight-thirty."
"Train time or their time?"
"Train time," he said. "I don't know anything about their time."
"Is train time the same as Cincinnati time?" she asked Jack Gibbons.
"I haven't been back there in three years," he said. "I seem to remember something about daylight saving."
"You're pretty much in a hurry to get there, aren't you?" the conductor asked. He was trying to be cute-staring at her low neck. She knew where she'd stand with him if he weren't on duty. Maybe even if he was. She felt a cold thrill of laughter run all through her-the same funny feeling she'd had playing for the first time before a big white audience with the spotlight on her. Like a cruel joke or something. But not on her.
"No, I'm very comfortable in your train," she answered. "Long as I can sit here in the club car. Is it open all night?"
"He goes to bed around twelve," the conductor said, indicating the Negro barman with his thumb. "That means there won't be any more drinks, but you can sit here as long as you want. Somebody might take your seat at Pittsburgh if you don't watch out."
"I ain't worried-" She checked herself for fear he'd ask why.
"Well, you can sit here and talk to me then," the conductor said. "I'll point out the spots of interest."
His manner was so fresh-he didn't seem to care if he was on duty.
"You stay on all the way to Cincinnati?" she asked.
"No. I'm through at Pittsburgh. About three hours from now."
"I wish I had a job like that," she said, feeling somehow compelled to force the conversation. "Just take a little ride on the train and that's that."
"Yeah? What do you do?"
She felt the kind of tightness at her hairline. "I'm an artist," she said.
"Yeah?" His eyes went from hers to Jack Gibbons' and back to hers again. She felt he'd done that to see whether Jack Gibbons was her escort or just somebody on the same train; he ought to be able to tell by the vacant chair between them. "Well, I'm an artist too." He gave Jack Gibbons his cracked smile. "I painted my house last week!"
"Anybody want any more drinks," the barman said, "I'm closin up the bar."
"How about it?" Jack Gibbons asked.
"No, thank you," she said. "I got most of my glass here."
The fat man up in the corner raised his head from his newspaper as if brought back from a long way off. Then he folded the paper neatly, struggled up to a standing position, dusted something off his right pants leg with a fat nipper of a hand, and lumbered out of the car-leaving just the five of them. The barman was wiping off a glass while his girl friend stared soberly out the window opposite her, out into the night. She sat like that until he was almost finished with his duties. Then she stood up, pulled her dress down out of the crease under the bulge of her belly, and yawned elaborately. Giving the barman a big personality smile, she went up the aisle and out of the car. After a few more useless wipes with his cloth, he folded it, placed it neatly on a shelf under the bar, and followed her. The train lurched as he reached the short corridor that led to the door.
"G'night, everybody," he said, opening the door.
He got silence for an answer. The door closed.
"I guess him and Aunt Jemima are fixing to make some pancakes tonight," the conductor said, looking at Jack.
Kit-Kat heard herself laugh-high and hysterical, almost like a scream. Jack Gibbons looked at her. The conductor looked at her. She started to reach into her bag for a cigarette but stopped herself. Had to get out of here, all the excitement had worn off and she was starting to act funny. Would Chick be awake? He could sleep for ten hours solid after he'd hung one on. Her "manager."
"Mistuh Chick, my manager." Sure he was her "manager": didn't he manage to spend every penny she picked up on these lousy little two-week dates she was getting since the war? She'd never get rid of him less she bought him off and maybe not even then. Please, God, she thought suddenly, let Capitol Records sign me for a new album. Please, God, let Al Klein have the contract all set for me when I get back in two weeks. Let him get me my old spot at Cafe Society too ... the Blue Angel....And let me get rid of Chick.
She'd been thinking so hard she must have missed Jack Gibbons' reply. But, glancing at him, she realized he hadn't answered-the conductor had been left in silence after his little remark. She started to feel grateful, then checked herself. Because of me! she thought. That's why the son of a bitch didn't answer, because of me!
She stood up. "Guess I'll go on back and get some rest." Their eyes were square on her. "Eight-thirty can't come around any too soon to suit me." She hated them both. Hated Jack Gibbons most, because he knew. "Good night."
"Good night," Jack Gibbons said.
The conductor was looking at her. He smiled.
She was almost to the door, when it opened and there was Chick. His shirttail was half out, his bloated face was like a fat stewed prune. She opened her mouth to say something when the conductor spoke behind her.
"The bar's closed," the conductor said.
"I came for my wife," Chick said thickly, not taking his eyes from hers. "I'm not interested in no bar."
"Your wife?" the conductor said. "This woman your wife?"
She'd fooled him! She'd fooled him good and proper! She might not have fooled Jack Gibbons, but she'd fooled that conductor all right! Her nostrils strained big, her throat tensed.
"Come on, let's get out of here," Chick said, paying no attention to the conductor. Nasty with sleep and drink-he had her by the wrist and was pulling her along the short corridor that led to the door.
"His wife!" she could hear the conductor saying to Jack Gibbons. "She's married to that coon!"
She wanted to hear Jack Gibbons' answer, but the door closed on his first word. As they went through the darkened car and dropped safely into their seats, a hysterical elation lifted her from the depths to which she'd fallen, and all the tightness in her forehead was gone.
BLOOD WEDDING IN CHICAGO
"Hunh! Hunh!" Bang Bang breathed. "Hunh! Hunh! Hunh!"
Bang Bang hit the heavy bag. Hard. Flashing much enthusiasm with both hands, hooking that heavy bag, straightening it out, dancing around it. And lashing out flirtatiously with big bright attractive eyes at whoever was looking on.
At George Gainford, that is, who stood with casual arrogance off to one side and caught the performance on the bias. Before Bang Bang might decide to raise his right hand in triumph as Heavy-Bag Champion of the World, George Gainford said: "What you tryin to do there, Bang Bang? You ain't got no knockout punch yet."
A door closed and Soldier Jones came in out of the cold, his shoulders wet with New Jersey snowflakes, his big flat feet, a little pigeon-toed, moving sure and direct not toward an opponent, the way they had moved across a hundred rings fifteen years ago, but toward the space-heater. He felt the spaceheater and was satisfied.
"Cold out there," Soldier Jones said, shuffling over and picking up a rag and putting it on the shelf behind the spaceheater. More softly, like an echo, he repeated, "Cold out there," and at that moment noticed us.
"What you boys standing up for? They's chairs."
On the other side of the ring, by the window that looked out on the road that came winding up the cold mountain, Bang Bang was tapping the light bag with the persistence of a hungry woodpecker, but George Gainford wasn't watching now. He was leaning over, using a handkerchief to improve the shine on his shoes.
"We've been driving for about an hour," Yogi said to Soldier Jones. "So we've just been sitting down."
I sat down because somebody I didn't know had invited me to. Soldier Jones sat down too, planting those big feet far apart in front of him. Soldier Jones knew how to be comfortable.
"From New York?" he asked.
"Yeah."
"Where 'bouts you live?"
Yogi, my impassioned boxing guide, told him where he lived: midtown, Sixth Avenue near Fifty-sixth Street, but Soldier Jones had trouble getting it straight. He frowned slightly and couldn't quite place it. "That's below Central Park," Yogi said. "West Side."
"Oh ... yeah," Soldier Jones said. "That must be downtown....You boys fighters, ain't you?"
It was a piece of straight-faced flattery that Soldier Jones knew how to hand out: he had us cornered while we admitted we weren't fighters, and Yogi broke clean with a question: "Is this his first day for sparring?"
"First day," Soldier Jones said. "He'll be along soon."
"What's his weight?" Yogi asked, still standing; a slender twist of charged wire, unable to relax, his eyes in that small neat head the kind of bright, glittering eyes that hunting birds have.
"Weighs about '56," said Soldier Jones, who knew how to relax. "That's his good weight. Have no trouble makin weight. He'll leave that to the other man to worry about."
He got up, eased his bulk through the ropes, and walked, bending slightly, across the sparring ring. "Leave the other man worry about that," he said to nobody in particular as he climbed through the other side and began straightening up a few things on the rubdown table.
Now a bigger boy than Bang Bang, and lighter-complexioned-a middleweight with a neckless head buried between the broadest shoulders on the Eastern Seaboard-came in, changed into trunks, and began shadow-boxing around the ring. "Hunh! Hunh!" breathed this big boy, Wtting shadows. Bang Bang came into the ring with him. "Hunh! Hunh!" breathed Bang Bang. They danced parallel to each other, from side to side of the ring, the big boy uninterested in everything except the terrible shadow he was beating back, but Bang Bang shooting glances at us, his pleasant young face pleased with whatever audience was around. (Could be the sports writers up from New York, looking him over, finding out he looked almost as good as the champ, putting it in the paper that way.)
June the trainer ambled in wearing a sweater-a slender Negro neither young nor old whose deep-furrowed face had been molded through thirty or forty years by the play of a tough and ironic intelligence. Like Soldier Jones, he said, "Make yourselves comfortable. He'll be along soon."
"Who'll he spar with today?" Yogi asked.
June rolled with the question, out of an old racial habit. "He don't have any regular sparring partners-he don't hire people to box with him. You go round hiring people and then they turn out to be the wrong ones, like you go in a store and buy something and then get it home and it's not what you want at all. So he spars with whoever is around the camp, like Bang Bang over there. Or maybe some fellow comes up for a visit and he looks kind of good to us, we'd say-" and he pointed right at me-"we'd say, 'Hey-you-you put on the gloves and go in there with him."
"I'd be glad to do it," I said, "except I'm paralyzed on both sides and my head hurts."
"All I mean is," June went on without losing his thought, "there ain't any official way we got for sparring partners."
Yogi said there was certainly a lot of difference between this place and Pompton Lakes-the size, and so on.
"Well, the camp at Pompton Lakes is for the public, kind of for show. This here's just his. We ain't training for the public here. We're training for the man in the ring."
We watched him slip through the ropes on his way over to the gym part of the cabin, and now, though all the bustle of Bang Bang and the wide boy and Soldier Jones and June continued, there was above everything a quiet expectancy, as if all this was only a little incidental activity to fill up time until the main event started.
Then he came in, from the cabin he used as living quarters next door, without-a sound-looking to anyone who had ever seen him in newsreel shots or on television or in photographs very small, unmuscular, maybe because he wore clothes (a yachting cap on the back of his round head, a small tight-fitting windbreaker) and in his official appearances he wore almost nothing at all. He was twenty-nine years old, weighed 156 pounds, stood five feet eleven, had a reach of 72'/2 inches, an un-expanded chest of 161/I inches, an expanded chest of 38 inches, a waist 28*4 inches around, thighs 19 % inches, calves W/z inches, biceps'll% inches, forearms 10% inches, neck 15 inches. He wore all these measurements, which added up to a very graceful, very fast and very powerful man, with an easy, unalerted modesty. His eavy mouth, turned up faintly at the corners, gave his oval face a slightly sardonic look. But his dark eyes, made long and narrow by high cheekbones, were set in dead-focus on whatever was in front of him. They were the kind of eyes that some men gain in moments of vision or in the grip of a powerful but passing emotion or through the use of drugs, but that this man had all the time, probably as a result of a tempered, street-corner shrewdness and a super-normal latent energy that he could call on when he had to. His face was smooth and unscarred. He stood there, sway-backed, nonchalant, unattached-like some passer-by who had heard all the boxing going on in here and had come in out of the cold to see who was doing it. Actually he was the camp's owner, the camp's star, and the only reason the camp had for its existence. His name was Ray Robinson, called Sugar by the people who don't know him and Ray by those who do. He was the welterweight boxing champion of the world.
"Hey, Yogi! Where you been, man? I ain't seen you for a long time," he said with just a flick of his eyes.
Yogi told him we'd come up from New York to see him train.
"Ain't you a little thinner than when I saw you last time, Yogi?"
Yogi thought not.
"Yes you are-you're getting thin, Yogi."
"No, as a matter-of-fact, I'm probably heavier."
"Heavier-yeah, well, that's what I mean. Did I say thinner? I guess I really meant heavier."
A faint, fast smile lit his face-this was his own special brand of kidding in the style of his boxing.
"Guess I'll go over and change clothes."
He climbed through the ropes of the ring that was empty now, and when he got to the other side he turned and, smiling, said, "Come on over."
We went over, two men too many in the small space of the gym. He took off his clothes and Soldier Jones got out the sweating cream and began rubbing it on Ray's belly, near his groin.
"What are you doing there, man? I don't want to lose weight down there. Here, gimme that stuff." He took the salve away from Soldier Jones and began applying it himself.
"How'd you like Paris, Ray?" asked Yogi.
"I could take some more of that Paris," Ray said. "I can't wait to get over there again. You'd be crazy about it."
"Did you get around to the nightclubs?"
"Man, I didn't go to the nightclubs, the nightclubs came to me."
"My brother's in Paris," Yogi said. "I told him to look you up, but he had a little trouble getting in touch with you."
"Don't send any men around to see me when I'm in Paris," Ray said, watching June tape his right hand. "When I'm in Paris I'm not interested in men."
He moved out, in bag-gloves and jockstrop and trunks and socks and gymshoes, to the heavy bag. He worked on ring time, hitting the bag three minutes, resting when George Gainford rang the bell, hitting the bag again three minutes, resting, moving on to the light bag, resting, hitting, resting, stooping into the ring to shadow-box-Bang Bang and the wide boy with him. Now the three of them moved on parallel lines across the ring (Hunh! Hunh! Hunh!") and back again ("Hunh! Hunh! Hunh!") in a fantastic ritual dance that removed these three naked men from the drab, scuffed surroundings and placed them in some new dimension of space and experience where the reach in inches of a left plus the cubic displacment of air of a right became the official currency, the means of survival, the moral law.
The bell halted them in their tracks, but they did not talk or look at one another; they continued to move their heads and shoulders and arms restlessly, each man completely separate and alone in his battle with a phantom that any day or week now would turn into hard flesh and angry blood and come jabbing, hooking, weaving in.
The bell started them forward again as a shine of sweat highlighted their three faces. Only Bang Bang found time to roll his eyes outward beyond the ropes that bound their world. The wide boy crouched and plunged and reached with sweeping punches that bruised the air. Ray boxed upright, his right held almost perpendicularly in front of his chin, his left singing out like a long cruel whip. In their very separateness and determination they seemed laced together into a single unit that hardly brushed the canvas as it worked its way from one set of ropes to the other and back again and back again-a unit that extended by a long throbbing artery down through several million years of history to the first man's first fear.
Outfitted with headgear, Ray sparred with the wide boy now. The wide boy never jabbed but, crouched low, came at him with hopeful barrelhouse rights and left hooks. Ray moved delicately from side to side and backward, blocking the blows and feeding in the sharp straight left-a toe dancer with flesh that melted to nothing under a punch and resolidified immediately a few inches away. Toward the end of the session he stopped evading and moved in on his man, chattering with his left and bringing the right down savagely and then hooking not once but twice with his left before his man could get away.
