“No, ma’am, not since my voice changed.”
She continued to nod amiably at him. “I figured that. Well, what are you doing over in this neck of the woods?” She cocked her head at Bigelow and said: “You sure didn’t come this far for a bargain.”
Bigelow, perhaps jealous at the loss of attention, said quickly: “He’s my delivery boy.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Ralph.
“Your dad’s business going under, so he put you out to work?” asked Mrs. Hugel.
The edge of nastiness probably meant nothing. Ralph was aware that women of her age were often sarcastic for no apparent reason; it seemed to go with their hats and what was called middle-aged spread.
“No, ma’am. I always have some kind of job.”
“It’s good for a boy to make his own spending money, I think,” she said, as if in argument. “My Clyde started his paper route when he was twelve. Some said, my, that’s child labor, but he never suffered for it and by time he was eighteen he had a hundred and eleven dollars in the bank, and that ain’t hay. He learned the value of money, I say.”
“He still bookkeeping at the pencil factory?” Ralph asked politely.
“He certainly is,” said Mrs. Hugel, again with the cryptic defiance, which may have been just a personal quirk of style. She turned to Bigelow and said belligerently: “Gimme a bunch of your bananas and try to include a few that ain’t all black.”
Bigelow winked at her. “Sure thing, Toots.”
“And just keep a civil tongue in your head.”
When Mrs. Hugel had left, Bigelow led Ralph to the cellar and directed him to bring certain cartons upstairs. Ralph discreetly looked for and saw the window he had busted Saturday night. It was masked with a piece of cardboard. The broken glass had been taken away.
“Whenever you ain’t got no deliveries to go on,” said the grocer, “you make yourself useful down here. I don’t wanna see you standing around with your finger up your rear end.” He leered at Ralph. “You got muscle enough to handle these babies?” He lifted a carton of Carnation Milk and thrust it at Ralph, who taking a deep breath managed to accept it without plunging to his knees, though it was so heavy that he did not dare speak in answer lest his chin collapse.
Bigelow said, chuckling: “You get ruptured, it ain’t my responsibility.” In a bit of grandstanding he seized two of the cartons for himself and clumped up the stairs. Like so many fat men he was extremely strong, yet Ralph believed that someone as tall and wide, but without the belly, could probably take him.
Had Ralph been alone he might have rested the box against the stair railing about halfway up—he was getting old and out of condition—but knowing that unless he followed hard upon Bigelow’s heels the grocer would needle him, he climbed onward, trying the method of breath control advanced in the pamphlet he had bought by mail on The Secrets of Oriental Self-Defense, the only useful technique explained therein (unless you were attacked by an adversary armed with a Samurai sword or a sharpened bamboo stave). Before long he sensed that he was turning purple, but two steps from the top he got a psychological boost from noticing that Bigelow’s pace had slowed considerably.
Emerging into the store, Bigelow coughed and lowered his burdens, really dropped them, in the middle of the floor. In relief Ralph placed his carton atop the other two. He was adjacent to the meat department. Working with a cleaver at the butcher’s block was a much younger man than Bigelow. He had sandy hair and wore a bloodstained apron, also a dirty-white overseas cap.
He gave Ralph a merry grin and said: “Hi, Small Change. Your breath is coming in short pants.” He crashed his cleaver into a hunk of meat, and from the latter fell a clean pork chop, suddenly taking form as it were; a neat thing to see.
Ralph immediately took to this friendly, deft fellow. After he caught his breath he said: “I’m working here now after school.”
“I got eyes,” the butcher said in his jolly-snotty way. “What happened to Horse? He flush himself down the kibo?” He cut two more chops and added them to the first, weighed the trio, tore a length of brown paper from the roll mounted on the counter, wrapped them, and tied the parcel with string from a ball on a spindle, going through this series in what seemed one continuous motion, finally slapping the package down and writing the price upon it with a black crayon.
“Catch,” he cried and tossed the parcel at Ralph, who luckily was far enough away to react efficiently before it reached him. “Miz Slingerland, two twenty-eight Randolph. Know the neighborhood?”
