“Tara-tara!” trumpeted Mickey magnificently from his swaying perch. “Here comes Pete Martin! Tara-tara!”
And up at the house the front door was open and his father was standing there waiting for him.
“Swifty Martin!” he called from his house in a thundering voice, grinning slyly, puffing on his cigar. “Welcome home, Swifty Martin!”
Peter ducked into the house still holding Mickey high on his shoulders, his mother rushed up laughing and crying, “My he-ro! My hero!” as everyone laughed. There stood Francis in a corner with a bemused smile, Joe was pouring out a glassful of wine, the sisters were kissing him, and on the table the great roast turkey lay upturned on a platter surrounded by all the steaming dishes, glassware, silverware, and white linen of a huge holiday dinner.
“Now you’re going to sit down right there, and begin to eat, and eat until you can’t eat another mouthful!” the father was shouting excitedly. “Come on, take off that big sweater, make yourself at home! Joe, bring over that glass of wine!”
“Give him a chance to wash up first!”
“Wash up! Go right now and wash up! Here’s your wine! Anything you want is yours.” The father was out of his wits with joy and celebration. “Here’s a cigar, by God! Take this cigar and smoke it—”
“My goodness!” the women cried.
“He’s a man, ain’t he? He can smoke a cigar, dammit! Besides he doesn’t have to train any more till he gets to college now. Come on there, All-America, show ’em what you can do.”
Peter stood in the middle of the room, holding the cigar and the glass of wine, laughing and bending over with laughter with all the others.
“Let’s eat! It’s time to eat!” yelled the father. “Rosey, bring out the gravy, bring out that other bottle of wine, bring out my whiskey. Oh, but you shoulda heard the twelve o’clock news on the radio! If I ever meet the dirty rat who wrote the news!—”
“What’s the matter?”
“He said that when you caught the pass you romped—mind you, you romped. Listen, you smashed for that touchdown! They’re trying to give all the glory to the guy who threw you that measly little pass in mid-field, they’re trying to say that you just caught the pass and danced over safe and sound, and by God—if I ever—I’ll wring his scrawny neck! I never saw such a hard-won touchdown in all my life! I never saw anybody get hit so many times and stay on his feet so long! I never did see anybody run so beautifully and so strongly, and now they’re going to spread this bull around that you just danced around and romped over the goal after catching a pass! This is the crummiest town anyway!”
“Take it easy, Pa!”
“Well, dammit, I’m mad! I’m mad enough to break somebody’s neck, and I’m gonna break that radio announcer’s neck this week!”
“Dinner’s ready!” called the women from the dining room.
“Everything is yours, Petey, my boy,” cried the father with sudden tears in his eyes. “Everything in this house and in my possession is yours. Sit down here with your family and eat, my son, eat your fill. It’s a day for celebration and happiness, it’s a rare day, my boy, a rare day in this kind of world. Believe me, boy, you’ll realize what I mean someday—”
“Now you’re not going to start making speeches!” cried Rosey, incredulously.
“I can’t help it, dammit, I feel—well, I don’t know how to say it, I just feel—happy and sad! This is my own boy, today he showed the world what he could do, I’m proud of him and I don’t care who knows it! I don’t care if I do make a fool of myself! He’s my boy, that’s all there is to it!”
“Well, don’t start crying about it!” said the mother. “Everybody’s hungry and it’s time to eat. Ruthey,” she said in a low voice aside, “what kind of a highball did you mix your father?”
“If I feel like crying, dammit, I’m gonna cry!” shouted the old man. “But I’m not going to cry! Here, here, everybody sit down and eat! Sit the hero over there by his mother, let her cry over him, I’m all through. All I’m gonna do now is eat! Then I’ll go out and wring that announcer’s neck!”
“Oh, boy, what a turkey!” spoke up Peter, holding his knife and fork in his fists. “Let me at it! I was thinking about it all morning.”
“If you’re a hero, Petey boy, it’s because your mother feeds you like a horse,” said the old man sadly. “Here, what the hell, it’s Thanksgiving today, isn’t it? Let’s have a little toast. We’re not Pilgrims and we’re not religious in the way they used to be, but at least we can have a little toast. Give the kids some wine, Marge; let’s all drink a toast—”
And the kids were giggling under the table.
