Time Travel Omnibus, page 602
Something hurt in my chest.
He started snuffling, unable to catch his breath. He tried to speak, but the words were only mangled sounds, huffed out with too much air and pain.
Then he forced himself to sit up and rubbed the back of his hand across his runny nose.
He stared at me. It was panic and fear and confusion and shame at being seen this way. “Th-they hit me from in back,” he said, snuffling.
“I know. I saw.”
“D’jou scare’m off?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t say thank you. It wasn’t necessary. The backs of my thighs hurt from squatting. I sat down.
“My name is Gus,” he said, trying to be polite.
I didn’t know what name to give him. I was going to tell him the first name to come into my head, but heard myself say, “My name is Mr. Rosenthal.”
He looked startled. “That’s my name, too. Gus Rosenthal!”
“Isn’t that peculiar,” I said. We grinned at each other, and he wiped his nose again.
I didn’t want to see my mother or father. I had those memories. They were sufficient. It was little Gus I wanted to be with. But one night I crossed into the backyard at 89 Harmon Drive from the empty lots that would later be a housing development.
And I stood in the dark, watching them eat dinner.
There was my father. I hadn’t remembered him being so handsome. My mother was saying something to him, and he nodded as he ate. They were in the dinette. Gus was playing with his food. Don’t mush your food around like that, Gus. Eat, or you can’t stay up to hear Lux Presents Hollywood.
But they’re doing “Dawn Patrol.”
Then don’t mush your food.
“Momma,” I murmured, standing in the cold, “Momma, there are children starving in Russia.” And I added, thirty-five years late, “Name two, Momma.”
I met Gus downtown at the newsstand.
“Hi.”
“Oh. Hullo.”
“Buying some comics?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You ever read Doll Man and Kid Eternity?”
“Yeah, they’re great. But I got them.”
“Not die new issues.”
“Sure do.”
“Bet you’ve got last months. He’s just checking in the new comics right now.”
So we waited while the newsstand owner used the heavy wire snips on the bundles, and checked off the magazines against the distributor’s long white mimeographed sheet. And I bought Gus Air boy and Jingle Jangle Comics and Blue Beetle and Whiz Comics and Doll Man and Kid Eternity.
Then I took him to Isaly’s for a hot fudge sundae. They served it in a tall tulip glass with the hot fudge in a little pitcher. When the waitress had gone to get the sundaes, little Gus looked at me. “Hey, how’d you know I only liked crushed nuts, an’ not whipped cream or a cherry?”
I leaned back in the high-walled booth and smiled at him.
“What do you want to be when you grow up, Gus?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Somebody put a nickel in the Wurlitzer in his booth, and Glenn Miller swung into “String of Pearls.”
“Well, did you ever think about it?”
“No, huh-uh. I like cartooning, maybe I could draw comic books.”
“That’s pretty smart thinking, Gus. There’s a lot of money to be made in art.” I stared around the dairy store, at the Coca-Cola posters of pretty girls with pageboy hairdos, drawn by an artist named Harold W. McCauley whose style would be known throughout the world, whose name would never be known.
He stared at me. “It’s fun, too, isn’t it?”
I was embarrassed. I’d thought first of money, he’d thought first of happiness. I’d reached him before he’d chosen his path. There was still time to make him a man who would think first of joy, all through his life.
“Mr. Rosenthal?”
I looked down and across, just as the waitress brought the sundaes. She set them down and I paid her. When she’d gone, Gus asked me, “Why did they call me a dirty Jewish elephant?”
“Who called you that, Gus?”
“The guys.”
“The ones you were fighting that day?”
He nodded. “Why’d they say elephant?”
I spooned up some vanilla ice cream, thinking. My back ached, and the rash had spread up my right wrist onto my forearm. “Well, Jewish people are supposed to have big noses, Gus.” I poured the hot fudge out of the little pitcher. It bulged with surface tension for a second, then spilled through its own dark-brown film, covering the three scoops of ice cream. “I mean, that’s what some people believe. So I suppose they thought it was smart to call you an elephant, because an elephant has a big nose . . . a trunk. Do you understand?”
