Closing Time

by Joseph Heller

  BOOK

  TWO

  4

  Lew

  I was born strong and without fear. To this day I don't think I know what it is to be afraid of another human being. I didn't get my muscles and big bones and deep chest from baling old newspapers and doing heavy lifting as a kid in my father's junkshop. If I didn't have the strength he would not have made me do it. He would have put me to work keeping count and running errands, like he did with my sisters and my older brother Ira. We were four sons in my family and two girls, and of the boys I was the second from the last. My mother would tell people I was the strongest baby she ever saw, and also the hungriest. She needed both hands to pull me away from the breast.

  "Like Hercules in his crib," Sammy Singer said once.

  "Who?"

  "Hercules. The infant Hercules."

  "What about him?

  "When he was born a couple of big snakes were sent into his crib to kill him. He strangled one with each hand."

  "It was nothing like that, wise guy."

  Little Sammy Singer knew things like that even when we were kids back in public school in the third or fourth grade. Or maybe it was the sixth or seventh. The rest of us were doing book reports on Tom Sawyer and Robinson Crusoe and he was doing them on the Iliad. Sammy was clever, I was smart. He looked things up. I figured them out. He was good at chess, I was good at pinochle. I stopped playing chess, he kept losing money to me at pinochle. Who was the smart one? When we went into the war he wanted to be a fighter pilot and picked the air corps. I picked the ground force because I wanted to fight Germans. I hoped to be in a tank and ride right through hundreds of them. He turned out a tail gunner, I wound up in the infantry. He was knocked down into the water once and came home with a medal, I was a prisoner of war and was kept overseas until the end. Maybe he was the smarter one. After the war he went to college with the government paying, I bought a lumberyard outside the city. I bought a building lot and put up a house on spec in partnership with a few of my customers, who knew more about construction than I did. I knew more about business. With the profits from that one I did the next house alone. I discovered credit. We did not know in Coney Island that banks wanted to lend money. He went to operas and I went out shooting ducks and Canada geese with local plumbers and Yankee bankers. As a POW in Germany I worried each time I changed hands what would happen when the new guards looked at my dog tags and found out I was a Jew. I worried, but I don't remember that I ever had fear. Each place I moved as they shipped me deeper and deeper into the country toward Dresden, I made sure to find some way to tell them before they found out. I did not want them to get the idea they had someone who was hiding anything. I did not think until Sammy asked later that they might spit in my face or smash my head with the butt of a gun or just lead me away from the others into the bushes with their rifles and bayonets and stab or shoot me to death. We were most of us kids, and I figured they might bully and sneer awhile and that I just might have to bust a few jaws before I taught them to stop. I never had any question I could do that. I was LR, Lewis Rabinowitz from Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York, and I never had doubts back then that I could not be beaten at anything and could succeed in doing whatever I wanted to.

  I always felt that way as a kid. I was big and broad from the start and had a strong voice, and I felt bigger and broader than I was. In public school I could see with my eyes that there were older kids who were bigger than I was, and maybe they were stronger too, but I never felt it. And I was never in dread of the kids in those few Italian families we had in the neighborhood, all those Bartolinis and Palumbos, that all of the others were almost afraid to talk about unless they were home. They carried knives, those guineas, it was rumored in whispers. I never saw any. I left them alone and they didn't bother me. Or anyone else for that matter, as far as I could tell. Except one time one of them did. A skinny older one in the eighth grade came slouching past and stepped on my foot deliberately as I sat on the sidewalk at the front of the line outside the schoolyard after lunch, waiting for the doors to open and the afternoon session to begin. He wore sneakers. We were not supposed to wear sneakers to school except for gym, but all those Bartolinis and Palumbos did whenever they wanted to. "Haaay," I said to myself when I saw it happen. I'd watched him coming. I'd seen him turn in toward me with a mean and innocent look. I did not see my arm shoot out to grab him by the ankle and squeeze there only hard enough to hold him in place when he tried to pull free and continue past me without even moving his eyes, like he had a right, like I wasn't even there. He was surprised, all right, when he saw I wouldn't let him. He tried to look tough. We were under thirteen.

