He fetched his lunch to the little red school house in a little red wagon and tried to make the cows learn to ride a bicycle so’s they’d make better time from the pasture when he called them up for milking. He traveled that fast he wore goggles around the barnyard before anybody ever heard of an automobile, and was called Speedrow in five states and twenty counties when the Indianapolis racing track was still a hayfield, a frogpuddle, and a couple of turnip patches. He was speed on wheels; he knew good and well that wheels make the world go round and get the job done and done right and for keeps while you would be scratching your head and thinking of it any other way.
When he started his automobile factory, a man could have roamed it from front to back and from ceiling to floor without seeing more than a few trucks and barrows and such like on wheels. In them days a bunch of men got around in a ring and pretty soon here come one with a part of the frame and laid it down on the floor and another one soon follows suit until they got enough to start out on. Then they started reaming and trueing and whamming and bamming and sledging and boring and bolting until it looked like a thing that might take a snifter of gasoline and go skedaddling down the pike to a faretheewell.
I tell you, boys, when you put in a wheel here and a roller there and a belt in the other place, it ain’t long till you got to be hell on wheels and no brakes, and it was goodbye crapping a smoke or drinking a rest. If you had to hold up two fingers like a kid being excused in school, you’d meet yourself coming back or they’d know the reason why. You had to pick ’em up and lay ’em down right there at your post and make believe you liked it or ask them to pull your card. You would just walk outside talking to yourself if you couldn’t stand the gaff.
Hank decided that iron was too high and lasted too long so he got to scouring the back alleys for every tin can he could lay his hands on and made flivvers out of them. As long as they held together long enough to get off the belt and outside the gates he never worried his mind but hollered: “More tin! More wheels! Roll ’em, boys, roll ’em!”
I told ’em what would come to pass, and it will yet. It will yet as sure as God made little apples. Two men will run the whole shooting-match. Number one will just politely dump a load of cans on a great big steel block, and—bing! flash! bing! bang! squeak! just like that, down’ll come a million-ton die and when it raises they’ll be a new black flivver ready to be driven away by number two or maybe even a radio, for chrissakes. Maybe one man would do the whole job and mow the old man’s lawn when he’s got nothing to do but just fool around and keep busy.
This will come to pass, good peoples, as sure as you’re born, and plenty of men already without a hair on their heads or a tooth in it will live to see that day. It’s been inching along ever since Hank found his first wheel and put it on a wagon and when he found out that anything round will roll and speed up work and take the beans and bacon right out of a man’s jaws because he ain’t needed no more.
It got so you couldn’t throw a pork-and-beans can in the alley that it wasn’t picked up and hustled right along to Hank’s factory. The little children on street corners and in vacant lots began to sing:
There was an old man, he had a wooden leg,
He had no auto nor no auto could he beg.
He got two spools and an old tin can;
He made him a flivver and the darned thing ran!
A man’s got wheels same as a factory, and no matter how much you pour the old oil to them, they wear out. You can get your two-thousand-dollar-an-ounce oil and it’ll keep them bearings rolling a little longer than 3-in-1 or two-bit cylinder oil, but there’s nothing lasts forever, not even the bearings of a man like Hank Lord.
Hank’s bearings began to wear out. Old age sprinkles the worst kind of emery dust in a man’s bearings, and even if you take some of them out and put in a diamond-studded one, it’s going to feel that wear and tear and get lopsided and go to jumping and gum up the works.
There was ten thousand doctors with half a million shots in the arm shaking their heads mournful around Hank’s five-hundred-room house when he turned in his checks to the tool crib. Fifty thousand nurses couldn’t do a thing but cry a little and say: “He was a good man for the shape he was in. It’s a shame he’s gone.”
They sent his coffin down the assembly line, and its gold plate and diamonds shone so that it hurt a man’s eyes to look at it, leave alone lay a hand on it. Everybody had on his white gloves and a white suit and the coffin went slow out of respect for the dead. A man had plenty of time to put in the bolts and screws and tighten the handles.