“This is a good, good day—this is a rare day. You’ll all understand what I mean someday. You forgot Francis there, give him a glass of wine, give my boy a glass of wine. They did this a couple of hundred years ago right here in New England, they rejoiced, we’ll rejoice. Here! a toast to our boy, Pete, and to the whole family. Everybody drink up!
“Now!” he concluded. “Everybody eat! I’m ranting on like an old fool. Don’t pay no attention to me, eat!”
2
[1]
At twenty young Joe was the victim of the early fatalism that says: “What’s the use anyway? Who cares what happens!” That frame of mind proceeds on towards even greater excesses in the name of despair, while all the time it is only the sap of youth running over, running wild.
With his brother Peter riding high on the wave of marvelous success, and his brother Francis having completed high school and making ready to go to college—while Joe himself had quit school impatiently to get jobs—and with things moving on, Joe now found himself alone and insignificant in his own eyes. He was the eldest son and it began to occur to him that maybe he was the shiftless son, too.
A kind of lyrical ecstasy possesses certain young Americans in the springtime, a feeling of not belonging in any one place or in any one moment, a wild restless longing to be elsewhere, everywhere, right now! The air is balmy and springlike, redolent with so many musics from everywhere, everything seems to describe dizzy circles, there are illimitable thoughts of long spaces and long voyages, it is a strange, maddening but still as yet ecstatic feeling of irresponsible wanderlust of the soul, responding to everything at the moment—“I don’t give a damn!”
Joe was in just the mood to come across Paul Hathaway. In his new job driving for a big company that ran trucks on the four-hundred-mile run between Boston and Baltimore, he was assigned as a junior driver and his senior partner turned out to be this man.
Paul Hathaway had been driving trucks for fifteen years during the course of a hectic whiskey-drinking life and three wives. On their first trip south in the huge aluminum-bright truck-trailer, down U. S. highway No. 1, Joe got to know Paul well. He was a fierce and lonely man, about thirty-five years old, with a swarthy pockmarked countenance, dark blazing eyes, and an angry brooding manner. He always held a cigar butt clamped in his teeth as he sat high in the cab driving. He spoke very little, for the most part listening to Joe’s interminable talk and laughter with a sullen discontented scowl. But when they stopped at a diner for food, he would never let Joe pay the bill, got very angry about it if Joe insisted and covered him with a contemptuous look.
“Ah, what a lousy rotten life!” Paul Hathaway would always say, his dark eyes burning with hate and loneliness. Young Joe began to like him very much, to look upon him as a man with a real heart and a torn aching sense of despair, which appealed to him deeply.
They had made several trips together down to Baltimore and spent time in the Pratt Street saloons there, drinking, and talking, dancing with the women, reeling drunkenly down dark streets at dawn and waking up next day in some flophouse near the waterfront. Back in Boston the same thing began all over again: they staggered around South Boston or Charlestown, slept anywhere they could, returning home to Galloway next day dirty and bleary and disgusted.
Paul Hathaway was married to a shrewish worthless woman who, the
moment he walked in the door, was on his neck with a thousand curses and maledictions, complaints, whining tears, and shriekings of disgust. She always ended up throwing things at him. They lived in a shabby old rooming-house over a canal in the Galloway mill district.
Through some drunken miscalculation Joe happened to sleep in Paul’s rooms one night after a big binge that began in South Boston and ended on Rooney Street in Galloway. He woke up in terror. There was such a noise and furor coming from Paul’s bedroom, such shriekings and cries and the smash of glass, that he thought the man was beating his wife to death. Hurrying over to look in, he was amazed to see Paul lying on the bed calmly smoking a cigarette and contemplating the ceiling, while his wife raved in a tantrum, throwing objects on the floor and pointing her finger at him in trembling rages.
