Lucio thought to himself: I will not be able to keep this job very long.
He wrote his brother a letter.—This brother named Silva was serving a ten-year sentence in a Texas prison. He was Lucio’s twin but their natures were not alike. Yet they were close to each other. Silva had been the rebel, a boy who loved music and whiskey, whose life was nocturnal as the life of a cat, a sleek young man he had been, with always the delicate scent of women about him. His clothes flung carelessly about the flat, which they had shared in the town further south, were faintly dusted with powder from women’s bodies. Small trinkets tumbled out of his pockets, testimonials of intimacy with Gladys or Mabel or Ruth. When he awoke he always wound up the victrola and when he wanted to sleep, he switched the radio off.—Lucio rarely saw him either awake or asleep. They very seldom discussed their lives with each other but once Lucio found a revolver in his brother’s coat pocket. He left the revolver on the bed which they used at opposite hours—under it he placed a pencilled note. This is your death, said the note. When he came home the revolver had disappeared. In its place on the bed was a pair of workman’s gloves that Lucio used at the foundry. Pinned to it was a note in Silva’s irregular hand. Here is yours, said the note.—Shortly thereafter Silva had gone to Texas and there was arrested and given a ten-year term on a holdup charge. Lucio started the letters which now had gone on for eight years. Each time he wrote he informed his brother of some purely fanciful advancement in his career. He told him that he had become a foreman and a stockholder in the corporation. That he belonged to a country club and drove a Cadillac car—that recently he had moved north to assume a much better position with several times as much pay. These lies were further and further elaborated: they began to comprise a sort of dream existence. His face flushed while he wrote them—his hand shook so that toward the end of the letter the writing would be illegible almost. It was not that he wanted to arouse his unfortunate brother’s envy, it was not that at all.—But he had loved the brother intensely and Silva had always been so contemptuous of him in a kind sort of way.—Silva apparently believed the news in the letters. How well you are doing! he wrote. You could see he was startled and proud—so that Lucio thought with dread of the time when the truth must be known, when his brother got out of the prison…
Lucio’s feeling that he could not long hold the job became an obsession with him; a certain knowledge that clung to his brain all the time. In the evenings, with Nitchevo the cat, he could shut it partly away. Nitchevo’s presence was a denial of all the many threatening elements of chance. You could see that Nitchevo did not take stock in chance. She believed that everything progressed according to a natural, predestined order and that there was nothing to be apprehensive about. All of her movements were slow and without agitation. They were accomplished with a consummate grace. Her amber eyes regarded each object with unblinking serenity. Even about her food she made no haste. Each evening Lucio brought home a pint of milk for her supper and breakfast; Nitchevo sat quietly waiting on her haunches while he poured it into the cracked saucer borrowed from the landlady and set it on the floor beside the bed. Then he lay down on the bed, expectantly watching, while Nitchevo came slowly forward to the pale blue saucer. She looked up at him once—slowly—with her unflickering yellow eyes before she started to eat, and then she gracefully lowered her small chin to the saucer’s edge, the red satin tip of tongue protruded and the room was filled with the sweet, faint music of her gentle lapping. He watched her and as he watched her his mind smoothed out. The tight knots of anxiety loosened and were absorbed. The compressed and gaseous feeling inside his body was forgotten and his heart beat more quietly. He began to feel sleepy as he watched the cat—sleepy and entranced. Her form grew in size and the rest of the room dwindled and receded. It seemed to him, then, that they were of equal dimensions. He was a cat like Nitchevo—they lay side by side on the floor, lapping milk in the comfortable, secure warmth of a locked room beyond which no factories or foremen existed, nor large blonde landladies with hauntingly full-fleshed bosoms.
