At that point Davis returned.
“I’ll tell you what,” Beth said. “If I decide to put in a service department I’ll give you a call and you can drop around and we’ll talk about it. I want to see how good you are at a bench.”
He shook hands with Roger, and then he and Davis arose and departed, leaving Roger alone in the booth with the empty glasses and ashtray full of cigarette butts and twisted-up paper. The three of them had been drinking mixed drinks, but before him were bottles of Golden Glow beer. And, he realized, he alone did not have on a tie and business suit. He had left the apartment in his workclothes, his trousers and canvas shirt and coat.
Finishing his beer he left the bar-and-grill and miserably took a bus home.
Virginia had already been laid off from her job, and a month or so later he received his dismissal notice. They drew California State Unemployment checks, reported each week to tell about their efforts to find work, and began to spend some of the money they had saved. In early December of 1945 John Beth called him on the phone.
“Hey I want you to drop down to the Appliance Center,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you.”
Putting on a suit and tie Roger went downtown on the bus. A gang of workmen had begun remodeling the basement of Beth’s Appliance Center. Long service benches were going in.
“My repair department,” Beth said. “Look, you want to go to work for me? Makro says you know your stuff.”
Makro had worked with him at the warplant. Now Makro had got a job as parts buyer for a big supply house.
“I want to buy in,” Roger said.
“You can’t. It’s my store.” They sat upstairs in Beth’s office, above the display floor.
Roger said, “It was my idea to put in the repair department.”
“I don’t know. We were all chewing the fat about it, as I recall. Well what do you say? Take it or leave it.”
The situation dazed him. All he could think to say was, “I have around a thousand dollars to put in; I can buy the fixtures and stuff.” He could not look at Beth; he felt as if his eyes and mouth had been stuffed full of cloth. He sat rubbing his upper lip.
“Well I got work to do,” Beth said, when he did not say anything.
Getting up, he left the office and walked downstairs and outside onto the sidewalk.
He spent the afternoon wandering around downtown, inspecting store windows, wondering what to do. Finally he entered a radio repair shop and asked the owner if he needed a repairman. The owner said no, and he left. When he saw another shop he asked there, too. The answer was again no. He asked at two more places and then gave up. By bus he started home. The bus was crowded with women shoppers and their parcels.
What an awful deal, he thought. How could it have happened?
Perhaps, all in all, he had gone in the wrong direction. He thought of Teddy, his first wife, and their child, who had been put in a school somewhere in the East two years ago, and he had not seen either of them since. She had remarried. Well, he had got to California; he had got his wish. But things did not have the shape he wanted. The ordeal of the war work, sleepless at night, long bus rides every day, the cramped apartment. Shit, and what was it for?
Several blocks from the apartment he got off the bus and walked inside a barbershop. All the chairs were busy, and men sat everywhere, reading magazines and smoking. So he gave up and left; he crossed the street to a bar, where he ordered a bottle of beer.
But as he drank his beer he longed for the feel of the barber chair, the hair lotions and the hot wet towel, the comfort. From where he sat he could see the barbershop; he watched until fewer men were waiting, and then he recrossed the street.
“Give me a shave,” he ordered the barber, when his turn came. “And a haircut both: I want both of them.” Only once in a year did he get a shave from a professional barber; to him it was a luxury like nothing else. He lay back and shut his eyes.
Later on the barber had to rouse him. “What do you want on your hair? Just water?”
“No,” he said. “Some of that oil that smells so good.”
The barber let him sniff several of the bottles until he found the one he liked.
“You going out to a party or something?” the barber asked, rubbing the oil into his hair with the palms of his hands. “You sure are going to smell good: I guess that’s what attracts the ladies.”
He paid the barber and left the shop in a much better mood. His cheeks and chin had not been so smooth in years. That was the best shave I ever had, he thought as he walked along the sidewalk. The buses had let off workmen everywhere and he had to thread a path among them. They hurried to get home, saying nothing. Their faces, grained and stubbled, passed and passed until he stepped into a bar where he had gone a number of times before. For almost an hour he sat hunched over on his stool, drinking beer and meditating.
