“Ah-ha-haaaaaaaah!” “Put it here, Franky!”
Thud!
They always warmed up for fifteen minutes or so with a hard ball and catchers’ mitts.
Stanley’s brush stopped after half an inch. He paused, hoping for a lull, knowing there wouldn’t be any. The braying voices went on, twenty feet below his window, bantering, directing one another, explaining, exhorting.
“Get the goddam bush outa the way! Pull it up!” a voice yelled. Stanley flinched as if it had been said to him.
Two Sundays ago they had had quite an exchange about the bushes. One of the men had tumbled over them in reaching for the ball, and Stanley, seeing it, had shouted down: “Would you please not go against the hedge?” It burst out of him involuntarily—he was sorry he had not made the remark a lot stronger—and they had all joined in yelling back at him: “What d’yuh think this is, your lot?” and “Who’re you, the gardener?—Hedges! Hah!”
Stanley edged closer to the window, close enough to see the bottom of the brick wall that bounded the far side of the lot. There were still five little bushes standing in front of the wall, forlorn and scraggly, but still standing, still growing—at this minute. Stanley had put them there. He had found them growing, or rather struggling for survival, in cindery corners of the lot and by the ash-cans at the end of the alley. None of the bushes was more than two feet tall, but they were unmistakably hedge bushes. He had transplanted them for two reasons; to hide the ugly wall somewhat and to put the plants in a spot where they could get some sunshine. It had been a tiny gesture toward beautifying something that was, essentially, unbeautifiable, but he had made the effort and it had given him satisfaction. And the men seemed to know he had planted them, perhaps because he had shouted down to watch out for them, and also because the superintendent, who was never around and barely took care of the garbage cans, would never have done anything like set out hedge bushes by a brick wall.
Moving nearer the window, Stanley could see the men. There were five of them today, deployed around the narrow rectangular lot, throwing the ball to one another in no particular order, which meant that four were at all times yelling for the ball to be thrown to them.
“Here y’are, Joey, here!”
Thud!
They were all men of thirty or more, and two had the beginnings of paunches. One of the paunchy men was redheaded and he had the loudest, most unpleasant voice, though it was the dark-haired man in blue jeans who yelled the most, really never stopped yelling, even when he caught and threw the ball, and by the same token none of his companions seemed to pay any attention to what he said. The redheaded man’s name was Franky, Stanley had learned, and the dark-haired man was Bob. Two of the others had cleated shoes, and pranced and yelled between catches, lifting their knees high and pumping their arms.
“Wanna see me break a window?” yelled Franky, winding up. He slammed the ball at one of the cleat-shod men, who let out a wail as he caught it as if it had killed him.
Why was he watching it, Stanley asked himself. He looked at his clock. Only twenty past two. They would play until five, at least. Stanley was aware of a nervous trembling inside him, and he looked at his hands. They seemed absolutely steady. He walked to his canvas. The portrait looked like paint and canvas now, nothing more. The voices might have been in the same room with him. He went to one window and closed it. It was really too hot to close both windows.
Then, from somewhere above him, Stanley heard a window go up, and as if it were a signal for battle, he stiffened: the window-opener was on his side. Stanley stood a little back from the window and looked down at the lot.
“Hey!” the voice from upstairs cried. “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to play ball there? People’re trying to sleep!”
“Go ahead’n sleep!” yelled the blue jeans, spitting on the ground between his spread knees.
An obscenity from the redhead, and then, “Let’s go, Joey, let’s have it!”
“Hey!—I’m going to get the law on you if you don’t clear out!” from the upstairs window.
The old man was really angry—it was Mr. Collins, the nightwatchman—but the threat of the law was empty and everybody knew it. Stanley had spoken to a policeman a month ago, told him about the Sunday ballplayers, but the policeman had only smiled at him—a smile of indulgence for the ballplayers—and had mumbled something about nobody’s being able to do anything about people who wanted to play ball on Sundays. Why couldn’t you, Stanley wondered. What about the no ballplaying written on the side of his own building and signed by the Police Department? What about the right of law-abiding citizens to spend a quiet Sunday at home if they cared to? What about the anti-noise campaign in New York? But he hadn’t asked the policeman these questions, because he had seen that the policeman was the same kind of man the ballplayers were, only in uniform.