“Everybody’s talking about me, you no good basted, and you know damn well why! They see you come home drunk, they say here comes Minnie Hathaway’s drunk husband again. When you come home, which ain’t often, you no good rat! And here I sit waiting for you, I haven’t got enough money to buy a dress, I have to wait here while you go drinkin’ and whorin’ all over the country. It’s bad enough in your own hometown, you have to go out with out-of-town whores! Someday I’m gonna buy a gun and shoot you dead! Someday I’ll just leave and never come back! Don’t laugh, I can take care of myself, I can get a job and be happy again, be young like I used to be! I don’t need you, you lousy bum!”
Paul only turned his dark, tortured face to the boy in the doorway and said in his gruff voice: “Good morning, Joe.”
And outside the dirty snow was melting in the streets, the canal whirled by floating refuse of March, the mill whistles blew, all was defeat and squalor and empty beer bottles in the hallway.
“On top of that you have to bring home all your damn drinkin’ bum friends and dirty up my home. You have no consideration for me. You go drinkin’ and whorin’ right here on Rooney Street while I sit here with nothing to do, thinkin’ you’re out working and making money for our home, and all the time there you are three-four doors away having the gad-damnedest time of your life while I sit here, sit here, sit here!” And she screeched in a seizure of ungovernable fury.
Paul Hathaway withdrew a handful of bills from his wallet and threw them at her feet, and reached over to the table by the bed and helped himself to another drink of whiskey, all in pro-foundest silence and calm.
Joe hurried out of the house feeling ashamed and terrible, but after a while choking with glee at the thought of old Paul lying there taking it all so calmly and drinking his whiskey. He never went back to Paul’s home but thereafter they were closer friends than ever. Several weeks later, when Joe was driving back through Maryland, he stopped the truck along the highway and turned to Paul.
“Man, I’d like to know what I’m doing driving this truck. Just look out there: a highway, lights, a big moon above, a breeze blowing over the fields. Hear the music from that diner? See these cars going by full of beautiful women? Back and forth, back and forth, from Boston to here, and what do we get for it? All we do is drive and drive, get more tired all the time, every drink we take makes us worse. No kidding, that’s the way I feel right now!”
“Aff,” said Paul, waving a contemptuous hand, “I been feeling like that all my life.”
“It’s a crazy world,” said Joe.
“It’s a lousy rotten life!” corrected Paul. “You saw my wife Minnie, didn’t you? You saw what kind of a loudmouthed fleabag she is! Well, that was my third wife and every single damn one of them was just like her! All three!”
Joe scratched his head, grinning.
“That’s women for you!” shouted Paul. “They’re all alike, I never did meet one who had any sense, I never will! The only one who was any good, maybe, was my first wife. Jeanie. She’s in Pittsburgh now. But even she was a loudmouthed nagging goat. I always tell them to go do their gad-dam washing, that’s all they’re good for!”
“So here we are, sitting in this truck,” went on Joe dreamily, “tied to it like a couple of slaves, and look at those snazzy cars go by full of beautiful women. Wham!”
Paul waved a contemptuous hand and looked away.
“I could take this big baby and drive it right out to California,” cried Joe triumphantly, punching the wheel of the truck. “Just think of it, man! We’d go in swimming at one of those big beaches, Malibu or whatever they call it, just for a swim, that’s all, drive three thousand miles just for a swim.”
“You’re crazy,” said the dark Paul, looking away.
“Yeah! Drive through the desert, through Texas, Arizona, stop off for a drink now and then, pick up the broads, go swimming, drive on out to the coast! Can you see it?”
Then they were silent in the truck, the windows open to the soft Spring night with all its odors of loamy fields and flowers and the sharp pungent smell of exhaust fumes on the highway, and the heat of the highway itself cooling under the stars, and the fried-food smells floating in the air from all the places. And Joe was full of crazy music and desire and suppressed wild shouting, he was smoking on his cigarette with a desperate restless anguish; while Paul sat there glowering straight ahead, mumbling to himself, cursing and brooding.
“I’ll tell you something,” Paul now said finally, angrily. “My wife left me this week. I didn’t tell you but she left me last Thursday.”
“Where’d she go?”