The bartender lounged by him, once, and said, “Did you ever see a horse that could run backwards?”
“No,” he said.
“I’ll bet there isn’t no such thing. But a person can run backwards.”
Another man, a worker in a black leather jacket and steel helmet, said, “He could run backwards if he tried.”
“Hell he could,” the bartender said. “He couldn’t see where he was going.”
When he had finished his beer Roger stepped from the stool, said goodnight, and walked slowly outside.
The street had darkened. The lights bothered him and he shut his eyes; putting his glasses in his coat pocket, he stood for a moment rubbing his eyes. Where else? he wondered. He had done that at another time. He thought about Teddy again, and Irv Rattenfanger, and the tune “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön” which had been popular when he and Teddy were going together. They had danced the “Dipsy Doodle” at a roadside tavern in Maryland, one night…in those days he had been a darn good dancer. Strange that Virginia, who used to be a dancer, didn’t like to dance. They had gone dancing only once. Her coordination, he thought, as he walked out onto the sidewalk; no good. No sense of rhythm. Why? It did not make sense.
Ahead of him a big Negro stopped to talk to another Negro. Roger, walking with his head down, stumbled against the big Negro, who did not budge.
“Watch where you’re going,” the Negro said.
Roger said, “Look out for me.”
“Watch yourself,” the Negro said, as big as a barge.
“You watch it,” Roger said. “You coal-black jig.” But it was not soft enough; the Negro heard him and as Roger started past, the Negro raised his fist and hit him a blow in the ear. Roger spun and fell; bounding to his feet he jumped forward and hit the Negro with all his might. As he did the Negro hit him again, this time in the mouth, and teeth flew in all directions. He slid to his hands and knees. Then the Negro and his companion started quickly off. Other men appeared, white men, and two of them helped Roger up.
“What’d that jig do?” they yelled, attracting more white men. “Did he slash you, buddy?” They felt from head to foot, searching for blood as he swayed between them, his fingers covering his broken front teeth.
“A nigger jumped this guy,” one of the men told the crowd forming around them. “Beat him up and got out.”
One of the men offered to drive him home. They put him into the car, cursed all Negroes, wished him luck, and gave him his glasses, which had fallen from his pocket.
“There’s more of them moving into L.A. every day,” the man who was driving him said.
He rested his head on his arm, suffering the pain.
“Of course they’re most of them up from the South,” the man said. “They’re mostly farm hands; they don’t know how to conduct themselves in a city. I mean, they’ve got money for the first time in their lives, and it goes to their heads. They’re having themselves a hell of a good time. I’d rather have them than the Pachucs, though, I’ll tell you. If those Pachucs get you they’ll hold you down and stomp on you; they got those cleated boots.”
Sp
eaking as best he could Roger said, “The god damn niggers.”
“Well, it could have been anybody,” the man said, as he drew the car up to the curb in front of the apartment building. “Is this the right place?”
“Yes,” he said. He held his handkerchief to his mouth. His ear rang and he could not hear well; sounds hummed and then shrank away. “Thanks,” he said, as he got from the car.
“It could happen to anybody,” the man said. He stayed parked at the curb until Roger had reached the steps of the building, and then he drove off.
When Virginia saw him she leaped up, horrified. “What happened?” She ran to him and pulled his hands away from his mouth. “Oh my God,” she said. “What was it? What happened?”
“A guy beat me up,” he said. “I never saw him before in my life.”
“I’m going to call the police,” she said. “I’m going down to the phone.” She started out into the hall.
“The hell with that!” he said desperately. Sinking down on the couch he said, “Get some ice cubes.”
She brought him the ice cubes and he made a compress out of them. Lying on his back he held them against his upper jaw. Virginia wiped away the trickle of ice water.