“That’s dumb. I don’t have a big nose . . . do I?”
“I wouldn’t say so, Gus. They most likely said it just to make you mad. Sometimes people do that.”
“That’s dumb.”
We sat there for a while and talked. I went far down inside the tulip glass with the long-handled spoon, and finished the deep dark, almost black bittersweet hot fudge. They hadn’t made hot fudge like that in many years. Gus got ice cream up the spoon handle, on his fingers, on his chin, and on his T-shirt. We talked about a great many things.
We talked about how difficult arithmetic was. (How I would still have to use my fingers sometimes even as an adult.) How the guys never gave a short kid his “raps” when the sandlot ball games were in progress. (How I overcompensated with women from doubts about stature.) How different kinds of food were pretty bad-tasting. (How I still used ketchup on well-done steak.) How it was pretty lonely in the neighborhood with nobody for friends. (How I had erected a facade of charisma and glamor so no one could reach me deeply enough to hurt me.) How Leon always invited all the kids over to his house, but when Gus got there, they slammed the door and stood behind the screen laughing and jeering. (How even now a slammed door raised the hair on my neck and a phone receiver slammed down, cutting me off, sent me into a senseless rage.) How comic books were great. (How my scripts sold so easily because I had never learned how to rein in my imagination.)
We talked about a great many things.
“I’d better get you home now,” I said.
“Okay.” We got up. “Hey, Mr. Rosenthal?”
“You’d better wipe the chocolate off your face.”
He wiped. “Mr. Rosenthal . . . haw’d you know I like crushed nuts, an’ not whipped cream or a cherry?”
We spent a great deal of time together. I bought him a copy of a pulp magazine called Startling Stories and read him a story about a space pirate who captures a man and his wife and offers the man the choice of opening one of two large boxes—in one is the man’s wife, with twelve hours of air to breathe, in the other is a terrible alien fungus that will eat him alive. Little Gus sat on the edge of the big hole he’d dug, out in the empty lots, dangling his feet, and listening. His forehead was furrowed as he listened to the marvels of Jack Williamson’s “Twelve Hours to Live,” there on the edge of the fort he’d built.
We discussed the radio programs Gus heard every day: Tennessee Jed, Captain Midnight, Jack Armstrong, Superman, Don Winslow of the Navy. And the nighttime programs: I Love a Mystery, Suspense, The Adventures of Sam Spade. And the Sunday programs: The Shadow, Quiet, Please, The Mollé Mystery Theater.
We became good Mends. He had told his mother and father about “Mr. Rosenthal,” who was his Mend, but they’d spanked him for the Startling Stories, because they thought he’d stolen it. So he stopped telling them about me. That was all right; it made the bond between us stronger.
One afternoon we went down behind the Colony Lumber Company, through the woods and the weeds to the old condemned pond. Gus told me he used to go swimming there, and fishing sometimes, for a black oily fish with whiskers. I told him it was a catfish. He liked that. Liked to know the names of things. I told him that was called nomenclature, and he laughed to know there was a name for knowing names.
We sat on the piled logs rotting beside the black mirror water, and Gus asked me to tell him what it was like where I lived, and where I’d been, and what I’d done, and everything.
“I ran away from home when I was thirteen, Gus.”
“Wasn’t you happy there?”
“Well, yes and no. They loved me, my mother and father. They really did. They just didn’t understand what I was all about.”
There was a pain on my neck. I touched a fingertip to the place. It was a boil beginning to grow. I hadn’t had a boil in years, many years, not since I was a . . .
“What’s the matter, Mr. Rosenthal?”
“Nothing, Gus. Well, anyhow, I ran away, and joined the carny.”
“Huh?”
“A carnival. The Tri-State Shows. We moved through Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, even Kansas . . .”
“Boy! A carnival! Just like in Toby Tyler or Ten Weeks with the Circus? I really cried when Toby Tyler’s monkey got killed, that was the worst part of it, did you do stuff like that when you were with the circus?”
“Carnival.”
“Yeah. Uh-huh. Didja?”
