“Is there anyone—your parents maybe—anyone you should say good-by to? Nearest of kin?” Bernard asked.
“My mother,” Jules said slowly, struck by something odd in this question but too tired to figure it out. “I’d better see her.”
“Oh, your mother! You have a mother? She’s dependent on you?”
“I give her a little money, but mostly she’s on welfare.”
“Does she have money for groceries?” Bernard asked, concerned.
“Yes, I think so.”
“But she’s on welfare?”
“Since April.”
“I don’t approve of welfare, frankly,” Bernard said. “Doesn’t welfare encourage her to be idle?”
“It might.”
“But do you need any money for her? Let me make you out a check, my boy.”
“No, really. I don’t need it.”
“Nonsense! I’ll make you out a check and you can run over with it, of course, but you should tell her to get off welfare if she can. You can bring her to live with you and I’ll support you both, gladly.”
“I could maybe go to college here, at Wayne State, instead of in the East,” Jules said.
Bernard ripped the check out and passed it up to Jules. It was made out to John Wendall for twenty-five dollars.
“I really don’t need this,” Jules said uneasily.
“Nonsense, take it. I don’t mind. I’m glad to give it to you.”
They had dinner around five o’clock in a Howard Johnson’s. Bernard brought the package in with him. Jules ordered the same dinner Bernard ordered: hamburger plate with French fries. Bernard was moody. He ate with his shoulders slumping forward, disappointing Jules; he ate like a truck driver sitting at a counter. Jules thought of the adventure before him as he chewed his hamburger. He tried to re-experience that ballooning sensation in his chest; how had that felt? Across the way he could see a waitress mopping up something that had been knocked onto the floor. It seemed to him that this scene might drag him down forever if he wasn’t careful, if he didn’t look aside….
“I forgot! This is for you!” Bernard said, snapping his fingers. He brought the package up on the table. “It’s a very necessary part of our equipment—I hope you won’t be alarmed.”
Jules watched as he unwrapped it. It was a gun. Jules, in a panic, reached out and drew the wrapping paper back up over it. “My God! Jesus!” he whispered.
“Of course I shouldn’t open it in here, of course,” Bernard said wisely. “I’ll give it to you outside.”
“No, not to me, no thanks,” Jules said. “I’m not carrying a gun!”
“But why not?”
“I don’t want to get put in jail, I don’t want to get my teeth kicked out for possession!”
“We’ll put it in the glove compartment then.”
“But that’s the same thing!”
“We won’t talk about it any more at the present.”
“But…”
The next morning he went to see his mother. She gave him coffee and they chatted. It was the usual conversation: chatting about Maureen’s appetite. She eats everything I make for her, so she’s all right…And then he had to go in to see Maureen herself, lying in bed, forever lying in bed and stuffing her face with coffee cake and cookies and whatever sweet crap Loretta gave her, so that her face had broken out, her body grown disgusting. Maureen was going to drive him crazy too unless he put distance between them. St. Louis wasn’t far enough.
He went to pick up Bernard at noon. Bernard did exist; he appeared in a small crowd, materializing out of it. He wore the same coat. Jules leaned back to open the door for him and had the idea that the two of them had been together for a lifetime already and might be sentenced together for another lifetime, an eternal lifetime, like conspirators who wind up together in hell, a sad joke their being together for eternity…
Bernard said, “To the airport!”
“Which one?”
“Metropolitan. Hurry.”
It was a long drive. Jules nearly fell asleep. To keep himself awake he tried to explain about the Cadillac, but Bernard was reading a newspaper and did not seem to hear. Out at the airport Bernard had Jules drive around while he went into one of the terminals to check something. Jules wondered why he hadn’t simply made a telephone call.
Bernard came back on the run. He sighed cheerfully. “It’s all on! Our plans for St. Louis!” He struck the back of the seat with one flat-handed blow, as if to make a point he didn’t really believe in.
Jules drove back to Detroit.
