"God knows," I said. I didn't feel hungry, and the coffee was sour in my stomach. "Let's get on to town. You can get breakfast there if you want it. Look, why don't you call Mae? She's been wanting to go up to the lake, and it looks like a nice day for it. You could take all the kids, and get your mind off this for a change. Nothing has to be decided today."
She said all right, with a dull lack of interest in the whole thing, but I knew Mae would be good for her. We dressed and rode dismally downtown, with the cracked windshield as a constant reminder.
I told Tracey to tell her folks we'd be staying with them tonight and left her to handle them when they found out why. I didn't think I could face any more talk about any of it just then. I went on to the office.
I didn't do enough work that morning to put in your eye. I kept thinking I ought to go in and talk to George about a job in another town, but I couldn't quite do it. In the first place I didn't think he could or would get me one, and in the second place I didn't want to commit myself—not yet, not quite yet. Maybe tomorrow. Business offices are much like wolf packs. If for any reason you fall off your feet, there are nineteen eager young men with crew cuts waiting to gobble you up and take your place.
I don't know why, but that morning stands out in my mind as the time when I absolutely hit bottom. The chief thing I remember about it is gray. Just gray. Everything. Past, present, and future.
I was making an effort to heave myself up to go to lunch with the usual gang when the phone rang on my desk. I answered it. It was a man's voice, gravel-toned and slightly accented.
"Who?" I said, not getting either the name or the voice.
"Noddy. Noddy. Ain't this Mr. Walter Sherris?"
"Oh. Sure. Hello."
He came to the point fast. "You asked me to ask around. I did. I think I got something. Maybe."
"What?" I asked, excited in spite of myself.
"I ain't sure. Listen, how's your guts, friend? Pretty strong?"
"I—guess so. Why?"
"Drop by here about seven-thirty, eight o'clock. I'll show you some life you ain't seen before, and we can incidentally hang our ears out in the breeze. Okay?"
I was going to say no, and if he knew anything he should go to the police with it, and if he didn't he should forget it. I was going to say I was all through with that.
But I didn't.
I said yes.
14
IT was a sultry evening, still light, but banking up that familiar blackness in the west. It had been one long blazer of a heat wave and apparently it was going on right into fall.
I left the car on the nearest lot and walked down to Noddy's. I had called the house. Tracey had not come back yet from the lake, but Dad was there. He said they had been dreadfully upset by what had happened, and he had sent Mother up too for the day. Mae had been upset too, he said, and I said I knew she was because she had tongue-lashed me for twenty minutes over the phone, winding up with an invitation for me and Tracey and the kids to move in with them for a while.
"She's a great girl," Dad said. "I've always liked her."
"She's the best. Listen, Dad, I may be late tonight. I've just heard from a fellow. I don't know whether it'll come to anything or not, but it's sort of a last chance. Nothing dangerous at all. Tell Tracey not to worry, and I've got a key."
"I'll probably be up when you come in, Walt," he said. "I'm a late reader, you know. Be careful."
I assured him I would be. And I intended to be. I still had the .38 in my pocket. I wondered, not for the first time, what I would do if the time ever came to use it. Handling guns on a rifle range is one thing. Using them with intent to kill is another. How do you feel, a peaceable citizen with no leanings toward violence, when you face another man—or a boy, even worse, a boy with no beard yet to his chin and no real knowledge, in spite of his crimes, of this life you are going to take away from him—how do you feel when you face him and choose your spot and fire? Do you look into his eyes and recognize him as a human being, or do you know him only as a blind agency of evil, a menace, a thing to be stamped out and made not? I didn't know, and I didn't want to know. I hoped I would not be forced to find out.
Noddy's was already lively with the early-evening trade. I saw Miller in one of the booths and went over and talked to him for a minute, telling him how it had gone with the Bush boy.
"I still think he's the boy," I said.
He nodded. He had a newspaper spread out on the table in front of him. "You see this?"
I said I had. Somebody on the police beat had picked up the story of yesterday's attack, and because of what had gone before he was able to make quite a little thing out of it. "I'll be famous," I told Miller, "if I live long enough."