They were still yelling, Mr. Collins and the quintet below. Stanley put his palms on the brick ledge of the windowsill and leaned out to add the support of his visible presence to Mr. Collins.
“We ain’t breakin’ any law! Go to hell!”
“I mean what I say!” shouted Mr. Collins. “I’m a working man!”
“Go back to bed, grampa!”
Then the redheaded man picked up a stone or a large cinder and made as if to throw it at Mr. Collins, whose voice shut off in the middle of a sentence. “Shut up or we’ll bust yuh windows!” the redheaded man bellowed, then managed to catch the ball that was coming his way.
Another window went up, and Stanley was suddenly inspired to yell: “Isn’t there another place to play ball around here? Can’t you give us a break one Sunday?”
“Ah, the hell with ’em!” said one of the men.
The batted ball made a sick sound and spun up behind the batter, stopping in mid-air hardly four feet in front of Stanley’s nose, before it started its descent. They were playing two-base baseball now with a stick bat and a soft ball.
The blond woman who lived on the floor above Stanley and to the left was having a sympathetic discussion with Mr. Collins: “Wouldn’t you think that grown men—”
Mr. Collins, loudly: “Ah, they’re worse than children! Hoodlums, that’s what they are! Ought to get the police after them!”
“And the language they use! I’ve told my husband about ’em but he works Sundays and he just can’t realize!”
“So her husband ain’t home, huh?” said the redheaded man, and the others guffawed.
Stanley looked down on the bent, freckled back of the redheaded man who had removed his shirt now and whose hands were braced on his knees. It was a revolting sight—the white back mottled with brown freckles, rounded with fatty muscle and faintly shiny with sweat. I wish I had a BB gun, Stanley thought as he had often thought before. I’d shoot them, not enough to hurt them, just enough to annoy them. Annoy them the hell out of here!
A roar from five throats shocked him, shattered his thoughts and left him shaking.
He went into the bathroom and wet his face at the basin. Then he came back and closed his other window. The closed windows made very little difference in the sound. He bent toward his easel again, touching the brushtip to the partly drawn highlight on the nose. The tip of his brush had dried and stiffened. He moistened it in the turpentine cup.
“Franky!”
“Run, boy run!”
Stanley put the brush down. He had made a wide white mark on the nose. He wiped at it with a rag, trembling.
Now there was an uproar from below, as if all five were fighting. Stanley looked out. Frank and the other pot-bellied man were wrestling for the ball by the hedges. With a wild, almost feminine laugh, the redhead toppled onto the hedges, yelping as the bushes scratched him.
Stanley flung the window up. “Would you please watch out for the hedge?” he shouted.
“Ah, f ’Chris’ sake!” yelled the redhead, getting up from one knee, at the same time yanking up a bush from the ground and hurling it in Stanley’s direction.
&
nbsp; The others laughed.
“You’re not allowed to destroy public property!” Stanley retorted with a quick, bitter smile, as if he had them. His heart was racing.
“What d’yuh mean we’re not allowed?” asked the blue jeans, crashing a foot into another bush.
“Cut that out!” Stanley yelled.
“Oh, pipe down!”
“I’m gettin’ thirsty! Who’s goin’ for drinks?”
Now the redheaded man swung a foot and kicked another bush up into the air.
“Pick that hedge up again! Put it back!” Stanley shouted, clenching his fists.
“Pick up yer ass!”
Stanley crossed his room and yanked the door open, ran down the steps and out. Suddenly, he was standing in the middle of the lot in the bright sunshine. “You’d better put that hedge back!” Stanley yelled. “One of you’d better put all those bushes back!”