And then…
Though he was to have plenty of time to think it over, the event that followed never really became believable to him. Lying in a hospital bed some years later, having nothing to do except regain his strength, he was able to think and rethink that afternoon but he was never able really to believe in it. Bernard instructed him to go to a certain address on Livernois, which turned out to be a sleazy-looking muffler shop. Then on to another address near Grand Boulevard. Jules was able to park on the street in front of the house, since this was a residential neighborhood. “I have to finalize something here,” Bernard said. Jules reached over and got the newspaper out of the back seat and read it, beginning with the comic page.
Time passed.
After a while he looked up uneasily. The street was fairly crowded. People were strolling around. No Bernard. The house he’d gone into was made of brick, old and decrepit. An awning on the front porch was rotted. Jules let time pass, maybe an hour, before he prodded himself into getting out of the car. He stared at the house and a terrible feeling came over him: is this as far as he would go?
He rang the doorbell several times. No answer. He tried the door and it was open. A hallway, a stairway. Plasterboard showed. A few coat hangers were lying on the floor. The house was empty, yet cluttered with boxes and old clothing and junk, the remains of a family. It smelled. Jules poked around downstairs though he felt instinctively that what he was looking for was not downstairs.
He went upstairs. “Mr. Geffen?” he said. At the top of the stairs lay a dead rat, very stiff. Its tail was long and rubbery but still. He stepped over the rat and looked into the first room, where a card table had been set up. Two chairs were drawn to it, close together. A ruffled pink curtain lay on the floor. A Captain Marvel comic book lay near one of the chairs. Jules could smell a terrible cold smell, inside him, that had nothing to do with this dump of a house or with the dead rat out on the landing.
He went to the next room, leaned in through the doorway, and there he saw Bernard. Bernard was lying on his back near an opened closet door. His throat had been cut. Jules leaned farther into the room as if someone had given him a shove, but he did not move his feet. Bernard, a graying man in his fifties, lay on his back on the bare floor with his throat freshly slit and the butcher knife placed in his hand, the fingers loose about it. “My God!” Jules said aloud.
Now he was beginning to wake up, though slowly enough, and his eyes danced around the spectacle of that bright blood, streaking the floor and staining Bernard’s raincoat, the red so bright that it gave Bernard a look of youth and energy. Blood was everywhere, smeared up onto his cheeks, even onto his forehead. His eyes were open and blood was even smeared across one of his eyes and clotted in the eyelashes.
“Mr. Geffen?” Jules said feebly.
He tiptoed over to the dead man. Yes, the butcher knife had been put in his hand and had fallen out again slightly. Bernard seemed to have no interest in the knife. He had a surprised, though dignified look, even with all that blood. Jules stared into his face and saw that the blood was smeared onto the eyeball of one eye, the left eye. That was strange. Jules shut his own eyes, feeling pain in them. When he opened them after a moment nothing had changed.
He took out his wallet and in a slow, cold panic took all the money out of it, a thick handful of bills. Distastefully b
ut with dignity, he bent over and put all the money into Bernard’s inside coat pocket, stuffing it in. He remembered the car keys; he put them in the pocket too. The odor of terror was rising sharply about him. He straightened. He got out of the room. Out on the street he bypassed the Lincoln, which had attracted a small crowd of Negro kids, and headed off on foot for his room many miles away, leaving behind his fingerprints and any evidence of himself that existed for fate to handle.
He did not pick up the suit on Friday.
4
September 1956. Jules was driving a truck filled with flowers around the unflowery streets of Detroit. He had become so accustomed to driving that the motor’s drone was confused with his thinking, his energy. In a sweet flowery daze he thought about Bernard’s niece, though he had nothing to think about her, no reference point.
When he had the opportunity to drive out to Grosse Pointe he cruised near her house, unafraid of being seen, feeling himself invisible. His hair was combed down flat beneath his delivery boy’s hat. Of Bernard he did not often think because the sight of that man had a little unnerved him. So much blood, and blood smeared on an eyeball…But of Bernard’s niece he thought constantly. She was the opposite of the sight of that dead man, she had somehow to do with the fragrant burden of flowers he hauled about the streets, their stems and leaves and heads nodding in rhythm to the demands he made on his truck, in a constant hurry but without any destination. He had no clear reference point. He thought about the girl and mixed her up with the cool, disdainful lovely distance of Faye’s body—Faye had now disappeared—and the futility of Bernard’s quest, a mystery to Jules.
