He drove into an enclosed yard that was paved with ashes, the car making a loud crunching noise. He stopped the engine and extinguished the lights. It was so dark inside the automobile that for a moment Bernice could see nothing whatever. But she could hear him opening the bottle of Rock & Rye, and she could smell its peculiar sweet odor.
Ernie said, “Here you go.”
She groped out and found the bottle he had extended. She wiped the neck on the heel of her hand and took a belt. Whew. The first one went down the hardest. She returned the bottle to Ernie.
She said, “I guess this is the first me ‘n’ you been out like this, huh?”
He made the sound of taking a swig and then replied, “I guess that’s right, Bernice. I never had the nerve to astya before.”
She took the bottle from him. “I guess you was just shy, huh, Ernie?”
He reclaimed the bottle. “Heck, you was always so sophisticated, Bernice. I knew you’d end up in the city.”
She chuckled. “Then where’d you get the nerve now, Em?”
He laughed in return. “From what we’re drinking!”
She gargled another slug. “Well, you just listen here, Ernie, you’re a real nice fellow. I always did think that. You show respect for a person, and you got real nice manners. That’s what a girl likes. You don’t have to drive a Packard or wear white spats and carry a cane, you know. Heck, that kind are usually phonies, anyway.”
“Is that right?”
“My gosh, yes. I could tell you something about that. But after all’s said and done, I still come back here, you notice.”
“Yeah,” said Ernie. “I sure do.” His profile could be dimly seen now as it was joined by the mouth of the bottle. He swallowed, and then handed her the Rock & Rye.
“I’ll tell you,” Bernice said, “I think I’ll pass this one up. I don’t like to drink so much so quick. Gives you sour stomach.” Ernie said nothing. She realized that for all he had drunk he was still too shy to make the first move. She said, “Fact is, I wouldn’t mind resting a little onna back seat, if you don’t mind.”
“Not me. Nosir, I sure wouldn’t mind, Bernice. You just go ahead.”
She got out, opened the rear door, and climbed into the back of the car. Ernie took another pull at the bottle and stayed where he was.
Bernice breathed audibly and said, “There, I feel a lot better.”
He said, “That’s nice.”
She waited awhile, and then she lost patience. If he thought her fast, well, there was no help for it. “If you wanna visit back here with me, Ernie,” she said, “well, it’s perfectly O.K. so far as I’m concerned.”
Now he moved quickly, not bothering to get out and go back there but just flipping himself over the top of the seat. In the rear of a car nobody ever did much stripping ordinarily, because of the sheer difficulty of the task, but Ernie was an awfully eager guy once the ice was broken, and in a few moments Bernice was mostly naked, as was he, and both were flopping like captive fish in a net of inter-wound clothing.
It was at their most helpless moment that the lens of an outsized flashlight, large and radiant as a floodlamp, glared in on them through the rear left window, that faced by Bernice, and a furious voice was heard.
“You filthy stinking trash, I’ll blow you to kingdom come!”
CHAPTER 7
Tony knew that Bernice was right in her insistence that action was what the situation called for, but what should he do? Meanwhile, he continued in the state of distraction that had caused him to miss the stop sign, thereby bringing about the episode with the Millville cop.
“Hey, Tony,” someone shouted behind him. “What’s wrong with you?”
He stopped and turned. Joey Wurzel was trotting up the sidewalk.
“Jesus,” Joey said, “I was yelling my block off. You getting hard uh hearing?”
“Hi, Joey.”
Joey said, “Why didn’t you come to practice? Coach was really sore. You know every day counts now.” Joey, undersized and peppy, was manager of the football team. “He made me run over to your home on my bike. You wasn’t there. Nobody was there.” He peered at Tony in accusation.
“Oh, uh, my dad got sick.”