“I got to go to the dentist,” he said.
“Do you want me to call around now?”
“No,” he said. “Tomorrow.”
That night he did not go to bed; he spent the night on the couch, lying on his back. Several Anacin tablets helped the pain but he did not seem to be able to fall asleep.
What’ll I do? he asked himself.
He thought of other places that he had liked better. Actually, he realized, he had not got any happiness out of being here, not even in the beginning. Washington D.C. had been much better, he decided. In spite of the weather. He liked the buildings there. And he did not mind the snow.
In Arkansas as a child he had slogged through the snow, and he remembered the spindly trees without leaves that stuck up along the hillsides, thickets of them, and all of them weak, frail, and yet they covered the uncleared ground everywhere. Probably they were still there. He thought of the time he had put an old earthenware vase up on a stump and pitched rocks at it until it shattered, and in the potsherds was a coin, stuck there when the clay was wet. When he cleaned the coin off he found that it was a twenty-cent piece. In all his life—he was eleven—he had never seen or heard of a twenty-cent piece before, and he carried it around with him for almost two years, believing that he had the only one in the world. And then, one day, he tried to spend it, and the salesclerk refused to accept it; she said it was a fake, that there was no such coin. So he threw it away.
Now, lying on his back with the compress against his mouth, he tried to remember what he had wanted to buy with the twenty-cent piece. Candy, he decided. Well, it would be gone now, in any case. The coin or the candy.
The next morning his mouth had become too swollen for him to eat. He tried sipping some coffee, but the pain stopped that. Yet he remained at the kitchen table, staring down at his cup and plate.
“You have to go to the dentist,” Virginia said. “You can’t eat, and you can hardly talk—let me go call.”
“No,” he said.
“But what are you going to do?”
He sat wretchedly in the living room most of the morning, doing nothing in particular, not speaking to Virginia or even thinking about anything. The pain from the broken front teeth became worse, and finally in the early afternoon he let her go downstairs to the public phone. She did not come back for a long time. At last she appeared and said, “I finally got one who can see you today. His names Doctor Corning.” She had the address and he read it; the office was on the other side of town.
Taking the slip of paper he put on his coat.
“I’m going with you,” she said.
“No.” He shook his head.
“I am.”
“No!” Pushing past her he walked outside into the hall and to the stairs. But she followed.
“You might faint,” she said. “I want to go with you; why don’t you want me with you?”
“Go to hell,” he said furiously. “Go on back inside.” He descended, and when he reached the sidewalk he saw that she had given up. So he walked on to the bus stop by himself.
The trip took over an hour. In the dentist’s waiting room he tried to smoke, but he could not hold the cigarette between his lips, so he had to put it out. The dentist made him wait fifteen minutes. Three small children sat opposite him with their feet sticking out straight; all three stared at him, giggling, until their mother told them to hush.
The dentist admitted him at last and gave him a shot of Novocain. “I can save one,” he said. “I can give you a cap for it. But the other two are right down at the gum.” He began to remove the broken pieces of the teeth. “Your wife said on the phone somebody hit you.”
He nodded.
“It’ll take a couple of days to have the cap made. Anyhow, you should stop feeling the pain now that I’ve got the remains of the others out. I think you’ll be able to eat soft foods, as long as you don’t try to bite.” With his mirror he inspected the other teeth. “How long has it been since you’ve seen a dentist?”
“A long time,” Roger said. He had not been to a dentist since before the war.
“You have major work to be done. Most of your molars are decayed. You should have x-rays taken. You really shouldn’t let your teeth go. Aren’t they sensitive to sweets?”
He grunted.
“The cap and the other work I have to do will run you sixty dollars,” Doctor Corning said. “Can you pay me that now? With patients I don’t know I like to have it in advance.”
He paid him with a check.
“On the restoration,” Doctor Corning said, “I’d say you have between two and three hundred dollars worth of work needed. And the longer you wait the more it’ll cost.”