Later, tossing the medicine ball hard against George Gainford's mild paunch and taking it from Gainford very hard against his own flat belly, he said, "I was a little glove-shy today."
The wide boy was wiping himself with a towel, his eyes blurry. "Man, what did you say you were? My head don't feel like you were glove-shy."
Everybody laughed and the wide boy, his face bruised, laughed too. Still stopping and starting with the bell, which rang insistently at three-minute intervals, Ray began to skip, holding the two ends of the skipping rope in his right hand and then transferring it to his left without missing a beat and then to his right and to his left again; then holding an end of the rope in each hand and skipping in perfect reflex to the fast tapping of the rope on the floor-June looking on with absolute concentrated interest.
We said so long to him as he lay on the rubdown table, breathing easily, his face once more composed in a look that was at the same time dead-certain and half-amused at its own certainty.
"You come up next week, then," Ray said.
Stepping-outside into the whirling snow, we bumped into Soldier Jones. "You come up again," Soldier Jones echoed. "You'll see more if you come up in a week or so, when he's further along in the training."
By the door of the other cabin, where Ray and Bang Bang and the wide boy and June and George Gainford and Soldier Jones all lived during these months of isolation before Ray's big fight, two men were struggling with a huge television aerial. Soon it would be perched on top of the living quarters, a tall reminder or all the long, dedicated days and nights there were still to get through here on this mountainside before Ray finally went out to Chicago.
"Nobody mentioned LaMotta," I said, turning the Ford around, and heading down the drive past a little marker that named the place Cabin in the Sky.
"But his ears are probably burning," Yogi said. "Everybody there was thinking about him all the time. Did you notice how Ray's sparring partner was imitating LaMotta's style?"
"LaMotta had better be better than that," I said. "Maybe we ought to look in on him."
"It's not much fun," Yogi said. "It's grim. I don't like white training camps."
But I talked him around, and four days later we took a cab uptown to a sooty Bronx street-corner bounded on one side by the El and on the other by a newspaper kiosk and a lot' of traffic. A door said gleason's gym-come in & learn how to box. We climbed the stairs. At the top a bored-looking man wearing a brown felt hat relieved us of fifteen cents apiece.
There was already a crowd, sitting on undertaker's chairs rowed up on two sides of an elevated ring where nobody was boxing. They were high-school hoods and closed-down bookies and old men with fifteen cents to spend and ex-pugs and admirers of a certain glum, plodding brand of East Side, Jewish-Italian-American minority courage. Everybody looked very glum and very plodding. Jacob LaMotta, middleweight boxing champion of the entire world, was nowhere to be seen, but a man who should have been able to beat him, a poker-faced, light-heavyweight gorilla with deep corrugations at the nape of his neck and no back to his head, was working out on the heavy bag in front of us. Maybe not, though-his punch looked good, with a big body and big arms behind it, but he moved very slowly and his reflexes, as he circled the bag, looked sluggish.
When a nose has been broken and spread and rebroken and respread, and when the brows have been flattened by a thousand blows and pasted over with a thick layer of scar tissue, and the cheekbones and mouth and ears and jaw have all been slightly distorted from having been available to too many punches through a dozen years of prizefighting-a man's face is apt to take on a sad, rather sincere look that it would never have taken on if it had been allowed to grow old in a less brutal way. This melancholy face, which was the face that Jake LaMotta carried with him in the ring or in training of merely when sitting across the breakfast table from his spectacular blond wife, was actually a handsome prideful monument to what the middleweight champion could do best: take . a punch, take a lot of punches, and keep plowing in; and often win because he kept plowing in strong, and ordinary punches could not stop him. He was exceptionally proud of the fact that in ninety-five professional fights since 1941 he had never been knocked off his feet. He had been beaten, of course-thirteen times on points and once by technical knockout-but never floored. And since a man must pride himself on what he can do and not on what he cannot do, this was Jake LaMotta's pride, this vertical position which he managed to assume at all times in the ring. It could not be Ray Robinson's pride because he had been knocked off his feet on a few occasions, once during the five bouts he had fought with LaMotta between 1942 and 1945, before either had become a champion. But even so, Ray had won four of those five fights by decision, and lost one by decision, and, out of 127 pro fights in a career which in time-span almost exactly paralleled LaMotta's, had been beaten only once-that one time by LaMotta. All this is important to know to be able to judge the precise value, in terms of pride and in terms or winning boxing bouts, of a face like Jake LaMotta's.
Wearing this sad, flat face above a short, hairy, powerful, oUve-skinned body, the middleweight champion came out of the dressing room on the far side of Glea-son's Gym and climbed up into the ring. He shadowboxed-a hard, compact rock of a man, the muscles in his barrel chest and wide shoulders and short, bulging arms covered over with a thick layer of tissue that was the padding with which he absorbed blows and withstood them. His footwork was elemental, a mere hopping from foot to foot; he stayed close to the ground, his head and chest turtled in, and moved forward with short, mean bodyblows, ten at a time in rapid succession, snorting furiously through that big bent nose of his as he grimly murdered nobody against the ropes.
Now the boy he was going to spar with climbed into the ring after him and began to shadow-box too. This boy, a pale colored boy, was tall, limber and a little gawky. He towered above LaMotta, not only because he was three or four inches taller than LaMotta's five feet seven, but also because he fought upright. When a bell rang they began to spar, the colored boy imitating Ray's style. Everything that LaMotta hoped would come true when he went to Chicago to defend his title was acted out before our eyes. LaMotta bored grimly in, torpedoing his tall opponent, who wanted to box, and blasting him to pieces before he could even get set to throw a punch. Working in close on the body, he continually threw sharp, stunning uppercuts-most of them here only phonies which by intention fell inches short of the tall boy's chin, as if LaMotta understood completely that these blows from his gloves were more than any man should be expected to take unless he were getting twenty or thirty grand for doing it.
As we climbed the El steps on our way to neutralize that three-buck cabfare with a cheap trip back downtown, Yogi, white and tense and bored as he always was after he had been in the presence of something or someone he disliked or disapproved of, asked, "What do you think?"
"He looks like a strong, mean man," I said. "The pleasure is all Ray's."
"You mind if I stop and get my wife a box of candy?" the cab driver asked me when he pulled up for a light. "It's curtains if I don't come home with something tonight. Valentine's Day."
"We'll never make it," I said. "It's eight twenty-five and look at this traffic. Why don't you get it coming back?"
He got away on the yellow. "Okay," he said. "You're the boss. I've been trying to get it for the last hour but nobody'll let me."
"You ought to knock off anyhow after you get me there and watch the fight in a bar," I told him. "This one will be something to see."
"I got enough fights at home," the cab driver said. "I don't need to watch nobody else's fights."
What I saw out the windshield was a double fine of cars that extended farther than you could see down the long avenue that ran from Chicago's Loop to the Stadium. A promised piece of high-priced violence in a roped-off, twenty-by-twenty-foot area of canvas was paying off tonight.
The cars honked and brayed and the beefy Windy City cops were everywhere. Chicago was a good spot to stage the kind of organized violence we all were out for. Walking around this afternoon after getting off the train and checking into a Loop hotel, I'd seen that, for all that had happened to the rest of the world in the last ten or fifteen years, Chicago really hadn't changed much. There was still a raw, drab depression squalor about the dingy bars and four-bit burlesque houses and vacant stores and boarded-up buildings along South State and South Wabash. It was true that the stagger-bums hit you for a quarter now instead of a dime; but the breath smelled the same and the eyes were no more in focus and the big dirty hand held on as tightly as ever. In the mammoth-columned granite architecture of the banks and commercial buildings around the Board of Trade, there was an overpowering, gold-lettered arrogance that you seldom saw in Eastern buildings; an arrogance stemming from the same small seed of inferiority before the older East that sent shoots into every area of Chicago's social and intellectual life. Any newspaper obit-writer who had never been east of Lake Shore Drive could tell you what a bunch of gold-plated phonies they were back there in New York or Boston; any housewife had a civic pride that swelled like a bull's hump at mere mention of Chicago's housing projects or Chicago parks. Beneath this tough crust of arrogance, the same restless urge toward violence that marks most of America's big inland cities bubbled and boiled. So it was a good place to stage a fight. It was a good place for Ray Robinson to fight Jake LaMotta for the Middleweight Championship of the World.
"I'd better get out," I said. "It's eight-thirty and we're not moving."
"You got a big walk ahead of you, buddy."
I put some money in his hand. "I wouldn't want to miss this," I said, and hit out down the avenue past block after block of creeping cars; past one scalper after another begging to buy fight tickets; past program hawkers, newspaper boys, and hundreds of people who were not selling anything or going anywhere but had been drawn here to the streets around the Stadium by the attractive thought of the battle that would take place inside. Something that looked like a full-scale riot was swarming around the Stadium's doors. But I elbowed my way through, had my twenty-buck ticket torn by the doorman, and hightailed it toward my entrance.
No dice. Thirty or forty of us heard from the usher blocking the steps that the single prelim that preceded the main bout had already started and nobody could be seated until it was over. I edged my way up the steps and got to the top just in time to hear the drawn-out awww-nmuwwwww from the crowd that means pain to someone, and to see Bang Bang hit the canvas flat on his face, his big bright eyes rolled up into his head, his fight over and done with.
Now, while his seconds helped Bang Bang to his corner, and the announcer crooned: " ... in twooooo minutes and fiiiii seconds of the fifth rooooouuuuund...." and Bang Bang's conqueror stood by the announcer's elbow, waiting to have his hand raised, I scrambled for my seat and sat down on it. An organ was playing a tune that echoed back and forth into a mash of sounds in the mammoth, noisy, smoky cavern of the Stadium.
All the people you always see at fights were here, except that tonight there were more of them. Instead of two or three platinum and peroxide blondes in seven-and-a-half-inch heels, I counted eighteen-all with chins s held high and lashes lowered to half-mast. Gorgeous Negro women all around me offset the blondes with a beauty that most white people have no idea exists, since in their isolation they deal only with Negro girls not pretty enough to do something better than vacuum rugs and scrub pots in a white woman's house. This sweep of faces in the great bowl of the Stadium made a black-and-white checkerboard pattern, a pattern that added a colorful border of latent violence to the square patch of brilliantly lit canvas which it surrounded.
The ring was empty now, and empty it had the same meager look of over-inflated importance that a battlefield has after one battle has ended and before another has begun. On the canvas near the center of the ring was a faint, fresh smear of Bang Bang's blood.
The lights across the Stadium went out. The organ stopped. Only the ring, small and deserted over there, still gleamed. Fifteen thousand people cannot be completely silent, but when they try to be it is an awesome thing. They tried to be now, as two long poles of light, spotted from somewhere near the ceiling, suddenly sprang down, felt their way hesitantly back and forth across the audience a few times, then crossed, in gigantic, accidental symbol of the suffering that was about to take place here, and came to rest on the doors at opposite ends of the Stadium.
The doors opened, almost simultaneously. From each emerged a champion.
Preceded and followed by a long train of manager and trainer and doctor and handlers and friends. As the two groups moved with painful slowness toward the ring and toward each other, a low, thrilled rumble of passion greeted them. The white hood covering each fighter's head somehow suggested that these two grave processions were the components of a strange wedding soon to be solemnized. And perhaps a wedding would have the same powerful attraction if the audience were allowed to witness, beyond the altar ritual, the consummation as well. This wedding tonight would be in the grand style of those marriages of other centuries, in which an unwilling, frightened bride sometimes battled her groom for a dozen nights before, bloody and scratched and weary, he finally took her.
Three quarters of that long distance to the ring, the champion in the leopard-skin robe, Jake LaMotta, halted, and the crowd applauded him ... while Ray Robinson, challenger, continued on. There is as much ritual in a championship boxing bout as there is in the battling of walruses on an Arctic island. One ritual is the appearance in the ring of the challenger first, and as Ray Robinson slipped between the ropes and faced his handlers with shadow-boxing, no overhead handshake, no gesture toward the crowd, he got a mild round of applause that was nothing like the roar that went up when LaMotta entered and turned his thick, rugged body slowly around with one mighty right arm upraised for all the world to gaze at.
It was apparent from the beginning who the crowd wanted to see win; and they wanted it for a complex of reasons, some of them the best reasons, some the worst. There were people here who were cheering for LaMotta because he was the underdog (even in the defense of his own title against a lighter man), and underdogs, which all audiences are, should win even when they are inferior. There were people here who wanted to see as brutal a contest as possible, and so did what they could to persuade LaMotta to put up the fight of his life against a man who had already beaten him four times. There were also people here curiously sensitive to human coloring, who wanted to see any white man beat up any Negro under any circumstances. On either side of me and behind me was a group of Italian-Americans who knew one another and who had brought their patriotism along with them. As a defense against their partisanship, I pulled out a black cigar, lit it, and laid down a dense blue smoke screen, as the announcer spoke of things to come ("Next week, in this arena...."), the ringside celebrities were alerted ("Please come up quickly when you hear your name") and "The Star-Spangled Banner" was played.
The classic contest, whether in mythology, in history, in a bullring, or in a boxing ring, is always the same: a fragile, keen, and handsome man battles an ugly beast larger and stronger than himself and defeats it. The beast is brave, and charges with no regard for its own safety. The man is also brave, but he has to find weapons other than his own blind strength to win. The knight uses his sword to slay the dragon; David uses a slingshot to vanquish Goliath; the matador befuddles and tires the bull with a cape; the real boxer uses his brain, and blocks out his fight round by round, pacing himself. It was Ray Robinson's plan to tire his bull right down to its toes before he dedicated and sacrificed it. Since this would take seven or ten or twelve rounds of hitting and eluding a powerful, determined animal, the plan was filled with danger. It was this special kind of danger that would give the fight the special interest it had beyond other great fights.
But in the very first round, as Jake LaMotta, no leopard but only a man after he had shed his robe, came crouched and eager across the ring after Robinson, with his left up-pointed at a 45-degree angle straight at Robinson's face, something else became apparent: the bull was inspired by the magnitude of the occasion to an effort greater than anyone had counted on, and it is such inspiration-beauty and brains and plans and agility notwithstanding-that sometimes comes through to win.
Ray Robinson, his own man giving his own performance, jabbed that left in hard and got away and jabbed again and got away and missed and missed again but got away. And LaMotta, willing to take punishment in return for the privilege of dealing it out, kept after him, his face exposed to that cutting left hand but his own hands busy at Ray's face and his body. A crowd interested not in plans but only in aggressiveness and courage cheered LaMotta till their ears rang and their own blood blinded them. Cheered him through the second and third and fourth and fifth and sixth and seventh and eighth and ninth rounds.
