Collected Stories, page 28
“Oh,” he said. “I was wondering what had become of you.”
The basement air was foul and heavy, dense with the reek from the toilets. Henry saw as he stepped inside that at the far end only the night light behind the bar was on, but that light was coming from Schmeckebier’s door at this end too, the two weak illuminations diffusing in the shadowy poolroom, leaving the middle in almost absolute dark. It was the appropriate time, the appropriate place, the stink of his prison appropriately concentrated. He drew his lungs full of it with a kind of passion, and he said, “I just came down to—”
“Who is dot?” Schmeckebier called out. He came to his door, wrapped to the armpits in a bar apron, with a spoon in his hand, and he bent, peering out into the dusk like a disturbed dwarf in an underhill cave. “John? Who? Oh, Henry. Shust in time, shust in time. It is not long now.” His lower lip waggled, and he pulled it up, apparently with an effort.
Henry said, “What’s not long?”
“Vot?” Schmeckebier said, and thrust his big head far out. “You forgot about it?”
“I must have,” Henry said.
“The duck feed,” his father said impatiently.
They stood staring at one another in the dusk. The right moment was gone. With a little twitch of the shoulder Henry let it go. He would wait a while, pick his time. When Schmeckebier went back to his cooking, Henry saw through the doorway the lumpy bed, the big chair with a blanket folded over it, the roll-top desk littered with pots and pans, the green and white enamel of the range. A rich smell of roasting came out and mingled oddly with the chemical stink of toilet disinfectant.
“Are we going to eat in there?” he asked.
His father snorted. “How could we eat in there? Old Maxie lived in the ghetto too damn long. By God, I never saw such a boar’s nest.”
“Vot’s duh matter? Vot’s duh matter?” Schmeckebier said. His big lip thrust out, he stooped to look into the oven, and John Lederer went shaking his head up between the tables to the counter. Henry followed him, intending to make the break when he got the old man alone. But he saw the three plates set up on the bar, the three glasses of tomato juice, the platter of olives and celery, and he hesitated. His father reached with a salt shaker and shook a little salt into each glass of tomato juice.
“All the fixings,” he said. “Soon as Max gets those birds out of the oven we can take her on.”
Now it was easy to say, “As soon as the feed’s over I’ll be shoving off.” Henry opened his mouth to say it, but was interrupted this time by a light tapping at the glass door beyond Sciutti’s shop. He swung around angrily and saw duskily beyond the glass the smooth blond hair, the even smile.
“It’s Billy,” he said. “Shall I let him in?”
“Sure,” the old man said. “Tell him to come in and have a duck with us.”
But Billy Hammond shook his head when Henry asked him. He was shaking his head almost as he came through the door. “No, thanks, I just ate. I’m full of chow mein. This is a family dinner anyway. You go on ahead.”
“Got plenty,” John Lederer said, and made a motion as if to set a fourth place at the counter.
“Who is dot?” Schmeckebier bawled from the back. “Who come in? Is dot Billy Hammond? Set him up a blate.”
“By God, his nose sticks as far into things as his lip,” Lederer said. Still holding the plate, he roared back, “Catch up with the parade, for Christ sake, or else tend to your cooking.” He looked at Henry and Billy and chuckled.
Schmeckebier had disappeared, but now his squat figure blotted the lighted doorway again. “Vot? Vot you say?”
“Vot?” John Lederer said. “Vot, vot, vot? Vot does it matter vot I said? Get the hell back to your kitchen.”
He was, Henry saw, in a high humor. The effect of last night was still with him. He was still playing Mine Host. He looked at the two of them and laughed so naturally that Henry almost joined him. “I think old Maxie’s head is full of duck dressing,” he said, and leaned on the counter. “I ever tell you about the time we came back from Reno together? We stopped off in the desert to look at a mine, and got lost on a little dirt road so we had to camp. I was trying to figure out where we were, and started looking for stars, but it was clouded over, hard to locate anything. So I ask old Maxie if he can see the Big Dipper anywhere. He thinks about that maybe ten minutes with his lip stuck out and then he says, ‘I t’ink it’s in duh water bucket.’ ”
He did the grating gutturals of Schmeckebier’s speech so accurately that Henry smiled in spite of himself. His old man made another motion with the plate at Billy Hammond. “Better let me set you up a place.”