He made an appointment for the cap, and then he went downstairs to the street. The Novocain had made his face hard and misshapen and he continually raised his hand to touch himself. The amount of money that he had paid out put him into a frenzy. He realized—he knew—that he had been robbed, taken advantage of. But he was helpless.
God damn, he said to himself.
He had a vision of crooks, swindles of every kind; he saw up into the office buildings and the crooked activity going on, the wheels, the machinery. Loan offices, banks, doctors and dentists, quack healers preying on old women, Pachucs smashing store windows, defective equipment, food with filth and impurities in it, shoes made of cardboard, hats that melted in the rain, clothes that shrank and ripped, cars with broken motor blocks, toilet seats running with disease germs, dogs carrying mange and rabies throughout the city, restaurants serving rotted food, real estate under water, phony stock in nonexistent mining companies, magazines with obscene pictures, animals slaughtered in cold blood, milk contaminated with dead flies, bugs and vermin and excretion, rubbish and garbage, a rain of filth on the streets, on the buildings and houses and stores. The electric machines of the chiropractors crackled, the old ladies screamed, the patent medicine bottles boiled and exploded…he saw the war itself as a stupendous snow-job, men killed for fat bankers to float loans, ships built that went right to the bottom, bonds that could not be redeemed, Communism taking over, Red Cross blood that had syphilis germs in it. Negro and white troops living together, nurses that were whores, generals who screwed their orderlies, profits and black-market butter, training camps in which recruits died by the thousands of bubonic plague, illness and suffering and money mixed together, sugar and rubber, meat and blood, ration stamps, V-D posters, short-arm inspections, M-1 rifles, USO entertainers with corks up their asses, motherfuckers and fairies and niggers raping white girls…he saw the sky flash and drip; private parts shot across the heavens, words croaked in his ears telling him about his mothers monthlies; he saw the whole world writhe with hair, a monstrous hairy ball that burst and drenched him with blood…
> “Shit,” he said, walking along the sidewalk, his hands shoved down into his pockets.
Gradually he got control of himself.
“Jesus Christ,” he said in a weak voice. His hands shook and he felt cold. Perspiration gathered in his armpits and as he walked his legs wobbled beneath him. At a drinking fountain he stooped and took a mouthful of water; he spat it into the gutter and then wiped his chin with his handkerchief.
Things weren’t as bad as that, he thought. They still had seven or eight hundred dollars in the bank, more than he had ever had in his life.
But he was still frightened. He did not know what to do. So he continued walking, among the grocery stores and used car lots and drugstores and bakeries and shoe repair shops and dry cleaners and movie theaters, gazing into the windows and trying to think what was the best thing for himself and his wife.
In front of a used car lot a salesman stood picking his teeth and watching people go by. As Roger passed him he said, “What kind of car did you want, buddy?”
Stopping, he said, “How did you know I wanted a car?”
The salesman shrugged.
“What do you have?” he asked him.
“Lots of clean cars, buddy,” the salesman said. “Come on in and look around. I’ll give you a good deal, the best deal in town.”
His hands in his pockets, he wandered onto the lot.
When Virginia heard him coming up the stairs she ran to open the door. He no longer seemed miserable and discouraged; he smiled at her in his old manner, the secret, meaningful smile, as if there was something he knew that she did not.
“What did he do?” she asked. The swelling had gone down; he seemed able to move his mouth. “Why were you gone so long?”
Roger said, “Come on downstairs.”
“Why?” She hesitated, not trusting him.
“I want to show you something.” Turning, he started back. “I bought a car.”
At the curb a blue pre-war sedan was parked.
“A ’39 Chevy,” Roger said.
“Why?” she said.
On his face the cunning, the sense of having done an act of importance and daring, flooded out. He rocked back and forth, glancing at her and then at the car; finally he said “Guess why. Go on. I’ll bet you can’t guess.”
Puttering About in a Small Land Page 11