Voices From the Street

  Staring down at the table, Hadley said in a low voice: “You can say anything you want. Or do anything you want. You never did anything wrong in your life.”

  “According to you.” She sighed. “I wish Bob thought that way. According to him everything I do is wrong. He enjoys it—he gets sardonic humor out of mistakes I make. When I break a dish or drop a bottle in the bathroom, anything where I’m at fault. He’s got that damn workshop in the back, all those power grinders and tools—” She broke off abruptly. “Who is it, then? Not a girl? That narrows it down.” She eyed him doubtfully, apprehensively. “Baby, in college you fooled around with that gang awhile—when you were painting. It was all right, then; I understood that. But if you’re mixed up with them now—”

  “No,” Hadley said, “this is something else. I—heard a man speak.”

  “You sound like that popular song, that ‘Nature Boy.’ God, that dreadful thing.”

  Gazing intently at his sister, Hadley said: “It’s something I still don’t completely understand. I don’t know how it’s going to affect me…it hasn’t gone through me all the way. I feel there’s more; it’s still working on me.”

  The amusement left his sister’s face. “What kind of a man?” Seriously, she bent back in her chair, convinced by the tension of his voice. “You really mean it.”

  “I sure do. You know how so many things never made any sense to me. Things people were doing, all this activity…like your husband.”

  Sally colored resentfully. “Baby—” She shrugged. “Well, what’s sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose.”

  “I’m not going to knock him. I have a lot of respect for him. But I don’t understand him; I don’t understand what it’s all for, all the running around. All the struggling. Sometimes I sit there in the Health Food Store, watching people going by on the sidewalk. They’re nuts! Where the hell are they rushing to? Swarming like ants… It’s senseless.”

  “You always did like lying around dreaming,” Sally said softly. “You were always the big dreamer. Spinning big deals in your head, all the things you were going to do. Schemes… You’re a natural-born salesman. I’ll bet you really charm the old women.”

  “And now I understand it,” Hadley continued. “Now, when I see them, I’m not puzzled.”

  Troubled, his sister shook her head. “What do you understand, Baby?”

  “What they’re doing. Where they’re going. Why they’re out there scrambling around.”

  “Why are they out there?”

  Hands locked together, Hadley said: “There isn’t any way I can tell you that you won’t laugh. It sounds so damn silly when I say it.”

  “Say it.”

  “The end of the world’s coming.”

  There was silence. Sally’s hands were shaking as she tapped her cigarette against the ashtray. “What do you mean? You mean the war?”

  He nodded. “Yes, in a way. But beyond that. The war is only a part of it.”

  “But you do mean the war. You’re worried about the war.” She cursed harshly, furiously. “Goddamn them—are they still after you, trying to induct you? You with your kid—”

  “It’s not that.”

  “What, then?” She crumpled her cigarette out furiously. “You mean you’re afraid? Christ, Baby, you’re a little old woman yourself, a little timid old woman. You’re scared of being blown to bits. Baby, you haven’t any backbone at all. I’m so goddamn ashamed of you…” She pulled herself together, shuddered. “But I can understand. I guess when you have a kid to worry about… I’d worry, too. Well, get away from here. Move out into the wide-open country. Get lost—it’s a big country. Buy a farm and raise vegetables…you always liked to do that. Leave the country; go to Mexico.”

  “There’s no place that’s safe.”

  Sally’s blue eyes blazed. “And this is what you’ve figured out? That everybody’s going to get killed, so all you have to do is just sit and wait for it? Is that what you’re doing, just waiting for the A-bombs to start dropping? Who the hell is this man?”

  Hadley, staring hard at the table, said: “Theodore Beckheim. You probably never heard of him.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “He heads a religious group. The Society of the Watchmen of Jesus. They have a movement all over the world. A big following in Africa.”

  “Religious fanatics! Holy Rollers!”

  “I guess so. Only, it doesn’t seem fanatic. It just makes sense. As if I’d always believed it, but I hadn’t quite got all the pieces together. When I heard him it just sort of locked into place.”

  “What are you going to do?” Jerkily, rapidly, she gathered up her coat and purse, stuffed her lighter into a pocket. “Here’s Bob; I can hear him yelling around.” She raised her voice. “Over here—this booth!”