Nitchevo took a long time about drinking her milk. Often he was asleep before she had finished. He would awake later on and find her small warmth against him—he would sleepily raise his hand to caress her and he would feel the faint, faint vibration of the vertebral ridges along her back as she purred. She was getting fatter. Her sides filled out.—Of course there had been no spoken declaration of love between the two of them, but each understood that a contract existed between them to last their whole lives. Lucio talked to the cat in drowsy whispers—he never fabricated such stories as those that he wrote to his brother but merely denials of worries that plagued him most. He told her that he was not going to lose his job, that he would always be able to give her the saucer of milk night and morning and let her sleep on his bed; he told her that nothing disastrous was going to happen to them, that there was nothing to be afraid of between heaven and earth. Not even the sun, that rose newly burnished each day from the heart of the cemetery, would break the enchantment which they had established between them.
One evening Lucio fell asleep with the light in his room still burning. The landlady, who was sleepless that night, saw it shining under the crack of his door and she came to the door and knocked and getting no response, she pushed it open. She found the strange little man asleep on the bed with the cat curled against his bare chest. His face was sharp and prematurely aged and his eyes, when they were open, made it look older still, but now they were closed, and his body was thin and white and underdeveloped like that of a spindly boy. He did not look like very much of a man, she observed. But she wanted to test his manhood. The Russian had also been thin, cadaverous almost, and always coughing as though an army of vandals were tearing him down from inside. Nevertheless, there had been a great fire in his nature which magnified him as a lover, made him assume almost a great physical stature. So she remembered the Russian who occupied that room before and she came to the side of the bed and threw the cat down to the floor and placed her hand on the sleeping little man’s shoulder. Lucio woke and found her seated beside him, smiling, still smelling of the bed’s warmth and faintly of flour. Her face was double in his unfocussed vision. Two large beaming moons that swam in the room’s amber glow. Her hand on his shoulder burnt him, stung him painfully as the hide of a steaming horse had once stung his fingers when he touched it as a child. Her mouth was wet, the heat of her bosom engulfed him. The roses upon the wallpaper—how large they were!—And then they sank back into shadow…
When the landlady had gone he went back to sleep again, scarcely aware of what had happened between them—except that now he felt more completely rested and quiet and the bed, it seemed to have risen to a great height over the dark, huddled roofs and bristling stacks of the factory town—and to be floating loose among stars that were not as chill as they looked, but warm with a human warmth that was scented with flour…
The life in the house grew sweet and familiar to him.
Sometimes when he entered the downstairs hall at fifteen after five on a wintry evening, he called out loudly and bravely, Heigho, Everybody, heigho! The blonde landlady moved out from the radio noise as though she was drugged, with a body stuffed full of honey-sweet popular songs—moons, roses, blue skies, rainbows after showers, cottages, sunsets, gardens, loves lasting forever!—She smiled with so much of it in her and touched her broad forehead and let her hand slide down her body, pressing herself here and there and enjoying the knowledge of so much sweet flesh on her and willing to share it…. Yes, yes, moons, lovers, roses—followed him up the hallstairs and into his bedroom and spilled themselves over the bed in a great, wild heap of “I love you!”—“Remember me always” and “Meet me tonight by the moonlight!”—the radio filled her up like a ten-gallon jug which the dark little man unstoppered upstairs before supper.
But the work-a-day life in the plant was more and more strained. Lucio went at this work with a feverish haste, his anxiety coiling up tight whenever t
he foreman stopped at his place in the line. The grunt which he uttered, somewhat louder each time, was like a knife thrust into the center of Lucio’s back; all his blood flowed out through the wound so that he scarcely had strength to remain on his feet. His hands went faster and faster until they lost their rhythm and the metal strips jammed and the machine cried in a loud and furious voice, which ended abruptly the man’s illusion as master.
“God damn!” said the foreman,” Why dontcha watch whatcha doin’? I’m tired a the way yuh bung up things all a time with yuh jittery fingers!”
He wrote to his brother that night that he had received another considerable boost in salary; he enclosed three dollars for candy and cigarettes and said that he was planning to engage another great lawyer to reopen Silva’s case and take it, if necessary, to the United States Supreme Court.
