With Shuddering Fall

  Shar leaned forward on the counter as if he were tired. He and the man looked at each other: the man’s eyes were still and jellied behind his glasses. “I wish to hell he would get here,” Shar said. “I’m sick of this place.”

  “Yes, yes, that’s true,” the man said vaguely. His hair was dark and thin and came down on his forehead in two flimsy strands. His chin was reflected on the dull scratched top of the glass counter. For some reason he seemed to like Shar; he nodded amiably at him. “But those state troopers won’t be back any more. They know me; we used to give out gas here a while back, and they stopped in a lot. They knew my brother more but me too. . . . Did you like what I said to them?”

  “Hell,” said Shar.

  As if this were an answer, the man went on chattily, “They must have patrolled the road last night, driving back and forth and stopping cars. Maybe they set up a roadblock for a while. The kid will tell you if there’s one now—it’s all right. They wouldn’t keep it up long. They’d figure you got out.” Behind him shelves reached to the ceiling: boxes, canned goods, boots, grimy glassware, coils of rope. Shar let his eyes wander over the objects. “Your face does look a lot better now,” the man said. He smiled seriously. “It was just the surprise of it, last night I mean, you coming in here like you did—My heart isn’t so good and I—”

  Shar looked at him. “What’s wrong with your heart?”

  “Why—why—I’m not sure—” the man stammered; he was obviously flattered. As if he did not want to ruin the moment by talking, he fell silent.

  Shar lit another cigarette and strolled back to the window. There was nothing to see. “Those bastards will never find me,” he said. Then he felt embarrassed for having spoken. Back at the counter, with his soft stomach expanded against the glass, the man would be nodding enthusiastically.

  “Do you have—do you have insomnia?” the man said.

  “What?”

  “Insomnia—like me. That would help you.” He stood in the same position, one fat hand on the pile of blankets. “I can’t sleep much and when I do, I wake up before dawn. The birds do it—at dawn, I mean.” Seeing Shar’s look, he went on, “I mean, that would help you. If you have a long way to go and want to keep going straight through. Or anything you want to do and don’t want to waste your life sleeping—insomnia would help. An ideal insomnia.”

  Shar turned back to the window. He hardly heard the man. “Think if you’re fifty years old. That means you spent maybe eighteen years asleep. Did you ever think of that? All that time asleep, and lying flat on your back. . . . It makes me mad to think about it,” he said. “I don’t like to think about it.”

  The cold white glare began to hurt Shar’s eyes so he came back to the counter again. “Another thing,” the man said, “a lot of things going on that you want to change—make better, I mean. Specially in a store like this where you’re by yourself and people coming in and out all the time. Some ones of them only stop once, like you . . . like you’re doing. Some things go on you’d like to change or give some help to. I mean, like this kid the other night. He was maybe thirteen or so, a runaway for sure, and freezing cold and hungry. Well, I happened to see him coming out there and couldn’t think what to do—to let him in or not, to give him something or not. I couldn’t think. I locked the door, though—without thinking—I got that done. He stood out there rattling around with it. I thought maybe I’d go up and unlock it but I never did. Because he was hungry, I knew he was hungry, so I was afraid of him. Then I thought he’d break in or throw a rock through the window, but he didn’t. He was run away from something for sure—and had a face all gone thin like a hawk or an old man. They get like that.”

  Beneath the marred glass of the counter Shar saw opened cartons of cigarettes and candy bars and pieces of candy that lay out in the open, lengths of licorice and peppermint sticks. There was even a fly, dazed with the cold or just coming back to life, that crawled over one of the peppermint sticks.

  “I ought to have tossed him out a candy bar!” the man said suddenly. He gave a shrill, brief giggle that stopped when Shar stared up at him. “Well,” he said, resuming his nod, “you don’t need to worry. Not a bit. I’ll do just what you say.”

  “What about the boy?”

  “No, he won’t say anything. I’ll see to it.”

  Shar watched the fly. Its wings beat slowly, tiny pulsations. It crawled with intricate steps over the candy. “All right,” said Shar. “It better be that way. Once I get out of here I don’t want to come back, or send anybody back for you.”

