2
ON a black, sultry night in early summer Biff Brannon stood behind the cash register of the New York Cafe. It was twelve o’clock. Outside the street lights had already been turned off, so that the light from the cafe made a sharp, yellow rectangle on the sidewalk. The street was deserted, but inside the cafe there were half a dozen customers drinking beer or Santa Lucia wine or whiskey. Biff waited stolidly, his elbow resting on the counter and his thumb mashing the tip of his long nose. His eyes were intent. He watched especially a short, squat man in overalls who had become drunk and boisterous. Now and then his gaze passed on to the mute who sat by himself at one of the middle tables, or to others of the customers before the counter. But he always turned back to the drunk in overalls. The hour grew later and Biff continued to wait silently behind the counter. Then at last he gave the restaurant a final survey and went toward the door at the back which led upstairs.
Quietly he entered the room at the top of the stairs. It was dark inside and he walked with caution. After he had gone a few paces his toe struck something hard and he reached down and felt for the handle of a suitcase on the floor. He had only been in the room a few seconds and was about to leave when the light was turned on.
Alice sat up in the rumpled bed and looked at him. ‘What you doing with that suitcase?’ she asked. ‘Can’t you get rid of that lunatic without giving him back what he’s already drunk up?’
‘Wake up and go down yourself. Call the cop and let him get soused on the chain gang with cornbread and peas. Go to it, Misses Brannon.’
‘I will all right if he’s down there tomorrow. But you leave that bag alone. It don’t belong to that sponger any more.’
‘I know spongers, and Blount’s not one,’ Biff said. ’Myself--I don’t know so well. But I’m not that kind of a thief.’
Calmly Biff put down the suitcase on the steps outside.
The air was not so stale and sultry in the room as it was downstairs. He decided to stay for a short while and douse his face with cold water before going back.
‘I told you already what I’ll do if you don’t get rid of that fellow for good tonight. In the daytime he takes them naps at the back, and then at night you feed him dinners and beer. For a week now he hasn’t paid one cent. And all his wild talking and carrying-on will ruin any decent trade.’
‘You don’t know people and you don’t know real business,’ Biff said. ‘The fellow in question first came in here twelve days ago and he was a stranger in the town. The first week he gave us twenty dollars’ worth of trade. Twenty at the minimum.’
‘And since then on credit,’ Alice said. ‘Five days on credit, and so drunk it’s a disgrace to the business. And besides, he’s nothing but a bum and a freak.’
‘I like freaks,’ Biff said.
‘I reckon you do! I just reckon you certainly ought to, Mister Brannon--being as you’re one yourself.’
He rubbed his bluish chin and paid her no attention. For the first fifteen years of their married life they had called each other just plain Biff and Alice. Then in one of their quarrels they had begun calling each other Mister and Misses, and since then they had never made it up enough to change it.
Tm just warning you he’d better not be there when I come down tomorrow.’
Biff went into the bathroom, and after he had bathed his face he decided that he would have time for a shave. His beard was black and heavy as though it had grown for three days. He stood before the mirror and rubbed his cheek meditatively. He was sorry he had talked to Alice. With her, silence was better.
Being around that woman always made him different from his real self. It made him tough and small and common as she was. Biff’s eyes were cold and staring, half-concealed by the cynical droop of his eyelids. On the fifth finger of his calloused hand there was a woman’s wedding ring. The door was open behind him, and in the mirror he could see Alice lying in the bed.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘The trouble with you is that you don’t have any real kindness. Not but one woman I’ve ever known had this real kindness I’m talking about’
‘Well, I’ve known you to do things no man in this world would be proud of. I’ve known you to--’
‘Or maybe it’s curiosity I mean. You don’t ever see or notice anything important that goes on. You never watch and think and try to figure anything out. Maybe that’s the biggest difference between you and me, after all.’
Alice was almost asleep again, and through the mirror he watched her with detachment. There was no distinctive point about her on which he could fasten his attention, and his gaze glided from her pale brown hair to the stumpy outline of her feet beneath the cover. The soft curves of her face led to the roundness of her hips and thighs. When he was away from her there was no one feature that stood out in his mind and he remembered her as a complete, unbroken figure.
‘The enjoyment of a spectacle is something you have never known,’ he said.
Her voice was tired. ‘That fellow downstairs is a spectacle, all right, and a circus too. But I’m through putting up with him.’
‘Hell, the man don’t mean anything to me. He’s no relative or buddy of mine. But you don’t know what it is to store up a whole lot of details and then come upon something real.’ He turned on the hot water and quickly began to shave.
It was the morning of May 15, yes, that Jake Blount had come in. He had noticed him immediately and watched. The man was short, with heavy shoulders like beams. He had a small, ragged mustache, and beneath this his lower lip looked as though it had been stung by a wasp. There were many things about the fellow that seemed contrary. His head was very large and well-shaped, but his neck was soft and slender as a boy’s. The mustache looked false, as if it had been stuck on for a costume party and would fall off if he talked too fast. It made him seem almost middle-aged, although his face with its high, smooth forehead and wide-open eyes was young. His hands were huge, stained, and calloused, and he was dressed in a cheap white-linen suit. There was something very funny about the man, yet at the same time another feeling would not let you laugh.
