Appointment in Samarra

by John O'Hara

  “Check and double check,” said Helene. They ignored Al completely and went to the dance floor. “Is that your wife?” said Helene.

  “Which one do you mean?” said Julian.

  “Oh, I know Kitty Hofman,” said Helene.

  “Well, my wife is the other girl, yes,” said Julian. “You’re a swell dancer, or have I said that before?”

  “No, you didn’t say it before. You’re not so bad yourself, Mr. English.”

  “Oh, call me Malcolm.”

  “Is that your name? Malcolm? I thought he—oh, you’re giving me the razz. Okay.”

  “No, I’m sorry. My name is Julian. Call me Julian.”

  They said no more until the music stopped, and as they stood there, Julian applauding and Helene standing with her hands folded in front of her, he suddenly said: “Are you in love with any person?”

  “Isn’t that a personal question?” she said.

  “Of course it is. Are you?”

  “What makes you ask that all of a sudden?” she said.

  “I wanted to know. I—” the music continued. “I wanted to ask you to go out with me. Will you?”

  “When do you mean? Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s awful cold out,” she said.

  “But you will?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I have a room here.”

  “No, I want to go outside. Out in the car.”

  “Well, maybe that’d be better. We can’t stay long. I have to sing again in about a half an hour. Oh, I better not go. Your wife will see us, and so will Al.”

  “Will you go?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  They glided to the edge of the floor and broke into a walk and disappeared. Three persons, over and above all the others in the big room, saw them go. Three persons: Caroline, Al Grecco, Foxie Lebrix.

  In a little while Julian fell asleep in the car, and Helene went back to the house by herself. It was long after three when Julian felt himself being shaken and came slowly half awake. “Wha’?” he said.

  “Don’t wake him up,” someone said.

  “We have to wake him up to put his coat on. Come on, Ju. Snap to.” It was Whit Hofman. “Come on.”

  “Here, let me,” said Kitty Hofman. She started to get in the car.

  “Get away,” said her husband. “Come on, Ju. Carter, get in the other side. Here, take his coat. I’ll hold him up and you put his coat around him and the two of us can put his arms in the sleeves.”

  “I know,” said Kitty. “Let’s put snow on his face.”

  “Oh, drop dead,” said Whit.

  “The snow might be a good idea,” said Caroline.

  “Who sai’ pu’ snow my face?” said Julian.

  “Are you awake, Ju?” said Whit.

  “Sure I’m ’wake,” said Julian.

  “Well, then, put your coat on,” said Whit. “Here. Hold the other arm, Carter.”

  “I dowanna put my coat on. Why do I have pu’ my coa’ on? Hu? Who do I?”

  “Because we’re going home,” said Whit.

  “Go on, darling, put your coat on,” said Kitty.

  “Oh, hello, Kitty,” said Julian. “How about a dance, Kitty?”

  “No, we’re leaving,” said Kitty.

  “Oh, get out of the way, Kitty, for Christ sake,” said Whit.

  “I think I’ll go to sleep,” said Julian.

  “Come on, Julian. Snap out of it,” said Caroline. “Everybody wants to go home and it’s freezing out here. Put your coat on.”

  Without another word Julian put his coat on, scorning all assistance. “Where’s my hat?” he said.

  “We can’t find it,” said Whit. “The hat check girl said she must have given it to someone else by mistake. Lebrix said he’d buy you a new one.”

  “Turn your collar up,” said Caroline.

  Julian turned up the deep collar of the coat, which was a husky garment of raccoon skins. He slumped back in a corner of the car and pretended to go to sleep. Carter sat in the other corner and Kitty Hofman sat in the middle of the back seat. Caroline sat up front with Whit, who was driving Julian’s car. The whooping of the wind and the biting crunch of the tire chains in the snow and the music of the motor were the only sounds that reached the five persons in the car. The married four understood that; that there was nothing to be said now.

  Julian, lost in the coonskins, felt the tremendous excitement, the great thrilling lump in the chest and abdomen that comes before the administering of an unknown, well-deserved punishment. He knew he was in for it.

