Here Comes a Candle, page 9
He was unwrapping one gun after another and laying them in a neat row in the middle of the bed, sitting on one side of it himself. Joe noticed that he put them all down pointing one way, away from himself and Joe.
He said, “Sit down, Joe. Now look, here’s the gun I’m going to start you on, first few times we go out. Want you to do a lot of shooting and twenty-two cartridges are for free compared with what thirty-eights cost. Twenty-twos are less than a cent apiece, even for the long rifles, and that’s the kind you want to use. Thirty-eight costs you nearer a nickel a shot, even for shorts. Shoot off a few hundred rounds and that’s a difference of three bucks, say, to fifteen bucks. Mitch is paying for the cartridges, but we don’t want to stick him too bad.
“Now this gun’s a twenty-two thirty-two target revolver, six shots. Come only with a six inch barrel, but I had this one cut down to three. You can’t carry a six inch barrel in a shoulder holster—not and get it out quick when you want it, anyway—and you want to get used to carrying a gun in a shoulder holster. Know what I mean by a twenty-two thirty-two?”
“No,” Joe said.
“Shoots twenty-twos, but it’s built on a thirty-two frame. It weighs about twenty-two ounces. Nice accurate little gun, and cheap to shoot. But strictly not for business; you want a thirty-eight for that. And you can get a thirty-eight even lighter than this. Here. Try the trigger pull.”
He swung the cylinder and ejected the cartridges and then handed the gun to Joe. “Not often; you’re not supposed to snap guns when they’re empty. Not good for them. But once or twice won’t hurt.”
Joe took the gun. He started to sight it at a picture across the room and then, before snapping it, put it down and swung out the cylinder himself to make sure Dixie had got all the bullets out of it.
Dixie nodded approvingly. “Attaboy,” he said. “I was waiting to see if you’d have sense enough to do that. If a man hands you a gun that’s not loaded, even if you saw him take the bullets out, make sure yourself. Especially with an automatic. One thing to remember about an automatic is that even after you take out the clip there’s a bullet in the chamber. Now go ahead and snap it.”
Joe snapped the gun a few times, first pulling the trigger all the way for double action and then trying the trigger pull with the gun cocked.
He said, “You said we should do some dry shooting. That’s shooting this way without bullets, isn’t it? But if it’s hard on the gun—”
“It isn’t hard on the gun if you’ve got empty cartridges in the chamber. Then the firing pin’s got something to hit on, to cushion it. I don’t happen to have any empty shells for a twenty-two, but I have some thirty-eights. I’ll let you dry shoot with one of them. This one, in fact; this is the gun I’ll graduate you to after a few days with the twenty-two.”
He handed Joe a small, light revolver with a two inch barrel.
“That’s a honey,” he said. “An S. & W. Terrier. Weighs only seventeen ounces and handles like a toy gun, but it’s got plenty of shocking power at close range. Nice gun to carry, too. In a shoulder holster you hardly know you’re wearing it, and it’s good for carrying in a topcoat or overcoat pocket, too. I sometimes carry it in an overcoat pocket even if I’m carrying Maggie in a shoulder holster. Here’s Maggie.”
Maggie, it turned out, was the favorite of his harem. He showed her to Joe with all the pride and care of a Sultan exhibiting a Circassian beauty. Maggie was a three-five-seven Magnum.
“The most gun there is,” he told Joe. “She weighs forty-one ounces, damn near two and a half times what that Terrier weighs, but hell, kid, she shoots through bullet-proof glass, bullet-proof vests, auto bodies, anything but the side of a battleship. And still she’ll mush to fifty caliber going through eight inches of soft paraffin. It’s got more shock power than an army forty-five and the range—by God, you could put telescopic sights on one of these things and use it at several hundred yards. Even with this three and a half inch barrel.”
Joe was fascinated by the guns. Dixie showed them one at a time, explaining how each of them worked and its advantages and disadvantages. He let Joe handle them, all but Maggie the Magnum. There was a Luger, a forty-five Colt automatic, a little vest pocket twenty-five automatic that weighed only thirteen ounces—but that Dixie said was quite deadly at close range if you shot it straight—and a thirty-eight Banker’s Special that was similar to the Terrier except that it weighed two ounces more, held six instead of five cartridges, and had a slightly larger butt. That was the lot, seven of them.
