While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction

  His prayer was answered. He became radiant even before he spoke, he was so sure his words were going to be the right ones. One regret, at least, was going to be wiped off the slate.

  The stranger raised his proferred hand to a position of solemn oath. “Mr. Sweeny,” he said, “I give you my solemn word of honor that I have two kiddleys. If you have one kiddley, that makes three kiddleys between us.”

  He handed Sweeny a dime. “So you win, Mr. Sweeny.”

  Sweeny was restored to health instantly. He jumped up, shook the stranger’s hand. “I knowed you was a two-kiddley man by looking at you,” he said. “You couldn’t be nothing but a two-kiddley man.”

  “I just don’t know what got into me to pretend I was ever anything else,” said the stranger.

  “Well,” said Sweeny cheerfully, “nobody likes to lose.” He looked at the dime one last time before pocketing it. “Anyways—you got a lesson cheap. Don’t never bet nobody down here at his own game.” He nudged the stranger, winked confidingly. “What’s your game?”

  “My game?” said the stranger. He thought awhile, amiably. “Shakespeare, I suppose.”

  “Now you see,” said Sweeny, “if you was to come up to me and make me a little bet about Shakespeare—” Sweeny shook his head craftily. “I just wouldn’t bet you. I wouldn’t even listen.”

  Sweeny nodded and walked away.

  (illustration credit 12)

  MR. Z

  George was the son of a country minister and the grandson of a country minister. He was in the Korean War. When that was over, he decided to become a minister, too.

  He was an innocent. He wanted to help people in trouble. So he went to the University of Chicago. He didn’t study just theology. He studied sociology and psychology and anthropology, too. He went to school the year around, and, during one summer session, there was a course offered in criminology.

  George didn’t know anything about criminals, so he took it.

  And he was told to go to the county jail to interview a prisoner named Gloria St. Pierre Gratz. She was the wife of Bernard Gratz, who was said to be a killer for hire and a thief. Ironically, Gratz remained at large and unhunted, since nothing could be proved against him. His wife was in jail for possessing stolen goods, goods almost certainly stolen by him. She had not implicated him—neither had she given a reasonable account of where else the diamonds and fur coats might have come from. She was serving a year and a day. Her sentence was just about up when George went to see her. George was interviewing her not simply because of her criminality, but because she had an astoundingly high I.Q. She told George that she preferred to be addressed by her maiden name, the name she had used during her days as an exotic dancer. “I never learned how to answer to the name of Mrs. Gratz,” she said. “That’s nothing against Bernie,” she said. “I just never learned.” So George called her Miss St. Pierre.

  He talked to Miss St. Pierre through a screen at the jail. It was the first jail George had ever been in. He had written down the bare bones of her biography in a loose-leaf notebook. Now he was double-checking the information.

  “Let’s see—” he said to her, “you left high school in the middle of your junior year, and you changed your name from Francine Pefko to Gloria St. Pierre. You stopped seeing Mr. F, and you became a carhop outside of Gary. And it was there that you met Mr. G?”

  “Arny Pappas,” she said.

  “Right—” said George, “Arny Pappas—Mr. G. Is carhop one word or two?”

  “Two words, one word—” she said, “who ever wrote it down before?” She was a tiny girl—a trinket brunette, very pretty, very pale, and hard as nails. She was bored stiff with George and his questions. She yawned a lot, not bothering to cover her velvet mouth. And her responses were bewilderingly derisive. “A smart college kid like you ought to be able to make ten words out of it,” she said.

  Gamely, George went on trying to sound professional and brisk. “Well now,” he said, “was there some reason for your discontinuing your education in your junior year?”

  “My father was a drunk,” she said. “My stepmother clawed. I was already grown up. I already looked twenty-one. I could make all the money I wanted. Arny Pappas gave me a yellow Buick convertible all my own. Honey—” she said, “what did I want with algebra and Ivanhoe?”

  “Um,” said George. “And then Mr. H came along, and he and Mr. G got into a fistfight over you?”

  “Knives,” she said. “It was knives. Stan Carbo—that was his name. Why call him Mr. H?”

  “To protect him—” said George, “to keep this all confidential—to protect anybody you might want to tell me about.”

  She laughed. She stuck the tip of a finger through the screen, and she wiggled it at George. “You?” she said. “You’re going to protect Stan Carbo? I wish you could see him. I wish he could see you.”

  “Well,” said George lamely, “maybe someday we’ll meet.”

  “He’s dead,” she said. She didn’t sound sorry. She didn’t even sound interested.

  “That’s too bad,” said George.

  “You’re the first person who ever said so,” she said.

  “In any event,” said George, looking at his notes, “while he was still among the living, Mr. H offered you a job as an exotic dancer in his nightclub in East Chicago—and you accepted.”

  Gloria laughed again. “Honest to God, honey—” she said, “you should see your face. It’s bright red! You know that? Your mouth looks like you’ve been sucking lemons!” She shook her head. “Rollo—” she said, “tell me again what you think you’re doing here.”

  George had been over the question several times before. He went over it again. “As I told you,” he said patiently, “I’m a student of sociology, which is the science of human society.” There wasn’t any point in telling her that the course was actually criminology. That might be offensive. There didn’t seem to be much point in telling her anything, for that matter.

