them

  “I didn’t steal that punchboard,” Betty said. “Somebody stole it from me.”

  “I said shut up about that.”

  “Well, nobody can prove I stole it.”

  Jules caught Betty’s rodent-like, frightened look and he figured that she had stolen it, whatever it was; she’d been caught stealing things in the past and she always denied it. Denied everything. That was her style, stupid and flat-footed, denying what was obvious.

  “A lot of kids take things at school,” Maureen said. “Sister Mary Margaret went in the cloakroom today and said she found something in somebody’s coat pocket that wasn’t supposed to be there, and those people had better return the things, but she wouldn’t say who it was. She was real mad. Nobody did anything. She went around the room asking who took her calendar, it was a little calendar up on her desk, and she asked everybody one by one but they said they didn’t know. I was scared when she came to me. She said, ‘Maureen, you know, don’t you?’ I said no. I had my fingers crossed and my toes crossed.”

  “Who took it?” Betty said.

  “Oh, that Floyd or maybe Anna Cruise, I don’t know. I don’t hang around with those dopes.”

  “What’d they do with it?”

  “Threw it out, somebody said.”

  Loretta looked up suddenly. “Is that her making that noise? The old woman?”

  No one had heard anything.

  Maureen said, “I’ll go look.”

  “You sit still,” said Howard. “This is supper.”

  Jules stared at the table for a few seconds and then brought the salt and pepper shakers together. They made sense together. “She needs more pills,” Loretta said.

  Howard, eating, didn’t look up.

  “I said she needs more pills.”

  “All right.”

  “Well, your brother Samson said he’d give her twenty dollars a week, and she told him to go to hell, now what do you expect? We got to buy all them pills.”

  Howard didn’t answer.

  “Those pills cost three dollars every goddam time! Last year it was something else, then they took all the goddam tests over again and it was something new…”

  Howard pushed his plate away from him toward the center of the table. He had big beefy hands. Jules looked at those hands and saw the pale half-moons of the nails, a surprising sight.

  Loretta said angrily, “When she drops dead your brother and his wife will send flowers. Have some Masses said. Connie will come up here by Greyhound and have another baby right in the front room. She’ll want to stay here so I can wait on her. Your goddam family will all move in sooner or later. Let them.”

  Howard looked at her. “What are you talking about?” he said. “If Connie comes up to Detroit—”

  “Is she coming?”

  “Your mother says maybe.”

  Howard appeared to be listening but said nothing.

  Loretta said, leaning forward against the table, “Well, I don’t want her! I don’t! I got Maureen moping around here. I don’t want two of them moping around!”

  “I’m not moping around,” Maureen said, surprised.

  “I’m not taking anybody else in! I take care of her now and for what? For nothing! She told your goddam brother to go to hell with his money and now what? Now what? I can clean up after her! Sure! And she said herself that your brother said he wouldn’t give that hundred dollars to you that time because you’d spend it on yourself—that’s what your brother thinks of you!”

  “She made that up.”

  “No. No, absolutely no, your mother does not make anything up but always tells the truth, just ask her. Everything she says is absolutely the truth, that’s why we keep her around here.”

  “All right,” Howard said.

  “All right yourself.”

  “How sick is she?” Betty said, jiggling the table.

  “You shut up!” Loretta cried.

  Howard stood suddenly. He stared down at his hands. “You want your face pushed in?” he said in a strangled, quiet voice.

  Loretta jumped back from the table. “You try it! You, you goddam big sow, you pig, you stinking mama’s baby pig!” she screamed.

  Maureen put her hands over her head. Betty cringed away. Jules got ready to escape. Their father headed for the back door, stumbling. They could hear him muttering to himself.

  Betty put her fist into her mouth to keep from laughing.

  “Good-by! Good night! Sleep tight out in the alley with the rats! You know where you belong! Bastard! Mama’s baby bastard!” Loretta cried.