He ordered a pint of liquor and drank it straight in half an hour. Then he sat at one of the booths and ate a big chicken dinner. Later he read a book and drank beer. That was the beginning. And although Biff had noticed Blount very carefully he would never have guessed about the crazy things that happened later. Never had he seen a man change so many times in twelve days. Never had he seen a fellow drink so much, stay drunk so long.
Biff pushed up the end of his nose with his thumb and shaved his upper lip. He was finished and his face seemed cooler.
Alice was asleep when he went through the bedroom on the way downstairs.
The suitcase was heavy. He carried it to the front of the restaurant, behind the cash register, where he usually stood each evening. Methodically he glanced around the place. A few customers had left and the room was not so crowded, but the set-up was the same. The deaf-mute still drank coffee by himself at one of the middle tables. The drunk had not stopped talking. He was not addressing anyone around him in particular, nor was anyone listening. When he had come into the place that evening he wore those blue overalls instead of the filthy linen suit he had been wearing the twelve days. His socks were gone and his ankles were scratched and caked with mud.
Alertly Biff picked up fragments of his monologue. The fellow seemed to be talking some queer kind of politics again.
Last night he had been talking about places he had been--about Texas and Oklahoma and the Carolinas. Once he had got on the subject of cat-houses, and afterward his jokes got so raw he had to be hushed up with beer. But most of the time nobody was sure just what he was saying. Talk-talk-talk.
The words came out of his throat like a cataract. And the thing was that the accent he used was always changing, the kinds of words he used. Sometimes he talked like a linthead and sometimes nice a professor. He would use words a foot long and then slip up on his grammar. It was
hard to tell what kind of folks he had or what part of the country he was from. He was always changing. Thoughtfully Biff fondled the tip of his nose. There was no connection. Yet connection usually went with brains. This man had a good mind, all right, but he went from one thing to another without any reason behind it at all.
He was like a man thrown off his track by something.
Biff leaned his weight on the counter and began to peruse the evening newspaper. The headlines told of a decision by the Board of Aldermen, after four months’ deliberation, that the local budget could not afford traffic lights at certain dangerous intersections of the town. The left column reported on the war in the Orient. Biff read them both with equal attention. As his eyes followed the print the rest of his senses were on the alert to the various commotions that went on around him. When he had finished the articles he still stared down at the newspaper with his eyes half-closed. He felt nervous. The fellow was a problem, and before morning he would have to make some sort of settlement with him. Also, he felt without knowing why that something of importance would happen tonight. The fellow could not keep on forever.
Biff sensed that someone was standing in the entrance and he raised his eyes quickly. A gangling, towheaded youngster, a girl of about twelve, stood looking in the doorway. She was dressed in khaki shorts, a blue shirt, and tennis shoes--so that at first glance she was like a very young boy. Biff pushed aside the paper when he saw her, and smiled when she came up to him.
‘Hello, Mick. Been to the Girl Scouts?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t belong to them.’
From the corner of his eye he noticed that the drunk slammed his fist down on a table and turned away from the men to whom he had been talking. Biffs voice roughened as he spoke to the youngster before him.
‘Your folks know you’re out after midnight?’
‘It’s O.K. There’s a gang of kids playing out late on our block tonight.’
He had never seen her come into the place with anyone her own age. Several years ago she had always tagged behind her older brother. The Kellys were a good-sized family in numbers. Later she would come in pulling a couple of snotty babies in a wagon. But if she wasn’t nursing or trying to keep up with the bigger ones, she was by herself. Now the kid stood there seeming not to be able to make up her mind what she wanted. She kept pushing back her damp, whitish hair with the palm of her hand.
‘I’d like a pack of cigarettes, please. The cheapest kind’.
Biff started to speak, hesitated, and then reached his IS hand inside the counter. Mick brought out a handkerchief and began untying the knot in the corner where she kept her money. As she gave the knot a jerk the change clattered to the floor and rolled toward Blount, who stood muttering to himself. For a moment he stared in a daze at the coins, but before the kid could go after them he squatted down with concentration and picked up the money. He walked heavily to the counter and stood jiggling the two pennies, the nickel, and the dime in his palm.
‘Seventeen cents for cigarettes now?’
Biff waited, and Mick looked from one of them to the other.
The drunk stacked the money into a little pile on the counter, still protecting it with his big, dirty hand. Slowly he picked up one penny and flipped it down.
‘Five mills for the crackers who grew the weed and five for the dupes who rolled it,’ he said. ‘A cent for you, Biff.’ Then he tried to focus his eyes so that he could read the mottoes on the nickel and dime. He kept fingering the two coins and moving them around in a circle. At last he pushed them away. ‘And that’s a humble homage to liberty. To democracy and tyranny.
‘To freedom and piracy.’
Calmly Biff picked up the money and rang it into the till.
Mick looked as though she wanted to hang around awhile. She took in the drunk with one long gaze, and then she turned her eyes to the middle of the room where the mute sat at his table alone. After a moment Blount also glanced now and then in the same direction. The mute sat silently over his glass of beer, idly drawing on the table with the end of a burnt matchstick.
