The Big Hunger

by John Fante

  “Fine house,” he said. “One of the best in town. Good and solid. Very fine basement. Buy it.”

  My wife held back. In childhood she had known the tragic family that once lived in the house. Their name was, significantly, Coffin, and she could not forget that two of them had died at 1515 Harmony Lane. Mrs. Coffin had succumbed to a heart attack in the front bedroom, while her son Edward had died of polio in the back bedroom. These depressing events of fifteen years ago had no effect on me. I was surprised that my wife should encourage such melancholy associations.

  “You, of all people,” I said.

  “Are you sure you’ll be happy here?”

  “All my life I’ve searched for this place,” I told her. “It’s as though I’ve been here before, in a dream.”

  This was not exactly the truth, but the thought of one more real estate agent put murder in my heart. We went down to the bank and signed the papers. The house was ours. We spent a sickening amount on furniture and moved in.

  At the rear of the house was a sun porch which looked out on a few eucalyptus trees and a back fence glutted with variegated ivy. The porch was to be my workroom. My wife hung some curtains, a couple of Van Gogh prints, and the usual props a writer has to stare at. But it was a fine workroom. There was sun and space and fresh air. Here, I thought, is peace: here the words shall come, the pages mount. And I began to believe what I had said in the first place: that I had seen this house in my dreams.

  The words did not come, nor the ideas. But the painters came, and the carpenters, for my wife wanted to change the house inside and out, to obliterate every trace of its past.

  The house was built in the early twenties. The living room walls were panels of fine walnut covered with a thin coat of varnish to accentuate the grain. They seemed to give the room age and warmth, but my wife insisted they made the room dark and gloomy. She had the woodwork painted white, and the rest of the wall covered with a green fern-patterned wallpaper. The change brought brightness to the room, but now it looked like the Hollywood apartment we had just left. There was a big potbellied stove in the room which made me look forward to cold nights and a roaring fire. After the white paint and green ferns, the poor stove was hustled away and a floor furnace installed. This involved a lot of ripping and pounding and money. It made heavy invasions of my serenity. I did no writing in my workroom. Seated at the desk, I listened to the noise and figured costs.

  Meanwhile the painters climbed the house from the outside, scraping and patching in preparation for two coats of battleship grey. Mr. Smitters, the paint contractor, stood on a ladder and kept looking at me as I tried to work. He had big white teeth and was unpleasantly good-humored, with the usual inanities about the soft life of a writer. I thought of going outside and staring at him as he did at me, and making unkind remarks about his profession. All of these interruptions nibbled at the clock, and one sterile day followed another. We had been in the house for a month, and I had nothing on paper except some figures proving we would starve to death that winter.

  Then the Old Man arrived in his truck, with four fifty-gallon barrels of red wine. He backed the truck down the driveway to the outside entrance of the basement. For two days he hammered and sawed and sang directly beneath me. He constructed racks for his barrels and he repaired some broken furniture stored in the basement. The lighting arrangement didn’t suit him, and for eight hours one day he disconnected the main switch and strung mysterious wires into the basement from the garage. But he knew nothing about electricity, he was only guessing, and his efforts ended in a confusion of wires and complete darkness at the end of the day. We had to call an electrician to untangle the mess.

  When the Old Man arrived with his barrels, we assumed he only wanted to store the wine in that cool place, to let it age in a quiet, healthy atmosphere. But we underestimated the Old Man’s resourcefulness. The wine had come from the vines of a paesano outside of town. He had bought it for twenty cents a gallon, hauling it seven perilous miles in his bumpy truck. The ride had angered the wine, clouding its redness. The old Man sat beside the barrels like a doctor at a deathbed, smoking a cigar and frowning. Occasionally he poured a small amount into a glass and held it up to the light. He tiptoed around and spoke in whispers. After a breathless, nerve-wracking week in which all of us participated, the Old Man announced that the potion was saved, that it was bright claret and not vinegar.

