Ham on Rye: A Novel

  I heard my father come in. He always slammed the door, walked heavily, and talked loudly. He was home. After a few moments the bedroom door opened. He was six feet two, a large man. Everything vanished, the chair I was sitting in, the wallpaper, the walls, all of my thoughts. He was the dark covering the sun, the violence of him made everything else utterly disappear. He was all ears, nose, mouth, I couldn’t look at his eyes, there was only his red angry face.

  “All right, Henry. Into the bathroom.”

  I walked in and he closed the door behind us. The walls were white. There was a bathroom mirror and a small window, the screen black and broken. There was the bathtub and the toilet and the tiles. He reached and took down the razor strop which hung from a hook. It was going to be the first of many such beatings, which would recur more and more often. Always, I felt, without real reason.

  “All right, take down your pants.”

  I took my pants down.

  “Pull down your shorts.”

  I pulled them down.

  Then he laid on the strop. The first blow inflicted more shock than pain. The second hurt more. Each blow which followed increased the pain. At first I was aware of the walls, the toilet, the tub. Finally I couldn’t see anything. As he beat me, he berated me, but I couldn’t understand the words. I thought about his roses, how he grew roses in the yard. I thought about his automobile in the garage. I tried not to scream. I knew that if I did scream he might stop, but knowing this, and knowing his desire for me to scream, prevented me. The tears ran from my eyes as I remained silent. After a while it all became just a whirlpool, a jumble, and there was only the deadly possibility of being there forever. Finally, like something jerked into action, I began to sob, swallowing and choking on the salt slime that ran down my throat. He stopped.

  He was no longer there. I became aware of the little window again and the mirror. There was the razor strop hanging from the hook, long and brown and twisted. I couldn’t bend over to pull up my pants or my shorts and I walked to the door, awkwardly, my clothes around my feet. I opened the bathroom door and there was my mother standing in the hall.

  “It wasn’t right,” I told her. “Why didn’t you help me?”

  “The father,” she said, “is always right.”

  Then my mother walked away. I went to my bedroom, dragging my clothing around my feet and sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress hurt me. Outside, through the rear screen I could see my father’s roses growing. They were red and white and yellow, large and full. The sun was very low but not yet set and the last of it slanted through the rear window. I felt that even the sun belonged to my father, that I had no right to it because it was shining upon my father’s house. I was like his roses, something that belonged to him and not to me…

  9

  By the time they called me to dinner I was able to pull up my clothing and walk to the breakfast nook where we ate all our meals except on Sunday. There were two pillows on my chair. I sat on them but my legs and ass still burned. My father was talking about his job, as always.

  “I told Sullivan to combine three routes into two and let one man go from each shift. Nobody is really pulling their weight around there…”

  “They ought to listen to you, Daddy,” said my mother.

  “Please,” I said, “please excuse me but I don’t feel like eating…

  “You’ll eat your FOOD!” said my father. “Your mother prepared this food!”

  “Yes,” said my mother, “carrots and peas and roast beef.”

  “And the mashed potatoes and gravy,” said my father.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You will eat every carrot, and pee on your plate!” said my father.

  He was trying to be funny. That was one of his favorite remarks.

  “DADDY!” said my mother in shocked disbelief.

  I began eating. It was terrible. I felt as if I were eating them, what they believed in, what they were. I didn’t chew any of it, I just swallowed it to get rid of it. Meanwhile my father was talking about how good it all tasted, how lucky we were to be eating good food when most of the people in the world, and many even in America, were starving and poor.

  “What’s for dessert, Mama?” my father asked.

  His face was horrible, the lips pushed out, greasy and wet with pleasure. He acted as if nothing had happened, as if he hadn’t beaten me. When I was back in my bedroom I thought, these people are not my parents, they must have adopted me and now they are unhappy with what I have become.

  10

  Lila Jane was a girl my age who lived next door. I still wasn’t allowed to play with the children in the neighborhood, but sitting in the bedroom often got dull. I would go out and walk around in the backyard, looking at things, bugs mostly. Or I would sit on the grass and imagine things. One thing I imagined was that I was a great baseball player, so great that I could get a hit every time at bat, or a home run anytime I wanted to. But I would deliberately make outs just to trick the other team. I got my hits when I felt like it. One season, going into July, I was hitting only. 139 with one home run. HENRY CHINASKI IS FINISHED, the newspapers said. Then I began to hit. And how I hit! At one time I allowed myself 16 home runs in a row. Another time I batted in 24 runs in one game. By the end of the season I was hitting .523.

  Lila Jane was one of the pretty girls I’d seen at school. She was one of the nicest, and she was living right next door. One day when I was in the yard she came up to the fence and stood there looking at me.

  “You don’t play with the other boys, do you?”

  I looked at her. She had long red-brown hair and dark brown eyes.

  “No,” I said, “no, I don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I see them enough at school.”

  “I’m Lila Jane,” she said.

  “I’m Henry.”

  She kept looking at me and I sat there on the grass and looked at her. Then she said, “Do you want to see my panties?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She lifted her dress. The panties were pink and clean. They looked good. She kept holding her dress up and then turned around so that I could see her behind. Her behind looked nice. Then she pulled her dress down. “Goodbye,” she said and walked off.