  7

  When he was a boy, Julian English once ran away from home. In a town the size of Gibbsville—24,032, estimated 1930 census—the children of the rich live within two or three squares of the children of parents who are not rich, not even by Gibbsville standards. This makes for a spurious democracy, especially among boys, which may or may not be better than no democracy at all. In any case, in order to get a ball game going the sons of the Gibbsville rich had to play with the sons of the non-rich. There were not even nine, let alone eighteen, boys of Julian’s age among the rich, and so the rich boys could not even have their own team. Consequently, from the time he was out of kindergarten until he was ready to go away to prep school, Julian’s friends were not all from Lantenengo Street. Carter Davis would stop for him, or he would stop for Carter, when they were going to play baseball or football. They would go down the hill to Christiana Street, the next street, and join the gang. The gang’s members had for fathers a butcher, a motorman, a “practical” surveyor (that is, a surveyor who had not gone to college), a freight clerk, two book-keepers for the coal company, a Baptist minister, a neighborhood saloonkeeper, a mechanic in a garage (which he called a garridge), and a perennial convict (who was up this time for stealing 100,000 cigarettes from the Gibbsville Tobacco Company).

  These boys had enough to eat. They did not have to sell papers, although the minister’s son sold subscriptions to The Saturday Evening Post and was always talking about blue vouchers or green vouchers and the Ranger bike he was going to get when he had enough vouchers. He was not available on certain days of the week, when he had to go to meetings of the other Post salesmen. He was an industrious boy, and his nasal Indiana twang and the fact that he was a stranger (he had come to Gibbsville when he was five) and was bright in school all helped to make him unpopular in the gang. You could always tell his voice from the others: it was high, and his enunciation was not sing-songy like the other boys’, which showed strong Pennsylvania Dutch influence. Julian liked him least of all. Best of all he liked Walt Davis, the son of the cigarette thief. Walt was no relation to Carter. Walt was crosseyed, which somehow made him handsome, or Julian thought so. In the nights preceding Hallowe’en it was Walt who remembered the various Nights: one night was Gate Night, when you took people’s gates off the fences; another night was Tick-Tack Night, when you held a button through which string had been run and wound up, against window panes, making a very effective sound until the string ran down; another night was Paint Night, when you painted sidewalks and people’s houses. On Hallowe’en you dressed up as ghosts and cowboys and Indians and women and men, and rang doorbells, and said: “Anything for Hallowe’en?” If the people gave you pennies or cakes, all right. If they didn’t, you stuck a pin in the doorbell and threw the doormat out in the street and carried away the porch furniture and poured buckets of water on the porch so it would freeze in the night. Walt knew which Night was which; he got the information from his father.

  The leader of the gang was Butch Doerflinger. He was fat and strong and brave. He had killed more copperheads than anyone else and was a better swimmer than anyone else and knew all about older people because he had watched his father and mother. They didn’t mind, either. They thought it was funny. Julian was afraid of Butch, because Julian’s mother had threatened to “report” Butch’s father for beating his horse. Nothing ever came of it, and every year or two Butch
’s father would get a new horse.

  There were things not to talk about in the gang: you did not talk about jail, because of Walt’s father; nor about drunken men, because there was a saloonkeeper’s son; nor about the Catholics, because the motorman’s son and one bookkeeper’s son were Catholic. Julian also was not allowed to mention the name of any doctor. These things did come up and were discussed pretty thoroughly, but usually in the absence of the boy whom the talk would embarrass. There was enough to talk about: girls; changes in boys which occured at fourteen; parades; which would you rather have; if you had a million dollars what would you do; what were you going to be when you got big; is a horse better than a dog; what was the longest you’d ever been on a train; what was the best car; who had the biggest house; who was the dirtiest kid in school; could a policeman be arrested; were you going to college when you got big, what girl were you going to marry and how many children were you going to have; what was the most important instrument in the band; what position was most important on a baseball team; were all the Confederates dead; was the Reading better than the Pennsylvania railroad; could a black-snake kill you….