He tried to avoid close thoughts about anything. Better to stick to himself, to keep driving. He liked to be tired at night so he could sleep without any thoughts, except thoughts of Bernard’s niece; but these were not really thoughts. Still, it had puzzled him that Bernard had died so quickly and so permanently. One minute he had been bounding up to the car, the next lying flat on his back, and that was the end. It was no surprise to Jules that the police never picked him up, since he knew how they smudged fingerprints and lost evidence, working in a hurry, but he was surprised that he never found out what had happened—he’d searched through the newspapers for weeks, looking for notice of Bernard’s death, but found no mention of it. So a man could die and disappear? It was like the rifle shot that had been fired through the window of a friend of Loretta’s, in August. A shot had rung out, a bullet had crashed through the window and gone into a wall, and nothing else—some screaming, some alarm, but nothing else. A rifle is fired, but most of the time a rifle is not fired. Nothing follows.
He was drawn to Grosse Pointe though it was out of his way; he made up for lost time by driving fast along ordinary streets. Grosse Pointe was for him a paradise of evergreens and brick. There no one fired through windows; doors were left unlocked; the officials of the Detroit Mafia, seeking genteel lives, bought mansions and hired nursemaids for their curly-haired children; everyone settled down, settled in, breathed deeply the air that blew from the lake. Jules wished his employer did more business in the Pointes. Jules liked nothing more than delivering flowers to a home in Grosse Pointe, carrying out a gilt-wrapped heavy bucket of mums, the flowers light and their containers heavy, expensive, ringing a golden doorbell, hearing golden chimes deep inside. He had dreams in which Faye’s body was confused with the bulk of a house, one of those beautiful ornate houses, and this in turn was confused with the body, the being, of Bernard’s niece, who, innocent as Faye was not, had the right to live in such a home. Faye would never live in such a home. And he dreamed, sleeping lightly, of the mysterious golden interior of one of these homes, its rooms and corridors and its softness, like the fragrant softness of a woman’s secret body, a mystery to him. He was still eighteen.
This job was a lousy one, he knew that. Yet he was reluctant to quit and find another. He was locked in a cheerful inertia, in love as if hypnotized by long distance; he imagined his routes around the city and into Grosse Pointe as an ingenious cobweb of crossings and crisscrossings, leading him inexorably to that girl. She would not have known him. She could not have remembered him. But he sat in his driver’s seat preparing for her, his face made gentle with plans of love, his eyes working intelligently under the asinine green cap he had to wear, or wore out of indifference.
“I don’t like you in that uniform. I don’t like uniforms,” Loretta would say, drunk, maybe put in mind of a cop’s uniform. “At least take off that goddam cap!”
“I don’t put on airs. I’m happy driving a flower truck,” Jules said with exaggerated politeness.
“Take off that goddam cap in the house!”
So Jules would bow and snatch off the cap with a cavalier-like gesture, irritating his mother even more. “You’re crazy!” she would say.
Autumn was lovely in Grosse Pointe though it made no mark on Detroit. Jules noted the leaves about to change, he noted the autumn flowers arranged in symmetrical patterns around driveways, he noted the teen-aged girls, newly returned to school, in plaid skirts or Bermuda shorts of dark material, sometimes wearing knee socks on their slender strong legs. His lust for one girl flowered generously over them all; if he had fallen in love with Bernard’s niece, he had fallen in love with all the nieces and daughters of the Pointes, those fair-skinned, thoughtful girls with their shining clean hair.
At fourteen he had been older than he was at eighteen. At eighteen, in love, vulnerable, he had to prod himself to think about a new job, about money, about his sister. Bernard’s niece freed him from thoughts of money because no amount of money could ever get her. It was hopeless. One hundred dollars might have bought Faye a while ago, but even Faye’s price was higher now, and in any case Faye had disappeared—and why did he need a new job, didn’t he live in the present? What else mattered? And, living in the present, how could he bear to make himself think about Maureen?