  “Of course. No—no. That’s right.”

  “If I was here,” Shar said, “I wouldn’t stand for it but would get the hell out of here. Like I did when I was a kid. Give it all up and leave—burn it all up and leave.”

  “Would you?” said the man with great interest.

  Shar shrugged his shoulders, sorry he had said anything. He tapped on the counter. Beneath the glass the fly remained still, as though paralyzed by the sound or the vibrations. “The hell with it,” he said. “Nothing would hold me anywhere. I wouldn’t give it up to no one or anything to hold me. Without being free—” He paused and looked away. The man waited. When Shar went on it was about something else, and he could feel the man’s queer disappointment. “It better be a good car,” he said. “I don’t care what it looks like but it better be good underneath.”

  “I don’t know much about cars.”

  “Well, I do. It better be good for what I’m giving you.”

  “There’s some risk involved for me—”

  “Risk!” said Shar. For the first time that morning he felt angry. The sensation pleased him. “Mention that to me again and I’ll stuff those goddam peppermint sticks down your throat—You’ll wish to hell you’d given them to the kid then.”

  “The kid?”

  “The one outside—the one wanting to get in,” Shar said. He stared at the man in distaste. “You’re a bastard not to give him anything.”

  “But he—he might have—When people are hungry they’re not the same,” the man said, pretending to be flustered but obviously pleased by both Shar’s attention and his contempt. “They do things—they might do things to you. A person can’t take a chance.”

  Shar yawned and looked around. The other wall of the store was also filled with shelves and merchandise, and before it there was another counter, stacked with half-opened boxes. A pile of shirts like the one Shar had just put on—heavy woolen shirts with leather buttons—had been tossed down, and there were work shirts of denim, and overalls, and shotgun shells, and leather gloves. “I got a lot of things stored up here,” the man said. “Some of them been here a long time—when my father had the place, even. They don’t move fast. Like that shirt I gave you and them gloves—they got fur on the inside. We had some ladies’ stuff but it never sold so we got rid of it. They’d rather go in to town for that—rather get the same stuff there. I never could figure out why.”

  “How long is he going to take?” Shar said impatiently.

  “It won’t be long now.”

  “I wish to hell he’d hurry up. It’s been light now for a couple of hours.”

  As if summoned, the man came around the counter. He was nearly a head shorter than Shar and fairly heavy, with thick neck and shoulders. “He had to wake them up down there,” he said. “They aren’t used to people coming around so early. But it oughtn’t to be long now. I don’t know what’s keeping him.”

  Shar looked at his watch. It was cracked but ticked faintly. “It’s been about an hour.”

  They waited, side by side. Shar stared mechanically at the window. Outside, the morning did not seem to get lighter but stayed the same—it had a dull, heavy look, as if a fog were pressed up hard against the building. Shar thought he would be glad to leave this country again, but he thought too that he would probably remember it in spite of himself: cold air, hard earth, mountains at the horizon, his father’s shanty, an abandoned barn with rats scuttling around f
or an hour or so. And, last night, a back door opening fearfully and this man staring out at him with a look of such terror that Shar thought for an instant the automobile accident must have disfigured him. . . .

  “There’s something coming, there it is,” the man said. He sounded a little disappointed. He went up to the door and opened it. “Yes. It’s him.”

  When the kid drove up Shar stood back from the window. The car was black, an old model, mud-crusted, with one door wired shut. “All right,” Shar said. “I’ll go out and—No, wait.” He drew back. “You go out and get rid of him.”

  Shar watched the man and the kid talking. When the kid glanced toward the window Shar turned aside. After a while the man came back in, carrying a bundle of clothing. “Could he get hold of everything?” Shar said. He took the clothes from the man; they were not folded but were wrinkled and damp. “How’s the car?”

  “Good, good,” the man said, rubbing his hands. “You want to check it? But it’s good—I know it. They got a good bargain, they wouldn’t try to cheat you. I mean, to cheat me—it’s all right. Don’t worry. . . . Those things are from the guy’s wife, that has the car lot. He said she put some good things in.”