“Oh. Well, you shoulda told us, Tony. We only got the rest of this week to get the new plays down pat. Those Catholics’ll be tough enough as it is, let alone if we ain’t working together like a well-oiled machine.” He referred to the upcoming Friday-night game against Saint Bona-venture High School, whose team was coming from Beewix to play Hornbeck. Like all Catholic teams that included Italians or Polacks, Saint Bonaventure’s was reputed to be made up largely of dirty players, who habitually gouged eyes, kicked groins, and willfully ground faces into the earth, and the coach had devised some new tactics to give them back as good as they dealt out.
“I’ll make it up tomorrow,” said Tony.
“If we can take ‘em,” said Joey, who was wearing his usual porkpie hat with the brim pinned up in front, “and then beat the jigs two weeks later, we got a good chance for the champeenship thisheer.”
Tony nodded. “I’ll be there.” He wanted to get away.
But Joey hung on, talking football. The big disappointment of his life was that he was too small to be a player. He talked more about the games than anybody on the team. Ordinarily Tony enjoyed this, but now he was miserably bored. Sports had been his whole existence, and he saw now that his life had been misspent.
He finally got rid of Joey, but not until he was just around the corner from home.
His mother was sewing under a bridge lamp in the corner of the living room. Upstairs, in his own room, he found Jack. He had forgotten that his brother would be on hand while Bernice stayed in the house. Jack was lying flat on the bed that had been his in the past, the one nearer the window. He was reading some book, which he held with stiff arms overhead.
He lowered it now and said, “I didn’t know where you wanted the stuff I took off the bed, so I just piled it right here. I’ll help you put it away if you want.”
It was Tony’s practice to drop anything he was carrying onto the unused bed. He also was in the habit of hurling his clothes there as he took them off. Jack had carefully put the schoolbooks, ring binder, and the like on the desk in the corner, and the clothes on the accompanying straight-backed chair.
“That’s O.K.,” said Tony. “Don’t worry about it.” There was also a lot of junk on his own bed, but he flopped down on top of it anyway.
Jack said, “I’m reading about this guy who was wrongfully accused of being yellow. Some kid fell into the lake, and he didn’t jump in to save him because he couldn’t swim, but nobody knew that. So everybody hated his guts, and he had to leave town though he had just got engaged to the best-looking girl. Where I’m at right now, he has gone up to Canada and joined the Northwest Mounted Police and been sent into the trackless wilderness of the Yukon to bring in a half-breed murderer. There’s a blizzard, and the snow is already six foot deep. An avalanche came down on top of his sled and buried his dog team, so he’s going along now by himself, on snowshoes.” Jack grimaced. “It’s a terrific story, but I wish he had joined the French Foreign Legion instead. I hate all those winter descriptions. I’d prefer the sand and camels, and just as everybody’s dying of thirst they spot an oasis, and they run and jump in the pool of water with their clothes on—but it’s a mirage! Nothing there but sand. So they are all dying like dogs—or you think they are, and so do they, but along comes some friendly Arabs with coconuts full of milk.”
Jack was as talkative as Joey had been, but with Jack you had to allow for his young age.
Tony said, “Well, don’t let me bother you.”
“Ken—that’s the hero’s name—he’ll do anything to show this girl he’s not a coward,” said Jack. “It was her brother who actually saved the little kid from drowning, and later he came up and just gave Ken a look of contempt, and then he took his sister by the arm and led her away.”
Tony
listened now.
Jack went on. “The one thing that gets me, though, is why in the world Ken just didn’t say he couldn’t swim? They do that a lot in books. People just won’t say the obvious thing. I guess the idea is that there wouldn’t be a story otherwise—then why would he go off and join the Mounties? But why couldn’t he just go and join the Mounties anyway? That’s the best part of the story.”
“The French Foreign Legion,” Tony asked, “ain’t that the thing guys join when they don’t know what else to do or where to go?”
“Yeah,” said Jack, “sort of. When they’re falsely accused of a crime or when they’re in disgrace, like this story. I never before heard of anyone joining the Mounties for that reason. In the Foreign Legion you give a false name, and it is an unspoken rule that nobody will ever ask you what your real one is or where you’re from or what you did before coming there. If you’re killed, you’ll be buried in the trackless sands of the Sahara, lost to the outside world, but you might get awarded the Croy de Gwair post-hewmusly.”