“I can find it,” said Ralph. “Should I go right now?”
“Well, I think so,” the butcher said, winking, “unless you want to go in the icebox and beat your dummy.” He was a real joker.
Before Ralph got to the door Bigelow called to him: “Hey, where you headed? C’mere. You always check, see, if there’s other stuff to go.” He threw some final items in a big bag already quite full and pushed it at Ralph. “Hummel, one ninety-four Constance.” He claimed from behind his ear the pencil that he wore there and handed it over. “Write-um down until you got-um memorized. That Hauser used to get-um all messed up.” He put out his hand. “And gimme that new pencil back. You get yourself a stub from Red.” He pointed to the meat department. Ralph started back the aisle, but Bigelow said: “Not now. When you come back. Get going and step on it. You got a bike I hope.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then you oughta be fast. I don’t pay you to stop and jaw with nobody or watch them put out a fire. Hauser would go around the corner and stay an hour. He wadn’t worth a fart in a windstorm. Keep your nose clean and you’ll do awright.” Bigelow suddenly and for the first time smiled: he wasn’t the world’s worst.
“Sure thing.”
The grocer returned to his habitual ill humor. “Get going then, for Pete’s sake.”
When Ralph returned from these deliveries, which owing to his unfamiliarity with the neighborhood took him longer than he had anticipated, Bigelow, waiting on several customers at once, took time to cock an eye at the wall clock and grumble, then pointed to two big sacks and a cardboard carton. These turned out to be loaded to capacity with cans and clinking bottles and displayed crayoned addresses. They were too much for the front basket on Ralph’s bike, and he had not yet bought the rear one suggested by Hauser, because he had not known whether he would get the job.
Eventually he balanced the carton across the rim of the basket—it was too large to fit within—and straddling the frame of the bicycle, holding a bag in the crook of each elbow, clutching the handlebars, he walked the vehicle to the first address, passing en route two kids he knew, who derided him.
His satisfaction in having dealt successfully with the problem now went out of memory: he realized he must cut a preposterous figure and could only hope he met no attractive girls before he had got rid of his load. His luck held in that respect, though failing him in another. At the next corner he met that Margie, who came along the intersecting street.
She proceeded to exploit her unusual opportunity. “You just let me,” she said triumphantly, and wrested the bag from his left elbow, which was too weary to resist. She hugged it ardently against the flat chest of her mud-brown blouse.
“You’re gonna get it if there’re eggs in there,” Ralph said disagreeably, feeling against his will an enormous easing of the muscles of his free arm. However, he was off center now, and had to correct quickly so as not to favor his right side, on which he held yet another sack. This movement unsettled the so carefully placed carton on the basket: it began to slide leftwards.
“You sap!” he cried at Margie, leaned over the handlebars to arrest the box, and inadvertently turned the front wheel to the wrong side. The heavy carton slid off the tilted basket, past his grasping fingers, and hit the sidewalk with a heart-and bottle-breaking sound. He watched Coke foam on the pavement, and then the slower oleaginous formation of spilled cream. The ketchup bottle was also broken, but its torpid contents did not escape the vessel,
remaining an integral mass of red paste and glass.
He assailed the buttinsky. “Goddam, you stupid twerp! Lookit that.”
Margie did as ordered, water appearing behind her lenses, which, Ralph also noticed, were dirty.
Her thin lips quivering in shame, she said: “I’ll pay the damages.” She wept silently but made snuffling noises when the tears reached her nostrils. Actually her nose was well shaped, and its skin was nice too, without blackheads or enlarged pores. The pimples on her cheeks were really the ruins of old ones, pale-violet blemishes. Brushing her hair once in a while would help. It looked clean enough but ratty.
“Here, hold this bike,” Ralph ordered, gave her the remaining bag as well, climbed out of the frame, and knelt to see what he could do about the mess. Only the bottles he had seen from above were smashed. Two other Cokes had survived. A can of tomatoes was dented, a loaf of Taystee Bread bent. Cream covered one end of a package of meat.
