‘Yes.’ The old man’s voice was mechanical. He could hardly see. The shock of a simple rap on the door was such that part of him was still in another city, far removed. He waited for his mind to rush home—it must be here to answer questions, act sane, be polite.
‘I’ve come to check your pulse.’
‘Not now!’ said the old man.
‘You’re not going anywhere, are you?’ She smiled.
He looked at the nurse steadily. He hadn’t been anywhere in ten years.
‘Give me your wrist.’
Her fingers, hard and precise, searched for the sickness in his pulse like a pair of calipers.
‘What’ve you been doing to excite yourself?’ she demanded.
‘Nothing.’
Her gaze shifted and stopped on the empty phone table. At that instant a horn sounded faintly, two thousand miles away.
She took the receiver from under the lap robe and held it before his face. ‘Why do you do this to yourself? You promised you wouldn’t. That’s how you hurt yourself in the first place, isn’t it? Getting excited, talking too much. Those boys up here jumping around—’
‘They sat quietly and listened,’ said the colonel. ‘And I told them things they’d never heard. The buffalo, I told them, the bison. It was worth it. I don’t care. I was in a pure fever and I was alive. It doesn’t matter if being so alive kills a man: it’s better to have the quick fever every time. Now give me that phone. If you won’t let the boys come up and sit politely I can at least talk to someone outside the room.’
‘I’m sorry, Colonel. Your grandson will have to know about this. I prevented his having the phone taken out last week. Now it looks like I’ll let him go ahead.’
‘This is my house, my phone. I pay your salary!’ he said.
‘To make you well, not get you excited.’ She wheeled his chair across the room. ‘To bed with you now, young man!’
From bed he looked back at the phone and kept looking at it.
‘I’m going to the store for a few minutes,’ the nurse said. ‘Just to be sure you don’t use the phone again, I’m hiding your wheel chair in the hall.’
She wheeled the empty chair out the door. In the downstairs entry, he heard her pause and dial the extension phone.
Was she phoning Mexico City? he wondered. She wouldn’t dare!
The front door shut.
He thought of the last week here, alone, in his room, and the secret, narcotic calls across continents, an isthmus, whole jungle countries of rain forest, blue-orchid plateaus, lakes and hills…talking…talking…to Buenos Aires…and…Lima…Rio de Janeiro…
He lifted himself in the cool bed. Tomorrow the telephone gone! What a greedy fool he had been! He slipped his brittle ivory legs down from the bed, marveling at their desiccation. They seemed to be things which had been fastened to his body while he slept one night, while his younger legs were taken off and burned in the cellar furnace. Over the years, they had destroyed all of him, removing hands, arms, and legs and leaving him with substitutes as delicate and useless as chess pieces. And now they were tampering with something more intangible—the memory: they were trying to cut the wires which led back into another year.
He was across the room in a stumbling run. Grasping the phone, he took it with him as he slid down the wall to sit upon the floor. He got the long-distance operator, his heart exploding within him, faster and faster, a blackness in his eyes. ‘Hurry, hurry!’
He waited.
‘Bueno?’
‘Jorge, we were cut off.’
‘You must not phone again, señor,’ said the faraway voice. ‘Your nurse called me. She says you are very ill. I must hang up.’
‘No. Jorge! Please!’ the old man pleaded. ‘One last time, listen to me. They’re taking the phone out tomorrow. I can never call you again.’
Jorge said nothing.
The old man went on. ‘For the love of God, Jorge! For friendship, then, for the old days! You don’t know what it means. You’re my age, but you can move! I haven’t moved anywhere in ten years.’
He dropped the phone and had trouble picking it up, his chest was so thick with pain. ‘Jorge! You are still there, aren’t you?’
‘This will be the last time?’ said Jorge.
‘I promise!’
The phone was laid on a desk thousands of miles away. Once more, with that clear familiarity, the footsteps, the pause, and, at last, the raising of the window.
‘Listen,’ whispered the old man to himself.
And he heard a thousand people in another sunlight, and the faint, tinkling music of an organ grinder playing ‘La Marimba’—oh, a lovely, dancing tune.