They did not see that the man moving in is not always the man who is winning; that a fighter of Robinson's exceptional skill can hit harder going away than most fighters can hit going forward; that Ray's plan was to bleed his bull, and lead him on and tire him until those iron hands drooped of their own weight and those slow feet stopped coming in. The crowd preferred not to notice that in each succeeding round LaMotta wore one more red badge for his courage: a bright crimson patch, like a birthmark, around his nose; tiny, painful cuts on both cheeks; a swollen left eye.
But in the ninth round Ray indicated in what direction the fight was going by aggressively hooking, jabbing, punishing his man, instead of backing up and countering. The bull still kept coming in, but it was a wearier bull and it was growing soft. It was trying now not to outpoint its tormentor and win rounds, but merely to keep coming in and somehow, by some wild miracle, to throw that lucky punch that would win the fight.
But it was later for LaMotta than anyone knew. What Ray Robinson had merely indicated in the ninth, he now chose to demonstrate in the tenth; and continuing the demonstration in the eleventh, he ran into the death throes of a champion-that rousing, tragic moment when Jake LaMotta came back from the dead and cornered him and hit him with everything he didn't have. Hit a man all closed up, all elbows and gloves and forearms and moving parts, who bled the bull of its last ounce of aggressive energy and then maneuvered by it and began the final phase.
Through the twelfth and part of the thirteenth rounds, LaMotta's pride in being able to stand on his own two feet in anybody's prize ring remained intact, while the face that went with that pride underwent terrible changes. A crowd that had come for blood was seeing blood; seeing a man beat up; seeing, too, a plan emerge from what had seemed at first merely a round-by-round contest in punching strength and evasiveness between two men. The crowd, standing up and screaming as one hoarse, super-human animal, was a fickle crowd; for it had forgotten LaMotta and now it was screaming for what it had really come to see: the blood, the pain, the violence, and a new champion himself hurt and bleeding, emerging in momentary, blood-smeared glory.
Pity can sometimes squeeze itself even between the ropes of a prize ring, and Robinson in the thirteenth round, with his man wide open, bent double and stumbling backward, at moments stopped his assault and seemed almost reluctant to hit him again. Nobody would notice this in the newspapers the next day, for most sports writers were watching for other things. But it was those moments of hesitation in the thirteenth round, before the referee stopped the fight and led the new champion back to his corner, that gave Ray Robinson a stripe of greatness.
Later, as LaMotta, a semiconscious mass of beaten flesh and an ex-champion now, huddled on his stool in the corner, Ray stood alone facing the crowd, his gloves removed but his hands still taped, his right hand raised and his fingers greeting the people he knew out there. Across the taped palm was a long stain of blood, his own of LaMotta's. Smiling slightly, his mouth bleeding and his eye bruised, he looked very small and very human and very much alone.
THE MYSTERY BUS RIDE
At Forty-first Street and Seventh Avenue, where a knife of darkness slices Times Square's glittering pie, the New York night begins. There the avenue on a misty evening slides away downtown into an obscurity regulated by a parade of blinking traffic lights and cheered by a cafe ere and there, but actually as desolate as the forest that stood on this land four hundred years ago.
Behind me, this misty November evening, Hollywood showed more savagery in its signs than a whole nation of Indians, and tom-toms kept the beat in the hostess halls and nightclubs, and the novelty shops offered rubber masks for those of us who lacked faces or needed a change.
I had a face, but I needed a change.
I could go home or I could go forward or I could turn back into the spangled square, but then I saw the bus station, a few doors up Forty-first, and I went toward it hopefully, just as if I really believed that a bus could make anything except a round journey, with your same old self meeting you at the end of the ride.
The mystery was there waiting.
It was a well-advertised mystery. An enormous sign plastered across the station window made the offer:
?? Wander Ye Into the Unknown??
Under this big red letters shouted:
?? THE MYSTERY BUS RIDE??
Where? What? How? Starts every Saturday evening at 8:15. $I.90 per person, including tax. Wander Ye Into the Unknown.
Inside behind the sign was the sorriest, scabbiest, drabbest, dullest little hole-in-the-wall of a bus station in the whole U.S.A.-lined with scarred brown coin lockers, outfitted with a couple of wooden benches, Uttered with candy wrappers, ticket stubs and cigarette butts. Five people, all of them sad but only one of them old, sat on the benches, ready to go back to Hackensack or Trenton or Jersey City, and two other people, a guy and his girl, gurgled and giggled while they waited for the ticket seller to show his face. I lined up behind them.
"I would like," I said to the horn-rimmed glasses in which the ticket seller masked himself, "to wander into that unknown you've got advertised."
"What's that?"
"Mystery Bus Ride," I said, and his eyes followed my finger to the sign on the window. "It says right there."
"One-ninety," he said, and threw me a yellow ticket.
"Okay, one-ninety, but what's the deal?"
"That's the mystery," he answered simply, and was already looking impatiently over my shoulder at a couple of people who had lined up behind me. "They're loading now-right, Charlie?"
A voice named Charlie said "Right" from the office behind him. So I paid my fare and took my ticket and went out into the loading lot.
The bus was a big red one, marked SPECIAL, shiny with the light rain that had started. Some of the wanderers into the unknown were already loaded, and looking apprehensively out of the windows. Others were getting on now. The male of the gurgling couple I'd seen inside was just handing his tickets to the driver. He was serious now. It was an appropriate moment to be serious. He was also very young, maybe eighteen, and I felt very old, at least thirty-one.
I knew that it was a mistake the moment I got on and looked down the aisle at the faces. Christ, it's a sponsored necking party, I thought. They're all couples. They all brought their unknown with them. (But there were two old grey-haired aunts, sitting primly and silently in a front seat. That helped a lot.) I folded myself into a seat anyhow-number two behind the aunts. To hell with it, leave us wander.
And the rain had started harder.
"Okay, Artie, close that door and leave us wander."
"Off we go into the wild blue wander."
"I want to know the mystery, Artie. How long we have to wait?"
They were the early boy-birds and girl-birds in the back of the bus: they had already gotten acquainted with Artie. Under his worn bus driver s cap, he had a pockmarked, beef-red, ladder's face, out of which looked the flame-bright eyes of a man who had learned his kidding in a bar. At forty-five he was going to fat, but all this was only padding for his ladder's personality. As the passengers shouted at him, he fiddled elaborately with his tickets. Ignoring them was part of the gag. At last he looked up, put his big hands on his hips, and stared hard straight down the aisle at the rear window. One full minute of silence. After which he nodded, slowly and wisely.
"Looks like I'm gonna have trouble with some of youse."
He nodded slowly and wisely for a few nods more, then strode back through the bus and threw himself on an empty seat in the rear-disappeared completely, stretched out. I stood up: he had put his hat over his eyes.
"I don't know what you people are gonna do, but I'm gonna go to sleep," Artie announced. He began to snore. He outsnored the laughs he got, and retreated finally to the front of the bus, where a couple more people were waiting to give him their tickets.
Behind me a snub-nosed girl called, "I notice Artie never forgets to get those tickets." But she had overstepped the bounds which Artie set for the game: he didn't answer. Instead he said something to a fat, middle-aged woman with dyed red hair who sat directly behind the driver's seat. She poked around in a cigar box which she held on her lap, and slipped him something. She was, it was obvious, no wanderer into the unknown, but Artie's prop woman, and probably his girl.
"I wish to make an announcement," Artie said. "If any-I body has to go, why, just ask me and I'll let you use this."
Between two blunt fingers he held up, for all his passengers to snicker at, a tiny wooden toilet.
"Number One, Artie!"
"Number Two, Artie!" j "Hurry, Artie!" some of the guys called, like kids in grade school. There was an appreciative giggle from the girls.
"Awright now," Artie said, showing us his palms. "Looks like everybody's got a baby here but one person, so here's a baby for him."
He leaned forward, offering me a pink, naked celluloid doll, two inches long. I took it and, not knowing what else to do with it, held it up for the inspection of the other passengers. They cheered.
Artie shoved his cap to the back of his head. "Now we I got that settled, I wish to make another announcement."
"Quiet, please!" somebody yelled. "Hear ye! Hear Ml ye!" somebody else yelled. "Down in front!" the baby-raced boy across the aisle from me yelled. He was hugging a little blonde with a slight, provocative arch to her nose.
Artie gave them the long silence, leaning against his driver's seat, staring hard at the back window and moving his head slowly up and down. Suddenly he rushed down the aisle, stretched out in the empty seat and began to snore again. He awoke to say, "Tell me when youse get there." It was already pretty obvious that Artie's act, while intense, was strictly limited. But nobody cared: they had all paid their buck-ninety on this rainy Saturday night and they were going to have a good time whether Artie slept or not.
Artie finally got up and made his announcement. Although nobody had said anything about where we were going, Artie claimed that all around him he was hearing remarks about our destination. "All I got to say is, anybody says he knows where this trip ends is lying and I mean it. I don't know, so how could any of youse know? Here I got in my hand eight envelopes. Now I am going to pass these out to some of these beautiful girls I see before me here" (he got a laugh) "and we will stop wherever it says for us to stop and then we will read the next one and find out where that one tells us to go. Everybody got that clear in their heads?" He held up a miniature funnel. "Anybody can't understand, here's a funnel we'll pour it in their heads with."
He went down the aisle distributing the envelopes, stopping here and there in great silence while he shook his head at somebody who had cracked wise to him, finally coming back up the aisle and saying, "Okay, who's got number one?"
Nobody answered. Several people in the back of the bus giggled.
"I guess some of you people can't read," Artie said. "Don't none of you know what a one looks like...? Awright, awright, that's better," he said, as a tall string-bean of a girl, flashing many teeth in a thin face, raised her hand in the back of the bus.
"Awright, come right up here," Artie said.
The boy friend stood up to let her by. Her large, embarrassed, eye-averted smile made the whole bus gleam with those teeth as she came toward Artie in a bright red Saturday-night dress.
"Awright, honey," Artie said, putting an arm around her but gazing at his passengers to show them he was only fooling. "Now, I think this is very nice, very cozy."
"Oh, yeah?" she said with a Bronx accent, also playing the passengers but not looking at us.
"Why, I could stand here all evening like this with you."
"Oh, yeah?"
"You mean you couldn't?"
She rolled her eyes upward and pulled down the corners of her mouth. "We-ell."
She was a lady of few words, so Artie persuaded her to open her envelope and read to us. She made a face at what she saw on the paper.
"My Gawd!"
Everybody moved forward in his seat.
"Oh, I see now-I thought it said something else."
"I'm gonna explain again," Artie said, pointing a big finger at the words. "You're-supposed-tuh-read-what-it-says-dere-on-duh-pa-per."
She read painstakingly: "Hello, all my dear fellow passengers of the Mystery Bus Ride. I suppose you are all wondering where we are going this evening. Well, you will not know that until the eighth envelope is opened. Right now I will tell you my name. My name is.'" She looked up blankly.
"You got a name?" Artie asked. "You're supposed to tell us your name."
"Oh, yeah?" she said. "Well, here goes-" And she made a football cheerleader's motion, doubling up her fist and thrusting it above her head toward the passengers. "Isabelle Pinsky."
Applause broke from the back of the bus. She rolled her eyes upward to acknowledge it. Then she went back to her reading: " 'Now all of you turn to the seat in back of you and introduce yourselves.' "
What knocked me out was that everybody did just that-very seriously and with considerable embarrassment, but they did it. The two old aunts in front of me turned around shyly. "My name is Mrs. Brady," said the one who looked maybe five years older than the other. She wore a blue hat with a lot of white berries on it. "This is my daughter, Miss Brady." Miss Brady smiled painfully and I told them in exchange a name-Harold Finch was the best I could make up oh the spur of the moment. I repeated this name to the couple behind me-the two I'd seen in the bus station. The girl was so young and embarrassed that she looked at her boy friend to see if it was all right to answer a strange man. But they finally delivered their names too: Alice Webber and Roger Hart.
"'Now that we all know each other,'" read Isabelle with a grimace, " 'I will tell you where we are going first of all. Driver! Take us to the corner of Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue and there we will open Envelope Number Two.'"
I thought it was one of the great anticlimaxes of our time, but everybody cheered and Artie, after nodding slowly and wisely, hoisted himself into the driver's seat and pulled out onto Forty-first Street, slick with rain.
We were moving downtown, away from the bright lights, and I saw now the one great difference between the Mystery Bus Ride and almost any other kind of entertainment you could find around Times Square on a drizzly Saturday night. At a movie, a nightclub, a penny arcade, a hostess dancehall, you could walk out whenever you took a notion. But the bus ride committed you to a group of people almost as irrevocably as an ocean-crossing did. A kind of group loyalty had set in as soon as Artie had closed the door and made his first announcement. I could have walked out on the bus ride at Fourteenth Street, while there was still time, but I didn't have the heart. In a city where all entertainment was standardized and impersonal and where people were brought into the greatest proximity while maintaining the least possible personal awareness, the old bus ride looked like a sweet, simple-minded idea. I knew this was true when Artie managed to get the pert little blonde with the provocative arch to her nose up there beside him to read the message in Envelope Number Two.
She was button-cute in her black velvet dress-every limb turned with a precision lathe, and the feet saucily pigeon-toed in black patent-leather pumps with spike heels. She was no Isabelle, averting her eyes and gulping, "Oh, yeah?" She looked her audience (which whistled) straight in its many eyes and said:
"Shut up, all of you!"
Coming from that delicious, baby-toothed, red-and-white mouth of hers, this was as unexpected as a pistol shot. And with a chilling matter-of-factness, she ripped open the envelope (while Artie put an arm around her and leered to get a laugh) and began to read very quickly and shrilly: " 'Well, Mystery Bus Riders, here we are at Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue. I guess you want to know where we are going now, don't you. But before we go on, I want each of you to turn to the people in the seat across the aisle and say hello.' " She looked up. "Just shut up and do it."
There was less embarrassment now as everybody did it. "Name is Fred Starkey," said her escort in the seat opposite me. To judge by his pink baby flesh, he could have been born no earlier than yesterday.
"Shut up!" ordered Blondie. Everyone obeyed. " 'Now, Mister Driver, please tell us your name.'"
"Joe Blow!"
"Santa Claus!"
"Where'd you get those ears, Artie?"
Artie stood nodding his look of mock disgust slowly up and down. "Awright," he said, "my name is Action Artie and I'm gonna take some action against somebody pretty soon."
"'Mister Driver,' " piped Blondie, staring at the paper, " 'take us through the Holland Tunnel and stop on the New Jersey side, where we will open Envelope Number Three.'"
Sheets of rain slashed the windows as the bus crawled westward with its little group of surrendered strangers. A couple of guys tried to start a song, but it got nowhere. The one big joke of the evening came up again when the bus left the tunnel, pulled off the Skyway, and stopped. The rain was driving so hard that a puddle had formed on the floor in back, and when Artie slid out of his seat and turned around, a tall Jewish boy with horn-rimmed glasses who looked interchangeably like the editor or the business manager on any college newspaper in America bellowed in an ankle-high frog voice:
"Hey, Artie, did you do this the last time you were back here?"