  “Goodbye,” I said.

  It happened each afternoon. “Do you want to see my panties?”

  “Sure.”

  The panties were nearly always a different color and each time they looked better.

  One afternoon after Lila Jane showed me her panties I said, “Let’s go for a walk.”

  “All right,” she said.

  I met her in front and we walked down the street together. She was really pretty. We walked along without saying anything until we came to a vacant lot. The weeds were tall and green.

  “Let’s go into the vacant lot,” I said.

  “All right,” said Lila Jane.

  We walked out into the tall weeds.

  “Show me your panties again.”

  She lifted her dress. Blue panties.

  “Let’s stretch out here,” I said.

  We got down in the weeds and I grabbed her by the hair and kissed her. Then I pulled up her dress and looked at her panties. I put my hand on her behind and kissed her again. I kept kissing her and grabbing at her behind. I did this for quite a long time. Then I said, “Let’s do it.” I wasn’t sure what there was to do but I felt there was more.

  “No, I can’t,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Those men will see.”

  “What men?”

  “There!” she pointed.

  I looked between the weeds. Maybe half a block away some men were working repairing the street.

  “They can’t see us!”

  “Yes, they can!”

  I got up. “God damn it!” I said and I walked out of the lot and went back home.

  I didn’t see Lila Jane again for a while in the afternoons. It didn’t matter. It was football season and
I was—in my imagination—a great quarterback. I could throw the ball 90 yards and kick it 80. But we seldom had to kick, not when I carried the ball. I was best running into grown men. I crushed them. It took five or six men to tackle me. Sometimes, like in baseball, I felt sorry for everybody and I allowed myself to be tackled after only gaining 8 or 10 yards. Then I usually got injured, badly, and they had to carry me off the field. My team would fall behind, say 40 to 17, and with 3 or 4 minutes left to play I’d return, angry that I had been injured. Every time I got the ball I ran all the way to a touchdown. How the crowd screamed! And on defense I made every tackle, intercepted every pass. I was everywhere. Chinaski, the Fury! With the gun ready to go off I took the kickoff deep in my own end zone. I ran forward, sideways, backwards. I broke tackle after tackle, I leaped over fallen tacklers. I wasn’t getting any blocking. My team was a bunch of sissies. Finally, with five men hanging on to me I refused to fall and dragged them over the goal line for the winning touchdown.

  I looked up one afternoon as a big guy entered our yard through the back gate. He walked in and just stood there looking at me. He was a year or so older than I was and he wasn’t from my grammar school. “I’m from Marmount Grammar School,” he said.

  “You better get out of here,” I told him. “My father will be coming home soon.”

  “Is that right?” he asked.

  I stood up. “What are you doing here?”

  “I hear you guys from Delsey Grammar think you’re tough.”

  “We win all the inter-school games.”

  “That’s because you cheat. We don’t like cheaters at Marmount.”

  He had on an old blue shirt, half unbuttoned in front. He had a leather thong on his left wrist.

  “You think you’re tough?” he asked me.

  “No.”

  “What do you have in your garage? I think I’ll take something from your garage.”

  “Stay out of there.”

  The garage doors were open and he walked past me. There wasn’t much in there. He found an old deflated beach ball and picked it up.

  “I think I’ll take this.”

  “Put it down.”

  “Down your throat!” he said and then he threw it at my head. I ducked. He came out of the garage toward me. I backed up.

  He followed me into the yard. “Cheaters never prosper!” he said. He swung at me. I ducked. I could feel the wind from his swing. I closed my eyes, rushed him and started punching. I was hitting something, sometimes. I could feel myself getting hit but it didn’t hurt. Mostly I was scared. There was nothing to do but to keep punching. Then I heard a voice: “Stop it!” It was Lila Jane. She was in my backyard. We both stopped fighting. She took an old tin can and threw it. It hit the boy from Marmount in the middle of the forehead and bounced off. He stood there a moment and then ran off, crying and howling. He ran out the rear gate and down the alley and was gone. A little tin can. I was surprised, a big guy like him crying like that. At Delsey we had a code. We never made a sound. Even the sissies took their beatings silently. Those guys from Marmount weren’t much.

  “You didn’t have to help me,” I told Lila Jane.

  “He was hitting you!”

  “He wasn’t hurting me.”

  Lila Jane ran off through the yard, out the rear gate, then into her yard and into her house.

  Lila Jane still likes me, I thought.

  11

  During the second and third grades I still didn’t get a chance to play baseball but I knew that somehow I was developing into a player. If I ever got a bat in my hands again I knew I would hit it over the school building. One day I was standing around and a teacher came up to me.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “This is Physical Education. You should be participating. Are you disabled?”

  “What?”

  “Is there anything wrong with you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come with me.”

  He walked me over to a group. They were playing kickball. Kickball was like baseball except they used a soccer ball. The pitcher rolled it to the plate and you kicked it. If it went on a fly and was caught you were out. If it rolled on through the infield or you kicked it high between the fielders you took as many bases as you could.