  Having saved the patient’s life, he now proceeded to drink it. He came with his paesanos from the local wine shops, he brought bricklayers and carpenters and hod carriers. The basement was transformed into a saloon. It was acceptable the first time, even plausible. Here were lovers of the grape who were normally served at bars for a dime a glass. And here was my Old Man, bread and wine his soul and sinew, the prince of hosts. He passed out thick tumblers and told his guests to help themselves. They came in mortar-begrimed trucks, and the less opulent simply walked the ten blocks from town. The uproar in the basement was like the fury of dogs in a kennel.

  It had to stop somewhere, but it was not easy to challenge the Old Man. For too many years he had preached the Fourth Commandment. Indeed, that children should honor their mothers and fathers, particularly their fathers, was the very core of his philosophy. But I had to speak out,

  “It’s got to stop,” I told him.

  This was after the paesanos had departed and he sat happily in the ruins, great splotches of wine on the floor, pieces of glass, and cigar butts.

  “What’s the matter, son?”

  “No more parties. They mustn’t come anymore.”

  “You’re talking about my friends,” he said. “Your father’s friends.”

  “They make too much noise. I can’t work.”

  “Work?” He giggled. “You call that stuff work, the stuff you write?”

  A familiar attack. I refused to be diverted.

  “No more parties, Papa.”

  “Son,” he said. “You’re talking to your father. And your father, he don’t like it. Your father’s an old man, son. He’s seventy years old. Watch your language.”

  My wife had less patience.

  “You’re being very unreasonable,” she told him. “I f those men come again, you’ll have to take your wine out of here.”

  The Old Man rocked in his chair.

  “What she said, son. What she said!”

  He got to his feet with heavy dignity, his eyes flooded with wine, and floated toward the door. Pausing, he patted my shoulder.

  “God help you, son. You’re gonna need it.”

  He never came back to that house again, but he did not forget the wine. Once a week he sent my brother with jugs to keep a supply on hand.

  The upstairs bedrooms were in very good shape, clean and roomy, despite a musty odor. For the first time in five years of marriage each of us now had his own bedroom. It saddened my wife, but I welcomed the change, feeling that it could do nought but add zest to the marriage bed.

  The bedrooms were beneath a gable, the ceilings rising to the peak of the roof. In each bedroom was a small trap door opening to a cramped dark attic. Here we found a few relics of the Coffin occupation—a couple of bedpans, a carton of tattered curtains, some dusty blankets, some old light fixtures. My wife insisted that these be taken out and destroyed. I dragged the stuff out and dropped it through the window to the lawn.

  Now she requested that the trap doors be nailed shut. This seemed foolhardy, since electricians would have to pry them open in case anything went wrong with the wiring. But the doors were battened down, the painters hauled away their splattered planks and ladders, the Old Man swore he would never darken our door again, and at last the house was quiet and truly our home.

  Mine was the back bedroom. My wife informed me that Edward Coffin had died there. I was not impressed. But one day among my wife’s books I found Edward’s picture in the Roseville High School annual and learned that he had been president of the Senior Class, captain of the basketball team, and chairman of t
he senior prom. My wife sighed and supplied additional information. She had dated Edward quite often the Spring before he died. She had kissed him a couple of times, too. This, I thought, was extremely significant, even though I realized it had no significance whatever.

  At first my wife slept wretchedly through spooky nights filled with dreams of horror. Hers was the bedroom in which poor Mrs. Coffin had expired. The clothes closet and built-in shelves were always turning up some small memento of that sad time: a strand of grey hair, a fragment of thread, a button, a hairpin. My wife stared at these trifles with awful premonitions.

  But the house really expressed itself at night, contracting after the great heat of the Sacramento Valley sunlight. It creaked and gasped. It sighed and whimpered. Two or three times a week I woke to find my wife beside me, her eyes streaked from shattered sleep. She insisted that she had heard footsteps all over the place, people walking up and down the stairs, voices in the kitchen, someone crawling in the attic, the rhythmic squeak of a rocking chair. But I had heard nothing and slept well.