  There were all sorts of things to be done. There was marbles, and there was a game of marbles called Dobbers, played with marbles the size of lemons. You played it in the gutter on the way home from school, throwing your Dobber at the other fellow’s and he would throw his at yours. It wasn’t much of a game except it made the way home from school seem short. Some days the gang would hop a wagon—preferably a packing-house wagon or a wholesale grocery wagon; coal wagons were too slow—and ride out to the state police barracks and watch the staties drill and shoot. The gang would go out on the mountain and play “Tarzan of the Apes,” jumping around from tree to tree and skinning their behinds on the bark. You had to be careful on the mountains, careful of airholes, which were treacherous, or supposed to be treacherous, places where the ground was undermined and liable to cave in. In the memory of the oldest citizen no life had been lost in Gibbsville as a result of a mine cave-in, but the danger was there. There was a game called Run, Sheepie, Run, and sometimes the gang would play Ku Klux Klan, after having seen “The Birth of a Nation.” Games that had their source in a movie would be played and played for days and then dropped and forgotten, to be revived months later, unsuccessfully. The gang had a Fisk Bicycle Club for a while. You were supposed to have Fisk tires on your bike, and that made you eligible to send away to the Fisk people and get pennants and caps and all the other stuff; buttons, books of instructions on wig-wag and so on. Julian’s father made him buy two Fisk tires, and Carter Davis had one Fisk tire, but these were the only Fisk tires in the gang. The other members of the gang were saving up to buy Pennsylvania Vacuum Cups, and meanwhile when they had a puncture they filled the tire with Neverleak. There were cigarettes to be smoked: Ziras, Sweet Caps, Piedmonts, Hassans. Julian sometimes bought Condax cigarettes, which were more expensive. Butch and Julian were the heavy smokers of the gang, but Julian liked the smell of someone else’s cigarette better than he liked smoking, and he discovered that smoking did not get him in better with Butch. He stopped after a year, using the excuse that his father had detected the nicotine stains on his fingers. Sometimes the gang would sit on the rocks on the mountain and watch the coal trains coming down the valley from the east, and they would count the cars: seventy-eight battleship cars was the highest number they ever saw and agreed upon. Sometimes they would go down in the valley and when the train slowed up or stopped at Gibbsville Junction they would get on and ride four miles to Alton or the five miles to Swedish Haven. It was a cold and dangerous ride, and about once a year some boy would fall off and lose a leg or be killed under the wheels, but the practice of hopping coalies went on. It was not wise to go beyond Swedish Haven, because after that the railroad veered off too far from the highway. There was a coalie that slowed down at Gibbsville Junction every day at about three-fifteen, and it reached Swedish Haven at four o’clock, which usually gave the gang time enough to get home, either by bumming rides on the grocery wagons or stealing rides on the trolley cars, or walking. You could get home only moderately late for supper.

  There was one other game that Julian did not like, because he was afraid of the consequences. That was known simply as Five-Finger Grab. There were two five-and-ten stores, Woolworth’s and Kresge’s, in Gibbsville, and about once a month after school the gang would wander through the stores. Sometimes they would not take a thing, usually because they were watched carefully by the clerks and the manager, whose office was placed so that he could look down on every counter. But sometimes after a tour of the store the gang would meet, and two or three of the boys would say: “Look what I got,” and show what they had got in the Five-Finger Grab: pencils, magnifying glasses, screw drivers, pliers, spools of wire, nickel Rocket baseballs, hard candy, school tablets, toys, cotton gloves, friction tape—these were some of the things that would be produced by the proud five-finger grabbers. The other boys would be ashamed, and the next time they went to the store everyone would try to get something.

  Julian at first would refuse to participate in the Five-Finger Grab, but when Carter Davis abandoned his side and went over to the grabbers, Julian had to do something. Once he tried to buy something—a jar of hard candy—to be able to show something after a grab, but he could not do this often; he was not given much money. A quarter a week was his allowance, and he had to have a nickel on Friday and a nickel on Saturday for two movie serials he was following, and that meant he could not buy much at the five-and-ten if he wanted to have a cinnamon bun and pickle, two cents, at recess. And so he became a five-finger grabber.