  “All right,” said Shar. “I’ll look at the car in a minute. Get rid of the kid.”

  “He’s gone.”

  The man followed Shar to the back of the store. “He’s my brother’s kid, works for Harry down there—Harry’s got the car lot. He’s smart and knows what’s what; he won’t talk. I told him.”

  Shar pushed a door open with his foot and went through, stooping, with the man clumsily behind him. “You ought to have got that blood off her hair,” the man said. “I could do it myself now if you want.”

  “What?” said Shar.

  “That blood on her hair—”

  The room looked as if it had been a storeroom before being converted into a bedroom: there was light only from a small high window that had neither a curtain nor a shade. Shar went to the bed where Karen was lying beneath a pile of dirty quilts. Her eyes were open slightly, so Shar had to stoop to see if she was really asleep. There was no pillow and her head seemed flung back at a painful angle. Her hair was matted and dirty and lay about her head in pale strands, spread out as if expressing surprise. Shar shook her. “I could get a washcloth,” the man said.

  “You stay where you are,” said Shar. He let the bundle of clothes fall and shook Karen; he pulled the quilts off her. The man, watching, stepped closer. Shar saw him in the corner of his eye. The man’s white pudgy hands were lifted as if he wanted to help.

  “Like I—like I said before,” the man began, moving a little closer to Shar, “there’s things happening here you’d want to change, or to help the people—Some things . . . that you could do some good to.” He stood watching Shar. “When they’re young people, especially then. But I—I—”

  Shar pushed him back. The man gasped in alarm, clutching his chest. “But I can’t! I can’t!” he said. “I can’t do it!”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Why, you can see them starting, and how they’ll go! You can see them like a map with red pencil on it—things to end with clothes all soiled, in a gas station somewhere, or a public rest room, or the back of a store with candy up front—those old pieces of candy there, stale and hard as rocks, stuck in that counter for so long—”

  Shar had jerked Karen to her feet and she now leaned against him, her hair fallen softly forward. Without glancing at the man Shar said, “What the hell are you talking about?” He was trying to get Karen to stand by herself. Something about her dazed eyes, her pale, transparent-looking skin, transfixed him; he saw that her lips were moving as if she were whispering to him, to lure him closer. “Damn you,” Shar said, “stand up. Stand up. How much time do you think I have?”

  He was picking at the buttons at the neck of her dress, then he gave up and took hold of the dress by the collar and ripped it open. She lifted her arms against him slowly, but he pushed them down. “Hand me that thing there,” Shar said to the man. The man awoke to action, already nodding, and gave Shar a dress of dark, cheap cotton, smelling of dampness. Shar tossed it beside him on the bed and turned back to Karen, tearing at the rest of her dress. He could see the man leaning to him and could almost feel the pressure of his body against him, and the weight of his look behind the glasses. “I don’t know what it is to you,” Shar said, “but it isn’t the end of anything. It isn’t any end. It’s only now begun.”

  Summer

  8

  Strolling along the main street of Synderdale one day in mid-summer were two young men, one a Negro employed by a racing company and the other an ex-college student, a big, pudgy, pleasant-faced young man who had quit school to experience life and who had managed to become employed by the same company that owned, or hired, the Negro. The Negro, Mitchie, was neat and cleanly handsome, and carried himself with pride: he was being groomed for racing. The other man, Ponzi, who had anxiously applied for a mechanic’s job and whose ignorance had not yet been discovered, carried himself with pride also—but it was a perverse, insolent, grinning pride, as if he were pleased with his slouching posture and damp clothes and the sweat that seemed to seep out of his skin, as well as the more obscure fact of his accompanying a Negro obviously his superior, obviously more attractive to any women they might encounter.

  It was the morning of the Synderdale picnic and race. The two were not really connected: the picnic was sponsored by volunteer firemen in the county to make money and the race was controlled by people outside Synderdale who rented the old fair grounds for the day. As Mitchie and Ponzi walked through town they enjoyed the sensation of being strangers and of being looked upon as superior. Groups of teen-age boys crowded along the street and looked at them, wondering if they were drivers in the race or owners; no one dared ask them. “A hell of a hot day for a race,” Ponzi said, wiping his face. “He’ll lose ten pounds on that track.”