Jake Blount was the first to speak. ‘It’s funny, but I been seeing that fellow in my sleep for the past three or four nights. He won’t leave me alone. If you ever noticed, he never seems to say anything.’
It was seldom that Biff ever discussed one customer with another. ‘No, he don’t,’ he answered noncommittally.
‘It’s funny.’
Mick shifted her weight from one foot to the other and fitted the package of cigarettes into the pocket of her shorts. ‘It’s not funny if you know anything about him,’ she said. ‘Mister Singer lives with us. He rooms in our house.’
‘Is that so?’ Biff asked. ‘I declare--I didn’t know that’
Mick walked toward the door and answered him without looking around. ‘Sure. He’s been with us three months now.’
Biff unrolled his shirt-sleeves and then folded them up carefully again. He did not take his eyes from Mick as she left the restaurant. And even after she had been gone several minutes he still fumbled with his shirt-sleeves and stared at the empty doorway. Then he locked his arms across his chest and turned back to the drunk again.
Blount leaned heavily on the counter. His brown eyes were wet-looking and wide open with a dazed expression. He needed a bath so badly that he stank like a goat. There were dirt beads on his sweaty neck and an oil stain on his face. His lips were thick and red and his brown hair was matted on his forehead. His overalls were too short in the body and he kept pulling at the crotch of them.
‘Man, you ought to know better,’ Biff said finally. ‘You can’t go around like this. Why, I’m surprised you haven’t been picked up for vagrancy. You ought to sober up. You need washing and your hair needs cutting. Motherogod! You’re not fit to walk around amongst people.’
Blount scowled and bit his lower lip.
‘Now, don’t take offense and get your dander up. Do what I tell you. Go back in the kitchen and tell the colored boy to give you a big pan of hot water. Tell Willie to give you a towel and plenty of soap and wash yourself good. Then eat you some milk toast and open up your suitcase and put you on a clean shirt and a pair of britches that fit you. Then tomorrow you can start doing whatever you’re going to do and working wherever you mean to work and get straightened out.’
‘You know what you can do,’ Blount said drunkenly. ‘You can just--’
‘All right,’ Biff said very quietly. ‘No, I can’t Now you just behave yourself.’
Biff went to the end of the counter and returned with two glasses of draught beer. The drunk picked up his glass so clumsily that beer slopped down on his hands and messed the counter. Biff sipped his portion with careful relish. He regarded Blount steadily with half-closed eyes. Blount was not a freak, although when you first saw him he gave you that impression. It was like something was deformed about him--but when you looked at him closely each part of him was normal and as it ought to be. Therefore if this difference was not in the body it was probably in the mind. He was like a man who had served a term in prison or had been to Harvard College or had lived for a long time with foreigners in South America. He was like a person who had been somewhere that other people are not likely to go or had done something that others are not apt to do.
Biff cocked his head to one side and said, ‘Where are you from?’
‘Nowhere.’
‘Now, you have to be born somewhere. North Carolina --Tennessee--Alabama--some place.’
Blount’s eyes were dreamy and unfocused. ‘Carolina,’ he said.
‘I can tell you’ve been around,’ Biff hinted delicately.
But the drunk was not listening. He had turned from the counter and was staring out at the dark, empty street. After a moment he walked to the door with loose, uncertain steps.
‘Adios,’ he called back.
Biff was alone again and he gave the restaurant one of his quick, thorough surveys. It was past one
in the morning, and there were only four or five customers in the room. The mute still sat by himself at the middle table. Biff stared at him idly and shook the few remaining drops of beer around in the bottom of his glass. Then he finished his drink in one slow swallow and went back to the newspaper spread out on the counter.
This time he could not keep his mind on the words before him.
He remembered Mick. He wondered if he should have sold her the pack of cigarettes and if it were really harmful for kids to smoke. He thought of the way Mick narrowed her eyes and pushed back the bangs of her hair with the palm of her hand.
He thought of her hoarse, boyish voice and of her habit of hitching up her khaki shorts and swaggering like a cowboy in the picture show. A feeling of tenderness came in him. He was uneasy.
Restlessly Biff turned his attention to Singer. The mute sat with his hands in his pockets and the half-finished glass of beer before him had become warm and stagnant. He would offer to treat Singer to a slug of whiskey before he left.
What he had said to Alice was true--he did like freaks. He had a special friendly feeling for sick people and cripples.
Whenever somebody with a harelip or T.B. came into the place he would set him up to beer. Or if the customer were a hunchback or a bad cripple, then it would be whiskey on the house. There was one fellow who had had his peter and his left leg blown off in a boiler explosion, and whenever he came to town there was a free pint waiting for him. And if Singer were a drinking kind of man he could get liquor at half price any time he wanted it. Biff nodded to himself. Then neatly he folded his newspaper and put it under the counter along with several others. At the end of the week he would take them all back to the storeroom behind the kitchen, where he kept a complete file of the evening newspapers that dated back without a break for twenty-one years.