“Gimme your handkerchief if you’ve got one.”
Behind the bags she said: “I don’t.” The bike was leaning against her hip and looked unreliable. Ralph rose and took it to a telephone pole; its backstand was broken.
“You can put the sacks down now if you want,” said he. Luckily he kept his eye on her. “No, not in that dog dirt!”
She came away from the curb. “I don’t mind holding them, really.”
He got out his own handkerchief, which had stayed fresh and pressed all day, and cleaned the sheen of cream from the meat parcel. He balled the soiled cloth and returned it to his rear pocket. He put the carton right side up and agitated it so that the contents would settle. Whoever opened those Cokes during the next hour would spatter their ceiling. He carried the box to the bicycle.
Margie tearfully stared between the bags at the sidewalk. “I insist on paying for the damages.”
With what? She carried no purse and had no visible pockets in her clothes. However, Ralph did not ask this obvious question. No use making a jerk feel worse; the result would be more jerkiness.
“Tell you what you could do,” said he. “You could go home and get a broom and dustpan and clean this mess up.”
“I don’t live near here.” In answer to his exasperated groan she said: “I was on my way to the library. I always go this way because I like to walk across the iron bridge and look at the water.”
Ralph merely groaned again and proceeded gingerly to place the carton upon the bike basket without dislodging the vehicle from its place of support. Succeeding in the effort, he called for the bags.
“Well, one thing I can do,” said Margie. “I can just tote these sacks for you.”
Ralph weighed the suggestion. Her company would embarrass him if he encountered acquaintances; but he had been mocked already by those boys for being overburdened as a lone hand. If she carried the bags, he could mount the seat and ride the bike, a situation of some dignity. Walking briskly behind his slow pedaling, she would be identifiable as an assistant and not a girl friend. In an emergency he could even sprint far ahead, leaving her in obscurity.
“All right,” he said. Then, as she began with the side of her shoe to scrape the largest fragment of glass towards the gutter: “Don’t do that! Cars park there.”
“Oh, yeah.” She peeped worshipfully between the bags. “Gee, you sure have a quick mind, Ralph. I’m scatterbrained I guess.”
“So I noticed.” He climbed on the bike seat.
Whenever he got too far ahead, which happened occasionally because the bags were heavy for her and she was careful to avoid further spillage, Margie cried out, and he stopped. After the first bag was disposed of, at a house seven blocks from the store, she was able to quicken her pace en route to the second destination, going indeed into an outright trot when Ralph, in mischief, turned on a burst of speed for the final fifty yards—and overshot the address, for harsh braking would have projected the carton to the pavement again.
He waited for her to come up puffing, sweating, her glasses fogged. Suddenly he felt shitty for pulling that stunt. At the first house, after receiving a lecture on balancing the box, she had held the bike while he carried the sack to the back door, waited in vain, and finally left it on the steps.
But now his conscience inspired him to say: “Go ahead, you can take it in.”
Her glasses had slipped down on the sweat of her upper nose. She stared over them, panting from the run, sweating copiously on the forehead, and clutching the bag in an attitude of endless apology.
“You mean it, Ralph?” As if he did not, she quickly opened the gate in the picket fence that surrounded this place and, having got inside, closed it firmly, speaking again only after she had got behind the barrier. “Gee, that’s nice of you.”
Ralph looked away. When he turned back he saw the dope had gone up on the front porch, violating the protocol of which everyone was aware, but before he could shout, the door opened and the housewife appeared. Ralph averted his eyes again and kept them so until Margie returned through the gate.
“Can’t you do anything right?”
Boldly ignoring the question, she said: “Here, this is yours.” She opened her fist, displaying exceptionally delicate slender fingers, though the palm was dirty and the nails chewed. She held a nickel.
Ralph drew back. “No, you keep it.”
“No, it’s yours!”
“You did the work. It’s only right.”