With eyes tight, the old man put up his hand as if to click pictures of an old cathedral, and his body was heavier with flesh, younger, and he felt the hot pavement underfoot.
He wanted to say. ‘You’re still there, aren’t you? All of you people in that city in the time of the early siesta, the shops closing, the little boys crying lotería nacional para hoy! to sell lottery tickets. You are all there, the people in the city. I cna’t believe I was ever among you. When you are away from a city it becomes a fantasy. Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another. And so it is good to hear the sounds, and know that Mexico City is still there and the people moving and living…’
He sat with the receiver tightly pressed to his ear.
And at last, the clearest, most improbable sound of all—the sound of a green trolley car going around a corner—a trolley burdened with brown and alien and beautiful people, and the sound of other people running and calling out with triumph as they leaped up and swung aboard and vanished around a corner on the shrieking rails and were borne away in the sun-blazed distance to leave only the sound of tortillas frying on the market stoves, or was it merely the ever rising and falling hum and burn of static quivering along two thousand miles of copper wire…?
The old man sat on the floor.
Time passed.
A downstairs door opened slowly. Light footsteps came in, hesitated, then ventured up the stairs. Voices murmured.
‘We shouldn’t be here!’
‘He phoned me, I tell you. He needs visitors bad. We can’t let him down.’
‘He’s sick!’
‘Sure! But he said to come when the nurse’s out. We’ll only stay a second, say hello, and…’
The door to the bedroom moved wide. The three boys stood looking in at the old man seated there on the floor.
‘Colonel Freeleigh?’ said Douglas softly.
There was something in his silence that made them all shut up their mouths.
They approached, almost on tiptoe.
Douglas, bent down, disengaged the phone from the old man’s now quite cold fingers. Douglas lifted the receiver to his own ear, listened. Above the static he heard a strange, a far, a final sound.
Two thousand miles away, the closing of a window.
The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit
It was summer twilight in the city, and out front of the quiet-clicking pool hall three young Mexican-American men breathed the warm air and looked around at the world. Sometimes they talked and sometimes they said nothing at all but watched the cars glide by like black panthers on the hot asphalt or saw trolleys loom up like thunderstorms, scatter lightning, and rumble away into silence.
‘Hey,’ sighed Martínez at last. He was the youngest, the most sweetly sad of the three. ‘It’s a swell night, huh? Swell.’
As he observed the world it moved very close and then drifted away and then came close again. People, brushing by, were suddenly across the street. Buildings five miles away suddenly leaned over him. But most of the time everything—people, cars, and buildings—stayed way out on the edge of the world and could not be touched. On this quiet warm summer evening Martínez’s face wa
s cold.
‘Nights like this you wish…lots of things.’
‘Wishing,’ said the second man, Villanazul, a man who shouted books out loud in his room but spoke only in whispers on the street. ‘Wishing is the useless pastime of the unemployed.’
‘Unemployed?’ cried Vamenos, the unshaven. ‘Listen to him! We got no jobs, no money!’
‘So,’ said Martínez, ‘we got no friends.’
‘True.’ Villanazul gazed off toward the green plaza where the palm trees swayed in the soft night wind. ‘Do you know what I wish? I wish to go into that plaza and speak among the businessmen who gather there nights to talk big talk. But dressed as I am, poor as I am, who would listen? So, Martínez, we have each other. The friendship of the poor is real friendship. We—’
But now a handsome young Mexican with a fine thin mustache strolled by. And on each of his careless arms hung a laughing woman.
‘Madre mía!’ Martínez slapped his own brow. ‘How does that one rate two friends?’
‘It’s his nice new white summer suit.’ Vamenos chewed a black thumbnail. ‘He looks sharp.’
Martínez leaned out to watch the three people moving away, and then looked at the tenement across the street, in one fourth-floor window of which, far above, a beautiful girl leaned out, her dark hair faintly stirred by the wind. She had been there forever, which was to say for six weeks. He had nodded, he had raised a hand, he had smiled, he had blinked rapidly, he had even bowed to her, on the street, in the hall when visiting friends, in the park, downtown. Even now, he put his hand up from his waist and moved his fingers. But all the lovely girl did was let the summer wind stir her dark hair. He did not exist. He was nothing.