  “They made a science out of people?” she said. “What a crazy science that must be.”

  “It’s still very much in its infancy,” said George.

  “Like you,” she said. “How old are you, baby?”

  “Twenty-one,” said George stiffly.

  “Think of that!” she said. “Twenty-one! What is it like to be that old? I won’t be twenty-one until next March.” She sat back. “You know,” she said, “every so often I meet somebody like you, and I realize it’s possible for some people to grow up in this country without ever seeing anything, without ever having anything happen to them.”

  “I was in Korea for a year and a half,” said George. “I think I’ve had a little something happen to me.”

  “I tell you what,” she said, “I’ll write a book about your great adventures, and you can write one about mine.” And then, to George’s dismay, she took a pencil stub and an empty pack of cigarettes from her pocket. She tore the pack apart, flattened it out to make a sheet of paper. “All righty—” she said, “here we go, Rollo. We’ll call this The Thrilling Life Story of Mr. Z—to protect you. You were born on a farm, were you, Mr. Z?”

  “Please—” said George, who really had been born on a farm.

  “I answered your questions,” she said. “You answer mine.” She frowned. “Your present address, Mr. Z?” she said.

  George shrugged, told her his address. He was living over the garage of the dean of the Divinity School.

  “Occupation?” she said. “Student. One word or two?”

  “Two,” said George.

  “Stew dent,” she said, and she wrote it down. “Now, I’m going to have to investigate your love life, Mr. Z. That’s actually kind of the main part of your science, even though it is in its infancy. I want you to tell me about all the hearts you’ve broken during this wild, wild life of yours. Let’s start with Miss A.”

  George closed his notebook. He gave her a bleak smile. “Thanks for your time, Miss St. Pierre,” he said. “It was good of you to
talk to me.” He stood.

  She gave him a blinding smile. “Oh, please sit down,” she said. “I haven’t been nice at all—and here you’ve been so nice to me, no matter what awful things I say. Please—please sit down, and I’ll answer any question you ask. Any question. Ask me a real hard one, and I’ll do my best. Isn’t there one really big question?”

  George was fool enough to relax some, to sit down again. He did have one big question. He had no more dignity, no more anything to lose, so he asked it—asked it flat out. “You’ve got a very high I.Q., Miss Pierre. Why is it that somebody as smart as you are should live the way you do?”

  “Who says I’m smart?” she said.

  “You’ve been tested,” said George. “Your I.Q. is higher than that of the average physician.”

  “The average physician,” she said, “couldn’t find his own behind with both hands.”

  “That’s not quite true—” said George.

  “Doctors make me sick,” she said. And now she turned really nasty, now that she had George relaxed for a full blast of malevolence. “But college kids make me sicker,” she said. “Get out of here,” she said. “You’re the most boring goon I ever met!” She made a limp, disgusted motion with her hand. “Beat it, Rollo,” she said. “Tell teacher I’m the way I am because I like the way I am. Maybe they’ll make you a professor of people like me.”

  Out in the anteroom of the jail, a little, dark, vicious young man came up to George. He looked at George as though he wanted to kill him. He had a voice like a grackle. He was Bernard Gratz, the lady’s husband.

  “You been in there with Gloria St. Pierre?” said Gratz.

  “That’s right,” said George politely.

  “Where you from?” he said. “What you want with her?” he said. “Who ast you to come?” he said.

  George had a letter of introduction from the professor who was giving the course in criminology. He handed it to Gratz.

  Gratz wadded it up and handed it back. “That don’t cut no ice with me,” he said. “She ain’t supposed to talk to nobody but her lawyer or me. She knows that.”

  “It was purely voluntary on her part,” said George. “Nobody made her talk to me.”

  Gratz took hold of George’s notebook. “Come on—lemme see,” he said. “What you got in the book?”

  George pulled the book away. It not only had his notes on Gloria in it. It contained notes for all of his courses.

  Gratz made another grab for the notebook, got it. He tore out all the pages, threw them up in the air.

  George did a very un-Christian thing. He knocked the little man cold—laid him right out.

  He revived Gratz enough to get Gratz’s promise that he was going to kill George slowly. And then George gathered up his papers and went home.

  Two weeks went by without much of anything’s happening. George wasn’t worried about being killed. He didn’t think Gratz had any way of finding him in his room over the garage of the dean of the Divinity School. George had trouble believing that the adventure in the jail had even happened.

  There was a picture in the paper one day, showing Gloria St. Pierre leaving the jail with Gratz. George didn’t believe either one was real.

  And then, one night, he was reading The Encyclopedia of Criminology. He was looking for clues that would help him to understand the life Gloria St. Pierre had chosen to lead. The Encyclopedia, all-inclusive as it tried to be, said not one word about why such a beautiful, intelligent girl should have thrown her life away on such ugly, greedy, cruel men.

  There was a knock on the door.

  George opened the door, found two unfamiliar young men standing outside. One of them said George’s name politely, read it and his address from a piece of paper torn from a pack of cigarettes. It was the piece of paper on which Gloria St. Pierre had started to write George’s biography, The Thrilling Life Story of Mr. Z.