“Which one do you like, kid?” Dixie asked.
“The Terrier.” Joe didn’t have to hesitate.
“Okay. Take your coat off and strap this holster on. I’ll put in some empties so you can dry shoot it. Then I’ll show you something about drawing.”
Joe had an hour of it and learned quite a bit. His reactions, Dixie told him, were naturally fast. Not a hell of a lot of practice, Dixie said, and he’d be really good. Shooting straight, once the gun was out of the holster, was something else again. Tomorrow they’d find out how straight he could shoot. It was better to be slow, Dixie told him, and shoot straight, than to be a fireball on the draw but not to hit anything when you started shooting.
When Dixie said he’d had about all he could take for one afternoon, Joe started to take off his coat to get at the shoulder holster. His first practice had been with his coat off, then with it on so he would learn to slide his hand across his chest toward the holster instead of having his hand out where he might get on the wrong side of the lapel or tangle with it.
Dixie stopped him. “Leave it on, kid.”
“Huh?”
“Get used to wearing it. Leave it on. If you wear a gun only when you think you might have to use it, you’re not used to the weight and feel of it on you, see? And leave those empty shells in it so you can dry shoot a little in your room this evening. And remember what I told you about how to squeeze and not pull.”
“Okay, Dixie. Thanks.”
“Now turn around and walk a little. Yeah, that’s okay. It doesn’t show at all. But don’t hold your left arm out a little like you got a stiff shoulder or something. Hold it natural. That’s it.”
“Makes me feel lopsided,” Joe said.
“Huh. That’s seventeen ounces. Try wearing a Magnum, forty-one ounces, sometime if you really want to feel lopsided. That light little Terrier is a good one to start off with. That suit you got is cut okay. A single-breasted’s better than a double-breasted for when you wear a holster, only you got to remember to keep one button buttoned. Otherwise you lean over and the coat falls away and somebody gets a flash of the holster or the gun butt. A single-breasted, cut loose.”
Joe wore the gun the rest of the day, feeling as conspicuous as though it was outside his coat instead of inside. When, twice, he walked past a policeman he walked very straight and stiff, but that, he realized, just proved Dixie Ehlers’ point; it would take a lot of wearing just to get used to doing it so it felt natural and let you act natural.
Early in the evening he dropped into Shorty’s for a game of pool and then, after he’d lined up a game and was about to start, he remembered that he’d never yet shot a game without taking off his suit coat. It would look funny if he did it now, so he had to get out of the game by getting himself into an argument on the amount and odds of the bet. It occurred to him too late, after he’d left Shorty’s, that maybe he could have gone back to the washroom and got the gun and holster in his coat pocket and then come back and he could have taken off his coat. But if anyone bumped his coat on the rack they’d have felt the weight of the gun there.
He happened to be in the neighborhood at the time and remembered Ellie had started late and was getting off at nine. So he dropped around to walk home with her. In the downstairs hallway of her new place on State Street she stopped before starting up the stairs.
‘Maybe you better not come up, Joe,” she said. “It’s late already and I want to unpack all my clothes before I turn in. They’ll get too wrinkled if I don’t.”
“Okay,” Joe said. If it hadn’t been for the gun, he’d have argued that he’d like to sit a few minutes and watch her unpack and they could talk while she put things away. But he’d discovered already that wearing the gun was particularly uncomfortable when he was with Ellie. He’d almost rather explain to a policeman what he was doing with a gun than explain it to Ellie. And no matter how careful he was, she might put up a hand to take a raveling or something off the lapel of his coat—girls did things like that—and feel the gun and ask him about it.
Right now she was saying “Goodnight, Joe,” and from the way she said it he knew she expected, even wanted, him to kiss her goodnight. But she’d surely feel the gun if he put his arms around her and it would seem stranger just to lean forward and peck her lips without using his arms than if he didn’t kiss her at all. So he said, “Goodnight, Ellie,” and took a step back and she turned and started up the stairs. And because he didn’t want her to think he was mad, he waited until she had gone up a few steps, a safe distance, and then said, “Ellie, how about tomorrow night? Like to see a show or something?”