  The curtains burst apart and Bob Sorrell stood there, feet planted apart, face dark and scowling. “Why didn’t you leave the damn curtains apart so I could see you?” he demanded.

  “We’re all ready to go,” Sally said in a thin, clipped voice. “Unless you want something.”

  “Me?” Bob laughed sharply. “Come on—let’s hit the highway.” He clapped Hadley on the shoulder as he rose from his seat. “Those are sure some screwball friends of yours. Where’d you pick them up? Christ, when I got a load of that old tractor they call a car… They won’t get two miles with that thing.” He bellowed loudly as they moved away from the booth. “The loose screws aren’t all down in the motor, either.” He snatched the check from Hadley’s lifeless hands and started off with it. “I’ll pay for it, buddy.”

  He strode on toward the cash register, digging silver change from his pocket. He grinned starkly back at Sally and Stuart, and gave them a broad wink.

  “This one’s on me,” he shouted across the restaurant, past the silently eating Chinese. “When we get down in Cedar Groves, Ellen can blow us to a real meal.”

  The warm dense wind of night swirled peevishly into the apartment through the open windows. Flies, moths, beetles, buzzed and tapped against light-bulbs, fried themselves and dropped in tiny sizzling bits to the carpet. Around the living room everybody lounged inertly, facing one another with involuntary relentlessness. It was eight thirty. In the kitchen the dinner dishes were piled and heaped on the sink, stove, table, drainboard. A place had been cleared large enough to open gin and tonic bottles, and to assemble drinks. A tray of melting ice cubes lay oozing sluggishly, surrounded by corkscrews, bits of metal foil, puddles of Gilby’s Deluxe, lemon rind.

  “It’s hot,” Sally murmured. “I think it’s hotter now than it was this afternoon. It’s so—sticky.”

  After a time Ellen said: “I think there’s more humidity here than on your side of the Bay.”

  “You’re pretty damn close to the water,” Bob observed. “Every once in a while you catch a whiff of the mudflats.”

  “Cedar Groves has certainly grown since I was down here last,” Sally observed. “When was that, at least a year ago, wasn’t it? That Christmas we all got together…that was two years, I guess. Anyhow, the town was smaller then.”

  Sally reached over to take her drink from the coffee table. She gazed down into it, at the bits of lemon floating in the gin.

  “Wait until you’ve used it a couple of times,” she said eagerly to Ellen. “It makes all the difference in the world. We’ll get it into the mail tomorrow morning.”

  “What are you talking about?” Bob asked her.

  “The Waring blender. When we were in the kitchen I told Ellen we’d give her the two-pint one; it’s really too small for us. Then when we come down next time she can whip up a daiquiri for us…and you won’t have to sit around moping over that?” She pointed at the glass her husband gripped between his two hands.

  Bob Sorrell sat moodily holding his glass of ginger ale; unless things were precisely to his liking he didn’t drink.

  Beside him, Sally had slipped off her high-heeled shoes and nylons. The sweater, hat, and suit she had wo
rn now hung in the closet in the bedroom; she had put on a yellow drawstring blouse of Ellen’s and one of her short, light summer skirts. Her honey-colored hair was down and tossed back, and she had scrubbed off most of her makeup. Thoughtful, subdued, she sat curled up on the couch, her bare legs tucked under her, one pale arm resting outstretched behind her. Grasping her glass with the other hand, eyes half closed, she yawned, smiled, sipped her drink, and listened distantly to the low murmur of the TV set.

  Leaning against the kitchen door, Ellen Hadley wore what she had worn in the afternoon. Her smooth, very youthful skin was an even tan in the dim light of the room. Without expression she sipped her gin sling, eyes vacant. Once, she reached down and fondly touched her husband on the shoulder; Stuart Hadley sat slouched in the big easy chair, eyes shut, mouth open, ignoring his glass perched on the chair arm with only dead ice cubes sagging in the bottom.