  “Imagination,” I said. “Pure fancy.”

  Nevertheless I bought a gun. I bought it quite suddenly one afternoon in Sacramento, seeing it in the window of a second-hand store. It was a Smith & Wesson .38 caliber Police Special.

  Propped against a box of cartridges, its blue steel leering with evil beauty, the weapon beckoned with frightful blandishments. Excepting an air-rifle, I had never owned a gun, and now I wanted this one. And why not? I owned a house. A man should have a gun to protect his property. I brought it home with a box of cartridges, a can of oil, and a gun-brush, the storekeeper having instructed me on how to clean it.

  The gun terrified my wife. She covered her eyes with one hand and motioned me out of the house.

  “Get it out. Take it away.”

  “But it’s not loaded.”

  I broke it open, spun the chamber, and pulled the trigger a few times.

  “I don’t care. No guns in this house.”

  We reached a compromise. I could keep the gun in the house if I separated it from the cartridges. She found a remote and futile place for the cartridges on the back porch, in the broom closet, at the bottom of a laundry bag full of discarded silk stockings. I took the gun up to my room and immediately proceeded to clean and oil it.

  The revolver filled me with craven fascination. I wanted to take it up into the Sierra foothills and fire it, but my wife resisted so fiercely that I gave up the idea. Instead, I found amusement in other ways. I practiced drawing the gun quickly. I learned to spin it around my trigger finger. I stood before the mirror and practiced dueling. I gave up the old habit of reading before sleep and cleaned the gun instead. Every night I sat propped up in bed with my gun brush, a small can of oil, and a cloth. The gun shone like a black jewel.

  Gradually my wife’s restlessness disappeared. In the morning she was refreshed from sleep and eager for the new day. She no longer feared the gun. She even picked it up and pulled the trigger.

  With writers, sleep and prose are brothers. If the stuff comes, if it moves across the page, the nights are serene. If there are no words, there is no sleep. It was one of those times. I couldn’t sleep.

  It was also the time of Roseville’s strangest bandit. Every day the Tribune had a fresh report of his crimes. Housewives were furious. The baffled police added an extra car to the night patrol, but the thief struck again and again. He was a panty thief. His plunder never varied. He showed no interest in shirts, dresses or overalls. Every night, now on the Northside, now on the South, the thief stripped some clothesline of a pair of ladies’ panties. In despair the police asked the women of the town to bring in their washing at night. But there was always someone who forgot, and it was into her yard that the scoundrel crept, snatched a pair of panties off the line, and vanished into the night.

  In my sleeplessness I mused about this exotic bandit. Polishing my gun, I pondered his curious depredations and contrived to find ways of capturing him. All at once I arrived upon a scheme.

  I put on a robe and tiptoed into the room where my wife slept. Opening her dresser, I removed three pairs of her silk panties. Without a sound I went downstairs and through the house to the backyard. Our clothesline ran parallel with the back fence along the alley. There in the moonlight I hung the panties, one black, one white, one pink. A soft breeze lifted them to irresistible proportions. Now I hurried back to my room, turned off the lights, and sat at my window awaiting developments. I was there ten minutes before I realized my scheme was mad and worthless. In the first place my gun was not loaded, nor had I any desire to shoot the famous thief. In the second place, should he arrive on the scene, he would simply snatch the panties and be off, for I certainly had no intention of rushing out and grappling with him.

  Alert as a wound, I smoked cigarettes and listened to the night noises. It was late summer and warm. Beyond my window an elm spread itself, luminous in the moonlight. Already the leaves were falling. We lived on a quiet tree-lined street. Approaching footsteps were audible two blocks away, and that was a rare sound, for everyone in the district went to town by car.