She turned back. “Would the next night, Thursday, be all right, Joe? I’ll still be straightening things up here tomorrow evening.”
“Sure, Ellie. See you Thursday evening. ’Night.”
He went out, still feeling foolish—and disappointed, too—because he hadn’t been able to kiss her goodnight.
Hereafter, no matter how much he practiced wearing a holster to get used to it, times he would or might be with Ellie he’d leave it home. There was a limit. Funny, he thought, how different women are from one another; if he ever put his arms around Francine, he’d be proud to let her feel that he was wearing a pistol. Probably, now, she thought he was just a punk running errands for Mitch.
But he pulled his mind away from the thought of putting his arms around Francy. Francy was Mitch’s girl and that was that.
He went right home after leaving Ellie, partly because he had to get up so early in the morning and partly because he was damned tired of wearing the gun and wanted to get it off. Maybe it would seem romantic to be wearing a loaded gun, when there was even a remote chance that you might have to use it, but wearing one loaded with empty shells had all of the inconveniences and disadvantages of the real thing and none of the thrill and excitement. Dixie had told him one should never have an unloaded gun around; maybe he should have loaded it to carry it and he could have brought along separately, in his pocket, the empty shells to use for dry shooting.
In his room he took off the suit coat and the holster first thing. He pulled down the shade and tried sighting the gun at a picture on the wall. One picture was a shepherd leading a flock of sheep and he tried picking off the sheep one at a time, but without actually clicking the gun. If he clicked it in here, probably someone would hear and wonder what be was doing. But the sheep weren’t very good; they were so small he couldn’t really draw a bead on any one of them.
He tried sighting at the shepherd in the picture and suddenly lowered the gun, embarrassed. He’d remembered that the picture was a religious allegory and that the figure of the shepherd was a figure of Christ. He didn’t really believe in religion; that was a lot of superstition, silly stuff they taught you about things that had happened so long ago they couldn’t matter now if they ever had. And that picture—the metaphor of Jesus as a shepherd—had annoyed him ever since he’d had this room; he’d almost got around to asking Mrs. Gettleman if she’d change it. The whole idea was wrong. A shepherd and his sheep! A shepherd raised sheep to sell, to butcher and eat, to fleece. If he worried about a lost sheep it was because it was costing him mutton and wool. A hell of a comparison for religious people to draw; if their Christ wasn’t any better to them than a shepherd to his sheep, they’d better forget about him. Still, it had embarrassed him a little to have been drawing a bead on Christ with a revolver.
He tried the picture on the other wall, but it wasn’t so good; it was a picture of a building, an ordinary small store with LEIBER AND HENNIG lettered on the windows in large letters and DRY GOODS below in smaller letters. Someone, sometime—probably either Mr. Leiber or Mr. Hennig, whoever they were—had thought enough of that store to have a photograph of it enlarged and framed. By now, probably, Mr. Leiber, Mr. Hennig and the store were all dead, but the picture still hung and would probably hang their irrelevantly as long as the building it hung in stood.
He tried sighting the gun at a window of the store but that wasn’t any fun and he put the gun back in the holster and put it on the dresser. And just for the fun of it, to make it look like an arsenal, he took his hunting knife out of the bottom drawer and put it, sheath and all, beside the holstered gun. It was a hunting knife he’d won on a punch-board a long time ago and he’d never used it for anything more romantic than sharpening pencils, but it was a beautiful knife with a bone handle and a wide five-inch blade in a tooled leather sheath. He’d been proud of it ever since he had it and almost wished he could go in for hunting or fishing just for an excuse to use and carry it.
He set the alarm for five-thirty and turned in. An auto horn blatted outside and then it was quiet, so quiet that he could hear the clock ticking, and it got louder and louder as he lay there. Louder and louder and louder. For some reason it made him remember and think about that night when he was six, the night his father had died. He wondered why. The ticking of a clock had had nothing to do with that night. Or had it? Somehow it seemed that it had, but he couldn’t remember how.
The Screen
1. Dearborn Street, Chicago. It is early evening. During this scene MUSIC is playing “Chicago, That Toddlin ’ Town” in style of a jazz band of 1935. Camera mounted on southeast corner of roof of Newberry Library Building (corner of North Dearborn and West Walton Streets) pans south along Dearborn Street past Bughouse Square toward the Loop. We pass Delaware Place and Chestnut Street and camera focuses on an old brown-stone front building halfway between Chestnut Street and Chicago Avenue.
