Catch As Catch Can

by Joseph Heller

  Several people were there, some of them familiar, but no one he wanted to talk to. Carl, the owner, spotted him and came forward. Nat didn’t like him. Carl was a Rabelaisian vulgarity, a very short, round, very hairy man with a coated tongue he displayed frequently to whomever he thought it would annoy. He spoke in his high, taunting voice.

  “Well, look who’s here.”

  “Hello, Carl,” Nat said.

  Carl was capable of anything, and he waited fearfully.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Out of town,” Nat said. “I was down in Florida for a while.”

  Carl studied him, cocking his head slightly and smiling mockingly. “Florida,” he said, with contempt. “Florida, my ass. Don’t hand me that. You weren’t in Florida. Do you know where you were? You were down in Kentucky taking the cure with the other junkies. Some Florida. Who you trying to kid?”

  Nat looked down guiltily, then managed to smile as he raised his eyes. “How the hell did you know?” he asked, with a weak attempt at bravado.

  “How did I know?” Carl asked incredulously, as though amazed by the question. “Carl knows everything. Didn’t you know that?”

  Carl laughed triumphantly and then moved off to a table in the rear. Nat was almost afraid to move, certain that everyone had heard, but when he looked up finally he saw that no one was watching him. Carl returned in a few minutes, approaching very deliberately. His face was fat and his swollen cheeks made wicked slits of his eyes. He spoke as though he had planned every word.

  “Business is bad. Business is lousy. And do you know why? Carl will tell you why. Because it’s cold and you can’t heat this place. Everyone comes in and complains to Carl about the cold. Everyone but you. You come in and you sweat like a pig. How can you sweat like that when it’s so cold?”

  Nat walked outside.

  It was colder now and soon it would be dark. Winter was like that, dark in the afternoon. In the summer the air was nice and people came from all over to use the beach. There was noise in the night and it was easy to get a girl, but in the winter people seemed silent and alone and everything grew still in a bleak reminder of despair.

  Nat mopped his face viciously, cursing himself for his strange affliction. He walked several yards and hid himself in the door way of a vacant shop. The small enclosure afforded a tenuous security, allowing him to watch the entrance to the poolroom without being readily observed. Several people passed, and then a figure appeared who made him start and step forward.

  “Sol!” he called. “Sol!”

  Sol was surprised to see him. He smiled and shook Nat’s hand warmly.

  “Hello, Nat,” he said.

  “Hello, Sol. How’ve you been?”

  Sol nodded. He was a few inches taller than Nat, fairly good looking with nice eyes and very fine black hair. For a moment he was puzzled by the doorway. Then he looked at the poolroom and seemed to understand.

  “Have you got some time?” he asked casually. “I want to get a bet down, but I’ll be right out.”

  Nat nodded. He was glad to see Sol. Sol was very intelligent; he had been to college for three years. They had once been very close, but for a while now Sol had been keeping to himself. Nat’s friends didn’t like him, resenting what they took to be an air of superiority, and they often joked about him. It always bothered Nat when they did, but he had never defended him.

  Sol returned in a few minutes. “Where’ve you been, Nat? I haven’t seen you around.”

  Nat paused a moment. “I was down in Florida for a while.”

  “Make out all right?”

  “Pretty good,” Nat said.

  They began walking slowly, moving past the poolroom and across the street to the next block, seating themselves finally on some steps before a house. Sol gave him a cigarette and they smoked in silence for a while.

  “Sol,” Nat said. He looked away awkwardly. “I wasn’t down in Florida. I was in Kentucky.”

  Sol laughed quietly. “I know you were,” he said. “Did you go for the cure?”

  Nat nodded. “They fixed me up too. I guess I wasn’t hooked so bad. I didn’t even have to stay the full time.”

  “Was it bad, Nat?” Sol asked.

  “Yeah. For a while it was pretty bad.” Nat laughed nervously, feeling painfully self-conscious. “Sol, do you still pick up? You can get on if you want to.”

  “It won’t bother you?”