“But it’s your job,” she said with a wail. “And then I broke that junk, so here’s a nickel against it. That takes care of the Coke. I still owe for a half pint of cream and a bottle of Heinz’s catchup.”
Ralph could not help seeing the flaw in this computation. Without her aid he would not have broken the bottles and he would have put the tip in his pocket. Result: five cents ahead rather than still as much as thirty cents in the hole. Also there was a two-cent deposit on the Coke bottle. However, mean logic aside, he thought better of her than he ever had before: she meant well.
He accepted the coin in a judicious manner. “O.K. then. But the accident wasn’t all your fault by any means.” He coughed and said: “It was nice of you to help.” He put one foot on a pedal. “O.K., listen, I’ll see you around.”
She pointed at the box. “You don’t need help with that?”
“Huh-uh.”
“See, I don’t have anything to do. I was going to the library, but I forgot my card. I could carry in that box for you, and the tip would be all yours.” She pushed the glasses up her nose.
“Thanks,” said Ralph, “but this is my first day on the job. I’ve got to make time, and I’m behind schedule right now.” She looked so woeful that he tarried another moment. “I got it. Why not go see your pal Imogene Clevenger?” The suggestion also gave him an opportunity to pronounce that name, the magic of which had returned after the progress in which his spiteful feelings of Saturday night had given way by next morning to a conviction that Lester Hauser had surely lied about her.
“She’s no pal of mine! The other night she went off with that awful sailor.”
Ralph squashed his testicles against the forward projection of the bicycle seat; there was some rotten pleasure in that. He said feebly: “That old guy?”
“He’s immoral too. He drinks like a fish.” Margie put her grubby hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry, Ralph. I forgot Horace is your best friend.”
“Lester is only his brother. You don’t have to like brothers of friends.” Ralph added pompously, impersonally: “You don’t even have to like friends of friends. Frankly, I can’t stand your friend Imogene.
“I just hate her,” Margie cried enthusiastically. “I don’t intend to ever see her again.”
“Yeah,” he said curtly. “See you.” He took off at a speed that threatened to throw the box back over the handlebars.
All the shades in Leo’s house were pulled down, but there was no black wreath on the front door. Buddy opened the screen and knocked on the wood. The door had a window of clear glass, but it was
hung with inside curtains through which nothing could be seen of the interior. Buddy had his eye there nevertheless, trying to look within, when the curtains parted at the bottom of the pane and Leo’s face appeared.
Though below Buddy’s level, and given Leo’s hysteria on the telephone, it looked normal enough. Buddy flashed his well-known grin. Leo’s heavy eyebrows came up though his head stayed low. The curtains closed and the door opened.
Leo wore an ancient spinach-green bathrobe, spotted with food stains. Taking the bit in his teeth, Buddy boldly pushed in without waiting for an invitation. The hallway was dark and had a queer odor.
Buddy began to talk with energy. “Gee, Leo, you give me quite a scare. You were talking so screwball on the phone, I figured you had gone haywire, but here I find you safe and sound, old son, and that sure takes a load off.” For effect he rolled his eyes, looking at nothing, and said: “Gee, what a nice place you’ve got here. I don’t believe I been inside in all these years. Well, sir…” He reached at Leo as if to touch him but did not, wanting no part of that filthy robe. “So I come over right away, anyhow.”
Leo closed the door and stood silently between it and Buddy, with the only available light behind him. Buddy could hardly see his face.
“Tell me I did the right thing,” said Buddy. “Have you got trouble?” He was astonished to hear his voice quaver and realized he was frightened. He needed a response; this gloomy dump was getting under his skin.
Leo spoke somberly. “It’s early. I’m not dressed yet.”
“Oh,” said Buddy with no conscious irony, “I thought it was noon, Leo.”
“She’ll be on view at four.”
Whatever that meant. Buddy had momentarily forgotten Leo’s grief on the phone, being obsessed with his missing gun.
“Listen, Leo,” he began, “I looked all over the office for that—” And then he remembered. “Good gravy, was I right when I asked about your dear mom?”
Leo lowered his head and his shoulders heaved.