  She had a dazzled, alert look about her. Her jaw seemed to flash toughly, and then she moved about the kitchen, flowing about it, very strong in her bare legs. She had won again. “It’s true and he knows it, everybody knows it, when that old sow dies he’ll squeal like a little pig, everybody knows it, am I telling some news? Jesus Christ, but I’m sick of this!” She picked up his bottle of ale and took a drink from it.

  “Grandma can hear you,” Maureen said.

  “She has ears, let her hear.” Loretta sat down in Howard’s chair. “So he has a tool-and-die thing of his own, a factory, he’s setting himself up in business. Your uncle. Uncle Samson. So he’s going to make money and his wife can spit in my eye, and your father will stand for it all because he’s a goddam stupid asshole and all he can do is push me around but he can’t make any money himself because he’s a goddam stupid asshole. Am I telling news? This is such old goddam stale news it’s not even on the radio any more, everybody knows about it.”

  “You’re really something,” Jules said.

  “Watch your mouth. Who got kicked out of the nuns’ school for fooling around, huh? You’ll end up like your father, you think you’re so smart.”

  “I’m not ending up like him or anybody else.”

  “Down in the morgue before you’re twenty!” She pushed Howard’s plate a little farther away from her. She took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. Her face was smooth and high-colored.

  Jules went back to eating, feeling somehow pleased.

  After a moment Betty said, “What movie did you see today, Ma?”

  “Oh, it was real nice, I liked it fine,” Loretta said. She always began this way when talking about movies.

  “What was it about?”

  “It was real nice. It had a kind of complicated plot, you didn’t know at first what was going on. You want me to tell you? There was a real big house, and a party going on, and the butler and the maids are working hard. The butler is real handsome, he’s making sure everything is just right, he puts out a fire some stupid rich old guy sets by mistake with his cigar, and a rich old bitch gets locked in the bathroom and he unscrews the door to let her out—that was real funny. Well, the story is about this butler and the maids, they’re real cute, and the chauffeur and the gardener and some other people that work here—it takes place in Philadelphia, the family is very wealthy but they’re really bankrupt but don’t know it yet. The old man is in the stock market. He has a daughter and a son and a crazy wife, a real funny old rich gal with wigs and stuff—she does card tricks and plays the harp, she’s just great, she loans her wigs to the maids and everything. Well, the butler gets the Wall Street Journal every morning before the old guy comes downstairs, to see what is going on in the stock market, and he finds out in a headline that the family is bankrupt. But he doesn’t want to tell them because the old guy has a heart condition, and also the daughter is going to get married to some French banker. And the movie is about how the butler gets the other servants to fool the family. They have a big ball for the daughter’s engagement and everything, and all the stuff is borrowed or stolen from different places, like florists and diamond stores and restaurants and stuff. Funny, it was so funny!”

  “What happened in the end?” Jules said patiently.

  “Oh, the stock market goes back up. The daughter gets married
. The butler marries one of the maids, there are two of them after him throughout the whole show. It ends all right,” Loretta said.

  “I wish I could see it,” said Betty.

  “Find that punchboard, kid, and you’re on your way!”

  “I told you, Ma—”