“Something like that. I carried water for the animals sometimes, although we only had a few of those, and mostly in the freak show. But usually what I did was clean up and carry food to the performers in their tops—”
“What’s that?”
“That’s where they sleep, in rigged tarpaulins. You know, tarps.”
“Oh. Yeah, I know. Go on, huh.”
The rash was all the way up to my shoulder now. It itched like hell, and when I’d gone to the drugstore to get an aerosol spray to relieve it, so it wouldn’t spread, I had only to see those round wooden display tables with their glass centers, under which were bottles of Teel tooth liquid, Tangee Red-Red lipstick and nylons with a seam down the back, to know the druggist wouldn’t even know what I meant by Bactine or Liquid Band-Aid.
“Well, along about K.C. the carny got busted because there were too many moll dips and cannons and paperhangers in the tip . . .” I waited, his eyes growing huge.
“What’s all thaaat mean, Mr. Rosenthal?”
“Ah-ha! Fine carny stiff you’d make. You don’t even know the lingo.”
“Please, Mr. Rosenthal, please tell me!”
“Well, K.C. is Kansas City, Missouri . . . when it isn’t Kansas City, Kansas. Except, really, on the other side of the river is Weston. And busted means thrown in jail, and “You were in jail.”
“Sure was, little Gus. But let me tell you now. Cannons are pickpockets and moll dips are lady pickpockets, and paperhangers are fellows who write bad checks. And a tip is a group.”
“So what happened, what happened?”
“One of these bad guys, one of these cannons, you see, picked the pocket of an assistant district attorney, and we all got thrown in jail. And after a while everyone was released on bail, except me and the Geek. Me, because I wouldn’t tell them who I was, because I didn’t want to go home, and the Geek, because a carny can find a wetbrain in any town to play Geek.”
“What’s a Geek, huh?”
The Geek was a sixty-year-old alcoholic. So sunk in his own endless drunkenness that he was almost a zombie . . . a wetbrain. He was billed as The Thing, and he lived in a portable pit they carried around, and he bit the heads off snakes and ate live chickens and slept in his own dung. And all for a bottle of gin every day. They locked me in the drunk tank with him. The smell. The smell of sour liquor, oozing with sweat out of his pores, it made me sick, it was a smell I could never forget. And the third day, he went crazy. They wouldn’t fix him with gin, and he went crazy. He climbed the bars of the big freestanding drunk tank in the middle of the lockup, and he banged his head against the bars and ceiling where they met, till he fell back and lay there, breathing raggedly, stinking of that terrible smell, his face like a pound of raw meat.
The pain in my stomach was worse now. I took Gus back to Harmon Drive and let him go home.
My weight had dropped to just over a hundred and ten. My clothes didn’t fit. The acne and boils were worse. I smelled of witch hazel. Gus was getting more antisocial.
I realized what was happening.
I was alien to my own past. If I stayed much longer, God only knew what would happen to little Gus . . . but certainly I would waste away. Perhaps just vanish. Then . . . would Gus’s future cease to exist, too? I had no way of knowing; but my choice was obvious. I had to return.
And couldn’t! I was happier here than I’d ever been before. The bigotry and violence Gus had known before I came to him had ceased. They knew he was being watched over. But Gus was becoming more erratic. He was shoplifting toy soldiers and comic books from the Kresge’s and constantly defying his parents. It was turning bad. I had to go back.
I told him on a Saturday. We had gone to see a Lash La Rue Western and Val Lewton’s The Cat People at the Lake Theater. When we came back I parked the car on Mentor Avenue, and we went walking in the big, cool, dark woods that fronted Mentor where it met Harmon Drive.
“Mr. Rosenthal,” Gus said. He looked upset.
“Yes, Gus?”
“I gotta problem, sir.”
“What’s that, Gus?” My head ached. It was a steady needle of pressure above the right eye.
“My mother’s gonna send me to a military school.”
I remembered. Oh, God, I thought. It had been terrible. Precisely the thing not to do to a child like Gus.
“They said it was ’cause I was rambunctious. They said they were gonna send me there for a year or two. Mr. Rosenthal . . . don’t let’m send me there. I didn’t mean to be bad. I just wanted to be around you.”