“Thanks,” Billy said. His voice was as polite and soft as his face, and his eyes had the ingenuous liquid softness of a girl’s. “Thanks, I really just ate. You go on, I’ll shoot a little pool if it’s all right.”
Now came Schmeckebier with a big platter held in both hands. He bore it smoking through the gloom of the poolhall and up the steps to the counter, and John Lederer took it from him there and with a flourish speared one after another three tight-skinned brown ducks and slid them on to the plates set side by side for the feast. The one frugal light from the backbar shone on them as they sat down. Henry looked over his shoulder to see Billy Hammond pull the cord and flood a table with a sharp-edged cone of brilliance. Deliberately, already absorbed, he chalked a cue. His lips pursed, and he whistled, and, whistling, bent to take aim.
Lined up in a row, they were not placed for conversation, but John Lederer kept attempting it, leaning forward over his plate to see Schmeckebier or Henry. He filled his mouth with duck and dressing and chewed, shaking his head with pleasure, and snapped off a bite of celery with a crack like a breaking stick. When his mouth was clear he leaned and said to Schmeckebier, “Ah, das schmeckt gut, hey, Maxie?”
“Ja,” Schmeckebier said, and sucked grease off his lip and only then turned in surprise. “Say, you speak German?”
“Sure, I speak German,” Lederer said. “I worked three weeks once with an old squarehead brickmason that taught me the whole language. He taught me about sehr gut and nicht wahr and besser I bleiben right hier, and he always had his Frau make me up a lunch full of kalter Aufschnitt and gemixte pickeln. I know all about German.”
Schmeckebier stared a moment, grunted, and went back to his eating. He had already stripped the meat from the bones and was gnawing the carcass.
“Anyway,” John Lederer said, “es schmeckt God damn good.” He got up and went around the counter and drew a mug of coffee from the urn. “Coffee?” he said to Henry.
“Please.”
His father drew another mug and set it before him. “Maxie?”
Schmeckebier shook his head, his mouth too full for talk. For a minute, after he had set out two little jugs of cream, Lederer stood as if thinking. He was watching Billy Hammond move quietly around the one lighted table, whistling. “Look at that sucker,” Lederer said. “I bet he doesn’t even know where he is.”
By the time he got around to his stool he was back at the German. “Schmeckebier,” he said. “What’s that mean?”
“Uh?”
“What’s your name mean? Tastes beer? Likes beer?”
Schmeckebier rolled his shoulders. The sounds he made eating were like sounds from a sty. Henry was half sickened, sitting next to him, and he wished the old man would let the conversation drop. But apparently it had to be a feast, and a feast called for chatter.
“That’s a hell of a name, you know it?” Lederer said, and already he was up again and around the end of the counter. “You couldn’t get into any church with a name like that.” His eyes fastened on the big drooping greasy lip, and he grinned.
“Schmeckeduck, that ought to be your name,” he said. “What’s German for duck? Vogel? Old Man Schmeckevogel. How about number two?”
Schmeckebier pushed his plate forward and Lederer forked a duck out of the steam table. Henry did not take a second.
“You ought to have one,” his father told him. “You don’t get grub like this every day.”
“One’s my limit,” Henry said.
For a while they worked at their plates. Back of him Henry heard the clack of balls hitting, and a moment later the rumble as a ball rolled down the chute from a pocket. The thin, abstracted whistling of Billy Hammond broke off, became words:
Annie doesn’t live here any more.
You must be the one she waited for.
She said I would know you by the blue in your eye—
“Talk about one being your limit,” his father said. “When we lived in Nebraska we used to put on some feeds. You remember anything about Nebraska at all?”
“A little,” Henry said. He was irritated at being dragged into reminiscences, and he did not want to hear how many ducks the town hog could eat at a sitting.