  “This is a nice little apartment,” Sally said sleepily. “But you know, paying out rent is tossing it down the rat-hole. We made up our minds right away to buy… That was five years ago, too. Of course, with Bob in the real estate business it would be sort of perverted to rent a place. Anyhow, you’ve seen our place. Haven’t you?” She yawned again. “God, this warm air makes me so sleepy…” She slapped listlessly at a mosquito buzzing around her ear. “I feel as if I’m about to pass out completely.” She examined her glass. “It isn’t this—it’s as weak as water.”

  “The way I figure,” Bob Sorrell said, “in ten years of rent a person has paid the original gross cost of income property back to the owner. After that, the owner is getting sheer gravy. If you’re going to rent, squawk like hell about everything—the paint, the plumbing, the thickness of the walls, the number of electrical input wires—”

  “What’s that?” Sally asked.

  “Well, you should have three-wire input. Two isn’t enough. Two means overload, danger of fire. A tenant should bellow like hell about that. Stick up for your rights or you won’t get anywhere. In this world you gotta toot your own horn, buster; ain’t nobody else going to toot it for you.”

  Sally nodded obediently.

  “And refrigeration—none of this central piping stuff, this sulfur gas. Too dangerous—pipe breaks in the walls someplace, floods the whole building.” Bob rapped on the wall. “This cheap fiberboard wouldn’t get past the inspectors these days. Boy, they’re really toughening up. When we built that big twelve-story job in East Oakland, those bastards went over every inch with a fine-tooth comb. Made us rip out all the wiring—every foot of it. We had to put it in the whole way, not just between the fuse boxes and the apartments. Why, this place wouldn’t get by at midnight in a blinding fog.”

  “How much rent do you pay?” Sally asked Ellen.

  Ellen stirred slightly. “Fifty-two fifty.”

  At this, Bob Sorrell let fly. “How many units in this joint? Eighteen? Twenty? Figure a gross intake of at least nine hundred a month. Of course that’s if they’re all rented. That’s the big risk on income property; if five of your units in a building this size stand idle, you lose your take. These guys try for the short haul; they raise the rent, goose a few more bucks from each tenant, and then find themselves stuck with half a dozen empty units. And they wonder why they’re not ahead at the end of the year.”

  “Tell them about that place down in San Jose,” Sally said. “That government housing business we got into.”

  Bob’s face responded with bleak intensity. “Well, the government leased that land from private investors. For a ten-year period, to build low-cost housing for war workers. Now the leases are dead; and the investors want the property back, to build something solid on. They’ve been squawking like hell.”

  “Those wartime units are just cardboard,” Sally confided. “We went around, and the walls are cracking… You can push them over with your foot.”

  Bob continued inflexibly, his voice harsh and loud in the small living room. “I put a bid in for the furniture—all that stuff was government owned; the tenants, mostly Okies and coons from the South, brought nothing but their shoes—if they had shoes. Christ, every one of those buildings is six units—that means six reefers, six stoves, six couches, six double beds, six dressers, so on down the line. Six complete three-room apartments of furniture. The buildings had been condemned, of course. They gave everybody sixty days to get out—then they roped the works off and started ripping. There was one week to get out the furnishings—we put in a what-the-hell bid of seventy-five dollars.”

  “For how many buildings?” Sally murmured. “Wasn’t it something like fifty or sixty?”

  “Fifty-seven.” Bob fooled with his ginger ale glass. “Nobody else bid. We got the furnishings of three hundred and forty-two three-room apartments for seventy-five bucks.” He grinned and shook his bony head, still overcome by it all. “The stuff we didn’t resell on the used-furniture market we used to furnish apartments in our own units. Boy, that was one sweet deal. Why, there was twenty thousand bucks’ worth of furniture there.”

  Breathlessly, cheeks flushed, Sally said: “Bobby, what about that place—you know the one I mean. Wouldn’t they just love it? And Baby could commute from there; isn’t there a train that runs right through there? Or he could get a car.” She turned eagerly to Hadley. “You ought to have a car, anyhow.” Back to her husband she continued: “What about it? It’s just going to waste; and it’s a beautiful little place.”

  “No,” Bob contradicted, with finality. “It wouldn’t go. Sure, it looks okay, but when you get down into the foundations and see what’s holding it up—” He made a disgusted writing-off squirting noise. “No, that’s okay for a short-term investment, but what they want is something permanent.”