  “I heard he lost eight or so one day,” Mitchie said. “That was before I was with them.”

  Traffic moved slowly through town. There were groups of people in uniform: they wore satin and gold braid and carried musical instruments that gleamed importantly in the sunlight. Drum majorettes, some of them not more than children, ran giggling along the sidewalks in short shiny skirts. Tassels on their white boots jiggled in their excitement. Catching sight of Mitchie and Ponzi, the girls whispered together and peeped at them slyly and surrendered to gales of laughter. “These country girls,” Ponzi said, grinning.

  A fat man in the street, dressed like an army officer of high rank except for the splendid scarlet of his uniform, blew experimentally on a tuba. Perspiring men carried flags of various colors and dragged drums across the street. One of the drums, Ponzi saw, said MARCHEN COUNTY CORPS. Still in the back of a pick-up truck was another drum, a newer and larger one, that said MEDINA FIREMEN. Little boys pounded on the drum with their fists and, just before Mitchie and Ponzi passed by, began to kick it angrily. People shouted. Someone had arranged for music to be broadcast throughout the town by means of a loud-speaker system, and the music got suddenly louder: it was a popular song, twangy and persistent, a woman’s voice straining against a background of frenzied guitars and electronic instruments. She sang:

  “The way love is it treats you wrong,

  It don’t care for hearts that break.

  Take your burdens to the Lord. . . .”

  Teen-age boys in roaring jalopies drove up and down the main street, waving and shouting. Someone on the sidewalk picked up a big stone and threw it after them, but it bounced harmlessly across the street; one of the uniformed firemen, tacking up a poster, looked angrily around to see who had thrown it. Before a drug store a sound truck had been parked, decorated with red crepe paper. A man dressed in a suit and tie stood on a platform with a microphone in his hand, interviewing a young girl and grinning and trying to draw into the conversation the group of people who stood silently watch
ing. As Mitchie and Ponzi passed by he said, “Now folks, folks, this is a busy day in Synderdale; a busy morning in Synderdale; there’s folks all up and down the street, and out in the park the firemen and their wives are getting tents set up, and games set up, and the big chowder kettles are filled with—chowder—and everything is getting ready for the parade! The parade is at one o’clock! The parade will be led off by the Synderdale Consolidated High School, and I have the young lady here who is president—what?—vice-president of the baton twirlers. A young lady who—” The girl wore white with gold braid. She giggled behind her hand. A woman in the crowd, probably her mother, nodded anxiously as if she were trying to tell the girl something.

  Young girls strolled along the sidewalk, four and five abreast, with linked arms. Some of them wore shorts and were barefoot, others were dressed as if it were Sunday, in high heels, and others wore the gleaming short skirts of the baton twirlers: approaching Mitchie and Ponzi, they pretended to look away and to talk breathlessly among themselves, but at the last moment they would turn on the men their neat, hard, sharply sweet looks and release each other so the men could pass by. Ponzi smelled their harsh perfume. He heard them giggle something about “that nigger.” Again he felt a thrill of insolent pride, and glanced at Mitchie to see if he had heard.

  Mitchie wore sky blue and white: he looked careful, even cautious, about his dress. A solemn necktie of gray gave him the look of a professional man. His hair was cut short, hardly more than a dark film on his head; his face was clean, a little shiny from perspiration, and his eyes and teeth, astonishingly white, seemed to hide themselves: he had the look of being on view and yet not self-conscious, as if he had been prepared by someone other than himself. Ponzi, walking proudly beside him with his chest out, wore a stained shirt of yellow, open at the neck, and khaki pants that were too big for him at the seat and knees and were stained with grease. His arms swung militantly back and forth as he walked, and his hands, clammy white beneath the grease stains, sometimes caught each other in mid-swing and for an instant clasped together, caressingly or nervously. “When did you say they’re coming? Why aren’t they here?” he said. “Shar’s been here for a day. What is he like—Max—will he notice me? What is he like?”