‘Madre mía!’ He looked away and down the street where the man walked his two friends around a corner. ‘Oh, if just I had one suit, one! I wouldn’t need money if I looked okay.’
‘I hesitate to suggest,’ said Villanazul, ‘that you see Gómez. But he’s been talking some crazy talk for a month now about clothes. I keep on saying I’ll be in on it to make him go away. That Gómez.’
‘Friend,’ said a quiet voice.
‘Gómez!’ Everyone turned to stare.
Smiling strangely, Gómez pulled forth an endless thin yellow ribbon which fluttered and swirled on the summer air.
‘Gómez,’ said Martínez, ‘what you doing with that tape measure?’
‘Gómez beamed. ‘Measuring people’s skeletons.’
‘Skeletons!’
‘Hold on.’ Gómez squinted at Martínez. ‘Caramba! Where you been all my life! Let’s try you!’
Martínez saw his arm seized and taped, his leg measured, his chest encircled.
‘Hold still!’ cried Gómez. ‘Arm—perfect. Leg—chest—perfecto! Now quick, the height! There! Yes! Five foot five! You’re in! Shake!’ Pumping Martínez’s hand, he stopped suddenly. ‘Wait. You got…ten bucks?’
‘I have!’ Vamenos waved some grimy bills. ‘Gómez, measure me!’
‘All I got left in the world is nine dollars and ninety-two cents.’ Martínez searched his pockets. ‘That’s enough for a new suit? Why?’
‘Why? Because you got the right skeleton, that’s why!’
‘Señor Gómez, I don’t hardly know you—’
‘Know me? You’re going to live with me! Come on!’
Gómez vanished into the poolroom, Martínez, escorted by the polite Villanazul, pushed by an eager Vamenos, found himself inside.
‘Domínguez!’ said Gómez.
Domínguez, at a wall telephone, winked at them. A woman’s voice squeaked on the receiver.
‘Manulo!’ said Gómez.
Manulo, a wine bottle tilted bubbling to his mouth, turned.
Gómez pointed at Martínez.
‘At last we found our fifth volunteer!’
Domínguez said, ‘I got a date, don’t bother me—’ and stopped. The receiver slipped from his fingers. His little black telephone book full of fine names and numbers went quickly back into his pocket. ‘Gómez, you—?’
‘Yes, yes! Your money, now! Ándale!’
The woman’s voice sizzled on the dangling phone.
Domínguez glanced at it uneasily.
Manulo considered the empty wine bottle in his hand and the liquorstore sign across the street.
Then very reluctantly both men laid ten dollars each on the green velvet pool table.
Villanazul, amazed, did likewise, as did Gómez, nudging Martínez, Martínez counted out his wrinkled bills and change. Gómez flourished the money like a royal flush.
‘Fifty bucks! The suit costs sixty! All we need is ten bucks!’
‘Wait,’ said Martínez. ‘Gómez, are we talking about one suit? Uno?’
‘Uno!’ Gómez raised a finger. ‘One wonderful white ice cream summer suit! White, white as the August moon!’
‘But who will own this one suit?’
‘Me!’ said Manulo.
‘Me!’ said Domínguez.
‘Me!’ said Villanazul.
‘Me!’ cried Gómez. ‘And you, Martínez. Men, let’s show him. Line up!’
Villanazul, Manulo, Domínguez, and Gómez rushed to plant their backs against the poolroom wall.
‘Martínez, you too, the other end, line up! Now, Vamenos, lay that billiard cue across our heads!’
‘Sure, Gómez, sure!’
Martínez, in line, felt the cue tap his head and leaned out to see what was happening. ‘Ah!’ he gasped.
The cue lay flat on all their heads, with no rise or fall, as Vamenos slid it along, grinning.
‘We’re all the same height!’ said Martínez.
‘The same!’ Everyone laughed.
Gómez ran down the line, rustling the yellow tape measure here and there on the men so they laughed even more wildly.