Hank might have been dead, but there’s too far you can go with the dead. Six pallbearers all drawing a six-dollar-day minimum started pacing respectfully to the hearse with the coffin. It was too much, boys, even for the dead, even for a man that’s earned his last long rest away from the wheels and the belts and the conveyers and the tin that rusts so easy when the enamel cracks off it as enamel will in spite of you.
The pallbearers almost dropped the coffin when Hank reared up and smashed the glass and yelled:
“WHAT THE HELL IS THIS? YOU CALL THIS EFFICIENCY? PUT THIS THING ON WHEELS! LAY FIVE OF THESE BIRDS OFF, AND CUT THE OTHER ONE’S WAGES ’CAUSE THE WORK IS EASY AND THE HOURS AIN’T LONG AND THE PACE IS SLOW!”
SINGLE EXIT
Lost, and by the wind grieved.
—Thomas Wolfe
Katz, lying beside his wife, felt himself wakening and wondered vaguely about the stillness of the room; the familiar sounds of midnight were missing down the hall. And beneath the old-fashioned radiator no gas was hissing, though he recalled lighting it when the first chill of the evening had crept off the street into the room. He listened for the tapping of water in the sink, where a loose washer in the single faucet had kept up a faint and faithful all-night knocking, against the basin’s cracked enamel, each night for many nights.
Heard, instead, a distant rustling behind the loosened paper of the wall, where a civilization of roaches wakened with each returning midnight; Katz felt oddly relieved at the sound. Had this midnight’s generation, behind the faded and flowered paper, been the last? He decided, without reason, that by the time the housekeeper came in, with the roach sprayer in her hand for the midday fumigation, not a roach would be alive. After coming into this room, each day at noon for countless noons, with the same rusted and ineffectual sprayer, she would find not one alive to crawl blindly away. Tomorrow noon, somehow, the whole great frame hotel would be as spotless as it must have been on that forgotten morning when its doors were first opened, long before Katz had been born in another place. When the city itself was young.
No further sound or rumor of sound; neither Monday morning’s first express straining north around the Congress Street curve nor Sunday night’s last local gathering speed for the run toward Roosevelt Road. No trolley moved, no cabman hooked; no single voice called drunkenly up from the long bar below. But a slippered foot moved softly down the gas-lit hall; and down the long unlovely street: alone.
Katz rose and dressed by the filtered glare of the double-globed arc lamp shining baldly through the dark and tattered shade. Buttoning his topcoat, he was uneasily surprised to see that the baby, beside his wife, was wide awake and apparently had been watching his every move for some moments. There was an unpleasant, contemptuous kind of accusation in the child’s eyes; but it made no outcry, and he pulled his worn lapels up around his neck as though unconcerned by its unwavering regard. Because the child felt ashamed of the cheap green felt of its father’s lapels? Because all the coat’s buttons but the top one were off and that one hanging? Like his respectability; by a single thread.
But where Katz was going respectability was suspect. For everyone there, without exception, would be striving, above all else, to be eminently respectable. So that all would be suspect there.
“And they better respect me too,” he warned them all beforehand. “I still pay my own way.”
He walked down endless flights, turning a
t last into the hotel entrance to the bar. Juke music funneled out through the entrance in a roaring bass, beating out “Blues in the Night” in a vocal that rang hoarsely, like a manacled madman’s voice full of hoarse glee at his own pain. Beneath it, standing in the doorway, Katz heard the fast and slippered shuffle of the same shoes he had heard whispering so lonesomely away, down an uncarpeted hall and out onto a lonesome street. A soft-shoe shuffle! Would there be applause to greet him? And many friends? He brushed down his coat and hurried in. As the juke died out on a troubled whine.
The dancers all had gone. The singers all were still. There was no one but a sweatered fellow placing chairs along the bar.
Katz stood shifting restlessly from one foot to the other, trying to down his disappointment at forever, all his life, arriving just a moment too late for everything.
“Closing up?” he asked diffidently.
The fellow moved on toward the back without answering, drawing chairs soundlessly across the floor, tossing them slowly, without effort, along the bar, so that no matter how carelessly he moved, they fell, softly, into neat rows; and stayed so strangely motionless, all along the bar.