“How the hell should I know!” he shouted bitterly. “She just left, that’s all!” And he looked at Joe with a confused abject wildness.
“What’re you gonna do?”
“I dunno what I’m gonna do,” muttered Paul quietly.
“You mean you miss her?” shouted Joe incredulously. “Brother, I don’t want to say anything, but she was a wild woman.”
“She was a wild woman,” echoed Paul quietly, “but she was a woman, she was my wife. My third wife. I dunno, maybe I’m crazy. I did tell you about Jeanie in Pittsburgh?”
“Your first wife, or was it your second?”
“Don’t be a sarcastic young punk, it don’t fit you! Yeah, my first wife.”
“What about her?” demanded Joe with mounting glee.
Paul, for an answer, reached into the cab compartment and pulled out a quart of whiskey and drank in grave silence.
Joe once more was full of wild mute desires.
“Paul, let’s do something! Dammit, I want to do something, I don’t know what!”
“Ah, you’re crazy.”
More silence—and Paul continued to drain the bottle in fierce lonely reveries. Joe got out of the truck and began throwing rocks over the fields, as far as he could throw, way across the moonlit fields.
“We dumped the load in Baltimore, didn’t we?” said Paul suddenly from the cab. “We dumped the junk on Pratt Street. We’re going back to Boston empty, ain’t we?”
“Yeah, what about it?” cried Joe, grinning.
“I mean we ain’t hijackers, are we?”
“What’re you talking about!” shouted Joe with laughter.
“Ah!” said Paul, and he turned away and drank some more. But suddenly he got out of the cab and took Joe by the arm. “Listen!” he said angrily. “You think I’m drunk?”
“Damn near it!”
“That’s beside the point. Look, let’s take off!”
“Take off?”
“Take off, gad-damn you, take off!” he yelled. “Can’t you speak English? Let’s take off in the truck and go to Pittsburgh!! I want to see my wife Jeanie—”
“Jeanie? You said she was your first wife!”
“She’s still my wife, damn you!”
“What do you mean?”
“Aff!” cried Paul bitterly. “I got three wives and I never divorced! You understand?”
“Ain’t that bigamy or something?” cried Joe gleefully.
“Who gives a damn what it is! All I know is I got three wives and I never divorced. I want to go see the one in Pittsburgh, right now, thi
s minute. Let’s take off! Joe, I’m a fool for my wives! I’d do anything for them. I want to give Jeanie some money, I just want to see her, damn you! You don’t understand, you’re just a young punk.”
Without a word Joe jumped up in the truck and started the motor with a roaring blast. “Come on!” he yelled jubilantly. “Let’s go!”
“Turn the sonofabitch around!” shouted Paul, beside himself with excitement now. “We gotta go back to Route 74 and up to Harrisburg and hit the Turnpike west! We’ll be in Pittsburgh long before morning! Turn him around!”
Joe flung the huge truck-trailer around in an arc and sent it roaring back down the highway in breakneck speed. And they were off.
And thus, in this manner, without a second’s forethought, Joe and his melancholy wild friend began a mad voyage that was to take them a thousand miles up and down the seaboard and into the middle west, in a truck which was now technically a stolen truck. All of it was done without a moment’s reflection and when they would remember it later on they would only recall the wild rushing speed of the truck, the moon meadows along the highway, the shouting and laughter in the high cab, the lunch diners along the road, the music and the madness of the Spring night and the American spaces. They never did find Jeanie in Pittsburgh.
Four days later they arrived back in Boston. They drove into the big garages on Atlantic Avenue at nine o’clock in the morning and got down wearily from the high cab, while men rushed up wanting to know what had happened, where they’d been, what was the idea, what was going on here!
And Paul only said: “You guys give me a pain in the neck.”
That is what he said, despite the fact that they were in trouble up to their necks. At this casual and matter-of-fact remark, Joe burst out into an uncontrollable whoop of laughter right in the face of the irate company official himself. He and Paul looked at each other with that furtive solemn look of two men who have gone through things together with the same idea, the same madness, known each other perfectly through a rout of days and nights, and therefore don’t really care what other men think or say about them.