DISSOLVE TO
2. Closer view of front of same building. Camera focuses on a third floor window and moves toward it. MUSIC (same) continues but fades slowly until it vanishes coincident with first spoken line. Camera (on boom) moves through window into a small bedroom, furnished inexpensively and without taste. Camera proceeds without pause through doorway into next room, a living room, equivalently furnished. Camera proceeds through this room, again without pause, to doorway of kitchen. There are three people in kitchen. FLORENCE BAILEY, a light coat over her arm, is seen walking toward a closed door that leads to the outer hallway, ALVIN BAILEY, a big man with an unkempt mustache and somewhat in need of a shave, is sitting at the kitchen table engrossed in a game of solitaire with a pack of dog-cared cards. He is in shirt sleeves and wears carpet slippers. JOSEPH BAILEY, age 6, is sitting on the floor in a corner busily making something unidentifiable out of an old Tinkertoy set. He is a thin, nervous looking boy, physically small for his age. He is very intent on what he is doing. Florence Bailey opens the door and pauses.
FLORENCE: ’Bye, Joey. Joe does not look up.
FLORENCE: ’Bye, Al. Got to hurry; I’m late now.
ALVIN: Okay, Flo. So long.
He continues playing solitaire without looking up or turning.
FLORENCE: Don’t forget, Al, half-past eight he goes to bed. You watch that clock and don’t forget.
ALVIN: Sure. ’Bye, Flo.
FLORENCE: And you’re staying right here with him, remember. You know how he is about being left alone. You know what I mean. You know what happened last time.
ALVIN: He’s got to get over that sometime, don’t he?
FLORENCE: Al! You’re not figuring on going out, are you? If you are, I’m not going to work! I don’t care whether we eat or not, and if you can’t get out and earn some money, why should I?
ALVIN: NOW don’t get your bowels in an uproar, Flo. I’m not going out. I got twelve cents. Where the hell would I go on twelve cents? The Blackstone?
He sounds good-naturedly amused, not angry. Apparently he is stuck in his solitaire game; he gathers the cards and starts to shuffle them. His back is still toward his wife, but he glances over the edge of the table at Joe.
FLORENCE: And remember that r-h-y-m-e you’re not supposed to mention. Don’t even use the word c-a-n-d-l-e or the other one, especially just before he goes to bed. Joe has looked up from his play, eyes wide, when the second word is spelled by his mother, but neither of his parents notices him or the expression on his face.
ALVIN: Okay, okay, okay. If you’ve told me that once…
FLORENCE: And you’re not going out?
ALVIN: Christ, no. I told you once. Thought you said you was late.
FLORENCE: All right, but don’t forget.
She closes door.
FADE OUT
FADE IN
3. Close view of Joe Bailey sitting in corner working with his Tinkertoy. We see that a little time has passed for the object he has been making has grown. We see now that it is probably intended to be a power shovel. On the floor in front of him there chances to lie one of the cylindrical pieces of the Tinker-toy set and from the center hole projects upward a short straight piece; in miniature, an imaginative mind could visualize the inadvertent construction as a candle in a candleholder. Joe’s eyes come toward it and slowly a look of horror comes into them. Then his eyes close suddenly and he averts his head as his hand reaches out for the two joined Tinkertoy pieces. His eyes open, looking this time at his father and away from the thing he holds in his hand and now pulls apart into two separate Tinker-toy parts.
JOE: P-P-Pop!
ALVIN: Yeah, Joey?
There is a sound of knocking on a door. Camera pans past Al Bailey, looking up from his solitaire game, and focuses on door.
ALVIN: Just a minute, Joey.
He comes into view of camera again as we see him walking toward door. He opens door, revealing DUTCH ANDERS and TONY MONTOYA standing outside doorway. Anders is short, stocky, coarse featured, wears a cap. Montoya is sleek, dapper; his eyes are not quite right somehow. You wouldn’t trust Dutch Anders in an alley; you wouldn’t trust Tony Montoya anywhere.