“In the meantime,” he ended, “sit tight!—There is nothing to worry about—absolutely.”
This was the same type of statement he made every night to the cat.
But only a few days later there came a letter from the warden of the Texas prison, a man with the curious name of Mortimer J. Stallcup, returning the money and tersely announcing the convict brother, Silva, had recently been shot dead in an attempted jail-break.
Lucio showed this letter to his friend the cat. At first she seemed to observe it without much feeling. Then she became interested—she poked it with one white, tentative paw, mewed and set her teeth into a corner of the crisp paper. Lucio dropped it to the floor and she pushed it gently across the rug with her nose and her paws.
After a while he got up and poured out her milk which had grown rather warm in the steam-heated room. The radiators hissed. Her tongue lapped gently.—The roses on the wallpaper shimmered through tears that drained all the tension out of the little man’s body.
Returning from the plant one evening that winter he had a rather curious adventure. There was a place a few blocks from the plant called the Bright Spot Cafe. Out of it on this particular evening stumbled a man who looked like a plain street beggar. He caught at Lucio’s sleeve and after a long, steady glance with eyes as enflamed as the cemetery-horizon before daybreak, he made a remarkable statement:
“Don’t be afraid of these stinking sons-of-bitches. They grow like weeds and like stinkweeds are cut down. They run away from their conscience and can’t be still a minute.—Watch for the sun!—It comes up out of their graveyard every morning!”
The speech rambled on for some time in prophetic vein—when at last he let go of Lucio’s arm, to which he clung for support, he headed back to the swinging door he emerged from. Just before going inside he made a final statement which struck home profoundly.
“Do you know who I am?” he shouted. “I’m God Almighty!”
“What?” said Lucio.
The old man nodded and grinned—waved in farewell and passed back into the brightly lighted cafe.
Lucio knew that the old man was probably drunk and a liar but like most people he sometimes had the ability to believe what he wanted to believe in despite of all logic. And so there were nights that harsh, northern winter when he comforted himself and the cat with the recollection of the old man’s statement. God was perhaps, he remembered, a resident of this strangely devitiated city whose gray-brown houses were like the dried skins of locusts. God was, like Lucio, a lonely and bewildered man Who felt that something was wrong but could not correct it, a man Who sensed the blundering sleepwalk of time and hostilities of chance and wanted to hide Himself from them in places of brilliance and warmth.
Nitchevo the cat did not need to be told that God had taken up his residence in the factory town. She had already discovered his presence twice: first in the Russian, then in Lucio. It is doubtful that she really distinguished between them. They both represented the same quality of infinite mercy. They made her life safe and pleasant. From the alley they had brought her to the house. The house was warm, the rugs and the pillows were soft. She rested in perfect content, a content which was not, like Lucio’s, merely nocturnal but stayed with her all through the days as well as the nights—which was never broken. (If He the Creator did not order all things well. He conferred one inestimable benefit in the animal kingdom when He deprived all but man of the disquieting faculty of examining the future.) Nitchevo, being a cat, existed in only one sliding moment of time: that moment was good. It did not occur to the cat that convicts might be attempting escapes from Texas prisons and being shot down (which accident terminated escape through dream), that wardens were writing terse letters announcing such facts, that foremen grunted contemptuously when they stood behind men whose fingers trembled with fear of doing things badly. That wheels cried out and cracked the whip as the master. That men were blind who thought they saw things plainly, that God had been driven to drink—Nitchevo did not know that this curious accident of matter, the earth, was whirling dangerously fast and some day, unexpectedly, it would fly apart from its own excessive momentum and shatter itself into little bits of disaster.
Nitchevo purred under Lucio’s fingers in absolute contradiction of all circumstances that threatened their common existence—and that was perhaps why Lucio loved her so much.