“What’s that?”
“A medal given by the French Army. They kiss you on both cheeks if you receive it while alive.”
Tony winced in revulsion. “Sounds like the Fruit Army.” He would prefer the Mounties. They were probably closer too. “How far is it from here to Canada?”
Jack said, “Gee, I don’t know. But I do know that at one place it’s real close to the American border: Niagara Falls. In fact, I think I read once that the Niagara Falls are really in Canada.”
“That can’t be right,” said Tony. “Niagara Falls have always been American. Somebody’s trying to pull a fast one.” It occurred to Tony that sometimes brainy people like Jack were easy to fool: just give them something out of the ordinary to think about, and they’d believe anything, just for the novelty of it.
Jack swung himself around and sat on the edge of the bed. “I just remembered, Tone: we never did get that letter written.”
“Huh?” For an instant Tony had forgotten about that entirely. “Oh, yeah. Well, I changed my mind. What would it be once we got it written? Just a lot of words.”
Jack chuckled. “You’re sure right about that. That’s all a letter can be. Of course, if you want to get something over to somebody, tell them something, it’s pretty hard to do it unless you use words, either talking or writing.”
But the process seemed unclean to Tony: explanations, reasons, excuses, they were just the kind of things you did as a substitute for what should be done.
“Thanks anyway,” he told his brother. “But you can still help me if you want to.” He lowered his voice, though his mother was downstairs. “I might have to go away for a while, see. You wouldn’t happen to have any money you could let me have on loan?”
“Sure. I’ve got that dollar sixty-five I mentioned.”
“I know that’s what you are saving up to be a foreign correspondent on,” said Tony, “and I’ll sure get it back to you before that time comes, I swear. But if I could use it now, it would sure come in handy.”
“That’s O.K.,” said Jack. “I was thinking of buying a portable typewriter, but that would cost twenty bucks or more, and it’ll be years before I could save up that kind of money, so you’re welcome to it.” He left the room for a few moments and then was back with the cash.
Tony said, “I won’t forget you for this,” and shook his brother’s hand.
Jack said regretfully, “You sound like you’re going on a long trip.”
“I’d rather not say where,” Tony told him, “so then if anybody tries to get it out of you, you really won’t know.”
“But what’ll I do then if they work me over with a rubber hose?”
Tony was able to smile at Jack’s exaggeration. “I don’t think that will happen. I meant Mom—and Dad, if he gets better.”
“You’re becoming a fugitive from justice?”
“I just think if I stay I’m just gonna get in more trouble, and the family don’t need any more of that. Now Bernice is back, she can drive Mom around, and since she’s made something of herself down the city, she’ll know how to handle these problems we got. I betcha Bernice could talk to the Bullards and make everything clear, and everybody’d be friends in no time. Ask her about that when she gets back. There must be worse things than that to deal with in the city every single day, I bet.”
Jack asked, “You leaving right now, under cover of darkness?”
“Naw,” said Tony. “That might sound good, but it’s more practical in daylight.”
“You going to walk?”
Tony smiled mysteriously. “I don’t wantcha to know too much, Jack. I told you that. I’ll be all right. You’ll see.”
“You’ll be coming back someday soon, I hope.”
“Why, sure,” Tony said. “You betcha.”