  "Hey, what're you doing?" he said with a snarl.

  My look was tougher. "You dropped something," I said with a cold smile.

  "Yeah? What?"

  "Your footsteps."

  "Very funny. Let go of my leg."

  "And one of them fell on me." With my other hand I tapped at the place he had stepped on.

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah."

  He pulled harder. I squeezed harder.

  "If I did, I didn't mean it."

  "I thought you did mean it," I said to him. "If you swear to God and tell me again you didn't mean it, I think I might believe you."

  "You a tough guy? You think so?"

  "Yeah."

  Other kids watched, girls too. I felt good.

  "Well, I didn't mean it," he said, and stopped pulling.

  "Then I think I believe you."

  After that we were friends for a while.

  Sammy decided one day to teach me how to fight and to show me while doing it how much better he was at boxing.

  "You can't just do it on brawn, Lew."

  He had a book of instructions he had read and some boxing gloves he had borrowed. I had to keep smiling at him as we laced each other up. He showed me the stance, the lead, he taught me the jab, the hook, the "uppracut."

  "Okay, tiger, you showed me. Now what do we do?"

  "We'll go about three minutes, rest for one, and I'll show you what you did wrong, and then we'll go another round. Remember, keep moving. No hitting in the clinches, no wrestling there either. That's not allowed. Put your left hand up, higher, keep it up and stick it out more. Otherwise I'll come right in and bop you. That's good. Let's go."

  He struck a pose and danced in and out. I moved straight toward him and with my left hand pushed both his arms down easily. With my right I grabbed his face in my open glove and twisted it playfully from side to side.

  "That's a clinch," he yelled. "You're not allowed to hold a face. You have to punch or do nothing. Now we break and start again. Remember, you've got to try to hit me."

  He danced around faster this time, popped the side of my head with one of his jabs, and flew right back. I moved right at him again, shoved his arms down easily with one paw, and began patting him on the face lightly with my other paw. I couldn't help laughing as I looked at him. I was grinning, he was panting.

  "Let's do something else," he said miserably. "This just isn't working, is it?"

  I used to worry sometimes about little Sammy because he couldn't do much and liked to needle people. But he was smart and it turned out he only needled people he could tell would not get angry at him. Like me.

  "Hey, Lew, how's your girlfriend with the big tits?" he would say to me during the war when I had started dating Claire and had brought her around.

  "You're a clever fellow," I would tell him with a forced smile through gritted teeth. I have a nerve at one side at the back of my jaw and the side of my neck that I used to feel twitch when I was starting to boil. I would feel it in pinochle too when I had bid too high and needed every trick.

  "Hey, Lew, give my regards to your wife with the big tits," he used to say after Claire and I got married. Winkler started baiting me that way too, and I couldn't crush him if I didn't crush Sammy, and I couldn't crush Sammy. He would have been my best man, but my folks wanted m
y brothers, and in my family all of us did what the other ones wanted us to.

  They named me Lewis and called me Louie as though my name was Louis, and I never saw that difference until Sammy pointed it out. And even then, I still don't see much difference.

  Sammy read newspapers. He liked the colored people and said they should be allowed to vote in the South and be free to live wherever they wanted to. I didn't care where they lived as long as they didn't live near me. I never really liked anyone I didn't know personally. We liked Roosevelt awhile when he became President, but that was mainly because he wasn't Herbert Hoover or another one of those Republicans or one of those hayseed anti-Semites in the South or Midwest or that Father Coughlin in Detroit. But we didn't trust him and we didn't believe him. We didn't trust banks and we didn't trust bank records and we did as much of our business as we could in cash. Even before Adolf Hitler we did not like Germans. And among the Germans who did not stand a chance in our house were German Jews. And that was even after Hitler. I grew up hearing about them.