“Look who’s here!”
“Oh, dry up! Come on, Joey!”
The ball bit Stanley on the shoulder, but he barely felt it, barely wondered if it had been directed at him. He was no match for any of the men physically, certainly not for all of them together, but this fact barely brushed the surface of his mind, either. He was mad enough to have attacked any or all of them, and it was only their scattered number that kept him from moving. He didn’t know where to begin.
“Isn’t any of you going to put those back?” he demanded.
“No!”
“Outa the way, Mac! You’re gonna get hurt!”
While reaching for the ball near Stanley, the blue jeans put out an arm and shoved him. Stanley’s neck made a snapping sound and he just managed to recover his balance without pitching on his face. No one was paying the least attention to him now. They were like a scattered, mobile army, confident of their ground. Stanley walked quickly toward the alley, oblivious of the ball that bounced off his head, oblivious of the laughter that followed.
The next thing he knew, he was in the cool, darkish hall of his building. His eye fell on the flat stone that was used now and then to prop the front door open. He picked it up and began to climb the stairs with it. He thought of hurling it out his window, down into the midst of them. The barbarians!
He rested the stone on his windowsill, still holding it between his hands. The man in blue jeans was walking along by the brick wall, kicking at the remaining bushes. They had stopped playing for some reason.
“Got the stuff fellows! Come ’n get it!” One of the pot-bellied men had arrived with his fists full of soft drink bottles.
Heads tipped back as they drank. There were animal murmurs and grunts of satisfaction. Stanley leaned farther out.
The redheaded man was sitting right below his window on a board propped up on a couple of rocks to make a bench. He couldn’t miss if he dropped it, Stanley thought, and almost at the same time, he held the stone a few inches out from his sill and dropped it. Ducking back, Stanley heard a deep-pitched, lethal-sounding crack, then a startled curse.
“Who did that?”
“Hey, Franky! Franky! Are you okay?”
Stanley heard a groan.
“We gotta get a doctor! Gimme a hand, somebody!”
“That bastard upstairs!” It came clearly.
Stanley jumped as something crashed through his other window, hit the shade and slid to the floor—a stone the size of a large egg.
Now he could hear their voices moving up the alley. Stanley expected them to come up the stairs for him. He clenched his fists and listened for feet on the stairs.
But nothing happened. Suddenly there was silence.
“Thank—God,” Stanley heard the blonde woman say, wearily.
The telephone would ring, he thought. That would be next. The police.
Stanley sat down in a chair, sat rigidly for several minutes. The rock had weighed eight or ten pounds, he thought. The very least that could have happened was that the man had suffered a concussion. But Stanley imagined the skull fractured, the brain partly crushed. Perhaps he had lived only a few moments after the impact.
He got up and went to his canvas. Boldly, he mixed a color for the entire nose, painted over the messy highlight, then attacked the background, making it a darker green. By the time he had finished the background, the nose was dry enough for him to put the highlight in, which he did quickly and surely. There was no sound anywhere except that of his rather accelerated breathing. He painted as if he had only five minutes more to paint, five minutes more to live before they came for him.
But by six o’clock, nobody had come. The telephone had not rung, and the picture was done. It was good, better than he had dared hope it would be. Stanley felt exhausted. He remembered that there was no coffee in the house. No milk, either. He’d have to have a little coffee. He’d have to go out.
Fear was sneaking up on him again. Were they waiting for him downstairs in front of the house? Or were they still at the hospital, watching their friend die? What if he were dead? You wouldn’t kill a man for playing ball below your window on Sunday—even though you might like to.
He tried to pull himself together, went into the bathroom and took a quick, cool shower, because he had been perspiring quite a bit. He put on a clean blue shirt and combed his hair. Then he pushed his wallet and keys into his pocket and went out. He saw no sign of the ball-players on the sidewalk, or of anyone who seemed to be interested in him. He bought milk and coffee at the delicatessen around the corner, and on the way back he ran into the blonde woman of about forty who lived on the floor above him.