  “Forget it. Forget it.” Loretta crushed out her cigarette in a plateful of mashed potatoes. “Look, kid, I got a headache from your lazy bastard of a father. And that old woman gets next to me, I mean she gives me a pain where a pill won’t reach. You little pests think you’re so special but you don’t know nothing! You, Jules, you look so goddam smart-aleck but you don’t know nothing! I wasn’t always this low. The two of them bring me down low. I could lay on the sidewalk out front and croak, that’s how low they get me, but I wasn’t always like this. There was a man who got killed because of me, shot right in the head, shot dead, and it happened because of me, and nobody’s ever going to get shot in the head for you, Reeny kid, with your sour puss and your gawky neck, and you, Betty, you look like a pigeon or something that’s going to have babies. I wasn’t always like this, and when I get rid of that old bitch I’m going back to work again, with Ethel. I’m getting out from under all of you and your smart-aleck mouths and all the food you eat up. Christ! I’m sick of all this. I want to be like people in that movie, I want to know what I’m doing, I don’t want to be shoved this way then that way. Now, if we got to move out of this house like somebody was saying, if they want to fix the street—now, now that’s what drives me crazy. Listen, Jules, it drives me crazy the way I always have to move from one place to another. You remember out in the country? Then we came to Detroit? Then all them dumps, them bus rides? I can’t stand always moving around! I want my own place, my own house. I want to be like somebody in a movie, I want to get dressed up and walk down the street and know something important will happen, like this man who was killed because of me—like that—and on my deathbed, Jules kid, I’ll tell you a secret about him and shake you up, just wait. I wasn’t meant to be like this—I mean, stuck here. Really I wasn’t. I don’t look like this. I mean, my hair, and I’m too fat. I don’t really look like this, I look a different way. And the toilet is bad again, there’s water on the floor, well, I can’t give a goddam about that, I wasn’t born to mop up every toilet in the city or take care of some old bat that should have dropped dead twenty years ago. Or have him climb on top of me, that fat bastard! No, listen, I really wasn’t and I’m not drunk now and you know it. I’m telling you the truth. Face to face. I’m saying what I feel. You think you’re all special, all people who are born think they’re special, but you’re no more special than me. I know who I am—I got a lot of things to do and places to see and this isn’t all there is in the world! Not this! Not for me!”

  * * *

  —

  Jules had momentum enough to get him all the way to Tenth Street before he tried for a ride. He walked backward in the street, his thumb in the air. Cars passed close to him, very close, but the drivers did not appear to see him; Jules, with a look of cool anxiety, appeared not to see them either. Car after car passed him. His eyes began to water in the early spring wind that swept off the river. There was an odor of metal and smoke in the air, a wet taste to it. In the middle of a scrubby block of buildings and vacant lots he was lucky enough to get a ride; the driver took him all the way downtown, to the parking lot where he worked.

  He worked for fifty cents an hour, helping out the attendant in the busy hours between seven and two in the morning, when people in marvelous cars came to entrust them to Jules or to the sunken-necked attendant, a man named Rich who was maybe thirty or forty. The smell of such cars’ insides stirred Jules’s lust in a mystical way, and the smell of ladies’ perfume, sometimes lingering with the cold leather or borne lightly on the air as they passed in their furs and immaculate hairdos, made his brain burst into fragments of wild hope. Such cars! Such women! Such men, in their excellent coats and gloves, their shoes excellent, their faces cleanly shaved and their hair newly cut, everything perfect. These people were headed for two or three good restaurants nearby, or across the way to the Sheraton-Cadillac, where things were going on not just on Saturday nights but forever, endlessly. Jules, shivering in his jacket, dressed skimpily on purpose, backed cars into place with great reverence for their beauty and never nicked a bumper or a fender; he believed he had a magic touch with beautiful and expensive things, while the moronic Rich had no touch at all but banged cars into place, trusting to luck. Rich sat in the attendant’s little shack, playing with a plastic game in which numbered squares of about twenty digits could be slid from place to place, the object being to line up the numbers in correct order; and while magnificent people drifted by him and the Sheraton-Cadillac Hotel sent its lovely lights out into the night in a spangled pattern someone as gifted as Jules might interpret, Rich saw nothing except the little flat rectangle of plastic in his hand, as if the mysteries and secrets of the world were present in this and had already shown themselves too difficult for him. “Hey, look how close I came to getting them in this time,” Rich would say to Jules, who was dreaming and brooding at his elbow, and he would shove the game into Jules’s face—Jules, who had no use for games and was slightly puzzled by them, by the energy people shot into them and lost forever. Rich had a short neck and a small, round head upon which a gray woolen cap seemed to have been pulled permanently; his manner was that of a studious but slow child, more childish than Jules’s sister Betty, and his frequent appreciative smiles were not comforting.