Artie, affecting great boredom and disgust, came back through the bus, stopped at the puddle and stood gazing down at it while slowly shaking his head.
"Tck, tck, tck, you kids got no manners," he said (a restrained splash of nervous laughter escaped from his audience). "I thought I told you what to do if you had to do something like this. You guilty?" he demanded of Frog Voice.
"I think one of the girls did it, Artie," said somebody across the aisle from Frog Voice. More giggles, the girls' voices high and nervous and happily embarrassed above the lower huh-huhs of the men.
This time Artie pulled out a tiny plastic outhouse. "Notice how it says LADIES," he said to the men. "I'm going to leave this with you in case of emergency," he said to Frog Voice's companion, who turned out to be Isabelle Pinsky herself. "I've got one says GENTLEMEN, too, but I don't see any gentlemen here so I'm keeping it for myself." (Giggles and huh-huhs.) "Awright, now, who's got the next envelope?"
In an amatory atmosphere, this childish joke was the only one that anyone would permit himself. It was the only joke that a group of young Americans, aged maybe eighteen to thirty-five (with the two old grey-haired girls and myself, the lone and lonesome wolf, thrown in for contrast) could find to ease the tension of their strangeness to one another and still reflect their aims, which were the aims of kids on dates anywhere. Artie did say once, "Now I want you fellows to keep those girls back there warm," but this was met with silence. Only the bathroom joke was acceptable, and by the time we got to Stop Number Eight, it was as threadbare as Artie's "I'm gonna go to sleep" act. It was threadbare, but it was repeated. It made the boys and girls tingle in the right place, but not for the wrong reason, and so it was the only possible joke.
By Stop Number Eight the fraud of the Mystery Bus Ride was pretty well apparent to everybody. Even Artie was quieter, although he did try to brighten things up by having two men read the last set of directions in unison. And now it could be seen that even having "secret directions" at all was a form of dishonesty. Since Stop Number Two outside the Holland Tunnel, we had never ventured from the highway-had turned off onto U. S. 22, passed the great black blinking sweep of the Newark Airport, and raced by one little rained-on New Jersey town after another without seeing anything more than a set of headlights waiting at an intersection, a tree tinseled with rain, a dark house in the distance studded with yellow rectangles of light. But when Artie slowed down and eased his Mystery Bus off the highway onto the gravel parking lot in front of a combination hot-dog stand and roadhouse called the Midway Inn, I couldn't believe that the fraud would be so brassily complete. This must be some sort of rest stop. This was the destination.
Artie's cargo, stiff and damp from the long wet ride, unloaded itself: huddled around Artie until the unloading was complete, then followed him, as docile as sheep, through the door above which a green neon sign announced uncertainly: palm room. A four-piece dance-band, out of tune, was playing inside. Waiters hurried us along to a plot of reserved tables in the far corner of the room, where we arranged ourselves (under the curious stares of the other customers) like a leper colony that must not mingle with people who had come here of their own free will. I sat at a long table with Blondie and Fred Starkey, Frog Voice and his Isabelle, and Miss and Mrs. Brady. Artie went outside, came back in and looked us over, then went outside again for good. We were on our own.
"This is the biggest swindle since they sold me the Brooklyn Bridge," said Frog Voice.
"Well, at least I didn't think it would be just like this" Isabelle Pinsky said. "I thought we'd at least go someplace good."
"Did you get in on this the way I did?" I asked. "Just walk by the bus station and see the sign?"
"We saw it in the newspaper," Frog Voice said. "We came all the way in from Sunnyside to go on this thing."
"That's nothing, we came all the way from New Jersey," Blondie said. "And then we come right back here-I could have got off and walked home when we passed Newark. But I thought it was fun when we opened up the envelopes."
Miss and Mrs. Brady looked deeply into each other's eyes when the waiter came for our order-then daringly ordered highballs. Blondie would have just a Coke.
"They're always saying that us young people drink and smoke and everything like that, she said, "but I think they stink when they say that. It just isn't true about the younger generation at all."
She was pretty terrible in her certainties. Her baby-faced escort looked at her hungrily but she refused to give him so much as a glance. She held her head at the angles she had learned from looking at movie stars and fashion magazines, and at any moment was prepared to say, "Shut up!"
I wandered outside and found Artie and the woman with the bright red hair sitting at the hotdog counter eating hotdogs. I sat down and ordered a hotdog too.
"You on the ride, ain't you?" Artie asked. He was a different Artie now; subdued; no longer the master of ceremonies.
"Yeah."
"How you like it?"
"Don't like it."
The redheaded woman peered past him at me. Her mouth was full of sandwich but she managed to say: "Oh, sometimes they have lots of fun. Sometimes there are groups of girls and everything. This is just a bad night." She gave Artie a possessive look. "Why, Artie and I met on the bus ride. Didn't we, Artie?"
"That's right," Artie said. "Lot of people meet on the bus ride."
Cars roared by on the highway. You could hear the dance-band faintly.
"And you go along on the ride every Saturday night?" I asked her.
"Oh, I enjoy taking the ride," she said. "I always go." Enjoyed looking after Artie too, I guessed.
I wandered around the grounds, then went back inside to the table. They all had new drinks, but they were sitting there glumly-strangers who had joined together for that big Saturday-night good time, and who now found no way to amuse themselves. The music seemed as sapped of vitality as the bus company's idea, of a mysterious destination. Everyone was acutely conscious of his hands. Nobody said anything.
Artie came in at last and rescued us from ourselves. We filed in good order after him, loaded back into the bus-each person taking his old seat. The bus coughed, then whined forward. A bleak fog of silence hugged us as we started back.
Hugged us until, out of the gloom of the highway ahead, a wild scene came running toward us, and then we were passing it. Like some giant bug thrown over onto its back, a sedan lay beside the road, its wheels no longer spinning. A police car and two other cars had stopped, and in the glare of their headlights we saw the three bodies, humiliatingly thrown in rag-doll positions along the highway-two girls and a man, their blood crawling away from them in widening blots.
The scene was behind us and running away. We raced toward Manhattan as something like a sigh ran through the bus and cut our boredom and disappointment away from us.
"I guess maybe they wanted" to wander into the unknown too," Frog Voice said suddenly. He expected a laugh, but nobody made a sound.
THE LOST FRONTIER
His childhood echoed with the crash of falling trees, the mighty windblown Michigan pines that cracked, quivered, then plunged as big as thunder among the bleeding chips of a dying era. Steve Harley the boy saw the rivers near his father's farm choked with timber, heard the whang of saws in Ludington and Muskegon, Hamlin and Scottville, slicing up the wilderness, leveling western Michigan. The bear retreated, the fox ran, the Indian put on pants, the mill town mushroomed, burned down and was built up again, but the lumberman's ax hammered on like a drum of doom. Steve Harley, who loved the woods better than any farm or any town, who spent a million hours of his boyhood tracking and tramping among the big trees in search of a wild fading freedom, grew up to a strange silence. In the space of a few years in the 1880's, the lumberjacks all slung their axes and went away; the mills closed down, rotted, fell apart; boomtowns became ghost towns, desolate and forgotten. Steve Harley, twenty-seven in 1890, had lived through an era of magnificent violation. The big trees, and the wilderness they stood for, were gone.
He inherited the farm; but he was no farmer. He hired a caretaker to help milk the cows and prune the fruit trees, and he took to the woods whenever he could, urging his thoroughbred over the ancient Indian trails, surprising the wildlife that had returned now that the axes no longer rang. A brooding devotion to the ravaged face of Michigan nature captured his life. He taught himself taxidermy and made stiff, glass-eyed monuments to the animals he loved, filling his house with them, presenting or selling them to his neighbors-as if this act of love alone could preserve his vanishing world. A stuffed deer stood in his living room; a golden owl perched on the china closet. There were wolves and ducks, a beaver and a small bear. But they were all a mockery and he knew it; the woods went on retreating. Methodists built summer cottages at Epworth Heights, and a lady up in Ludington opened a gifte shoppe. Grand Rapids week-enders left their paper plates and pop bottles among the big rotting tree-stumps on the hills.
He took a correspondence course in drawing and drafting, and this was better than dead hides and glass eyes, this was closer to what he felt-tracing the shape of every deer in one deer, drawing a tree or a field leaf by leaf, stone by stone. On a trip to Detroit he bought oil paints and brushes and practiced painfully with them, perfecting his strokes under a big magnifying glass, studying the way shadows fell in photographs, peering at distances and seeing, with his deep-set, telescopic eyes, the infinite detail that composes even the smallest natural object.
And he drank a lot. He neglected the farm for art and booze; mortgaged it; mortgaged it again. People said: "Steve, you thinkin of selling that farm of yours?" They said: "Steve, when are you gonna get married?" He knew what they meant.
A vast restlessness filled him: a wild thing he could not name was gnawing at his entrails. There was also his caretaker's wife, gnawing at his heart.
Spring is a treacherous season in northern Michigan, for the winters are endless there. From November to March the houses button up in big overcoats of snow, the roads disappear, the lakes and rivers freeze. Spring buds out at last in a chilly May, a tantalizing Pan that pipes a tune of running sap, restlessness, frontiers that no man ever saw. One spring day in the early twenties, Steve Harley gathered up a suitcase full of clothes, some painting equipment and his caretaker's wife, and headed west, toward a vision more youthful than his years. When he made his break ("made a fool of himself, people around Riverton said), Steve was well into his fifties. But he was still as strong and straight as a hickory post, and he would never be any younger.
That was the best spring he ever knew. They went to the State of Washington and visited his brother-fished the secret reaches of Northwestern rivers, cooked and slept in the open, wandered through lush, untouched country that was like a green gift from the gods of Steve's boyhood. He carried a Kodak and photographed everything: sheer canyons dropping to nowhere, twisting streams bubbling with white water, cotton-tailed deer that had never smelled a man before. But the flat, disappointing prints that Steve got when they went back to town had nothing to do with the country he had seen. He bought some canvas and started to paint again. He was in love, and the caretaker's wife knew it. He was in love with the wilderness.
She hadn't counted on this. She had taken her chances, escaped from the drudgery of farm life and a husband she didn't care about. But her sin, contemplated secretly in her kitchen back in Riverton, had seemed bigger than the whole Northwest, a fine gargantuan sacrifice to life-her own and Steve's. It seemed a lot less than that after a few months of living it. Her bones ached, her skin hardened, her hair was a rook's nest, her nails were never clean: the wilderness was winning out, dwarfing her own importance to something less, even, than a farm wife. And, besides, Steve drank. Not to bring up the fact that his money was gone and they faced starvation out here a hundred miles from nowhere. At any rate, they quarreled and she left him. She had her reasons-more than she needed, once she got around to thinking about them.
Alone, he wandered through the great Northwest like God's last caretaker; like the last man on earth who would ever see these trees, these streams, these animals, and who had to remember them, to record them before they were lost forever. But people in his old home state still thought of him. In 1925 a director of "The Oldest Savings Bank in Mason County" wrote to Steve at Harbor City, California:
Friend Steve, I have not heard from you in months and thought I would write and see what had become of you. Of course you know, Steve, that it is the same old subject, the mortgage ... I dislike to foreclose our mortgage, Steve, because you and I have always been mighty good friends, but you realize that this deal cannot go on forever....
That was the year Steve caught a six-foot, 321-pound sea bass off Redondo Beach, California; the year he hit out for Alaska in the middle of summer and hunted and trapped a country even wilder than Oregon. He knew no shame in his relations with nature; in careful pen lettering he could mark the back of a photograph: This is the most exquisitely beautiful Little White Salmon River; or O! Deer the most beautiful wild animal in south Eastern Alaska. He was a rugged, whiskey-drinking man of the forest; he didn't have to talk tough to prove his virility.
After Alaska he came back to the Northwest, and there, in 1927 and 1928, he painted his three great pictures. Each of them took him tireless weeks and months, for he was no impressionist; he wanted the real thing, and the real thing to Steve was every leaf on every tree, every drop in every spray of water. And yet he painted big. He saw big. He brought the magnifying glass to staggering sweeps of Northwest scenery, achieving grandeur through a massing of mere detail.
Because the season changed long before he could finish a painting, he had to work from photographs. On the back of each canvas he carefully set down the date. He was not working toward art; he never thought of himself as an artist. He wanted an exact duplication of the things that thrilled his senses. Aiming at undistorted truth, at a fanatically faithful realism, he achieved super realism. His pictures echoed out beyond the limits of their frames and included the whole Northwest as it existed two dozen years ago. Anyone looking at his work could say immediately: There it is. That's America.
Time was kind to Steve. It let him do at sixty what few men half his age could do. But time broke him, too. Time stiffened his hands and crippled his joints, sent him back to Michigan in the early thirties, an old man of seventy who would never hold a paintbrush or follow a forest trail again. For a couple of dollars a month he rented a tiny shack on a vacant lot in Scottville, hung his pictures around the walls, cooked his soup on a coal stove. His flat, greasy old cap was his trademark; he wore it asleep or awake. He was always dressed to go somewhere, but now he would never go anywhere again-except on relief. In shame, in humiliation, he applied for relief and got it. At first the Bureau of Old Age Assistance gave him twenty dollars a month; but an enthusiastic caseworker decided that he could get along better on eighteen. Steve lettered his reaction on the envelope in which the news came, and left it in his trunk for God or the mice to find:
Owing to advancing Age, God's Agents of adjustment have cut this assistance from 20. to 18. with the assurance of further cut as We grow older figuring Death from Starvation will reach zero mark.
Tne cold wind-swept November day in 1947, Steve Harley, eighty-four years old, died. Two people sent flowers, but nobody came to his funeral. The state buried him in an unmarked grave.
His wandering would have been remarkable if he had been anything except an American. But in a country noisy with a million journeys, Steve Harley's need to travel, to go, to leave, was a dream hardly noticeable, a fever that has possessed America from the beginning and that every year still sends half the nation out on the highways-looking for what? Traveling westward a hundred and fifty years ago, they found that no place is far enough. At last, after the final mountain range was behind them and only the endless sea lay ahead, they found that it was not the place they longed for after ail; it was not Kentucky or Missouri or California they really wanted; it was the trek itself, the restless, throat-clutching, liberating trek toward new worlds that receded before them, drawing them on.
A nation of travelers grew out of the size of the land and the size of the dream. And though in the end the land's proportions were established and the last frontier vanished, the dream was too grand "to die. Searching in circles, keeping the democratic ideal limber in a constant rubbing of elbows in hotels, dining cars, airliners, all-night bus stops, Americans go on exploring their country as if there were a hundred more lakes to be scouted and a thousand new peaks to be pointed out. Whoever buys a ticket and travels west, aching for fresh, bold landscape and a new horizon, has been lured by the national illusion. Whoever bundles the family into the old jalopy for a haphazard excursion on Sunday is an explorer in his bones, even though his biggest discovery is only a roadside hot-dog stand.