“We’d go out, a whole bunch of us,” John Lederer said. “The sloughs were black with ducks in those days. We’d come back with a buggyful, and the womenfolks’d really put us on a feed. Fifteen, twenty, thirty people. Take a hundred ducks to fill ’em up.” He was silent a moment, staring across the counter, chewing. Henry noticed that he had tacked two wings of a teal up on the frame of the backbar mirror, small, strong bows with a band of bright blue half hidden in them. The old man’s eyes slanted over, caught Henry’s looking at the wings.
“Doesn’t seem as if we’d had a duck feed since we left there,” he said. His forehead wrinkled; he rubbed his neck, leaning forward over his plate, and his eyes met Henry’s in the backbar mirror. He spoke to the mirror, ignoring the gobbling image of Schmeckebier between his own reflection and Henry’s.
“You remember that set of china your mother used to have? The one she painted herself? Just the plain white china with the one design on each plate?”
Henry sat stiffly, angry that his mother’s name should even be mentioned between them in this murky hole, and after what had passed. Gabble, gabble, gabble, he said to himself. If you can’t think of anything else to gabble about, gabble about your dead wife. Drag her through the poolroom too. Aloud he said, “No, I guess I don’t.”
“Blue-wing teal,” his father said, and nodded at the wings tacked to the mirror frame. “Just the wings, like that. Awful pretty. She thought a teal was about the prettiest little duck there was.”
His vaguely rubbing hand came around from the back of his neck and rubbed along the cheek, pulling the slack flesh and distorting the mouth. Henry said nothing, watching the pouched hound eyes in the mirror.
It was a cold, skin-tightening shock to realize that the hound eyes were cloudy with tears. The rubbing hand went over them, shaded them like a hatbrim, but the mouth below remained distorted. With a plunging movement his father was off the stool.
“Oh, God damn!” he said in a strangling voice, and went past Henry on hard, heavy feet, down the steps and past Billy Hammond, who neither looked up nor broke the sad thin whistling.
Schmeckebier had swung around. “Vot’s duh matter? Now vot’s duh matter?”
With a short shake of the head, Henry turned away from him, staring after his father down the dark poolhall. He felt as if orderly things were breaking and flying apart in his mind; he had a moment of white blind terror that this whole scene upon whose reality he counted was really only a dream, something conjured up out of the bottom of his consciousness where he was accustomed to comfort himself into total sleep. His mind was still full of the anguished look his father had hurled at the mirror before he ran.
The hell with you, the look had said. The hell with you, Schmeckebier, and you, my son Henry. The hell with your ignorance, whether you’re stupid or whether you just don’t know all you think you know. You don’t know enough to kick dirt down a hole. You know nothing at all, you know less than nothing because you know things wrong.
He heard Billy’s soft whistling, saw him move around his one lighted table—a well-brought-up boy from some suburban town, a polite soft gentle boy lost and wandering among pimps and prostitutes, burying himself for some reason among people who never even touched his surface. Did he shoot pool in his bed at night, tempting sleep, as Henry did? Did his mind run carefully to angles and banks and englishes, making a reflecting mirror of them to keep from looking through them at other things?
Almost in terror he looked out across the sullen cave, past where the light came down in an intense isolated cone above Billy’s table, and heard the lugubrious whistling that went on without intention of audience, a recurrent and deadening and only half-conscious sound. He looked toward the back, where his father had disappeared in the gloom, and wondered if in his bed before sleeping the old man worked through a routine of little jobs: cleaning the steam table, ordering a hundred pounds of coffee, jacking up the janitor about the mess in the hall. He wondered if it was possible to wash yourself to sleep with restaurant crockery, work yourself to sleep with chores, add yourself to sleep with columns of figures, as you could play yourself to sleep with a pool cue and a green table and fifteen colored balls. For a moment, in the sad old light with the wreckage of the duck feast at his elbow, he wondered if there was anything more to his life, or his father’s life, or Billy Hammond’s life, or anyone’s life, than playing the careful games that deadened you into sleep.
Schmeckebier, beside him, was still groping in the fog of his mind for an explanation of what had happened. “Vere’d he go?” he said, and nudged Henry fiercely. “Vot’s duh matter?”