  "I never wished harm on anyone," my mother would repeat. I heard her say that over and over again, and it wasn't true. Her terrific curses fell everywhere, even on all of us. "But if ever a people deserved to be punished it was them. When we came through from Poland to Hamburg they could not make themselves look at us. We were dirt in their eyes. We made them ashamed with our valises and our clothes, and we couldn't talk German. They were all of them ashamed of us and made us know it. Some stole money from us when they could. When there was an empty seat on a train or a bench on the street somewhere they would put down a hat there to make believe somebody was using it so we could not sit down near them. For hours they would make us stand there, even with our children. The people with money all did that. And they even all made believe they could not speak Yiddish."

  When Sammy came up to the house for a visit with me not long ago he mentioned he thought that probably German Jews did not speak Yiddish. My mother would have pretended to be hard of hearing if she ever heard that one.

  When the war came in Europe we were all of us still a couple of years too young to be drafted right away. I switched from Spanish to German in high school--I began getting ready--and began driving guys like Sammy crazy with my achtungs, wie gehts, hallos, and neins and jawohls. When they yelled at me to cut it out I threw them a danke schon or two. I kept up the German even into the army. By the time I enlisted I knew enough German to bully the POWs I found at Fort Dix and Fort Sill and Fort Riley and Fort Benning. As a POW outside Dresden I could talk to the guards a little and sometimes interpret for the other Americans. Because I could speak German, I was sent into Dresden in charge of a work detail, even though I was a sergeant and didn't have to go.

  The junk business boomed while I was still a kid civilian. Sammy's mother saved old newspapers and donated aluminum pots and pans, my father sold them. There was a good living in waste, as the old man found out, and a few small fortunes for the dealers in scrap metal. We went racing for buildings slated for demolition. We followed fire engines. The big Coney Island fires were always a gold mine, for us a copper mine and lead mine, because of the pipes we salvaged. When Luna Park burned down soon after the war we had a bonanza of junk. They paid us to take it away and they paid us again when we sold it to scrap dealers. Everything hot was packed in asbestos and we took the asbestos and baled that too. We were pretty well off after that one and the old man had the ten thousand to lend me to buy the lumberyard, at stiff interest too, because he was always like that, and because he didn't like the idea. He didn't want me to leave the junk business and he didn't want us to move almost three hours away. Old schoolhouses and hospitals were especially good. We bought a second truck and hired neighborhood strongmen who could lift and who could scare other junkmen away. We even hired one big shvartza, a strong, quiet black man named Sonny who walked in one day and asked for work. We tore through plaster walls and asbestos insulation with metal claws and hammers to get at the copper and lead pipes with our baling hooks, crowbars, and hacksaws. My pop fired Smokey Rubin.

  I passed on the word. News came back from Smokey that he would be out looking for me and that he'd better not find me. At night after that I went to Happy's Luncheonette on Mermaid Avenue and sat down to wait for him. Sammy and Winkler looked weak when they came in and saw me. I thought they would faint.

  "What are you doing here?" Winkler said. "Get out, get out."

  "Don't you know Smokey is out hunting for you?" said Sammy. "He's got a few of his pals."

  "I'm making it easier for him to find me. I'll buy you some sodas and sandwiches if you want to wait here. Or you can sit where you want."

  "At least go get your brothers if you want to act crazy," said Sammy. "Should I run to your house?"

  "Have a malted instead."

  We did not wait long. Smokey spotted me as soon as he walked in--I sat facing the door--and came right up to the booth, backed up by a guy named Red Benny and a weird one known as Willie the Geep.

  "I've been looking for you. I've got things to say."

  "I'm listening." Our eyes were locked on each other's. "I came to hear them."

  "Then come on outside. I want to talk to you alone."

  I mulled that one over. They were thirty or over, and we were seventeen and a half. Smokey had been in the ring. He'd been to prison and was cut up badly at least once in a knife fight.

  "Okay, Smokey, if that's what you want," I decided. "But have your boys there sit down awhile if you want to talk to me alone outside, and if that's what you want to do."