My heart slammed inside me. Again. Then again. “Gus, I have to go away.”
He stared at me. I heard a soft whimper.
“Take me with you, Mr. Rosenthal. Please. I want to see Galveston. We can drive a dynamite truck in North Carolina. We can go to Matawatchan, Ontario, Canada, and work topping trees, we can sail on boats, Mr. Rosenthal!”
“Gus . . .”
“We can work the carny, Mr. Rosenthal. We can pick peanuts and oranges all across the country. We can hitchhike to San Francisco and ride the cable cars. We can ride the boxcars, Mr. Rosenthal . . . I promise I’ll keep my legs inside an’ not dangle ’em. I remember what you said about the doors slamming when they hook’m up. I’ll keep my legs inside, honest I will. . . .”
He was crying. My head ached hideously. But he was crying!
“I’ll have to go, Gus!”
“You don’t care!” He was shouting. “You don’t care about me, you don’t care what happens to me! You don’t care if I die . . . you don’t—”
He didn’t have to say it: you don’t love me.
“I do, Gus. I swear to God, I do!”
I looked up at him; he was supposed to be my friend. But he wasn’t. He was going to let them send me off to that military school.
“I hope you die!”
Oh, dear God, Gus, I am! I turned and ran out of the woods as I watched him run out of the woods.
I drove away. The green Plymouth with the running boards and the heavy body; it was hard steering. The world swam around me. My eyesight blurred. I could feel myself withering away.
I thought I’d left myself behind, but little Gus had followed me out of the woods. Having done it, I now remembered: why had I remembered none of it before? As I drove off down Mentor Avenue, I came out of the woods and saw the big green car starting up, and I ran wildly forward, crouching low, wanting only to go with him, my friend, me. I threw in the clutch and dropped the stick into first and pulled away from the curb as I reached the car and climbed onto the rear fender, pulling my legs up, hanging onto the trunk latch. I drove weaving, my eyes watering and things going first blue then green, hanging on for dear life to the cold latch handle. Cars whipped around, honking madly, trying to tell me that I was on the rear of the car, but I didn’t know what they were honking about, and scared their honking would tell me I was back there, hiding.
After I’d gone almost a mile, a car pulled up alongside, and a woman sitting next to the driver looked down at me crouching there, and I made a please don’t tell sign with my finger to my freezing lips, but the car pulled ahead and the woman rolled down her window and motioned to me. I rolled down my window and the woman yelled across through the rushing wind that I was back there on the rear fender. I pulled over and fear gripped me as the car stopped and I saw me getting out of the door, and I crawled off the car and started running away. But my legs were cramped and cold from having hung on back there, and I ran awkwardly; then coming out of the dark was a road sign, and I hit it, and it hit me in the side of the face, and I fell down, and I ran toward myself, lying there, crying, and I got to him just as I got up and ran off into the gravel yard surrounding the Colony Lumber Company.
Little Gus was bleeding from the forehead where he’d struck the metal sign. He ran into the darkness, and I knew where he was running . . . I had to catch him, to tell him, to make him understand why I had to go away.
I came to the hurricane fence and ran and ran till I found the place where I’d dug out under it, and I slipped down and pulled myself under and got my clothes all dirty, but I got up and ran back behind the Colony Lumber Company, into the sumac and the weeds, till I came to the condemned pond back there. Then I sat down and looked out over the black water. I was crying.
I followed the trail down to the pond. It took me longer to climb over the fence than it had taken him, to crawl under it. When I came down to the pond, he was sitting there with a long blade of saw grass in his mouth, crying softly. I heard him coming, but I didn’t turn around.
I came down to him, and crouched behind him. “Hey,” I said quietly. “Hey, little Gus.”
I wouldn’t turn around. I wouldn’t.
I spoke his name again, and touched him on the shoulder, and in an instant he was turned to me, hugging me around the chest, crying into my jacket, mumbling over and over, “Don’t go, please don’t go, please take me with you, please don’t leave me here alone . . .