  He was very successful, and when he saw how successful he was he wanted to do it all the time. Most of the other fellows in the gang stole only for the sake of stealing; that explained why some of them, emptying their pockets after a grab, would pull out white feet for women’s stockings, baby rattles, cards of safety pins, wash cloths, soap, and other useless articles. But Julian became so proficient that he could tell beforehand what he was going to get, and usually he would get it. The gang would separate on entering the store, and there would be so many boys wandering around that it was hard to keep track of them.

  Julian did not know that he was being watched. He had been watched for a long time, and the manager saw that Julian was not taking things and stopped watching him. But when he began to have success as a grabber the salesgirls learned to keep on the lookout for him. They knew who he was; a Lantenengo Street kid, who did not have to steal. Several of them reported him to the manager, who thereafter forgot all about the other kids in order to keep his eye on Julian.

  One day after school the gang decided to have a Five-Finger Grab, and they all trooped down to Kresge’s. When they entered the store a bell rang, but they paid no attention to it; bells were always ringing in the store—signals to cash girls, signals to the assistant managers and floorwalkers and stock boys. Bells were always ringing. Julian had announced beforehand that he would get a flashlight for Butch, in return for which Butch was going to steal a large hunk of summer sausage from the Doerflinger meat market. Not just an ordinary slice, that he could get for the asking, but a hunk at least a foot long.

  The flashlight came as a case, battery, and lamp: ten cents for each part, thirty cents altogether. The electrical supplies counter was very near the front door, and Julian went right to it. The girl standing in front of the counter—the clerks stood in front of counters that were against the walls—asked him what he wanted, and he said he was only waiting for a friend who had gone to another part of the store. She looked at him without saying anything and kept looking at him. Well, he was not going to let her scare him, and he could outsmart her. He took out a package of Ziras, put one in his mouth, and pretended to reach in his pocket for a match, but all the cigarettes dropped to the floor, as Julian planned. The girl automatically leaned over, which was more than Julian had counted on—he merely wanted to distract her. He too leaned over
, and as he did his right hand reached over the counter and he had the flashlight in his pocket before he began to pick up the cigarettes. “No smoking in here,” the girl said.

  “Who said so?” said Julian, and at that moment his arm was grabbed tight.

  “I saw you, you little thief!” It was the manager. “I saw you take that flashlight. Miss Loftus, go get the policeman.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the girl.

  “I’ll show you. I’ll fix your feet for you,” said the manager. Julian tried to reach in his pocket to get rid of the flashlight. “Oh, no you don’t,” said Mr. Jewett. “That flashlight stays right in your pocket till the policeman comes. I’ll put a stop to this. Little highbrow, eh? Doctor English’s son. Lantenengo Street boy. Well.”

  Quickly there was a crowd around, and some of the fellows were in the crowd. They were frightened, and a couple of them left, which gave Julian a sinking feeling but he did not blame them, and he was glad to see that Butch and Carter stayed.

  “Go on away, you people,” said Mr. Jewett. “I’ll settle this.” The group slowly moved away, and that was the chance Butch had been waiting for. He moved closer to Jewett and said:

  “What did he do, Mister?”

  “Never you mind what he did. You know damn well what he did,” said Jewett.

  Butch kicked Jewett square in the shin and ran, and so did Julian. They got out of the store and ran to the left, knowing that Leffler, the policeman, would be coming from the ’squire’s office, at the right. They ran down one street, up another, down another, until they came to the railroad freight yards. “Jesus, I never ran so much in all my life yet,” said Butch.

  “Me either,” said Julian.

  “It’s good I gave him a kick,” said Butch.

  “You bet. If you didn’t I’d be there yet. What would they do?”

  “I do’ know. Send you to reformatory, I guess. I guess me too now maybe,” said Butch.