  "You've been saying bad things about me, right? Don't bullshit. Your father too."

  "What bad things?"

  "That you fired me and I've been stealing. Your father didn't fire me. Let's get that thing straight. I quit. I wouldn't work for any of you anymore."

  "Smokey"--I felt that nerve on the side of my cheek and neck start to tick--"the old man wants me to be sure to tell you that if you ever set foot in the shop again he'll break your back."

  That made Smokey pause. He knew the old man. If the old man said it, Smokey knew that he meant it. My father was a short man with the biggest, thickest shoulders I ever saw and small blue eyes in a face that reminded people of a torpedo or artillery shell. With his freckles and hard lines and liver spots, he looked like an iron ingot, an anvil five and a half feet tall. He'd been a blacksmith. All of us have large heads with big square jaws. We look like Polacks and know we're Yids. In Poland with one blow of his fist to the forehead he'd killed a Cossack who'd raised his voice to my mother, and in Hamburg he came close to doing that again with some kind of immigration warden who'd made that same mistake of being rude to my mother but backed away in time. In my family no one ever got away free with insulting any of us, except, I guess, for Sammy Singer with me and my wife with the big tits.

  "How's your dad, Marvin?" Red Benny said to Winkler, while everyone in Happy's Luncheonette watched, and after that Smokey had another reason to be careful.

  Winkler drummed the fingers of one hand on the table and kept quiet.

  His father was a bookmaker and made more than just about anyone else in the neighborhood. They even had a piano in the house for a while. Red Benny was a runner, a collector, a loan shark, a debtor, and a burglar. One summer he and a gang cleaned out every room in a resort hotel except the one rented by Winkler's folks, making the people upstate start to wonder what Winkler's pop did for a living to let just him be spared.

  By then Smokey was already slowing down a little. "You and your father--you're telling people I stole a building from you, right? I didn't steal that house. I found the janitor and made the deal for it all by myself."

  "You found it while you were working for us," I told him. "You can work for us or you can go in business for yourself. You can't do both the same hour."

  "Now the dealers won't buy anything from me. Your father won't let them."

  "They can do what they want. But if they buy from you, they can'
t buy from him. That's all he said."

  "I don't like that. I want to talk to him. I want to talk to him now. I want to straighten him out too."

  "Smokey," I said, speaking slowly and feeling suddenly very, very sure of myself, "you ever raise a voice on even one word to my father, and I'll see that you die. You lift a finger to me, and he'll see that you die."

  He seemed impressed with that.

  "Okay," he gave in, with his face falling. "I'll go back to work for him. But you tell him I'll want sixty a week from now on."

  "You don't understand. He might not take you back for even fifty. I'll have to try to talk to him for you."

  "And he can have the house I found if he gives me five hundred."

  "He might give you the usual two."

  "When can I start?"

  "Give me tomorrow to try to bring him around." Actually, it did take some talking to remind the old man that Smokey worked hard and that he and our black guy were pretty good together at chasing other junkmen off.

  "Loan me fifty now, Louie, will you?" Smokey begged as a favor. "There's some good smoking stuff from Harlem outside that I want to invest in."

  "I can only lend you twenty." I could have given him more. "That's funny," I said when they'd gone out the door. I was flexing my fingers. "Something's wrong with my hand. When I gave him that twenty I could hardly bend it."

  "You were holding the sugar bowl," Winkler said. His teeth were shivering.

  "What sugar bowl?"

  "Didn't you know?" Sammy snapped at me almost angrily. "You were gripping that sugar bowl like you were going to kill him with it. I thought you would squeeze it to pieces."

  I leaned back with a laugh and ordered some pie and ice cream for the three of us. No, I hadn't known I was gripping that cylindrical thick sugar shaker while we were talking. My head was cool and collected while I looked him straight in the eye, and my arm was ready for action without my even knowing it. Sammy let out some air and turned white as he lifted his hand from his lap and put back down the table knife he had been holding.