  George recognized it a split second before the two men started beating the stuffing out of him. They called him “Professor” every time they hit him. They didn’t seem mad at all.

  But they knew their business. George went to the hospital with four broken ribs, two broken ankles, a split ear, a closed eye, and a headful of orioles.

  * * *

  The next morning, George sat in his hospital bed and tried to write his parents a letter. “Dear Mother and Father:” he wrote, “I’m in the hospital, but you mustn’t worry.”

  He was wondering what to say beyond that, when a platinum blonde with eyelashes like buggy whips came in. She carried a potted plant and a copy of True Detective.

  She smelled like a gangster funeral.

  She was Gloria St. Pierre, but George had no way of recognizing her. Bernard Baruch could have hidden behind a disguise like that. She came bearing gifts all right, but no pity seemed to go with them. George’s wounds interested her, but the interest was clinical. She was obviously used to seeing people bashed up, and she gave George low grades as a spectacle.

  “You got off easy,” she said. She assumed George knew who she was.

  “I’m not dead,” said George. “That’s true.”

  She nodded. “That’s smart,” she said. “That’s smarter than I thought you’d be. You could have been dead very easily. I’m surprised you’re not dead.”

  “May I ask a question?” said George.

  “I’d think you’d be through asking questions,” she said. And George finally recognized her voice.

  He lay back and closed his one good eye.

  “I brought you a plant and a magazine,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he said. He wished she would go away. He had nothing to say to her. She was so wild and unfamiliar that George couldn’t even think about her.

  “If you want some other plant or some other magazine,” she said, “say so.”

  “Just fine,” said George. A whanging headache was coming on.

  “I thought of getting you something to eat,” she said. “But they said you were on the serious list, so I thought maybe you better not eat.”

  George opened his eye. This was the first he’d heard of his being on the serious list. “Serious list?” he said.

  “They wouldn’t have let me in if I hadn’t said I was your sister,” she said. “I think it’s some kind of mistake. You don’t look serious to me.”

  George sighed—or meant to sigh. It came out a groan. And, through the whanging and purple flashes of his headache, he said, “They should have you make up the list.”

  “I suppose you blame me for all this,” she said. “I suppose that’s how your mind works.”

  “It isn’t working,” said George.

  “I’m here just because I feel sorry for you,” she said. “I don’t owe you any apology at all. You asked for this. I hope you learned something,” she said. “Everything there is to learn isn’t printed in books.”

  “I know that now,” said George. “Thanks for coming, and thanks for the presents, Miss St. Pierre. I think I’d better take a nap now.” George pretended to go to sleep, but Gloria St. Pierre didn’t go away. George could feel her and smell her very close by.

  “I left him,” she said. “You hear me?”

  George went on pretending to sleep.

  “After I heard what he had done to you, I left him,” she said.

  George went on pretending to sleep. After a while Gloria St. Pierre went away.

  * * *

  And, after a while, George really did go to sleep. Sleeping in an overheated room with his head out of order, George dreamed of Gloria St. Pierre.

  When he woke up, the hospital room seemed part of the dream, too. Trying to find out what was real and what was a dream, George examined the objects on his bedside table. Among these things were the plant and the magazine Gloria had brought him.

  The cover on the magazine could very well have been a part of the dream George had been having, so he pushed that aside. For utterly sane reading, he chose the tag wired to the stem of the plant. A
nd the tag started out sanely enough. “Clementine Hitchcock Double-Blooming Geranium,” it said.

  But after that the tag went crazy. “Warning! This is a fully patented plant!” it said. “Asexual reproduction is strictly forbidden by law!”

  George thanked God when the perfect image of reality, a fat policeman, clumped in. He wanted George to tell him about the beating.

  George told the lugubrious tale from the beginning, and realized, as he told it, that he didn’t intend to press charges. There was a crude fairness in what had happened. He had, after all, started things off by slugging a known gangster much smaller than himself. Moreover, George’s brains had taken such a scrambling that he remembered almost nothing about the men who had done the actual beating.

  The policeman didn’t try to argue George into pressing charges. He was glad to be saved some work. There was one thing about George’s tale that interested him, though. “You say you know this Gloria St. Pierre?” he said.

  “I’ve just told you,” said George.

  “She’s only two doors down,” said the policeman.

  “What?” said George.

  “Sure,” said the policeman. “She got beat up, too—in the park right across the street from the hospital.”

  “How badly hurt is she?” said George.

  “She’s on the serious list,” said the policeman. “About the same deal as you—a couple of ankles broken, a couple of ribs, two big shiners. You still got all your teeth?”

  “Yes,” said George.

  “Well,” said the policeman, “she lost her upper front ones.”

  “Who did it?” said George.

  “Her husband,” said the policeman. “Gratz.”

  “You’ve got him?” said George.

  “In the morgue,” said the policeman. “A detective caught him working her over. Gratz ran. The detective shot him when he wouldn’t stop. So the lady’s a widow now.”

  George’s ankles were set and put in casts after lunch that day. He was given a wheelchair and crutches.