  Nat shook his head. Sol found a reefer, and in a few seconds the sweet, rich smell of marijuana was very strong. In the side street a boy and girl were talking in a doorway. The boy looked somewhat familiar, but it was the girl Nat watched. She seemed very pretty from the distance, very pretty and very happy, and Nat envied the boy for being with her and for being able to make her happy. Sol made sucking noises as he smoked the reefer and Nat eyed him greedily. Tea was all right, he told himself. It gave you a lift and it wasn’t too bad if you didn’t have any, not like The Horse and Big C, but tea was all right. He asked for the reefer and Sol hesitated doubtfully as he gave it to him. Nat felt steadier immediately. He kept it a while and then passed it back, exhaling comfortably.

  “It’s funny how tea acts when you’re hopped,” he said. “One stick can whack you out.”

  “Yeah,” Sol said. “So I’ve heard.”

  “Sol, how come you never got hooked?” Nat asked seriously.

  Sol shook his head slowly. “Junk is bad, Nat,” he said with conviction. “I guess you know that now. You were there when they first brought it around. Do you remember what happened?”

  Nat remembered perfectly. A sailor had skipped with money given him to buy a pound of marijuana. He was seen some time later and two of the fellows went to wait outside the house in which he roomed. When he didn’t show they broke into the room and went through everything he had, finding only a bag of capsules that had been carefully concealed. Some instinctive voice had told them of its value, and they returned with it to the neighborhood. An older person there recognized the contents and knew what to do with it.

  There were about twenty in the crowd that moved from the avenue to the darkened side street, some, like Nat and Sol, merely going to watch. They borrowed a spoon from the lunch-eonette, and there were enough cigarette lighters in the group to boil the capsules down. They didn’t have a hypodermic syringe so they had each of them taken a skin pop. With an open safety pin they punctured the skin over the forearm and jabbed the grains beneath. Some were clumsy and there was a lot of blood. It was a slow process, and even before the last one had finished the first one was throwing up. In a few minutes they were all vomiting into the street, every single one who was taking it for the first time. The picture was vivid in Nat’s memory and he chuckled nostalgically.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That was quite a sight.”

  “It was awful,” Sol said, with strong feeling. “The most sickening thing I’ve ever seen. Nat, how come you got hooked after that?”

  It was a question Nat had pondered over many times before, and he took a long time answering. “I don’t know,” he said, in a very low voice. “It was just something to do, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” Sol said. “I guess that’s it.”

  They were silent and Nat looked down the block at the couple talking in the doorway. They weren’t touching, but he noticed how they swayed deliciously toward each other and then apart in the subtle, unconscious game of temptation, promise, and denial that underran their conversation.

  The girl had light hair, and he would have loved to touch its soft strands and breathe its sweet, fresh fragrance. That was what he needed, he decided, a girl, not a whore but a nice girl, someone to laugh in the morning. But he couldn’t talk to a nice girl. He did pretty well with the tramps, not meeting them but moving in after someone else had found them, but he never knew what to say to a nice girl. Then you needed money with a nice girl. You couldn’t sit in a hallway or take her to the park, and even when he had the money to take her to the city he cou
ld never find anyplace to go but a movie, and all night long he would be petrified with the agonizing awareness that she wasn’t having a good time and that he was helpless and had failed pathetically.

  All this went through Nat’s mind, and he turned to Sol with a sudden motion. “Sol, where’s Berry? Have you seen him around?”

  Sol looked surprised. “I thought you were cured,” he said.

  “I was. At least I thought I was. I don’t know, Sol.” Nat shook his head miserably. He clasped and unclasped his fingers, staring down past them at the hard sidewalk. “I’ve been jittery ever since I hit New York. It was all right while I was away, but I’ve been shaking inside ever since I got home. I don’t know what’ll happen when I see him. It isn’t that I want a shot, but I want something, and I don’t know what’ll happen when I see him.”

  “Nat, why don’t you go away?” Sol clasped his arm and peered earnestly into his eyes. “To another city. There’s nothing here for you.”

  “I’ve thought about that, Sol. But I could only go to Florida or California, someplace where I knew someone, and then it would be the same thing all over again.”

  “Go someplace where you don’t know anyone.”

  Nat laughed bitterly. “I’d never make it, Sol. It’s pretty bad being alone in a strange city.”