"And the famouser you get, the more the gang will be afraid of getting caught," said Miller. "I was you, mister, I wouldn't go down any dark alleys without I had a friend walking behind me."
"Believe me," I told him, "I won't."
"You ready?" said Noddy's voice over my shoulder. I turned around. He was wearing green slacks and a striped sport short. "Sharp," said Miller. "Sharp !"
Noddy frowned at me. "We might get into some rough walking. Can you make it?"
"I can make it."
"Don't lose him," said Miller to Noddy, and grinned. "He's okay."
We went past the bar, where another man was serving, and through a curtained doorway into a back hall, and down that to a big room stacked high with stale-smelling cases of empty beer bottles. Noddy's car was parked outside the back door, in a narrow alley made all of damp bricks, one of those places that the sun has never managed to get into since it was built.
"I got two jugs in the back," he said. "Vino. Cheap. We're all set."
We got into the car. "What are we after?" I asked. "Can't you tell me?"
He shook his head. "So far I got a word, that's all. Just a word. And a word ain't nothing unless you got more to go with it." He shrugged. "Maybe we get more, maybe we just spend a hot evening getting winoed."
He drove to the mouth of the alley and waited his chance to make the dive into traffic. I looked at him.
"You're going to a lot of trouble for me," I said. "I'm grateful. But I don't see why."
"Well," said Noddy, "it's like this. I don't like them boys either. And if they're doing what we think they're doing they oughta be stopped. Right?"
"Right."
"So," he said, "I got possibly a source of information. It's no good to the cops. It's no good to you. It's only good to me."
He leaned over the wheel, measuring the distance between a westbound steel truck and an eastbound tanker. He added, "Maybe I like the way you fight, mister." And he stepped on the gas.
We made it.
"I'm sorry to disillusion you," I said, "but this is my last stand. If we don't come up with something definite tonight, I'm through."
"I read the paper," Noddy said. "Your woman is all right, huh?"
I said she was.
"But you're scared now."
"I am."
"Well, there's nothing wrong with that. When I hear a man say he ain't afraid of anything, I figure he's either a half-wit or a liar. Fear's a good thing. Without it you're dead. You know? I think all these yap-heads you read in the papers are crazy."
"Which ones?" I asked.
"These dames and such that tell you how you should raise your kid. Never frighten 'em. Teach 'em everybody's their friend and the world's as soft as a marshmallow. So what good does that do 'em? It ain't true. I got a boy fifteen. I took him down to the Receiving Hospital once on a Saturday night. I let him watch. I tell him that's what happens to guys who drive too fast. I took him around the jail. I tell him that's what happens to guys who get in trouble with the law. I show him the drunks and the hopheads, and I tell him that's what happens to guys who go on the booze or start shooting the dreamdust. So he's scared witless. He's scared to drive too fast, he's scared to get in trouble, he's scared to drink or take dope. This is bad?"
Noddy grinned. "Remember something else too."
"What's that?"
He held up his hairy, powerful right hand. "Best teacher in the world still. Let the woman scream all she wants to. Use it."
We had been heading east with the black clouds towering up behind us hiding the sun. Now Noddy crossed the river on the Smith Street bridge, over the railroad yards, where you can look westward down the winding line of mills and factories, ugly monstrosities foul with smoke, that make the wealth of Mall's Ford. I looked west in the glimmering stormy twilight. Then I looked east, and in the distance along a bend of the multiple tracks I saw the lunar peaks of a strip mine. And I thought of Finelli, who had died just along the road a piece from that mine, and I began to sweat between sudden hope and fear of disappointment.
Noddy made a hairpin turn across traffic at the end of the bridge and slid down an almost perpendicular street that angled to the bottom of the valley, riding the brake and bounding in and out of the holes in the old brick pavement. There were houses on both sides of the street, packed tight together, frame houses with slate roofs and tumbling porches, black with perhaps eighty years of railroad soot. Some of them were empty, the lower windows boarded, the upper ones without glass, wide open to the wind and rain. Others were still inhabited. You could hardly say lived in.