Henry shook him off irritably, watching Billy Hammond’s oblivious bent head under the light. He heard Schmeckebier’s big lip flop and heard him sucking his teeth.
“I tell you,” the guttural voice said. “I got somet’ing dot fixes him if he feels bum.”
He too went down the stairs past the lighted table and into the gloom at the back. The light went on in his room, and after a minute or two his voice was shouting, “John! Say, come here, uh? Say, John!”
Eventually John Lederer came out of the toilet and they walked together between the tables. In his fist Schmeckebier was clutching a square bottle. He waved it in front of Henry’s face as they passed, but Henry was watching his father. He saw the crumpled face, oddly rigid, like the face of a man in the grip of a barely controlled rage, but his father avoided his eyes.
“Kümmel,” Schmeckebier said. He set four ice-cream dishes on the counter and poured three about a third full of clear liquor. His squinted eyes lifted and peered towards Billy Hammond, but Henry said, on an impulse, “Let him alone. He’s walking in his sleep.”
So there were only the three. They stood together a moment and raised their glasses. “Happy days,” John Lederer said automatically. They drank.
Schmeckebier smacked his lips, looked at them one after another, shook his head in admiration of the quality of his kümmel, and waddled back towards his room with the bottle. John Lederer was already drawing hot water to wash the dishes.
In the core of quiet which was not broken even by the clatter of crockery and the whistling of Billy Hammond, Henry said what he had to say. “I’ll be leaving,” he said. “Probably tonight.”
But he did not say it in anger, or with the cold command of himself that he had imagined in advance. He said it like a cry, and with the feeling he might have had on letting go the hand of a friend too weak and too exhausted to cling any longer to their inadequate shared driftwood in a wide cold sea.
Pop Goes the Alley Cat
Getting up to answer the door, Prescott looked into the face of a Negro boy of about eighteen. Rain pebbled his greased, straightened hair; the leather yoke of his blazer and the knees of his green gabardine pants were soaked. The big smile of greeting that had begun on his face passed over as a meaningless movement of the lips. “I was lookin’,” he said, and then with finality, “I thought maybe Miss Vaughn.”
“She’s just on her way out.”
The boy did not move. “I like to see her,” he said, and gave Prescott a pair of small, opaque, expressionless eyes to look into. Eventually Prescott motioned him in. He made a show of getting the water off himself, squee-geeing his hair with a flat palm, shaking his limber hands, lifting the wet knees of his pants with thumb and finger as he sat down. He was not a prepossessing specimen: on the scrawny side, the clothes too flashy but not too clean, the mouth loose and always moving, the eyes the kind that shifted everywhere when you tried to hold them but were on you intently the moment you looked away.
But he made himself at home. And why not, Prescott asked himself, in this apartment banked and stacked and overflowing with reports on delinquency, disease, crime, discrimination; littered with sociological studies and affidavits on police brutality and the mimeographed communications of a dozen betterment organizations? The whole place was a temple to the juvenile delinquent, and here was the god himself in the flesh, Los Angeles Bronzeville model.
Well, he said, I am not hired to comment, but only to make pictures.
Carol came into the hall from her bedroom, and Prescott saw with surprise that she was glad to see this boy. “Johnny!” she said. “Where did you drop from?”
Over the boy had come an elaborate self-conscious casualness. He walked his daddylonglegs fingers along the couch back and lounged to his feet, rolling the collar of the blazer smooth across the back of his neck. Prescott was reminded of the slickers of his high school days, with their pinch-waisted bell-bottomed suits and their habit of walking a little hollow-chested to make their shoulders look wider. The boy weaved and leaned, pitching his voice high for kidding, moving his shoulders, his mouth, his pink-palmed hands. “Start to rain on me,” he said in the high complaining humorous voice. “Water start comin’ down on me I think I have to drop in.”
“How come you’re not working?”
“That job!” the boy said, and batted it away with both hands. “That wasn’t much of a job, no kiddin’.”
“Wasn’t?”
“You know. Them old flour bags heavy, you get tired. Minute you stop to rest, here come that old foreman with the gooseroo. Hurry up there, boy! Get along there, boy! They don’t ride white boys like that.”