Above the bar mirror a neon kitten flashed two suggestions off and on, in bright and blood-red steel:
GET UP A PARTY
FEED THE KITTY
GET UP A PARTY
FEED THE KITTY
At the corner table, undisturbed by the bouncer, Katz saw a woman sitting with her head pillowed in her hands. He walked an endless aisle toward her, between the tables and the bar; a way that went, forever narrowing, toward a single far-off sign:
THIS WAY OUT
A faded trinket of a hat, soiled by a decade of free beers and fifty-cent love, bought at some bargain counter for some forgotten Easter, lay beneath her hand. He felt she had been waiting there for him, with a rising desperation, as though he alone, of all the people wandering the earth, could bring news of new hope.
A beer, long gone flat, waited for him beside the hat. Beneath it, stained in a circle by the glass’s bottom, lay a yellow streetcar transfer, folded as though containing a personal message. He slipped it out cautiously, without moving the glass, planning secretly to himself to read some intimate knowledge of her upon it. It had been punched out going south on State: November 11, 1931.
“I’m Jerry the Greek,” Katz told her for some reason not clear to himself, but just to say something important in order to dismiss the transfer’s date from his mind. “I was in the big fella’s corner against Gibbons at Butte. Lord, them days in the West. The old mining camps. Fred Fulton. Gunboat Smith. Willy Mehane. Beat ’em all but Mehane. The big fella was stronger in the West. The East took his strength. In the old days he coulda beat five Tunneys. Them days. The Old West.”
Katz had never seen the Old West, yet felt homesick for it now. “ ‘By the banks of Red River,’ ” he hummed nostalgically, “ ‘Where seldom if ever—’ ”
She looked up. A dark woman with a tarnished dime-store locket dangling lopsidedly down her throat into the hollow between her breasts. Looking at him too steadily and with no word, she snapped the locket open. Katz saw, within a tiny mirror there, his own reflection, scarred by years of furtive living in rented rooms and secret corners. Of waiting too long, behind too many doors, for too many friends who never knocked. His own face, a young man’s face; yet strangely aged. A face made weakly fierce by daily failures, as only the faces of those who fail, always, every day, knowing their failure in full beforehand, become weakly fierce. A face full of a morbid vanity, and for a mouth, a brand: a single relentless line fashioned so by suspicion: of all other men toward himself, of himself toward all others. Days of false humility and nights of bitter treachery were in that lean and sallow face.
It was also the face of one who has striven, a full lifetime, to be always more abject than the landlord, than the housekeeper, than the grocer, than the bartender, than the dance-hall hostess and the pool-hall houseman, in order to gain an extra drink, or have the rent put off for a day, or to play a free round of rotation.
It was also the face of one who had had to keep his own heart pressed relentlessly within him, lest it, catching him unaware, give an advantage to another and leave him without the free drink, the free game, or the sorely needed extra day.
The woman snapped it shut, like closing Katz’s life with a snap, and he felt old and done in for good. A nameless regret choked him for a moment. What right had she, who had been in a thousand corners with a thousand men, to reproach him? His vindictiveness, aroused by the reflection of his face, rose in his throat till he felt a need of striking out blindly at her. He fondled the faded flowers of her hat idly, and she followed his fingers with her eyes. “Them flowers been beat out pretty long,” she acknowledged apologetically.
“You’re a beat-out flower yourself,” Katz told her brutally.
She smiled, with frank acknowledgment. “And for just as long, friend. Don’t rub it in.” She tapped his hand familiarly, and her touch was cold and friendless; as though she wore surgeon’s gloves. “Sweety-Dear, buy me a beer, I’m on my final uppers.”
She lifted the sole of her foot, to show she wore a pair of policeman’s rubbers, some station-house castoffs, the sole worn to the ball of the naked foot. A line of dirt encircled the naked ankle like a thin relentless chain.
“Why should I buy you anything?” Katz asked her. “I don’t even know you. I think you’re one of them kind.”
“What kind?” she asked curiously.
“Oh, you know. Them that figure the worse they look the easier they’ll make it.”