  When the lot was filled up, which often happened as early as nine o’clock on a weekend night or on a Wednesday, and a period of quiet lasted until about midnight, Jules sat sunk in his own thoughts, smoking a cigarette, estimating how far it really was across the street and over to that hotel. The distance between the hotel and the parking lot was nothing, but the distance between the parking lot and the hotel was everything; many times he had helped a man who had had too much to drink, putting his hands gingerly on the stranger’s good coat or stooping to retrieve his gloves from the sidewalk, and he was shrewd enough to see how the steps they took together, while appearing to be the same steps, were in reality far different. They were not walking together, not really. The tips of a dollar or more he sometimes got were a sign of this difference and that it existed powerfully and irreparably. He always said, “Thank you, sir,” brightly, mechanically; but he could not summon up in his heart any real hatred for the rich. He felt that his true essence was of great value and would someday be expressed in these signs of cars and women, and in that sense he was already one of them, though disguised from them in a windbreaker with soiled cuffs and collar and in a punk’s slightly blemished face.

  It was lively tonight and even Rich was hurried, mumbling words of greeting and gratitude into faces that seemed not to hear them, and Jules felt his energy strain upward to its highest pitch at about eleven o’clock, then begin to subside alarmingly as if he were turning into an old man. In a giant black Lincoln he peered at himself anxiously in a mirror, glad to see that he still looked all right, and for a long moment he sat there, trying to relax, to collect his thoughts. His grandmother…the clinic. All right. He had got through that. Her slow bleeding insides…if she wanted to bleed she would bleed. She would die to spite them. The fight at the supper table had come and gone. It might have happened days ago. It was over, forgotten. What did he care about their fights? Sometimes his father banged out the back door, sometimes he slapped Loretta’s face, sometimes he slapped someone else’s face, sometimes he broke a chair or a plate—it hardly mattered. Jules was too old to run away. It was shameful to be always running away. Until a few years ago he had run away from home every few months, curious about the city or bitter about home, and he had always ended up in the Children’s Shelter—worse than home, though anonymous, a confusion of homes. Whimpering, sniveling kids, black and white, too many of them. Everyone was tired. Bones stuck out angrily. Yello
wish teeth were prominent. Too much. Running away was a mistake. He was too old now to run away but too young to move out. His father wasn’t going to run him out of the house. He adjusted the rear-view mirror in the Lincoln and looked at himself again, seriously. Did he have the looks to get him out of this Lincoln and into one of his own? Did he have the brains? Or would something in him give out before he was old enough to collect all the rewards his imagination promised him?

  The lot closed at two and he drifted off toward home, cold but dully excited. He was always in a state of excitement, of queer, formless tension. There was little traffic on Fort Street. He crossed through an alley beside a garage, his hands stuck in his pockets. He felt that he was invisible. Above, the sky was misted over with cloud or smog, and he felt that he could make his way without being seen into any building or house in the city. A pang of excitement seized him, almost a pang of lust. He wondered if he could break into a building tonight, alone, on his own, why not? With Ramie and other boys he had made his way into darkened stores and had lugged out merchandise, nothing too heavy or expensive or personal, and they had never been caught. With his friends he was visible, just as they were, and a clumsy chain linked them all together no matter how fast they ran; by himself he was light as air, with all possibilities open before him, just as they were open to the enviable heroes of books and movies. He paused at the end of the alley and looked up and down the street. On his own, now; he was entirely on his own. The block was a block of commercial buildings, all dark. Bruce Kmetz & Associates, Reinert Resale, Olsen Construction Co. Nothing here.

  He walked on. He approached a bar and grill, George’s, closed for the night. In George’s would there be some cash lying around? Could he break into a cigarette machine or wasn’t that worth the risk? What about a burglar alarm? All the money he’d made this evening he had to turn over to his mother or risk her hysteria, and only the tips, which he kept quiet about, were his own. But anything he stole was entirely his own. No one else had anything to do with it. The money he got here and there, secretly, would pile up out of sight and help him transform his life.