At the foot of the street was a dump, one of those haphazard and illegal middens, fanning out into coarse grass. Noddy skirted the edge of this and went jouncing out over a barely discernible track that might once have been used by wagons, heading back now toward the bridge. There was a house there, almost lost in the shadow of the steel-and-concrete piers. It probably had been a farmhouse, back in the days when this rich bottom land still grew corn instead of slag and railroad ties. Now it was nothing. It was not even a house, really. It was just a forgotten thing that nobody had bothered to tear down.
There were people in it.
Noddy stopped the car. "Let me do the talking," he said. "You're just a pal I brought along and you had an accident. And don't try to hold up your end with these birds. I don't know what kind of a head you've got for vino, but it ain't enough. Okay?"
"You're the boss," I said.
We got out. Noddy took one of the jugs from the back and locked the car carefully. Then he walked toward the house. Traffic rumbled over the high bridge. A switch engine hooted in the yards, and there was a long rattling crash, several times repeated, of empty cars being humped into motion. It was almost dark. Four men came to meet us, scuffing through the tin cans that littered the ground outside their door.
Noddy introduced them. Suby, Cotter, Jellyhead, Sligh. In the dim light their faces were indistinct. Some were taller and some were shorter, but they all had the same hunched-over, tucked-up look, their shirts and their shapeless pants hanging on them as on figures made of broomsticks. Most of them seemed to have gray hair, but whether they were young or old I could not tell, even by their voices.
"We thought you was the cops. Hey, Noddy, whatcha got there?"
"Sonofabitch threw me out last time I was in his place. Didn't you, Noddy? Sonofabitch."
"So I got a business to run, Jellyhead. No hard feelings. Look what I brought."
"Free? For nothing?"
"For nothing. The good red vino." He shook the jug. "Let's have a party."
"Hey," said the one called Cotter suspiciously. "How come you're all of a sudden so generous? You don't give nothin' away free."
"The hell I don't. How many times did you sleep in my back room, hub? And how many times I've stood you to a drink when you was sick and didn't have the price?"
"One lousy drink," said Jellyhead, still standing on his hurt pride.
Okay," said Noddy. "Okay." He turned around. "Come on, pal. We'll go drink our jug somewheres else."
Immediately they caught hold of him, and Cotter turned and kicked Jellyhead.
"Shut up your ugly mouth," he told him. "What the hell do we care, anyway? It's wine, ain't it? And it's free, ain't it?"
Noddy looked at me. "Well, what do you say, pal? Shall we stay?"
"Sure," I said. "Why not?"
Noddy went up to the house and sat down on the ground with his back against the wall. I sat beside him on the flat slab of stone that made the doorstep. The door behind me was half open on one hinge as though it had stuck there, and I doubted if it could be shut at all. It was pretty dark inside, but light enough to see furniture if there was any. There wasn't, beyond a few boxes and a frowsy litter of stuff on the floor. A sour smell came out of mice and rot and damp plaster. I wondered what on God's earth would make a man willing to live this way, and then I saw how the four of them had crouched down in a ring around Noddy, watching him take the cork out of the jug. You could almost see their eyes glitter and their tongues hang out, and I thought of Harold Francis, clean and well fed and comfortable and hating every minute of it, yearning to get back to this.
I still didn't understand.
The jug went around. Nobody bothered about glasses. I doubt if there were any. You drank and swiped the mouth of the jug with your hand or your shirt sleeve, as a ceremonial gesture, before you passed it on. We sat in the warm evening, and it got dark, and all the lights of the city were on, distant enough to be pretty without intruding on us. Traffic on the bridge slacked off. On the hill behind us there was a radio going, and a baby cried, a thin penetrating screech. It was a shocking sound. At least it was shocking to me, to think of any child born and brought up in those ratholes. Somebody, I thought, ought to come with flame throwers and antiseptics and scrubbing brushes, and clean out these black places in the city, open them up and let the sun in. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves, I thought, to allow places like this to stand year after year and not do anything about them.