Steve Harley's eagle, like Steve himself, hovered over the American landscape, a pair of eyes that saw far and saw fine. Steve made a notation on the back of this picture: Painted by S. W. Harley (The Invincible). He meant that any man who has conquered space and forgotten time in search of a dream bigger than himself has not failed, however bitter his ending. He meant that the dream that haunts Americans is a ghostly dream, yet the frontier they go out to find will be really lost only when they search no longer.
THE HERO IN NEW YORK
It started out with a chance remark, the way a lot of things start out. It was supposed to be just a drink with this guy for old times' sake-one of the things I would do in Manhattan on a Friday when I drive my supercharger (it's a black '36 Ford convertible coupe that lacks a door handle and has never seen a wash) down out of the hills seventy-five miles above New York, where I live. Or on a Monday or a Wednesday: whatever day I might decide I've had enough of these green trees and calm Yankee ponds and noisy birds and the rattle of my own typewriter talking back to me, and need the shock-treatment of New York again.
I got to the bar before he did-one of those narrow, dark, expensive bars on East Fifty-second Street that charge sixty-five cents for a bottle of beer because of the female clientele that's allowed to hang around at the far end of the bar or at the tables in back. Only two members of this specialized clientele were there when I slid onto a stool and ordered a beer. They were sitting at the table nearest the bar and they gave me a real long look, but I was careful not to return the look until they got back to their conversation (" ... says to her ... says to him ... tell me your troubles ... says to her...."). Then I saw that one of them was a fine show. She looked like a gypsy who's just come into a lot of money. She had dark, oily hair, great black flashing eyes on either side of an overpowering aquiline nose, and a heavy, challenging mouth painted purple. There should have been at least one gold tooth winking in that mouth, but I couldn't see it from where I sat. Anyhow, she wore circular gold earrings and draped her entire body, right down to the floor, in a gray fox fur. Add spike-heel strap shoes and a tight black silk dress and you've got her. I didn't want her. Or the other one either, who looked like anybody's older sister and, like an older sister, was doing most of the talking. "So."
It sounded like Henry Fairmont Reed III, and I looked around and sure enough.
"I hope I haven't kept you twiddling your thumbs too long." Read that with a Harvard accent. "I'm glad to see that the ocean is not without its supply of fish tonight."
Henry meant the whores. "What could you call that one with the fox," I asked, "a mangrove snapper?"
"That would be a bonefish," said Henry Fairmont Reed III. The big beefy Irish bartender, who wouldn't have surprised me in a cop's uniform, put his two hands on the bar in front of us. "What are you drinking, Roberto? Suds, aye? Very well, then."
The bartender brought the beer and while pouring it asked, "You fishing men?"
"I haven't thrown out a line in years," I said. "Back in Michigan. How's the fishing around New York?"
"I go every Wednesday my day off," the bartender said. "I haven't missed a Wednesday over three months now."
"You mean upstate in the streams?"
"Ocean fishing," the bartender said. "That's the only kind of fishing I like."
I thought he was through with the conversation when he turned his back, but he'd only intended to pick up a copy of the Journal-American stashed under the bottle line-up. He began leafing through it with heavy-breathing concentration.
"Didn't you ever notice this?"
He turned the paper around and what he meant was almost two solid columns of ads for deep-sea public fishing boats. They were classified under Sheepshead Bay, Plum Beach, Canarsie, Astoria, Manhattan, Battery Park, City Island, New Rochelle, Far Rockaway (one of my all-time favorite names), Jamaica Bay, Island Park, Hampton Bays, Atlantic Beach, Lindenhurst, Freeport, Babylon, Montauk and Greenport. There were at least a hundred of them.
"Look at here, Henry," I said. "Did you know there was anything like this going on around New York?"
Henry decided to be all-knowing about it. "We-ell, public fishing boats are hardly a novelty." He held his lips in a cultivated Park Avenue purse.
"Yeah, but so many of them," I said. "This must be the third-largest industry in America or something."
"Every day, winter and summer," the bartender said. "You don't even have to bring your own tackle. And the bait's counted in with the fare too. Whole trip sets you back a fin or less."
"I'll wager a trip on the Atomic is quite an experience," Henry said, reading an ad. "I'm sure I could get quite ill on that bark without one little bit of trouble."
"How 'bout capturing a few flounders from the Survivor 111?" I said. "Daily, 8 a.m."
"Why not indeed, old sport," Henry said, cheerfully imitating an imitation of himself. "I take it that Survivors I and II are now resting quietly at the bottom of the ocean."
The names really sent me. "Out of Lindenhurst," I read, "you can get Salty Sam's XL11"
"I use a quart a day, solely for medicinal purposes," Henry said. "Now that Jovial sounds like a jolly old tub."
"The Rascal, the Glory, Romeo & Juliet, Barnacle Bill, the White Eagle, 6 a.m. Rocket, Hacklehead-"
"What was that?"
"It's the name of a boat. Hacklehead. Puts out from Montauk Point, Long Island, every single morning of the week."
"I see. Well, in the future be a little more careful of your language."
It was better than reading a railroad timetable. "Sparky, Hi-Hook, the Good Luck, Victory. Here's a fast boat-the Flash'll, mackerel, Captain Bill Grimley."
"Would you Flash'll more beers this way?" Henry said to the bartender. "Good old Bill Grimley. No finer salt ever jibbed his jib than good old Barnacle Bill Grimley."
"You don't want none of them boats," the bartender said, pouring. "Why go all the way out to someplace like Sheepshead when you go right down the street here? I always take the Falcon. Subchaser during the war, so it's a good solid fast boat. You know?"
"Where's that?" I asked.
"Right down here West Fortieth Street, seven a.m."
"Okay, Henry," I said. "You talked me into it. I'll stay over tonight and we'll go fishing tomorrow on the Falcon."
Henry looked seasick already. But I suddenly really felt like seeing what kind of kick this was, so I decided to challenge Henry into going. "You ever fished?" I asked him.
"Of course, I've fished," Henry said. He stood there, five feet eight inches high, in his Brooks Brothers suit, his natty bow tie, his conservative, highly polished, thirty-dollar shoes and said of course, he'd fished. "I've fished ... and I've not fished," Henry said. Then he showed the suspicious side of his nature: "I take it this will all end up as a literary composition of some kind. Even a miserable mackerel at the bottom of the ocean isn't safe from your pitiless scrutiny."
"I never thought of that," I said. "Maybe it will."
The gypsy girl in the fox fur had been called to the wall phone, where she was busy getting an address straight. Henry could blame her as the cause of all this fishing talk.
"All right, I'll go," Henry said, taking the bait. "On one condition. I'm not-" you pronounce it "nought" if you've gone to Harvard and had all the advantages-"not to provide the comic relief in this drama of the deep. I'm speaking of any literary efforts that might emerge from it."
"Check," I said. "And we better get to bed early tonight. We'll have to get up about six."
The girl in the fox was just climbing into a cab when we hit the street.
But don't let Henry Fairmont Reed I'll's pink, soft, young-gentleman's look fool you, friend. That HFR III knows more ways to sidestep a heavy assignment than an Ohio River catfish has whiskers, and can do it so adroitly that you don't even know he's sidestepping.
We ate upstairs at an Italian place on West Forty-seventh Street-cannelloni, scaloppine alia Marsala, a big green salad; and washed it all down with real Chianti in a basket bottle, the kind that does not taste muddy-raw like the California imitation but tastes rusty and leaves your mouth clean. We ate Italian because that was what we had in common. I'd met him in Rome two years before-that good year I had in Rome-and it was nice that I'd met him in Italy instead of America because in a first meeting in Italy I could put up with what seemed artificial and "culchuhed" about him, while in a first meeting in America I probably would not have put up with it because he was not really the kind of friend I had ever had or ever wanted to have. He was good schools and Park Avenue society and Latin and Greek and debutantes and deah mummy and deah fathah. His trip to Europe had been a three-month-long gift from his family to reward him for finally nailing his Ph.D. at Harvard; mine was a gift from myself to myself for staying in a room for a year and finishing a novel. But among the dedicatedly noisy, lazy, sneering, vanity-primping American expatriates around Rome-a real rabble that had nothing to do with the word "proletarian" and was committed to nothing and devoted to nothing and headed nowhere-Henry Fairmont Reed III had looked pretty good to me. He handled himself well. He remained what he was-his background-wherever he was, which in Rome had given him a kind of purity among the arty chameleons around him; even a kind of dignity. But what made him ultimately sympathetic to me was something I found out about him after I'd got used to the accent: for all his great show of propriety, he was really engaged in an elaborate, twenty-four-hour-a-day takeoff on the kind of young man he was supposed to be. There was a big pot of humor bubbling in secret under the fine manners and the right clothes and the plush family connections; a submerged laughter at the fact that his family had projected and the world had accepted and he had enacted a personage whom he considered, in our time and our world, ridiculous. He had, therefore, that auxiliary mind and second sight that marks the extraordinary man. And with it all he could at times be pretty goddamn tricky.
When we got to our coffee (I usually drink the coffee American-style), Henry said: "We are approaching the hour when festivities normally begin in our metropolis. I had in mind-"
"We're approaching the hour," I said, "when we better start storing away some sleep for tomorrow's fishing."
"I had in mind a little gathering on the other side of town," undaunted Henry continued. "To which you've been invited with overwhelming enthusiasm by a charming and beautiful hostess."
"Who would that be?"
"Miss Evelyn Clement."
I'd heard she was beautiful, all right, but I didn't know her.
"What do you mean, I've been invited?"
"Merely that I told her you were coming to town today and, as young ladies will, she threw herself at my feet and begged me to invite you to her gathering."
"Okay," I said. "If we can break it off about 11:30 and hit for hay."
"Right."
We split the check and took a cab east through Central Park. As one of Manhattan's eligible young Park Avenue bachelors (a part which he played with the same devotion he gave to charity ball donations and his socially acceptable role as an associate professor of English at Columbia), Henry Fairmont Reed HI knew a lot of pretty girls. Pretty and bright, that was the way he liked them, and apparently it wasn't as impossible a combination as it would seem, particularly since he didn't confine himself to the debutante corrals close to home but invaded the grazing grounds of those wild young ponies who every year herd into Manhattan from all over America by way of Bennington and Mills College and Vassar, and who rapidly metamorphose into Uptown Bohemians and find jobs as copy writers and publishers' Readers and Time researchers. Henry had a whole address book full of these girls and their tamer society counterparts, saw two or three of them a week for no better reason than that he liked to be in the presence of young female beauty and brains, and courted each of them and all of them with that studied seriousness which was a burlesque of seriousness. For he really didn't give a damn about getting married.
Evelyn Clement was one of them-a fashion artist with Fine Arts aspirations who during her first year in New York had had to support her hidden talents with her more obvious ones. That is, she worked as a model for a while until she was able to persuade a fashion magazine to buy her sketches. Henry and I got to her apartment in the East Sixties a little before ten. She opened the door for us, and she was as extraordinary as her photographs-a tall blonde with great dark eyes and a provoking, passionate mouth. Like most young ladies of brains and beauty and a certain amount of success in the New York professional world, she was going to a psychoanalyst. One look at that long, talented body and you'd have thought the solution to all her problems was as simple as one plus one. But no. To the delight of her friends, Evelyn had complicated things by liking girls and not being happy liking girls.
By my third drink I was buzzing good; I was even talking. Henry was talking too (he can really talk when he gets five highballs in him), and six or seven other people were talking. Evelyn was very good and very bright and very shameless in verbally diagramming a certain famous musician's ardent pursuit of her, and a slip of a girl named Jill, very nervous, was even better and more shameless in talking a parody of a kind of ludicrous novel that had come out about a year before called The Sheltering Sky. It was one o'clock before I knew it and the fish were getting dimmer and the phonograph (lots of Lee Wylie, who sounds great at that hour) was playing louder. I could see that we'd better take off if there was going to be any fishing tomorrow, and since any actual adventure is more important to me than any verbal one (this evening's score: 23 verbal ones, 0 actuals), I forced the issue with Henry and got him out of there.
He lives with his mother (a woman of great beauty and dignity) and his father (a gentleman who was probably Henry's exact double back in the Teddy Roosevelt era) and two older sisters (never met them) in a Park Avenue apartment house that boasts the second-longest canopy in town, at the end of which not one but two doormen greet you with stony, chin-lifted faces. The Reed apartment is the eleventh and twelfth floors of this building, with as many rooms as two or three normal-size houses. We fried up some eggs and ate them, drank some coffee, agreed on the getting-up hour, five forty-five, and then he showed me which one of the half-dozen guest rooms I could sleep in.
"Well, anchors away, old sport," Henry said. After he closed the door I could hear him padding down the hall towards his room. Then it was very dark and quiet for a while, then I heard him say: "All ashore that's going ashore."
He was standing at the door and it was morning-a bleak grey morning with the sound of a car or two, humming along Park Avenue, in it.
"Be right with you," I said. "You got a sweater I could wear?"
By six-thirty we were driving down Park Avenue in my car, and, considering everything, I really felt pretty good.
"Is it possible," Henry said, "that the mackerel actually get up at this hour?"
I believe he said that at Fifty-sixth Street. At Forty-fourth Street he said: "Is it possible that I get up at this hour?"
"Possible," I said, turning west. "Possible but not probable."
He was studying my face. "That look of determination on your face," he said, "may very well frighten the skipper out of his bearings, and I can't impress on you enough how important bearings are to a skipper."
"Going fishing," I said. "You gotta be determined when you're going fishing at 6:30 a.m. after the night before."
He was silent for a long time. Now I could see the Hudson and the boat. We went down a street lined with warehouses and parked trucks, under the West Side Drive viaduct, and into a parking area beside the docked boat.
It said the Falcon all right. 7 a.m. Deep Sea Fishing. The people on the boat were all crow ded over to the shore side, and some of them were talking to the people on the dock. Henry and I stood sizing things up. Nobody seemed to be selling tickets; nobody even seemed to be in charge.
"Okay, let's climb aboard," I said.
Henry was silent, but he made no move. I moved toward the rail.
I threw my leg over the rail and stood on board, but Henry still stood on shore. "Come on."
"I can't do it," Henry said, looking very white. "I'm afraid I just can't bring myself to do it, old boy. I'm afraid it's just not my sort of thing at this hour."
The boat stirred and the horn blew. I saw the half-foot of space between boat and dock begin to widen.
"Henry, you son ol a bitch," I said.
There were three yards of water between us now. Five yards. A dozen. He was better-dressed for the occasion than anybody on this boat-sneakers, heavy grey wool trousers, sweater, windbreaker; everything but a badge saying "Fisherman." But he wasn't coming. He really did look sick, but I cussed him out again anyhow. He waved, a faint smile on his pink face. He looked a little happier now that there wasn't the ghost of a chance of his getting on this boat. He stayed there, good ojd faithful, dependable Henry, until we were quarter of a mile downstream.