  Sally’s red lips blossomed into a disappointed, teasing pout. “I think it’s perfect. Just the right size—one bedroom for them and one for Pete. And we could come visit them all the time; we could shoot across the San Mateo toll bridge in no time at all.” Face glowing, she addressed Ellen and Stuart. “It’s a sweet little house in Mount Eden. Bob’s company held a first deed on it, and the people defaulted. It actually belongs to Bob now, in a, way. I mean, we could put it through the books—you know. Get it for almost nothing. You think you’d like that?”

  Bob raised his voice. “I told you it isn’t any good. It needs a whole new foundation—shoot, the damn thing’s just sitting there on concrete blocks!”

  “Well,” Sally shouted back, “they could fix it up! Jack it off the blocks and lay a solid frame!”

  “There’s no point in getting stuck with a dog,” Bob said, closing the subject. “Don’t get ants in your pants,” he said to Hadley, as if Hadley had said anything. “Just hold your water, buster… You’ll make out better in the long run.” Fixing his cold, baleful eyes on Hadley he continued: “You’d be better off getting yourself a decent car than a cheap house. With a good buggy you could shoot around anywhere you want. Christ, on weekends we buzz up to Sonoma County… On the open highway the Nash makes an easy eighty-five. You’re just breeeezing along.” He made a flowing motion with his hand. “Like riding on a cloud.”

  Sally ducked her head, blond curls swirling in a covert shiver of delicious amusement. “Bob’s a deputy sheriff of Napa County. You saw the red light in the back of the car—and he’s got a siren.”

  After a moment Ellen said tightly: “What gives you the most trouble, Bob…cattle thieves?”

  Bob eyed her humorlessly. “Smart kids hijacking cars,” he answered. He settled back against the couch and launched into an account. “I caught a couple of pachucs fooling around with my Dodge—remember the blue Dodge we had last Christmas? Sally and I were in the movie theater, up in Napa. We came out—it was about one thirty—here were these pachucs standing around.”

  “You know the way they do,” Sally broke in. She hunched over, imitating an adolescent slouch. “Hands in their pockets. Bob had the Dodge all shined up… Oh, it was really beautiful. White sidewalls, outside spots…everyth
ing.”

  “I could spot those pachucs a mile off,” Bob went on relentlessly. “Well, I had a roll of dimes in my hand…just happened to be carrying them.” He grinned sarcastically, crudely. “One of the pachucs walked up to me—he says, ‘How about a ride back into town?’ They were going along with us whether we liked it or not.”

  “Bob hit him right between the eyes,” Sally burst in. “That kid went down like a load of coal. The others just stood there staring at him. None of them moved, they just stood there. We got in the car and Bob backed her around, and off we went.”

  Bob laughed, loud, short, like a bark. “Shoot, when we turned the corner they were dragging the son of a bitch off—his heels was dragging in the gravel; they had him under the armpits. Man, he was out cold. For a week!”

  The room was silent for a time, except for the whirr of insects and the murmur of the TV.

  Stuart Hadley got to his feet slowly, supporting himself against the chair. He looked tired, completely dragged out by the dry heat of the July evening. He moved unsteadily across the room, shuffling with short, uneven stops, his body stiff and unwieldly. Ellen watched him, perturbed.

  “Stu,” she said, “where are you going?”

  Hadley halted at the bedroom door and turned toward her. His face was pale and puffy, his eyes half closed. He blinked, coughed, and turned back to the bedroom door. “See how Pete is,” he murmured.

  “He’s asleep,” Ellen said. “I just looked.”

  Hadley didn’t answer. He disappeared into the bedroom and shut the door quietly after him.

  The bedroom was dark and fairly cool. On the dresser in the corner the electric fan whistled creakily to itself, sending a ragged flutter of air across the room. Hadley stood for a time, accustoming himself to the gloom.

  Peter Hadley was sound asleep in his bassinet. He wheezed and snorted fretfully, his skin sticky with perspiration, spotted red from the heat. He twisted, fretted, turned over on his side and snored on without waking. He was a big healthy baby. He smelled faintly of sour milk as Hadley wandered over and stood gazing down at him.