“Wasn’t that awful this afternoon!” she said to Stanley. “I saw you down there arguing with them. Good for you! You certainly scared them off.” She shook her head despairingly. “But I suppose they’ll be back next Sunday.”
“Do they play Saturdays?” Stanley asked suddenly, and entirely out of nervousness, since he didn’t care whether they played Saturdays or not.
“No,” she said dubiously. “Well, they once did, but mostly it’s Sundays. I swear to God I’m going to make Al stay home one Sunday so he can hear ’em. You must have it a little worse than me, being lower down.” She shook her head again. She looked thin and tired, and there was a complicated meshwork of wrinkles under her lower lids. “Well, you’ve got my thanks for breakin’ ’em up a little earlier today.”
“Thank you,” Stanley said, really saying it almost involuntarily to thank her for not mentioning, for not having seen what he had done.
They climbed the stairs together.
“Trust this super not to be around whenever somebody needs him,” she said, loud enough to carry into the superintendent’s second-floor apartment, which they were then passing. “And to think we all give him big tips on Christmas!”
“It’s pretty bad,” Stanley said with a smile as he unlocked his door. “Well, let’s hope next week’s a little better.”
“You said it. I hope it’s pouring rain,” she said, and went on up the stairs.
Stanley was in the habit of breakfasting at a small café between his house and the subway, and on Monday morning one of the ballplayers—the one who usually wore blue jeans—was in the café. He was having coffee and doughnuts when Stanley walked in, and he gave Stanley such an unpleasant look, continued for several minutes to give him such an unpleasant look, that a few other people in the café noticed it and began to watch them. Stanley stammeringly ordered coffee. The redheaded man wasn’t dead, he decided. He was probably hovering between life and death. If Franky were dead, or if he were perfectly all right now, the dark-haired man’s expression would have been different. Stanley finished his coffee and passed the man on the way to pay his check. He expected the man to try to trip him, or at least to say something to him as he passed him, but he didn’t.
That evening, when Stanley came home from work at a little after six, he saw two of the ballplayers—the dark-haired man again and one of the paunchy men who looked like a wrestler in his ordinary clothes—standing across the street. The
y stared at him as he went into his building. Upstairs in his apartment, Stanley pondered the possible significance of their standing across the street from where he lived. Had their friend just died, or was he nearer death? Had they just come from the funeral, perhaps? Both of them had been wearing dark suits, suits that might have been their best. Stanley listened for feet on the stairs. There was only the plodding tread of the old woman who lived with her dog on the top floor. She aired her dog at about this time every evening.
All at once Stanley noticed that his windows were shattered. Now he saw three or four stones and fragments of glass on the carpet. There was a stone on his bed, too. The window that had been broken Sunday had almost no glass in it now, and of the upper halves of the windows, which were paneled, only two or three panels remained, he saw when he raised the shades.
He set about methodically picking up the stones and the larger pieces of glass and putting them into a paper bag. Then he got his broom and swept. He was wondering when he would have the time to put the glass back—no use asking the super to do it—and he thought probably not before next weekend, unless he ordered the pieces during his lunch hour tomorrow. He got his yardstick and measured the larger panes, which were of slightly different sizes because it was an old house, and then the panels, and recorded the numbers on a paper which he put into his wallet. He’d have to buy putty, too.
He stiffened, hearing a faint click at his doorlock. “Who’s there?” he called.
Silence.
He had an impulse to yank the door open, then realized he was afraid to. He listened for a few moments. There was no other sound, so he decided to forget the click. Maybe he had only imagined it.
When he came home the next evening, he couldn’t get his door open. The key went in, but it wouldn’t turn, not a fraction of an inch. Had they put something in it to jam it? Had that been the click he had heard last night? On the other hand, the lock had given him some trouble about six months ago, he remembered. For several days it had been difficult to open, and then it had got all right again. Or had that been the lock on his father’s store door? He couldn’t quite remember.