‘Sure!’ he said. ‘It took a month, four weeks, mind you, to find four guys the same size and shape as me, a month of running around measuring. Sometimes I found guys with five-foot-five skeletons, sure, but all the meat on their bones was too much or not enough. Sometimes their bones were too long in the legs or too short in the arms. Boy, all the bones! I tell you! But now, five of us, same shoulders, chests, waists, arms, and as for weight? Men!’
Manulo, Domínguez, Villanazul, Gómez, and at last Martínez stepped onto the scales which flipped ink-stamped cards at them as Vamenos, still smiling wildly, fed pennies. Heart pounding, Martínez read the cards.
‘One hundred thirty-five pounds…one thirty-six…one thirty-three…one thirty-four…one thirty-seven…a miracle!’
‘No,’ said Villanazul simply, ‘Gómez.’
They all smiled upon that genius who now circled them with his arms.
‘Are we not fine?’ he wondered. ‘All the same size, all the same dream—the suit. So each of us will look beautiful at least one night each week, eh?’
‘I haven’t looked beautiful in years,’ said Martínez. ‘The girls run away.’
‘They will run no more, they will freeze,’ said Gómez, ‘when they see you in the cool white summer ice cream suit.’
‘Gómez,’ said Villanazul, ‘just let me ask one thing.’
‘Of course, compadre.’
‘When we get this nice new white ice cream summer suit, some night you’re not going to put it on and walk down to the Greyhound bus in it and go live in El Paso for a year in it, are you?’
‘Villanazul, Villanazul, how can you say that?’
‘My eye sees and my tongue moves,’ said Villanazul. ‘How about the Everybody Wins! Punchboard Lotteries you ran and you kept running when nobody won? How about the United Chili Con Carne and Frijole Company you were going to organize and all that ever happened was the rent ran out on a two-by-four office?’
‘The errors of a child now grown,’ said Gómez. ‘Enough! In this hot weather someone may buy the special suit that is made just for us that stands waiting in the window of Shumway’s Sunshine Suits! We have fifty dollars. Now we need just one mo
re skeleton!’
Martínez saw the men peer around the pool hall. He looked where they looked. He felt his eyes hurry past Vamenos, then come reluctantly back to examine his dirty shirt, his huge nicotined fingers.
‘Me!’ Vamenos burst out at last. ‘My skeleton, measure it, it’s great! Sure, my hands are big, and my arms, from digging ditches! But—’
Just then Martínez heard passing on the sidewalk outside that same terrible man with his two girls, all laughing together.
He saw anguish move like the shadow of a summer cloud on the faces of the other men in this poolroom.
Slowly Vamenos stepped onto the scales and dropped his penny. Eyes closed, he breathed a prayer.
‘Madre mía, please…’
The machinery whirred; the card fell out. Vamenos opened his eyes.
‘Look! One thirty-five pounds! Another miracle!’
The men stared at his right hand and the card, at his left hand and a soiled ten-dollar bill.
Gómez swayed. Sweating, he licked his lips. Then his hand shot out, seized the money.
‘The clothing store! The suit! Vamos!’
Yelling, everyone ran from the poolroom.
The woman’s voice was still squeaking on the abandoned telephone. Martínez, left behind, reached out and hung the voice up. In the silence he shook his head. ‘Santos, what a dream! Six men,’ he said, ‘one suit. What will come of this? Madness? Debauchery? Murder? But I go with God. Gómez, wait for me!’
Martínez was young. He ran fast.
Mr Shumway, of Shumway’s Sunshine Suits, paused while adjusting a tie rack, aware of some subtle atmospheric change outside his establishment.
‘Leo,’ he whispered to his assistant. ‘Look…’
Outside, one man, Gómez, strolled by, looking in. Two men, Manulo and Domínguez, hurried by, staring in. Three men, Villanazul, Martínez, and Vamenos, jostling shoulders, did the same.
‘Leo.’ Mr Shumway swallowed. ‘Call the police!’
Suddenly six men filled the doorway.
Martínez, crushed among them, his stomach slightly upset, his face feeling feverish, smiled so wildly at Leo that Leo let go the telephone.
‘Hey,’ breathed Martínez, eyes wide. ‘There’s a great suit over there!’