He brought her odds and ends of flowers, but she lay around the house in a soiled nightgown, unseeing. He avoided the apartment to avoid her and Loretta and the squawling of that brat, Furlong’s kid. If he could get over this girl and become the old Jules again, cagey and on the lookout for advantages, he’d get hold of some money and take Maureen to a real doctor and be free of them all. But he was afraid of stealing and getting caught, especially now. Anything might happen now; he couldn’t afford to take chances with his freedom. He stopped thinking about Maureen and began to think about Bernard’s niece. She was with him constantly. He wondered if he was losing his mind, giving himself up to the memory of a girl he had seen for half a minute, when there were other girls who came with the enthusiasm of popular love songs into his arms, at home there, and he had the idea that never, never would that other girl be at home in his arms.
But he prepared himself for her with other girls: he was rehearsing Jules Wendall, her lover. He watched himself critically. He admired himself. Wasn’t he Jules Wendall, knocked down and kicked around but not counted out? Hadn’t he escaped from danger all his life? Hadn’t his luck always bounced him back up to the top, as if he were a rubber ball, all one texture, one foamy, happy, invulnerable, rubbery texture that nothing could kill?
No, of Maureen he would not think, his other, darker self, his sister, lying around in silence, unwashed, drab and coarse—he could not let himself think of her because he was eighteen and in love and he knew better than to think. He reeled with the drowsiness of imagined love, his mind fixed upon a girl with long black hair and a straight, inquisitive look, bound to him by the violence of her uncle’s death but totally unknown to him, and innocent of everything, innocent of the other women in his life, whose arms always threatened to pull him down. But he was still free. Everything lay before him. But sometimes, beneath the frothy odor of the flowers in his truck, he caught a whiff of something harder, more permanent, the stench of failure that was blown back into his face from the exhaust of a city bus or a big auto carrier, the sour, foul stenc
h of failure, of the foul, dark joke of a world in which he had lived all his life and might never escape.
One evening, broke, he stopped off at Loretta’s to see what was up, and there in the kitchen a man was sitting.
Jesus, another baby on the way, Jules thought.
Loretta jumped to her feet. “Jules, guess who! Guess who’s here!”
The man, shaven so recently that a few clots of blood were still fresh on his chin, got to his feet to shake Jules’s hand.
Loretta cried, “Jules, this is your Uncle Brock! Your uncle! My brother! And, Brock, this is my son Jules, my big son. What do you think of him? Isn’t he handsome?”
They shook hands energetically.
“It’s nice…nice to see you,” Jules stammered.
“It’s nice to see you. What’s that uniform?” Brock asked.
“Jules delivers flowers. In a truck.”
“That’s nice.”
“It’s a very steady job. Jules works hard.”
Brock smiled and could think of nothing to say. He was very uneasy.
Jules felt shrunken by Brock’s height and the bulk of his shoulders; he could not decide what to think—what did this guy want, what was up? Or was this a good thing, Loretta’s brother showing up?
“It’s the craziest thing, how Brock found us! My God!” Loretta cried.
Jules flinched at her excitement, which was a little liquory, and tried to figure out what was behind it—was she serious or putting on a show? It looked as if she was serious. She was so fluttery and pleased, and anyway, Jules thought, he should be grateful that this wasn’t another Furlong come along to move in with her and impregnate her with another little bastard. At this moment the kid was fooling around by the table, about to knock over a can of beer. Jules watched impassively.
“Sit down, both of you! Jules, have some beer. My God, what a surprise! Brock knocked on the door an hour ago, he just walked up the stairs like nothing! I knew him right off even though we didn’t see each other for—what was it?—nineteen years. Jesus Christ, nineteen years! Isn’t it the goddammest thing, how life goes?” Loretta laughed. She pulled at Jules and got him to sit down. Brock sat down awkwardly.