  “Yeah,” Sol said gravely. “I guess it is.”

  They were both silent. Nat was sweating again, and inside he was filled with a cold, penetrating uncertainty. He looked up from the sidewalk toward the doorway in which the boy and girl had been standing. The girl had disappeared and the boy was walking slowly toward the avenue. Nat watched him approach the corner, his eyes widening with amazement. It was Berry, and he was seized with a horrible disappointment when he recognized him.

  “There’s your man,” Sol said quietly.

  Nat nodded glumly. He looked back at the empty doorway, trying to remember what the girl had looked like, but he could recall nothing of her appearance, not even the color of her hair. Berry was walking on the other side of the avenue. Nat called him.

  Berry crossed slowly. He was tall and thin with a face that was very pale and a wide, self-satisfied grin. He nodded to Sol and spoke to Nat. “I thought you were away at camp,” he said.

  “I just got back.”

  “You weren’t gone long.” There was a trace of contempt in Berry’s voice. “You didn’t go for the cure by any chance, did you?”

  “Cure, hell!” Nat said. He could feel Sol’s eyes upon him, but it was easier to talk to Berry. “I checked out as soon as they cut me off.”

  “Yeah?” Berry drawled suspiciously. “Nick and Charley left before you did and they’re still getting fed.”

  “They were luckier. Where you going now?”

  “Home for dinner. Why?”

  “Have you got anything there?”

  “Can you pay for it?”

  “I’ve got five dollars.”

  “Then I’ve got something there,” Berry laughed.

  Nat rose with weary resignation and stepped to the sidewalk. He met Sol’s eyes for a moment and then looked away uncomfortably. “So long, Sol. It was nice seeing you.”

  “Yeah,” was all Sol said.

  Nat started to leave with Berry. They got as far as the corner and then Nat asked him to wait and walked back to the stoop. Sol was still sitting there. Nat bent close to him and spoke with an anguished intensity.

  “Sol, what I told him just now, it wasn’t like that at all. I went for the cure. I went for the cure and I suffered like hell getting it but I guess it just wasn’t any good.”

  “That’s all right,” Sol said. “You don’t have to explain.”

  “I just wanted you to know, Sol.”

  “Sure, Nat. I understand.”

  Nat straightened and moved away regretfully.

  “Well, so long, Sol. I’ll see you around.”

  “Yeah,” Sol said. “Take it easy.”

  A DAY IN THE COUNTRY*

  The poolroom was almost empty. A few high school kids were playing a noisy game of rotation at one of the front tables, their books littering the wooden benches that ran, one against each of the soiled yellow walls, the full, gloomy length of the long and narrow room. Nat glanced quickly at each of them. He frowned immediately with disappointment and continued toward the rear where Carl sat. The tip of his tongue ran anxiously over his lips. He passed Crazy George, who sat off by himself and stared blankly ahead, tranquil and self-amused, nibbling placidly at a sandwich and drinking chocolate pop from a bottle. There was the odor of dust in the air. The poolroom was old, older than Nat, who was twenty-six. He could recall loitering about the entrance as a boy, asking everyone who came out for the baseball scores. Once a man had been killed inside, shot down years before, during prohibition, it was said, as he stood chalking up his cue and plotting the table angles for a difficult shot. No one knew why. Old timers like Crazy George were fond of repeating the story. “For Christ’s sake!” Nat had snapped irritably at Crazy George one time. “Is that the high spot of your life?” He remembered clearly now the hurt look in the old man’s eyes.

  “Carl, I need some money.”

  Carl was perched motionless behind the glass-faced cabinet in which he stored the cue balls and the tiny cubes of chalk. His expression was blank and bored. He was short and fat and had a hard, broad forehead and sagging cheeks with deceptively mirthful lines curling down around them toward a small, bloodless mouth. He said nothing.

  “Not much, Carl.”

  Carl gazed at him without interest. After a few seconds he shrugged and shook his head.

  “Why not?” Nat demanded, in a rising voice.

  There was a sudden burst of laughter from the front as one of the players sent a ball rocketing over the cushions to the floor, where it struck with a bang and went thudding hollowly against the wall.

  “Damn kids,” Carl murmured.