It was now mid-January and every morning the wind with a tireless impatience would grab at the smoke of the plant and thrust it southeast of the town where it hung in a restless bank above the graveyard; the sun rose through it at seven o’clock in the morning, red as the eyeball of a drunken beggar, and stared accusingly till it sank again on the opposite side, across the turgid river; the river kept running away, polluted, ashamed, looking neither to the right nor to the left, but steadily running and running. The final week of the month the stockholders came in town for a crucial meeting. Glittering black and rushing close to the earth as beetles on desperate errands, the limousines sped toward the plant; disgorged their corpulent contents at private doorways and waited uneasily, like a nest of roaches, in cinder-covered parkways back of the plant.
What was hatching inside the conference chambers no one who actually worked at the plant could tell. It took some time for the eggs to incubate; secret and black and laid in coagulate clusters, they ripened slowly.
This was the problem; there was a slump at the plant. The stockholders had to decide what action to take, whether to cheapen the product and make it available thus to a wider market or else cut down on production. The answer was obvious; they would cut down on production, preserving the margin of profit, and wait for the need of the people to make more demand. This was promptly arranged. The wheels got their orders and stopped; the workers were stopped by the wheels. One third of the plant shut down and the men were laid off; the black roach-nest dispersed from the cinder parkway; the problem was solved.
Lucio—yes—was among them.
There were sixty-eight of them given their notices that morning. There was no protest, there was no demonstration, no angry voices were lifted. It was almost as though these sixty-eight factory workers had known from the beginning that this was in store. Perhaps in the wombs of their mothers the veins that had fed them had sung in their ears this song; Thou shalt lose thy job, thou shalt be turned away from the wheels and the bread taken from thee!
It was a glittering wasteland, the town that morning. All week the snow had fallen, lightless and thick. But now the sun shone upon it. Each separate crystal was radiant and alive. The roofs were exclamatory. The steep, narrow streets were ruthlessly brilliant as arrows.
Cold, cold, cold is the merciless blood of thy father!
In Lucio two things competed. One was the need to find his companion the cat. The other and equal need was that of his body to loosen its agonized tension, to fall, to let go, to be swept on like a river.
He managed to keep on walking as far as the Bright Spot Cafe.
There he was met by the man he had met once before, the beggarly stranger, the man who had called himself God.
Out of the lively, rotating glass door of this building, the
stranger emerged with an armful of empty beer bottles the management had rejected because they were not purchased there.
“Like weeds,” he repeated glumly, “like noxious weeds!”
He pointed southeast of the town with the arms not burdened with bottles.
“Watch for the sun. It comes from the cemetery.”
His spittle gleamed in the terrible glare of the morning.
“I clench my fist and this is the fist of God.”
Then he noticed the discharged worker before him.
“Where do you come from?” he asked.
“The plant,” said Lucio faintly.
The angry glow in the bloodshot eyes waxed brighter.
“The plant, the plant!” groaned the stranger.
His small black shoe, bound up with adhesive tape and wads of paper, spattered the snow as it stamped.
He shook his fist in the bristling stacks’ direction.
“Cupidity and stupidity!” he shouted. “That is the two-armed cross on which they have nailed me!”
An iron-loaded truck came by with a sloshing thunder.
The old man’s face convulsed with rage as it passed.
“Lies, lies, lies, lies!” he shouted. “They’ve covered their bodies with lies and they won’t stand washing! They want to be scabbed all over, they want no skin but the crust of their greediness on them! Okay, okay, let ‘em have it! But let ‘em have more and more! Maggots as well as lice! Yeah, pile th’ friggin’ dirt of their friggin’ graveyard on ‘em, shovel ‘em under deep—till I can’t smell ‘em!”
The sound of this malediction was drowned in another truck’s thunder, but Lucio heard the man’s words. He stopped on the walk beside him. The stranger’s vehemence was so great he had dropped his bottles. Together they crouched to the walk and picked them up with the grave and voiceless preoccupation of children gathering flowers. When they were finished and he, the stranger, had spat out the phlegm that choked him, he caught hold of Lucio’s arm and peered at him wildly.