  “What’s your name?” the teacher asked me.

  “Henry.”

  He walked up to the group. “Now,” he said, “Henry is going to play shortstop.”

  They were from my grade. They all knew me. Shortstop was the toughest position. I went out there. I knew they were going to gang up on me. The pitcher rolled the ball real slow and the first guy kicked it right at me. It came hard, chest high, but it was no problem. The ball was big and I stuck out my hands and caught it. I threw the ball to the pitcher. The next guy did the same thing. It came a little higher this time. And a little faster. No problem. Then Stanley Greenberg walked up to the plate. That was it. I was out of luck. The pitcher rolled the ball and Stanley kicked it. It came at me like a cannonball, head high. I wanted to duck but didn’t. The ball smashed into my hands and I held it. I took the ball and rolled it to the pitcher’s mound. Three outs. I trotted to the sideline. As I did, some guy passed me and said, “Chinaski, the great shitstop!”

  It was the boy with the vaseline in his hair and the long black nostril hairs. I spun around. “Hey!” I said. He stopped. I looked at him. “Don’t ever say anything to me again.” I saw the fear in his eyes. He walked out to his position and I went and leaned against the fence while our team came to the plate. Nobody stood near me but I didn’t care. I was gaining ground.

  It was difficult to understand. We were the children in the poorest school, we had the poorest, least educated parents, most of us lived on terrible food, and yet boy for boy we were much bigger than the boys from other grammar schools around the city. Our school was famous. We were feared.

  Our 6th grade team beat the other 6th grade teams in the city very badly. Especially in baseball. Scores like 14 to 1, 24 to 3, 19 to 2. We just could hit the ball.

  One day the City Champion Junior High School team, Miranda Bell, challenged us. Somehow money was raised and each of our players was given a new blue cap with a white “D” in front. Our team looked good in those caps. When the Miranda Bell guys showed up, the 7th grade champs, our 6th grade guys just looked at them and laughed. We were bigger, we looked tougher, we walked differently, we knew something that they didn’t know. We younger guys laughed too. We knew we had them where we wanted them.

  The Miranda guys looked too polite. They were very quiet. Their pitcher was their biggest player. He struck out our first three batters, some of our best hitters. But we had Lowball Johnson. Lowball did the same to them. It went on like that, both sides striking out, or hitting little grounders and an occasional single, but nothing else. Then we were at bat in the bottom of the 7th. Beefcake Cappalletti nailed one. God, you could hear the shot! The ball looked like it was going to hit the school building and break a window. Never had I seen a ball take off like that! It hit the flagpole near the top and bounced back in. Easy home run. Cappalletti rounded the bases and our guys looked good in their new blue caps with the white “D.”

  The Miranda guys just quit after that. They didn’t know how to come back. They came from a wealthy district, they didn’t know what it meant to fight back. Our next guy doubled. How we screamed! It was over. There was nothing they could do. The next batter tripled. They changed pitchers. He walked the next guy. The next batter singled. Before the inning was over we had scored nine runs.

  Miranda never got a chance to bat in the 8th. Our 5th graders went over and challenged them to fight. Even one of the 4th graders ran over and picked a fight with one of them. The Miranda guys took their equipment and left. We ran them off, up the street.

  There was nothing left to do so a couple of our guys got into a fight. It was a good one. They both had bloody noses but were swinging good when one of the teac
hers who had stayed to watch the game broke it up. He didn’t know how close he came to getting jumped himself.

  12

  One night my father took me on his milk route. There were no longer any horsedrawn wagons. The milk trucks now had engines. After loading up at the milk company we drove off on his route. I liked being out in the very early morning. The moon was up and I could see the stars. It was cold but it was exciting. I wondered why my father had asked me to come along since he had taken to beating me with the razor strop once or twice a week and we weren’t getting along.

  At each stop he would jump out and deliver a bottle or two of milk. Sometimes it was cottage cheese or buttermilk or butter and now and then a bottle of orange juice. Most of the people left notes in the empty bottles explaining what they wanted.

  My father drove along, stopping and starting, making deliveries.

  “O.K., kid, which direction are we driving in now?”

  “North.”

  “You’re right. We’re going north.”

  We went up and down streets, stopping and starting.

  “O.K., which way are we going now?”

  “West.”

  “No, we’re going south.”

  We drove along in silence some more.

  “Suppose I pushed you out of the truck now and left you on the sidewalk, what would you do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean, how would you live?”

  “Well, I guess I’d go back and drink the milk and orange juice you just left on the porch steps.”

  “Then what would you do?”

  “I’d find a policeman and tell him what you did.”

  “You would, huh? And what would you tell him?”

  “I’d tell him that you told me that ‘west’ was ‘south’ because you wanted me to get lost.”

  It began to get light. Soon all the deliveries were made and we stopped at a cafe to have breakfast. The waitress walked over. “Hello, Henry,” she said to my father. “Hello, Betty.” “Who’s the kid?” asked Betty. “That’s little Henry.” “He looks just like you.” “He doesn’t have my brains, though.” “I hope not.”