  “Christ, Carl!”

  “It’s your habit,” Carl said calmly. “Not mine.”

  “I never hung you up. I never beat you for a dime.”

  “What will you do tomorrow?” Carl asked, speaking slowly with the same toneless detachment.

  Nat stared at him a moment longer, his fingers flexing themselves rhythmically, and then turned bitterly away. He knew Carl, and it was useless to argue further. He left through the door close by that led into the side street. The cold, damp air made him pause. Jesus, Jesus Christ, he moaned inwardly. There isn’t much time! As if summoned by the thought, the fear boiled up inside him with thundering force, and he began walking rapidly. At the avenue he stopped and glanced about. He could find no place to go, and he began drifting back uncertainly, moving backwards as though retreating until he stood in the recess formed by the front entrance to the poolroom.

  What discouraged him most was the waste. The time, the money spent for carfare, the whole grisly struggle, with all its incredible pain and horror and yearning despair, had been good for only three days (the fact that he was counting should have told him), and all it took was the sight of Cookie. On Monday he was standing on that same corner with Solly Harris, telling him, with a laughing, irrepressible overflow of happiness and pride, of how he had won what he had humorously chosen to call the Battle of Lexington. Then Cookie was there, standing silently on the other side of the avenue, his face sallow and shrunken, his thin, shrivelled form pitiably clothed in rags, Cookie was there, appearing soundlessly like some grim and inexorable spectre, and suddenly it was all over. The Battle of Lexington was over, and he had lost.

  “Don’t go, Nat,” Solly Harris had warned gravely.

  “Just to say hello.”

  “You’ll regret it, Nat.”

  “You’re crazy, Solly,” Nat had laughed. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “No, you won’t, Nat. You won’t ever be back.”

  Nat threw his cigarette away and looked up desperately at the pale, cheerless sky. It was a gray, blustery December afternoon. A
few tattered clouds were chased darkly through the sky, driven by a severe, rattling wind that rose every few minutes like a tyrant’s rage and lashed vengefully about. He glanced with brief anticipation at everyone who passed. There was a solemn, ominous, straggling procession of strangers, of women, small children, and old men, packed to clumsiness in warm clothing, walking in heavy silence with heads thrust stiffly against the wind, all of them drab, even the children, with a musty, spiritless pallor. He had been everywhere, had hammered on doors and rung bells; no one was home, no one was expected until evening. Already the tickle was in his cheek, malicious, sharp, and prodding. He set his teeth grimly and began walking.

  He met no one on the way home. A quick flaring of hope came when he first spied Dr. Weiner’s house, a familiar, gray two-story building set back from the corner behind a handful of scrawny bushes and a few paces of lawn, but he lost courage instantly and even crossed to the other side to avoid a chance meeting with the slim, white-haired physician who had ministered to his family for almost thirty years and with whom he had once been so friendly. Mrs. Cooperman, Nat’s mother, still saw him regularly for her varicose veins and her dangerously high blood pressure that made the hot summer months a hell for her, paying him with what she managed to save from the money given her by her daughter and older son, both of whom were married and lived in homes of their own. Only Nat lived with his mother. Mrs. Cooperman was a proud, obstinate, emotional woman who imposed an inflexible limit on the amounts she would accept from her children and brooded in stern silence over the fact that Nat and his brother did not speak to each other.

  She was out when Nat arrived at the house. His room had been made up, cleaned, dusted; his clothes, even his moccasins, which he liked to have remain beneath the bed, had been placed carefully in the wardrobe. He waited a moment to make certain he was alone and then began opening drawers. He went through one after the other, moved with frantic determination from cabinet to cabinet, through every closet, searching the flat rapidly with a sly, calculating thoroughness. His hands shook uncontrollably. At times his excitement rose and he began scattering things about, but these panics passed, and in the end he made an excruciating effort to rearrange everything. Through it all, his face showed a strange lack of enthusiasm, as though he were resigned in advance to defeat. Suddenly his energy waned, bringing him to a stop, and he was left standing helplessly in his mother’s bedroom. There would be nothing of value, he knew. In the whole house there was only one thing, his mother’s winter coat, and she had that with her.