I took a walk around deck-slippery with mist and sea spray, smelling richly of the thousands of flashing fish that had been heaved aboard on past runs. The twin diesels put up a big fuss, but we were making good time on our way downtown. Manhattan, sliding by on our left, looked like a grey, mist-softened cardboard cutout where nobody lived, and this boat might have been a modern ark carrying the last survivors from the dead city. Even the river was dead-grey and deserted.
About fifty people were on board, three or four of them women, a few small boys of eight and ten, some teen-age kids, the rest men. A big group of these men seemed to know one another. They were warming up by digging into their mammoth supply of beer; talking in groups that dissolved into other groups with the careless camaraderie of long acquaintance. One of them, doing a lot of talking and swinging of arms and moving around, was the kind of big, tough, open-faced bruiser I've always gotten along okay with.
"What's that?" I asked him.
He was holding onto the rail with one hand, holding a bottle of beer in the other, and looking with bleary eyes at what I pointed to.
"Ellis Island," he said. "Wait a minute-hey, Jack, ain't that Ellis Island?"
A dark, foxy little man with glasses, also clutching a bottle of beer (the mark of the men on board who knew one another), came over to the rail. "Hell, no, Sunny, that's Governor's Island."
"Oh, yeah, that's Governor's Island," Sunny said, as if his friend had spoken in a foreign language and he was interpreting. "How 'bout that? Statue of Liberty."
He pointed it out like a proud personal possession-a green, distant toy across the water.
"You climb up inside that," Sunny said. "Wait a minute here. This Jack McElroy, my name's Sunny Rogers."
I told them my name and we all shook hands.
"See that guy over there?" Sunny said.
A heavy-set fellow with salt-and-pepper hair: the kind of Irishman who looks like a fat eagle.
"That's one of the smartest heads in New York or anywhere," Sunny said. "But you know what he does? He's a fireman."
"A fireman?"
"He's with a ladder company the neighborhood we all live. But that's one of the smartest heads you ever see. Wait a minute, I'll get you a brew."
Sunny came back bringing me a beer.
"That's one of the smartest heads you ever see," Sunny said.
I figured if he said it once more I'd have to agree with him. I saluted him with the beer, took a drink, and felt funny. It wasn't setting so good on my night-before stomach.
"That guy adds up three rows of figures all the same time," Sunny said. "What a head that guy's got on him. Hey, Marty!"
Marty came over, smiling faintly out of shyness.
"Bob, Marty, Marty, Bob," Sunny said. "This one of the smartest heads in New York City," Sunny said, putting his arm around Marty's shoulders.
"Yeah," said Marty, decrying the flattery.
"He adds up a tab upside down before a knucklehead waiter can even get his pencil out. This guy's like a genius," Sunny said, then shifted his eyes forward and left us with a jerk. "Gotta see about the kid."
I saw whom he meant-a hollow-chested, overgrown fifteen-year-old sitting alone up there, dull-eyed and unhappy looking.
"It's not his kid," Marty told me. "He's not married. He just likes to give this kid a break and take him on the fishing trips when the club goes. The kid's got parents but Sunny's always buying everything for him. Guy's got a big heart."
"You mean you all belong to the same club?"
"Not everybody on board. There about twenty-five of us here. It's a neighborhood club, Upper West Side. Blue Banner Social Club. Most of us grew up together in the neighborhood. We get a special rate on the fare when a bunch of us come."
"The club's just for fishing?"
"Well, we go fishing couple times a month, winter and summer. But we have beer parties too. Maybe play a little cards. You know, a social club. Lot of these fishing-social clubs around New York-we're always running into another bunch on one of these trips."
There was a moment of silence before Jack McElroy volunteered: "That Sunny's a wildman, eh?"
"Yeah," I said, looking Sunny's way where he was talking to the kid. "Looks like a good guy to have on your side in a fight."
"He's always been a wildman," Jack said. "But the army didn't help. He was with that New York division that went island-hopping right across the Pacific, got four wounds in his legs, all the medals. He just don't give a damn for anything but having fun."
"What's he do now?"
"He drives a bus," Jack said.
Sunny was coming back, carrying his empty beer bottle. "You wantta know how to kill a man?" he asked me. "Just take an empty bottle like this, see? And put your fingers around the neck like this and your thumb tight over the opening like this, that holds the air in and the bottle won't break. Then bring it down like this," he said, bringing it down like that, "it's just like iron and it won't break. There's O'Brien. Hey, O'Brien, come here, I wantcha meet a friend of mine ... I useta teach guys how to kill in the army," he told me as a red-faced Irishman with a proud chest came toward us. "O'Brien's president of our club. He's in the building business."
I shook hands with O'Brien. With that handshake, he stood a good chance of being in the political business too, one of these days.
When I turned to Sunny again, he was down in a boxer's crouch. "Here, I'll show you all the difference there is between a hook and a jab. See this? Jab. See this? Hook. What's the difference? Hook you bend your elbows, jab you don't. Only difference.
A wave seemed to come up from the bottom of the ocean and slap hard against the sides of my stomach. I looked down at the water and dropped my beer bottle into it.
"Be right back," I said, and started climbing forward along the rail against the heaving deck, got to midships, bent, and heaved. Heaved again, and thought I lost my eyeballs that time. Heaved again and felt like going overboard with it. Heaved again and started praying. Heaved again, then heaved again, and heaved again....
When I came out of it my head was sailing along ten feet above the ship, my legs were gone rubbery, my stomach was an aching void. I sat down and fastened my eyes on the horizon, the way you're supposed to do, but it didn't help. We had been crawling down the Jersey coast and you could still see land. The land looked like all I wanted in this world, but it was too late now.
After a while I got up and walked back down the deck to find Sunny again, but he wasn't around. Marty and Jack McElroy and O'Brien weren't around either. Just a lot of strangers were around. The people I'd been talking to must have been visions, not men. Or else they'd all gone overboard.
Then I remembered those four crossings of the Atlantic I'd made (two of them on troopships, two of them on my own) and how, once the boat was out at sea, a strange sea-change overcame every passenger aboard. Life, in the confinement of the ship, became both more intense than ordinary land-based reality, and more dream-like. The oddest kinds of relationships sprang up between these passengers isolated by waves from their past and their present; senseless grudges, bitter fights, fantastic friendships developed between people who would not even have noticed one another on dry land. It was the rolling ship and the shock of all that water that did it; that restless, treacherous, eternity of water.
I saw the colored deckhand fixing up a fellow passenger with a rod-and-reel and a lure, and I asked him if he'd take care of me too. He tied my rod-a long crude one with a wooden reel-to the part of the rail I chose, then asked me which I wanted to buy, a lure or hooks for bait fishing.
"What's the best bet?" I asked him.
"We going after mackerel," he said. "Now you nevuh really know. The lure you drop it in the water maybe twenty feet down and jerk it, like this. Just keep givin your pole them little short jerks. The bait you don't jerk. Maybe you bottom-fish with the bait." He looked at me. He was a gentle Negro, with no grudges and no hurry about him. "I try the lure, I was you."
"Let's try the lure."
He brought out a shiny piece of metal, three inches long, with a big hook protruding from each of its three sides. He tied it on the end of the line.
"See, when you jerk it," he told me, "it glitters down there in the water and the fish grabs it and you reel him in."
Nothing complicated about that, "That lure is seventy-five cents," he said, "and you own it. And here's a burlap bag to put the fish in. We just tie that to the rail here by your pole." I paid him.
"What are we stopping for?"
"We off Sandy Hook," he said. "See that little boat come chuggin out this way? That's the bait boat; we get our chum off him. Got ship-to-shore radio, so we could tell him just when to start out and meet us with the chum."
The motor launch swung around and came alongside with two men aboard standing among four or five lard-cans packed brimful of a fishy muck.
"Them's clams mostly," the Negro told me. "That's the chum."
"What do you do with the chum?"
"We chum with it," he said. "Get out to where the mackerel oughta be running good and dump some overboard. That attracts 'em, and while they're busy bitin at the chum they bite a hook by mistake."
The skipper, a young man in a black yachting cap whose glasses gave him an intellectual look, helped lift the chum aboard. Our passengers had a few things to say to the men on the bait boat ("How's things in Joisey?"
"That looks like a pretty nice Mulligan you got there") and the bait men had a few things to say right back ("They couldn't be woise."
"You'll get this for chow later"). Then the launch slipped away and we put out to sea in earnest.
Soon the land was gone; only an S of gulls, weaving momentarily above the boat before wheeling northward, reminded us that land was near. I prayed for the sun and a calmer sea, for we were rolling violently and mean purple waves bit at the boat. I remembered Henry and could almost hear his comfortable snores away out here: it was a thousand to one he'd gone home and hit that plush sack. I remembered to call him a son of a bitch again, too, just for luck.
"Here, have another beer."
It was Sunny. "Couldn't go a beer now," I told him. "My stomach's hanging out of my mouth."
"Woman stops my bus," Sunny said (he was no man to bother with transitional remarks), "stands outside blocking the doorway yapping, 'Driver, do you call this Fourteenth Street?' 'Lady,' I tell her, 'I live in this city all my life and I like this city. I even like the names of the streets in this city. I wouldn't think of changing any of them.'"
I believe that was the end of the story but I can't be sure because I stopped listening, a juicy urgency in my mouth, and let go overboard with the wind behind me and Sunny's voice in my ear: "There's places below you can lay down."
I went below, down a steep stair into an area in the prow where the crew had slept when this ship had been a subchaser and where a door still bore the words ammunition room. Lining either side of this ex-bunk-room were covered storage bins on which five men and a boy were stretched out, sick to death. I opened the door of the head and went in, closed it behind me.
The head wouldn't flush; they never flush; it was slopping over on my shoes. I braced myself with a hand on each wall, trying to keep the boat from rocking, sicker than I had ever been, trying to throw up but having no luck, but trying and trying until I thought if nothing else at least blood ought to come. After a couple of thousand years of this I went out and threw myself down on one of the storage bins, somebody's feet touching my head and somebody's fishhook hurting my side but I didn't care, I couldn't move.
I couldn't sleep either, and I lay there through a whole lifetime of seasickness, punishing the sea with every vile word I could think of, seriously doubtful about living to set foot on sweet firm dry land again.
The boat shuddered to a stop and I managed to get one eye open to look at my watch. It was ten minutes to ten; we'd been moving for a little less than three hours-not long enough to get to Southampton, but long enough to get a good piece out to sea, at the rate we'd been going. Now that the motors were silent, the voices of the people on deck seemed to split the air, as if everybody were talking into a microphone. Then a sound uke the sound of ice being broken underfoot crackled close to my ear. There was a pause, then the crackling again, then another pause, then more crackling.
In. answer to a question I didn't ask, one of the uneasy horizontal bundles around me mumbled, "That's the chum hitting the water."
There was a lot of silence now. A lot of fishing was probably going on up there.
Suddenly-boomp, boomp, boomp, smack, boomp, boomp, like a billy knocker being wielded against the deck right above my head. Somebody had lifted a fish aboard; a real honest-to-God live fish. I couldn't stay down here any longer, I had to go up and see what this was all about.
But by the time I got there, the fish had been dropped into a burlap sack and everybody was fishing quietly again. Somebody told me it had been a sea bass, the only catch so far.
I found the Negro deckhand using my rod. He hadn't had any luck either.
"Just keep jerkin the pole-see-like this. Little jerks."
I took the rod and started jerking, sighting, with every jerk, my lure's glitter down there in the turgid water. All around me other people were jerking away too. Less energetic people bait-fished with clams, letting their lines reel out until the bait was on the ocean bottom. An expectant quiet hovered over us, and we fished that way for half an hour. But nobody caught a thing.
Then the boat blew its horn, we all reeled in our lines, and we started up again. If the fish wouldn't come and find us, we were going out to find the fish. The boat began to roll again; the motors pounded on my eardrums. With a wool shirt, a sweater and a jacket on, I was cold.
Sunny wasn't cold. He was moving around too much to be cold. He was heating himself up with that beer.
"Ain't you fishing?" I asked him.
"Hell, no, I don't care nothin about fishing. I just come along for the ride. The kid likes to fish."
He was slowing down a little from that high gear I'd seen him in earlier-but still going from one of his buddies to another, heckling them, getting his laughs.
We stopped again. The white deckhand, a little squirt of a guy with three days' growth of beard on his lean face, lugged another lardcan full of chum forward, then began ladling it overboard with that crackling sound I'd heard below. As the brown film of chum fanned out and ran down past the boat with the tide, everybody took new heart and dropped in a line. The jerking started, the reeling in of lines to put on new bait started. The catching of fish did not start.
A momentary gleam of cheer broke through our bad luck when the sun looked out from behind that thick grey sky for a moment-a great frosted light-bulb up there that soon went out again. We fished. I looked around for Sunny, but he had disappeared. A boat came down out of the horizon; a public fishing boat like ours, but only half as big. It bounced cruelly in the troughs of the waves, and it made everybody feel a lot better to see it out there, worse off than we were because our boat was bigger. It never came near enough to shout.
The wind awoke when we moved again, and I went below to get out of it. The personnel down here had changed. Now there was a good-looking boy of eighteen, with curly black hair, sitting up close to the head, his face green-tinted and strained.
"My old man," he told me, "used to go out on these fishing boats twenty years ago, and he thought I'd like it too. This is the first time I've ever been out and this is the first time he's been out in twenty years."
"How you like it?"
"Next time he says to do this, I'm going to say let's take a rowboat and just go out close to shore." He thought awhile. "Well, one thing, I made up my mind today."
"What's that?"
"I been thinking about enlisting in the navy instead of letting them draft me in the army. But I don't think so now."
"There's an awful lot of water in that navy."
"That's what I been thinking. I made up my mind, sitting down here: the army can have me now. Probably next month."
"Why don't you go join the marines?" It was a rummy voice out of the shadows back in the corner. I could make out a gaunt, loose-jointed man of forty-five, a whiskey flush to his face, with features-a sharp, big nose, a wide, loose-lipped mouth, two tiny close-set eyes-but nothing that could be called a facial expression. He had a bottle of whiskey out and he was drinking at it. "Marines'll make a man out of you," he said.
The boy didn't answer.
"What'sa matter with you, kid, cantcha answer? You scared of the marines?"
The boy surveyed the drunk, but he still didn't answer.
The drunk took another-drink, stuck the bottle in his coat pocket, then went by us, walking pretty good with eyes looking nowhere, and climbed the stair.
"It's not always this bad," said a woman sitting a few yards down from the boy. She was a young woman in her late twenties with straight brown hair and big blue eyes; big and fat, and in those pants and sweaters she looked like a polar she-bear. The thin little guy with her was her husband. "We go out two or three times a month with our gang, and we almost always catch a lot of fish."