“That ain’t fair, Honey-Hush. I’m a beat-out flower for true.”
She looked at him steadily, without shame, for a long moment, so that he wanted to return her touch to show he truly believed her. But her fingers were so cold, the place was so drafty, and out on the street the rain began.
She lowered her eyes and added, half to herself, reminiscently, “I used t’ be a keeno blonde.” As though that explained all things, the stationhouse castoffs and the well of her despair. And pointed a wavering finger, for verification, at the matted bangs of her forehead, curled school-girl fashion. “You could believe that much, I should think,” she reproached him. “I ain’t cost you a cryin’ dime.” He saw what she meant. It was coming out black at the roots. She turned her head; toward the nape of the neck the hair was still streaked faintly blonde.
“Is there another room?” Katz asked with feigned innocence, pretending he himself didn’t know a single trick. He needed, badly, to trick her off in some fashion in which, all her days, she had never been tricked off before. A sly devil she was, he could see. Else why had she kept the transfer so long?
As though sharing an obscene secret with him, she nodded knowingly, touching her lips to indicate he had spoken too loudly.
“There’s a certain room, Honey-Hush,” she told him with cunning equal to his own. “But there ain’t no key, Honey-Hush. My roommate makes off she don’t know what she’s doin’ but she keeps the door open ’n’ some date walks right in without knockin’. He pertends it’s a accident, he was lookin’ for another room, ’n’ she makes off she wasn’t expectin’ comp’ny. They tell each other that, the devils. But she knows what she’s up to awright, she losed the key apurpose. They all lose their keys apurpose. They all know what they’re doin’.” She eyed him slyly. “Just a small beer, Sweet-Dear, then I’ll go.”
“They really don’t know what they’re doing, though,” Katz assured her. “None of us do.” Katz leaned forward and spoke confidentially. “None of us knows what we’re doing. Not one. Do you know l have nothing on under this coat?” He stood up and, as it fell open, stood smiling at his own nakedness.
“It’s nothin’ t’ grin about, I don’t see,” she upbraided him. “Close up yer clothes ’n’ buy me a beer. Behave yerself, Honey-Hush.”
He sat down, folding the coat modestly about him, explaining earnestly, “I wasn’t smiling at m
yself really. I was smiling at the simple wretchedness of everyone with nothing to wear but some sort of castoff rag or other. Who must try, night and day, to appear nearer to complete nakedness than the next beggar. For those to whom pride is a luxury. For those who sleep nightly with shame. All their lives; as with an unfaithful wife. Always accusing, always being accused; yet never speaking an accusing word. Every night.”
She rose, deeply hurt, turned on her heel haughtily, and walked swiftly through the side door. He heard the slippered whispering of the oversize rubbers retreating down Harrison Street, shuffling somehow stealthily, like a dancer’s feet. Till the sound was swallowed in a long silence, like an endless tunnel’s silence; as though Harrison Street were a slanting pit to nowhere, all night long. A single darkening one-way aisle, all unlit.
Katz wiped his forehead with his coat sleeve. He was perspiring and felt half drunk, as in fever. He stood up and ordered the lights to be turned on over the door, the floor show to begin, and someone to bring him the best in the house. But he could not hear his own voice, and toward the single exit at the back the same fellow moved on endlessly, tossing the same endless chairs softly along an endless bar. Above the bar mirror the neon kitten blurred indistinctly, turning from red to a flickering amber: staring without understanding at the arc lamp’s light through the tattered shade, he heard the faint and faithful tapping of the faucet against the cracked enamel of the sink.
His wife’s hand lay familiarly across his own.
The radiator began hissing, making a thumping as the heat strove to drive the chill night air out of the coils, and beside him the baby was uncovered and crying wretchedly with cold.
Katz withdrew his hand from his wife’s touch, covered the child, and lay back feeling like a pursued thief with a bad heart who has raced up many flights and sits back on his own bed at last, counting his own heartbeats in a sickening fear that the next may not come at all. Listening thus to his swollen and wild heart, still filled with a fear of an imminent and nameless disaster, he clasped his sweating hands together as though, by clenching them, his heart could be quieted in time.