  But now I heard footsteps. They were very near, in our yard, swishing through the dead leaves. The steps began in the front yard and moved around to the side of the house. I unhooked the screen and looked out the window. All was clear and bright, no movement, no sound. I locked the screen and sat back. Once more I heard the footsteps. This time I snapped on the light, opened the screen and called out, “Who’s there?” No answer. I snapped off the light.

  Instantly the leaves rustled, the steps moving around the house to the side door. Now I was certain of it: someone was in our yard, a tramp, a prowler, a thief. A man’s home was about to be invaded. The situation called for action. I picked up my gun. In the yard the invader’s feet plowed through the leaves defiantly.

  Alarmed and angry I stood with the gun in my hand, the bullets buried in a sack of silk stockings downstairs on the back porch. I cursed my wife and tiptoed down the staircase. I needed ammunition. The moon lit up the living room, and I crouched low at the foot of the stairs, for the curtains were apart and I could be seen from the outside.

  Sprawled flat on my stomach, I crawled through the dining room to the kitchen. My heart banged against the floor, the gun in my hand was sticky with perspiration, and I felt hot and suffocating in the flannel robe. The hiss of leaves told me the intruder was at the side door between the kitchen and the dining room. This was no panty thief, this was a burglar.

  An inch at a time, I dragged myself across the linoleum in the kitchen. By now I had reached the door to the back porch. Raising my arm, I turned the lock. There was a sharp click. Instantly the noise outside stopped. Sweat poured from me. I lay prostrate, panting and waiting. Another weary twenty feet lay between me and the broom closet. Again there was activity at the side door, and I thought I heard the knob turn. I kept going, dragging myself along the floor of the back porch to the broom closet. With both hands I reached up and tore the stocking sack from a hook.

  Feverish with excitement, I clawed through the stockings, cursing my wife and all women, my fingers snagging the silk as they searched for the elusive box of cartridges. At last I found it and loaded the gun. Now I was unafraid. With six bullets in the .38 I got to my feet and walked boldly through the kitchen to the side door. For hair-trigger action I cocked the gun. The situation was well in hand. I was aware of the consequences. I knew no jury would convict me.

  I flung open the door.

  “Stay where you are,” I said.

  He didn’t. It was Heinrich, the long brown Dachshund belonging to the Richardsons, our next-door neighbors. Heinrich yelped and skittered through the leaves and under the hedge.

  I sat on the doorstep. I was utterly exhausted, my whole body bathed in sweat, my face and robe smeared with dust and lint picked up on the long crawl across the floor. Tangled silk stockings draped my arms and ankles. It had been a terrifying night, and the less my wi
fe knew of it the better. I unloaded the gun, replaced the cartridges in the stocking bag, mopped up the sweaty streak across the linoleum, put everything in order, and took a shower.

  Then I remembered the panties out on the clothesline. They had to be returned. Disgusted with myself, I went downstairs once more and into the backyard. It was two o’clock. As I gathered the panties, I heard a voice behind me, and the voice said;

  “For lord’s sake.”

  It was Richardson. He was a railroad engineer. He went to work at insane hours, and he was on his way to work now, opening the doors to his garage.

  I said, “Hi, neighbor.”

  But there was a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach as I walked back to the house, for I knew Richardson stood in his driveway looking at me and thinking of the zany wanted by the police.

  For a week I avoided Richardson. He was a fiend for gardening, spending every possible moment in his yard. Whenever the urge for exercise seized me I went to the window, and there was Richardson in his garden, clipping roses or hauling manure. The confinement left me jittery and fogged from excessive cigarette smoking.

  One thing was certain: Richardson had not told his wife. Had he done so, it would have come back to me through the grapevine. For Mrs. Richardson and my wife spent most of their waking hours chinning over the hedge. Why had Richardson not told his wife? His silence was ominous. Had he reported me to the police? Had he told any of his fellow engineers at the roundhouse? Richardson had always regarded me with cautious reserve. Now I recalled an election discussion between us. Richardson had said he didn’t hold with any Communist ideas. Had he reported the panty episode to the FBI? Anything was possible in a world coming apart at the seams.