"What's the biggest number you ever caught on a trip like this?" I asked her.
"Why, one time we caught mackerel between the two of us. Your lure barely hit the water and you had a fish. There I was. drinking beer with one hand and pulling up the fish with the other. Was I exhausted after a couple of hours!"
"We went down to Brielle on our honeymoon," the husband said, "and we went out on a boat like this and caught seventy-two flounders in one morning."
"That's the first time I ever fished," the wife said. "This one takes me fishing on our honeymoon and I didn't even know whether I'd like it."
"She liked it. all right," the husband said. "She caught more fish them two weeks than anybody else around there."
"In that inlet," the wife said, "I just dropped a little hook over without even any bait on it and I caught a five-pound channel bass and nobody'd believe I caught it like that. Beginner's luck, I guess."
"You still do pretty good," the husband said, "Not so good today," the wife answered.
"You caught one of the three fish caught so far," the husband said. "You can't complain."
Ten minutes later I went up on deck again and the white deckhand was chumming and the fishermen were fishing, but I was tired of all that. Down at the Other end of the boat I saw a knot of people gathered around somebody. I headed that way.
It was the drunk, of all people. He'd hooked a miserable little fish no more than a foot long, and he was holding it up with one hand and pouring beer into its gasping mouth with the other.
"For Christ's sake," I said.
Twelve or fifteen people were looking on in fascination, some of them smiling nervously, others gazing soberly, while the drunk pranced around with his fish, drowning it in beer before our eyes.
Abruptly he stopped, threw his beer bottle overboard, and held the fish high above his head.
"Now I show you the best way to kill a fish," he said.
And shoved the fish's head into his mouth, bit down, and came out with just the fish's limp body, a little blood trickling from where the head had been. He spit the fish head out overboard and stood grinning with that big loose mouth at everybody, as if he expected a round of applause.
A couple of people turned away, but Sunny, standing a few feet from me, didn't turn away. Instead he went up close to the drunk and said, "Awright, you geek, put that fish down."
"This my fish," the drunk said. "I do what I want with it."
"Put that goddamn fish in that burlap bag," Sunny said, "and don't ever do anything again like that when I'm around."
"Who the hell are you?" the drunk whined, still holding the fish, but beginning to show fear behind his eyes. "You the owner of this boat or something?"
Nobody really saw it. Nobody knew what had happened until the drunk was suddenly sitting on the slimy deck, his shirttail out and one shoe untied, and Sunny was standing over him, his left still cocked.
When the drunk made no effort to get up, Sunny just turned easy on his heel and walked away.
"What was that," I asked, walking along with him, "a left hook?"
"That was a left hook," Sunny said. "Wanta know the only difference between a left hook and a jab? A hook you bend your elbow, that's all. A jab you hold your arm out straight. Like this, see?"
We started back at two-thirty, through a patter of rain that came down harder as we approached the shore. Our total catch: five fish, all of them little, none of them mackerel. Five fish, that is, if you want to count the ling, a sinister, muddy-looking fish with long drooping whiskers, that nobody wanted and that a couple of little kids carried around deck in a paper bag until we started up the Hudson, and then threw overboard. It floated. It was dead.
But we weren't dead, though a death-like silence had been gripping everyone through most of the trip. We were alive, and when we saw New York obscured in rain, identified Fourteenth Street, knew that we'd be on dry land and homeward bound in fifteen minutes, we were suddenly all talking at once, all making cracks about the fish and the rain, all vastly amused at the pointless, rain-washed trip-that kind or humor that bubbles up in soldiers when they have tramped through mud and fire for a week and come out of it to find themselves still alive after all.
Even the skipper, embarrassed by our bad day, called down from the bridge:
"I wish to make an announcement, everybody. Anybody on board who thinks he has more fish than he can use, there will be men at the dock who will buy them from you."
That was good for a laugh, and so was Sunny's shout, "Anybody who don't like this kind of livin must be crazy"-a shout that came out of his army days and that every G.I. barracks, tent and foxhole echoes with when the going gets rough.
We veered and headed into dock, all of us wet, rain running down our faces like tears, but none of us minding, all of us standing right out there on deck talking away. The white deckhand leaped ashore, the Negro threw him the mooring rope, he looped it around a post, the deckrail ladder went up, and we clambered ashore.
I stopped halfway in my run for the car, remembering Sunny, liking that big crazy guy, and wondering if he'd take a lift uptown. But I couldn't see him and I went on.
Half an hour later I was on the highway, heading for Connecticut through a rain that plunged in bucketfuls against the windshield and made the highway slick as oil. Yesterday, the bar, Henry Fairmont Reed III, Evelyn Clement's party, all those things seemed a couple of light-years away now; and Connecticut, the pond, the green trees, the lonely room where I worked, seemed even more removed. Floating above these things, framed in reality, was the Falcon-swarming with Americans who had taken the most private, most personal of experiences and turned it into a gregarious nightmare.
The shock-treatment had been a success.
THE WINTER OF 1939 THREE TALES
The Airplane Crime
The faster the better, it seemed to say. The better the faster, faster, the better, take it and go, the small gosling with the deep wound said. How deeper than my heart, how funnier than you'll ever know. Give me all the nice little things, he said, the bright shiny trinkets, and I will tell you everything you want to know.
First, there was the large room you must enter first, the same before all murders, I wanted the murder so bad, just like I've wanted everything, so I entered the large room.
What did you find? everyone said, sitting before him with their legs all crossed, some yawning and others sleeping. What was it all?
He wanted to go hide himself in all his embarrassment but they seemed so sincere he stayed on. What is it? he said. I'm not sure I understood everything you said.
Suddenly he was running up and down the room before them, crying aloud often, as if he were bored or something. Someone opened the door and he ran outside.
There he was content with nothing as usual and wished that he were someplace else. It is some people's fate to be like that, and it was certainly his.
... For they had all followed him out still yawning and kept right on his heels as he walked down the garden path towards the Green Elbow, where everything had happened first. One of them finally caught up with him and, looking over his shoulder into his race, asked earnestly with his heavy eyebrows drawn together tight, what happened there?
A man asked me how much I wanted to pay for a parachute and plane, he got out finally.
Speak up! a big chorus came from behind him. We want to hear too!
What d'you think we're coming along for, one small purple thing with a silver-comb mustache said, although he hadn't asked them.
I said a man asked me about a plane and parachute, he shouted. It was a sporting place, I had never been there before. There were people sitting all around talking and eating sandwiches. Some of them had their shoes off and all of them wore fancy sport clothes, like little yellow sandals and things, and they were sitting on their parachute packs and one man was playing with his propeller, trying to make it go around, a little girl with big brown eyes and a little teeny mouth kept jerking his arm but he was determined and I could see how she was crying-
Okay, they all cried. So what? they said. What has that got to do with it? We don't understand nuffin about that.
He blushed, became very apologetic, wished something would come and drag him away. I thought everything had something-
Say, where are we going? someone called, blowing the notes out clear on a bugle. If it's where I think it is! said the bugle.
. If it's where WE think it is, they all cried, and for some reason there was lots of jostling and merriment and much goosing and jiggling going on among them. Well, where are we going? they said so clear. We're going, they said, to buy a pound of butter see the stars make friends with Crusoe see what Friday looks like nestle on an earth slip bees into a bird's bonnet do the dimple dive make plans for a game of flip and flup.
We're going to the stores to see the town, they said. Everything will be lovely, they said, and we're not really following this gink at all, even if he'd like to think so. We're going to gaze at stars and ride on scooters.
And eat a baked baby a la mode, one little guy said, but they all shushed him up pretty quick, afraid that Gup would hear. Don't let Gup hear you, they said, and pulled his wool hat down over his eyes.
Gup turned on them suddenly and said, I did do it, of course, if that's all you want.
He thinks he'll fool us, says one.
He thinks he'll be a frog or a dress model, but we'll fool him, another said. They got together and gurgled at Gup, peering at him out of the buttonholes of their coats. It was their only chance, so all gurgled good at Gup, looking him up and down.
They were going through a forest of ferns and eiderdown, and everything tickled like feathers, so that there was a great giggling noise from the whole little group. Suddenly--
BANG! a bullet whizzed by, and
BIFF WOOF! a big fat policeman carrying two long guns lumbered by, looking both ways at everything.
Nobody saw anything! Especially us! they all said in unison before he could even ask. This didn't improve his temper and he went lumbering off down the path, crushing down tree trunks and firing off his guns for fun.
It's Gup! said Gimp. He's gone!
Gup is gone, they all said, and started looking for Gup.
It's Gup that's gone, they all were mumbling to themselves frantically, looking under rocks and leaves.
Some very small one found him hiding under twigs and things, and shouting HERE IS GUP! they pulled him out.
All right, he said, they were all sitting on their parachutes and eating hamburger sandwiches, and some of the girls were a little plump in places. That's all I've told you really, he said.
Of course I went with people, he said. They are in this story. One of them was young, with one of those little faces so kind and sweet you want to cry.
She did not belong to you then, they said, not to be mean, but from curiosity.
She belonged to someone else, someone said.
But that was only because of CIRCUMSTANCE, said someone else.
... We were going into the airplanes I remember, it was like walking through a barn with many rooms, and everywhere the people.
Did she invite you up to look at her hayloft? they all said.
She hardly noticed me. It was like a picnic. I tried not to look at her because of her husband. He thought that he was my friend. She did not look at me enough, he said, I wanted her to look at me lots more. She was not beautiful, maybe her nose was not just right for her face, but she wore some kind of green-blue sport sweater and a skirt that when you looked at her it was wonderful, and when she moved it made you just all feel like the grass had all bloomed out at once.
We know just how you felt, they all said. It was wonderful.
It was so nice, he said. And all the time I only wanted to love her, I only wanted to be nothing at all but something she would hug. I did not mean to hurt her, he said.
We know just how you felt, they said. Now tell us more. How did it happen?
Gup! tKey said. How did it happen?
Gup! they said. Gup is crying.
Gup, don't cry, they said. We've all known hard times.
Finally he got himself under control and went on. They noticed he had to hug a tree to keep from running off somewhere. And yet I knew her, he said. I felt that I knew her all the time, and that she knew me. She had changed into flying togs and was sitting there on a parachute like everybody else. I didn't want her to do that. Her husband was sitting beside her eating a banana and a bunch of grapes, and she didn't mind. I didn't want to see her like that. And there was someone else there, oh yes! That was me. And I got so nervous because the planes kept coming back and taking off, and I knew that she would go up in a plane with him. I was afraid.
But what happened? they cried. What happened, before the cop comes back?
I had killed him in a room above a little dive five years before. I had stuck him up proper with a dagger. I had to go through the crowded cafe to get out. It was such a lonely cafe. On such a lonely corner. Chicago, it was, far away. I went back there a long time after-
We liked the one about the airplanes and them bumpy women, they said. Come on, what's happened?
This is a long time after, he said. I had grown lots younger by then. I knew I'd have to .get back there just so I'd not break any rule about the scene of the crime. I looked through the cafe window. I knew what they were thinking of me. Then she came along from an alley, she had grown older, her face turned into a rat's face. When she got too close to me her whisker tickled a little.
Did you kill her? they all said.
With a little bolt from an airplane prop. I pushed her in an alley and slaughtered her proper then! I pulled out her whiskers one by one. I made a broom and swept up the street.
Here comes the cop! they called.
Clear the way for Gup! the cop was crying. He was shooting his big guns at everyone. He snatched Gup under his arm and in a friendly way pushed his pistol down his throat and then with a shout of laughter carried Gup off through the forest.
All they could do was call, Nobody saw a thing! Especially us! and run back through the woods to play.
Minerva's Party
When Minerva first invited us all to the party we were all very happy because with our new spring things bought just before Easter Day we were shimshammed up so that you could hardly know us. When we went to Minerva's in our automobiles, when the highballs became clinkleclankle and we swung from the chandeliers, when the whole blamming business became a pimple-pample of piano playing, when Joe and Mary and May-belle Carlotti sought for each other beneath the rugs-that was Minerva's party. That day were we profound. Were we profound that day in dialectic and analectic. The people at the party were several. The people at that party it appeared.
We had all loved Minerva all through the long winter because her eyes were so big and she looked at you like she'd like to take your hand and when we went to Minerva's party we all told her how much we loved her. When we told Minerva how much we loved her there were several of us who got smart with Minerva and so we slapped down all of us who got smart with Minerva and closed ranks and all of us stood around Minerva and told her how much we loved her.
Minerva was not mad or anything and Minerva took us into the kitchen and we all went into the cupboard with her and she got a big bottle of wine. I was not going to show you this big bottle of wine, Minerva said, and she blinked her eyes and opened the big bottle of wine. But since it is in the spring and since we are all so much in love with each other and since I am in love with you all and you all are in love with me and since you all have fresh-pressed pants and since all your ladies' husbands are in love with me and I am so in love with you all, I will.
And she did.
What happened most of all at Minerva's party was when somebody got wind of the big holdup at Forty-fourth Street and Central Avenue, it was such a wonderful night and bugles blowing and blackbirds singing and Minerva was so wild-eyed-wonderful and the world was gurgling and we were so in love with one another we all got into our cars and went out to the holdup. Our cars all blamped and plumped along and many things got in the way. Our cars reamed the pavements and blocked the lanes. A kind of shooting fray took place till all of us were driven mad. We looked around the whole dark block but nobody ever found where we were. We slipped and slammed. We bammed and crammed. We clutched and braked up all your hills and down your valleys. Mickle-mickle went our car.
Where is Mug the Slug? Where is Mike the Kike? Where is Mick the Dick? Where is the blarsted crime? We all sat in the back seat with Minerva and she was so fluff and soft and purrywonderful. She was crammed so wonder full of the key of C. She was so flutemellow in voice and allegretto pianissimo in parentheses.
When we could not find the crook or the cop or anybody and when everybody started making cracks about the cop and the crook and everybody, and when anybody started flimming and flamming around in the back seat and when Minerva stuck her foot through the top of the car and yodeled, we thought it time to go. Our car was a brand-new Studmore Pixton-Paxton V-25 with a trillo-millo motor, brake-shaft in the rear and rubber all around, so when you put your foot on the button it goes and we all drove off with Minerva in the back seat.
Minerva, we said.
But she had gone to sleep and it was necessary for all of us to wake her up.
Minerva, we said. Let us all put on gym shoes and do a little track work.
There was a peal of thunder when she opened up her eyes.
Minerva, we said. And when she opened up her eyes we all fell in love with her again.
Minerva, we said. When you were a little dreamin pigeon of a kid, and flew kites and played in puddles. Minerva, we said. Were your eyes like then like now?
The car kept going faster, the millo-mello motor kept grinding up your hills and down your valleys. We all got closer together in the back seat.