At first I just tilted the jug up without really drinking, but after a while the whole business began to get on my nerves. I took two or three pulls on the raw sour stuff, trusting to the alcohol to fight off the germs, and that didn't seem to do any good, so I took two or three more. The men squatted on the ground, smoking our "tailor-mades" greedily, blobby figures in a dim canvas. Their voices were meaningless, a monotonous blabber of obscenity and pointless gossip. They were laughing a lot now, getting cheerful, having a good time. I began to be angry with Noddy for bringing me here. The clouds banked so heavily in the west had begun to throw lightning around. The thunder rumbled. I thought the storm was moving north and that we would not get any rain from it here and I was glad. I did not want to be forced to take shelter in that house.
Noddy got up. I started to get up, too, because I wanted very much to go away from there, but he pushed me down, hard.
"Never mind," he said. "I'll get it."
He went to the car and came back with the other jug, and it started all over again. I knew I had better be careful, but it was too much to expect a body to take this cold sober. I shared the jug again. The red and green and yellow eyes of the block signals shone. I watched the pattern shift and heard the rails begin to hum, and then a train roared through with that particular magic that trains have, a rush of wheels and a flashing of bright windows on the night, and a hoarse wild echo dying.
"—they beat up Harry Francis," Suby was saying. "Sure I did. I was crossin' the yards down there and I seen these guys."
"What guys?" asked Cotter. "Let's have all the goddamn details, pal. All of 'em."
"What do you care so much?" said Jellyhead, thrusting his chin forward.
"Someday," said Cotter, "I'm gonna write a book."
Nobody laughed.
"How the hell do I know what guys," said Suby. "It was dark. I heard 'em coming along, laughing. I ducked back behind a string of cars and waited till they was gone. You bet!"
I was sitting up straight on my doorstep now. But Noddy was carrying the ball, and I had sense enough to let him.
"Hell, Suby
," he said, "you're a big strong guy. What was you so scared of?"
"Listen," said Suby, on a high note of indignation. "I heard about these guys. They been around all summer. They beat up ol' Stef Vorchek. That night I saw 'em they just beat up on Harry Francis. I didn't want to have nothin' to do with 'em."
"Aw," said Noddy. "Pass that jug around, boys. I gotta wash that down."
Suby was getting mad now. "A'right," he said. "A'right. You ask anybody in the jungle. They'll tell you."
"Is that right?" asked Noddy, looking at Sligh and Cotter.
"I guess so," said Sligh, shrugging his shoulders. "I never seen 'em myself, but word's kind of got around. Seems like there's this gang of young punks come down to have a little fun, and they never bother the sober guys or if you're with a bunch. But if you're real loaded, see, and by yourself—boom!"
"Hey," said Suby abruptly. "Hey, you know what?"
"What?"
"I'll bet they got Artie Clymer."
Noddy moved beside me in the dark, just a little, and I knew that Artie Clymer was the word he'd been waiting for.
15
NODDY leaned forward, passing the jug.
"Who got Artie Clymer?" he demanded. "What about Artie? Listen, I got a personal interest in that boy. He owes me money. He better not be gone."
"Well, he ain't been back for three days," said Suby. "A guy doesn't just go off and not come back for three days."
Noddy laughed rudely. "Tell me," he said. "I've known you not to come back for three weeks if you latched onto a supply somewheres."
"Maybe so," said Suby, with a certain dignity, "but that's different. Artie was bunking with us, so I know. He didn't go away. He went to the strip mine."
"Whatcha mean, he went to the strip mine?"
"Just what I said, he went to the strip mine. He——" Suby stopped to attend to the jug, and Cotter took up the story.
"Company just finished pulling out of there that day. When was that, Sligh? Sunday? What the hell you talking about, Sunday! What's today?" He did some figuring on his fingers. "Saturday, that's when. Saturday night, and we were doing good. Artie was drunk as a hoot owl. He said that ol' strip mine was just busting with stuff laying around, and he was gonna get it before somebody else did. So he picked up a sack and took off." Cotter made an expressive gesture with his hands. "And that's all."
The Tiger Among Us Page 11