* * *
Junior Bullard had hated his father’s guts for several years, but now that he was in the nut ward of the hospital and Junior could do anything he wanted without fear of being discovered by his old man—smoking, drinking, playing with himself while looking at underwear ads in mailorder catalogues—he felt worse. He was also still scared that someone might find evidence in the ruin of the hardware store that he had been there earlier on the evening of the fire, drinking stolen homemade grape wine and masturbating while studying the picture of a woman wearing something called a teddy, which had a buttoned crotch that drove him wild to think about: all this by the light of a candle, in the storeroom, so that the flicker could not be discerned from the street. It was possible that he had left the burning candle behind on his departure an hour later, for he had been somewhat woozy at the time. But what could he do? He had no privacy at home. The only other bedroom was Eva’s, just because she was female, even though he was several years her senior, and his own quarters were in the front part of the attic, reached through a closet-staircase from his parents’ room. This was too cold in winter and impossible to survive in the intense heat of summer, so in such seasons he had to sleep on a couch in an alcove off the dining room. His parents, his father especially, had always favored Eva over him, and the situation had got even worse since she acquired breasts and began to use Kotex. He had never liked girls, but only in the past year had he realized how unsavory their personal habits could be if you were related to them.
When the three of them had finally been allowed to see his father, they didn’t go to where the beds were, but to a waiting room off the mental ward, and some nurse brought out his old man, who seemed all weak and confused and scared in his robe and slippers. And even then he looked mostly at the two women and disregarded Junior. Junior swore to himself that he would never get so helpless in life as to be led around by a nurse. He had previously acquired a determination never to operate a business where you had to kiss the asses of the public.
Getting home that evening was difficult because that fat pansy of a preacher had left and his mother was forced to go about begging for a ride back to Millville. Finally some old guy gave them a lift in an ancient coupe, and since there was room only for three in the front, Junior was relegated to the rumble seat, a place he dreaded riding in, owing to his dislike of being blown around by the wind.
When they got home there wasn’t any meat for supper, but his mother went ahead anyway and fixed a meal consisting of eggs scrambled with fried potatoes, and there wasn’t any dessert but applesauce. He felt like emptying the bowls in one big heap in the middle of the kitchen floor and then letting all the neighborhood dogs in. He could feel new pimples forming on his forehead, and he resented his sister for her as yet smooth skin.
After supper he said he was going, and when his mother asked where, he answered, “Out.”
Eva observed, “You’re real fresh when Dad’s not here.”
He sneered at her. “Shut up, you sap.”
“I don’t think you should talk to your sister that way, Junior,” chided his mother.
“So what?” said he, and he left, letting the screen
door slam behind him. One of his chores was taking off the screen door when the summer was done; he had let this go for weeks.
It had long been Junior’s habit when heading downtown not to bother to go around to the front walk but simply to cut through the back lawn of the next-door neighbors’ and so reach the public sidewalk in the southward direction. These neighbors, the Durkeys, in summertime put up a low barrier of those white-wire hoops to discourage the crossing of certain flowerbeds, but Junior was none too careful about these and sometimes tripped on them and as a result trampled the flowers more than he would otherwise have done. He felt that this served the Durkeys right. They lacked the stomach to protest outright, but if they caught him at it, they might say, hypocritically, “Look out there, Junior. Wouldn’t want you to break a leg.”
He couldn’t see too well in the darkness now, but he went through the Durkeys’ yard anyhow. The Durkey house was dark. They had probably gone to bed already. They were the ugliest people in the world. Mr. Durkey had buck teeth and Mrs., popeyes and a goiter.
When Junior reached the sidewalk, he thought he saw a shadow behind the big elm at the next corner, so he walked out into the street. On reaching the point at which he could see the person behind the tree in the light from the nearby streetlamp, he recognized his father’s cousin, Reverton, who was turned toward the sidewalk, apparently waiting in ambush for someone to come along.
“Psst! Hey, Rev,” said he.
Reverton was badly startled. He jumped and whirled, and then he said, “By God, it’s you, ain’t it, Junior?”
“Who’d you think it might be?”
“Listen, I caught that Beeler snot up at the corner just yestidday. Now they know your dad is laid up, God knows what they’ll do.”
Whoever was responsible for the fire, if that potbellied dummy hadn’t mouthed off in the store, they wouldn’t have been blamed. It wasn’t Junior’s fault, but he still didn’t like to think about the Beelers.