Minerva! Minerva! we said.
She gathered us all closer together around her. We had to laugh. We had to laugh and cry. We had to laugh and cry and do the shag.
We had to stop the car and all get out. We had to all get out because we loved her so.
Minerva, we said. And it was a fine party, and she fluttered her eyes and we had to put on gym shoes and run up and down the fields. And when she laughed it was the most wonderful laugh in all the world.
And then she felt so good she had to gather us close around, and we all loved Minerva and Minerva loved we-all.
Murderpie
He popped out of the Seventh Avenue subway kiosk and stood very still just outside in the rain. He was such a little man with tiny features and such a small dark peering face under his straw hat, you had to laugh. He kept jerking his head from left to right and looking up and down the street and at all the second-story windows. He clutched a little canvas bag in his hand.
Then he began coming slowly down Fourteenth Street in the rain. His blue cotton trousers were so mussed and short, as though the rain had shrunk them. His free hand kept gripping and ungripping the air, and his dark face kept jerking and twisting around so much he looked ready to explode any minute. Suddenly he stopped still, dropped his bag. His mouth feU open.
It was the guy all right.
So they'd come for him after all!
If they think they're going to get me they're crazy. I'm just going to look down to the sidewalk till this guy goes away, he thought. He was a big guy with thick-soled shoes, glaring right through him with them big eyes-them big eyes he knew so well. I'll stand like this until he goes away, he thought. He'll never get wind that I came here to see him! If he thinks I came here to see him why the devil.
Then an awful feeling hit him.
I'll glance up just a moment, he thought.
... The whole bunch of them were across the street looking out of a big window they'd thrown up! The big window was on the second floor, fifty feet high, and they were all laughing and giggling and pointing. He felt so embarrassed he had to look down again. The bag was dripping! Everything dripping skipping dripping and running over his cuff. He set the bag quickly on his foot so nobody would see. He realized that the guy with the perforated shoes was gone and he had to chuckle, it was so damned ridiculous that those fellows were always bothering him, and nobody knew whether they were going or coming. The whole world could be running red waterfalls and by Jesus if he'd give a damn!
A car shot past him. If that was them again! He picked up his bag and began to run up the street. He had to wait at Sixth Avenue for the light so he set down his bag and tucked his right foot under his left knee so no one would see the whole world was dripping. He got so lonely and rotten there he wanted to do a doubledive. A bunch of people, mostly children and dwarfs, crossed the street about three miles down the road. They were all waving banners and stepping on each other's heels. He crowded close to a building so nobody would see. I'll get out of this place if it's the last thing I do and get over into Massachusetts and then take a steamboat to Bombay or someplace. Everybody always crossing a street or waving at me!
He knew suddenly that the big car had come. They were all in the front seat riding fast. The rear blinds were drawn on people of the worst description, with machine guns sticking their noses out here and there. There was one guy who was leaning over the driver's wheel driving who couldn't fool anybody. He had that big plaid cap on all right! All the guys in the car were trying to look innocent, like they didn't know. But he had to chuckle because they couldn't fool a soul. He could see how the man in the cap ground his teeth.
I'll get out of here NOW, he thought. They can drive that big car all the way from Peoria but they'll never get me back. I'll slaughter the whole mess of them. If I could get turned around and start back looking for a room, they'd probably never know the difference.
He was getting very tired standing on one foot. I'll get started back looking for a room. They'll never get me back to Peoria, big car or no big car. And they can stick their guns out all they want, they'll never get ME back to Peoria!
They're probably not here, he thought, since I cut those five up into hunks in Chattanooga, anyhow.
All at once he was flying along the wet street chuckling to himself and sneering at those bastards, until he felt on his head and found his little hat gone.
"But, mister, you don't have to put down all those names. If you just give me the name of the last city you've been to, sir."
Slowly he lifted his eyes from the registry book and looked into hers. He started to mumble something, then stopped, knowing that everybody would hold it against him. In the registry book he had scribbled down the name "Henry Platts" to disguise his real name, Harry T. Plattman. And in the "Last Residence" column he had scribbled all over it all kinds of cities.
"You don't have to put down all those, sir," she said. And there was something in the tone of her voice that warned him. He kept peering into her big fat Hungarian face and suddenly she smiled a little and boy he knew her! He had her number. He stepped back a step and wondered about running. Those dark steps went upstairs. From the first he noticed something queer about them. Then he spied him! Just where the landing turned around the corner, he was leaning!
Everything came whirling back to him-the subway changemaker at Times Square telling him he'd likely find a room in this neighborhood. How the rain had come and made his pants all mussed. How those dwarfs and children all started pointing at him. How them men in the big car hadn't much cared whether he ran or not because they knew he wouldn't go anywhere they couldn't get him. And as he looked at the landing the man took shape and nobody could fool him any more. He knew it now and now he knew everything. It was the man in the cap! And he was trying to keep his teeth from grinding. And they were all waiting for him to go up those stairs.
"Listen," he piped to the woman in a high treble voice.
She was standing there staring at him like mad.
"Listen, ma'am, I forgot some of my luggage, at the bus depot, you know, where I came in from New Jersey. I'll have to get back and get it or somebody will be sure and take it. Then I'll get back here and be sure and take your room." She made a little movement toward him and he thought, Ma'am, this is my time!
He started jerking on the doorknob with all his might and main. "Stop it!" she cried. "Don't jerk on that doorknob that way!" He threw down his bag and with two hands began to jerk on the doorknob and twist it every way. Bam! Bam! All he knew was he'd have to make the whole damn street know. She finally reached over his shoulder and got the latch turned for him and he ran away down the steps. He could hear her calling after him as he got into high speed. But he knew that they were just jealous because he got away and fooled that chubby face again.
When he stopped running he stood in a dark doorway, little and shivering and alone. He did not know which way he was going nor what he was ever going to do. He let himself slip down to a sitting position. It was still drizzling, but he was glad because only his feet and knees were getting wet. He began to wonder about his wampum mama with a moosehead. Then there was such a grinding he had to go up and ask the driver what was wrong with the bus. "What in the devil is wrong with this bus that it makes such a grinding noise with its wheel?" He tapped the driver on the shoulder. "What in the devil's wrong with this bus, bud?" In the back of the bus he could hear them all forming a circle because one young lady had slipped a knife into another and several young men were protesting. "Say, if that grinding noise doesn't stop I'm going to do something about it." He tapped the man on the shoulder. He tapped him and then he shook him. JHe shook him like a rug. He shook him until the guy's head rolled off onto the steering wheel, with a slice of blood and a little straw. And in one dead eye he saw it all. He screamed loudly: THE MAN IN THE CAP! and he started tearing back through the bus calling: "The man with the cap!"
And when he awoke his feet and knees were all sloshy-wet, and suddenly he began to wonder where he could have put it, and felt all around in the dark. But all he found was wet dirt and slime. And then he knew where it was. Back in that place with all those evil people. He couldn't go back to get it any more....
I have to battle the subway train and the whole damn red army, he said. If I get killed and chopped up into little hunks, who's going to take care of anyone?
He got up the steps somehow, by paying money. He got in the room. Suddenly he noticed that his little canvas bag was setting on the table. Yet he was not happy over it.
No one will take care of anyone and the streets can run red as they please when I'm slaughtered, he said.
He looked at the bag and wondered whether President Wilson's head was still there. Yet he didn't dare open it because if he did there would be no getting it shut again except with nails of some kind and he didn't want to use nails for fear of waking up everybody in the house. He didn't want to use nails, but maybe it would turn out that he would have to use nails for everything. Maybe he would have to nail the blinds shut with nails, because suddenly he noticed they had put two enormous windows in the room and they were all looking at him.
Some of them had big rosy smiles on their faces, especially two men at the top of the window. He leaped onto the windowsill and pulled the blind all the way down to the floor. Then he took little nails and put them into the blind. Then went over to the other blind and put nails into it too. He went running around the room putting nails into everything to keep it shut. He put a nail in the foot of the bed. He put a nail in the light button. He put a nail on his cuff. He put little nails in the mirror. Suddenly it was not his face at all. There were green speckles in his eyes instead of brown ones. They had been very clever in making the nose and the shapes of the nostrils of the nose and in trying to make it as long as his nose. But suddenly he uncovered the whole fraud by noticing a little lump at the bridge. He put a nail in that.
WHO ARE YOU? someone said. He turned around and they were all standing there. ARE YOU THE ONE WHO DID IT? WHO ARE YOU AND WHY ARE YOU HERE? they said.
WE DON'T KNOW WHY YOU ARE HERE, BUT WHO ARE YOU?
I'll have to keep still, he said, or they'll find out I wanted to rent a room.
A tall thin man standing in the back of the crowd said in a little whistle voice, I KNOW THAT MAN VERY WELL.
There were hundreds and thousands of little greasy ones. There were millions of big gruff thin ones with straggly hair.
I KNOW WHO DID IT, they all began to shout. I KNOW WHO DID IT.
I KNOW WHO HE IS, a little fat man with a duck face said. I KNOW HIM.
He wanted to put nails into all of their faces, but he knew that they would get suspicious. So he controlled himself. He looked all around for a man with a cap. He looked up and down the room into all of their silent faces. All he could find were three big men with enormous bags of flesh under their chins and moonbeam smiles in their faces. They were not looking at him but across the room at the mirror, and he knew that he would have to do it.
He felt in all of his pockets for more nails, but couldn't find any. All that was left was his little gold knife.
There were still some nails under their feet but he knew they would accuse him of cowardice if he would pick them up. His little gold knife was across the room. But he saw he would have to pass the man with the cap if he went to get it. Then all of a sudden he discovered it was in his watchpocket, pinned down with a nail.
He jerked it out. He turned away from them and hunched over so they would not see him open it. A little dog-faced man broke out of the crowd and came running lightly across the room and tried to peep over his shoulder. He was the first to get it! He got it in the ribs. Up through the jugular with a twang! There were things running up and down the walls trying to make him stop. The room didn't have any ceiling in it and they began pouring over the walls. He ran up to them and started ripping. fie ripped off a knuckle bone.
He ripped off the left hind shank of a rotund dwarf. And then he found that he had stuck through one of the Happy boys. He stuck the Happy boys up and down. He stuck the Happy boys on top of the head. If he had had a nail it wouldn't have been so bad. There was blood running running running, running on his cuffs. There were pieces of blood vessels floating around in blood.
There was a wishbone, broken in two.
NO.
NO THEY DIDN'T TALK NO MORE, NO.
They were coming over walls. In through doors. In through big windows, with their happy faces filling up space where others had been slashed down.
NO ONE WOULD KNOW.
NO ONE WOULD EVER KNOW.
WHY DID YOU COME IN A BIG CAR FROM PEORIA?
WHY DID YOU KEEP DRIVING A BIG CAR? IF I HAD A NAIL THEY WOULD NOT BE MAD AT ME.
IF I HAD A PIECE OF TOOTH LEFT TO STICK IN TOP OF THEIR HEADS THEY WOULD LIKE ME LOTS BETTER.
IF I HAD LITTLE NAILS TO STICK IN THEIR CUFF-LINKS THEY WOULD NOT HATE ME ANY MORE.
I WILL HAVE TO BAM THEM NOW, he said.
He began to push them down with his two hands. He pushed them all down to the floor. He pushed them down with his two hands. Some little squashy ones he shook. He shook big greasy ones with moonbeam smiles. His little knife was gone because no one was left to care whether anyone was alive or anything. The whole room was packed full of bones and shanks and broken wishbones. And some of the blood and gore was trying to get away out of the door. He closed up everything.
No, he said. No.
No, he said. No.
But you must look in the mirror.
,No, he said.
No.
But you must see the little mirror. No, he said. Not the little mirror. I do not know where it is.
Then he held the little mirror between his two hands. No, he said.
No.
No, he said. That is not true.
NO, he said. EVERYTHING IS A LIE. EVERYTHING, he said. EVERYTHING IS A LIE. THEY HATE ME!
BUT THE CAP!
YES! YES! YES!
He had found his little hat. He had found his little knife. FOR NOW I KNOW! FOR NOW I KNOW! FOR YES! YES! I AM HE! I AM THE MAN IN THE CAP!
I-I AM THE MAN IN THE CAP!
With fingers of love he took his cheeks and cut them off.
With fingers of infinite tenderness he took his ears and cut them off.
With hands of supreme devotion he took his hair and sliced it off. And then he found his nose again. He pulled out the little nail and said that no, I will not Ue no more. He took his nose and cut it off. He took his eyes and cut them out. He took his face and cut it off.
No I will not Ue any more.
Have you seen my little hat? Have you seen my canvas bag?
He was wandering around the square among the gay holiday crowd.
Has anybody seen anything of mine?
He needed everything of his now very badly. Nobody paid any attention to him and he wandered around in the crowd. He got lost there forever.
THIRTY YEARS AS A WRITER
It occurred to me the other day that I have been a writer for just about thirty years, for I wrote my first stories when I was eight or nine and I am now well along in my thirty-ninth year. It has been a good experience. I would recommend writing to anyone who wants to know himself and the world.
The world is yours, when you are a writer. You can stay at home and write, or you can move to Tunisia and write. In other words, you can write anywhere and about anything. I have written about war, love, children, myself and the neighbors. I have made up a lot of things and I have also put down a lot of things just as they seemed to be. When you write fiction you have at your disposal everything that is and has been and also everything that could or might be. Is there any other profession that gives you this kind of license and range in such specific terms? At times in fiction it is even possible to write about the impossible and make it real and convincing, as I did in "The Man in Hilda Hope's Apartment." But of course there are great dangers involved for both the writer and the reader when you do this.
The beach at Hamilcar in Tunisia; the Pope of Rome giving a public audience in St. Peter's Cathedral at the Vatican; Greenwich Village on a Sunday morning. These are sights and "experiences" in the simplest sense that I do not believe I have ever mentioned in writing before, perhaps because they were all pleasant and uncomplicated, while it is an experience formed of a complex of pleasure and pain and mystery that inspires fiction. Much that happens in life leaves a vacuum of yearning which is beyond our understanding, and it is to fill this vacuum that we write about such happenings. So it has been with me, at any rate.
Everything that happens to a writer is valuable to him, and that is the charm of this profession over all others. He may be put in jail or marry an heiress; go to sea or stay at home; associate with people or spend his time in lonely contemplation. But whatever he does and whatever happens to him will be of value to him as a writer.
Writers and readers sometimes become dissatisfied with fiction because they see it as a substitute for real life and therefore a sham. Yet the truth is that writing and reading are themselves real-life experiences of the highest order.
Thirty years-yet it might have been only yesterday that I began writing down my first stories and all of my writing life might have passed in the time that it takes to say, "Ghost, go west." As a writer you capture time and hold it as your own. Experience cannot elude you. You make it your own in prose, and it is there forever, yours.
