Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

by Stanley Elkin

  The world he had thought he was never to see again when he entered the hospital lay now around and before him in adjacent strata, disparate but contiguous planes in space. Because of his heightened awareness it seemed compartmentalized. He had the impression that he could distinguish where each section had been sewn onto the next. He saw the wide-arced slope of grass and trees—the park. Interrupting it—the busy boulevard like an un-calm sea. Beyond the angry roll and toss of traffic and black frozen asphalt like queer, dark ice in perpetual lap against the gutters of a foreign shore—an avenue. A commercial country of bank and shop where the billboards and marquees hung appended and unfurled, annexed like gaudily partisan consulate flags—almost, it seemed to Feldman in its smugly high-tariffed insularity, like a young and enterprising foreign power. Tall apartment buildings backstopped the planet, mountain ranges stacked against the world’s last margins, precarious and unbalanced. He knew that over these and beyond the curve of his world there were many leftover worlds. And the sun shone on them all. It was remarkable to him that people and worlds should be dying beneath such a sun.

  A young Negro girl came by, pushing a baby carriage. She sat down on Feldman’s bench.

  Feldman smiled at her. “Is your baby a boy or a girl?” he asked her.

  The girl laughed brightly. “My baby an elevator operator downtown. This one here is a white child, mister.”

  “Oh,” Feldman said.

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  Feldman wondered whether she would get up now, whether she had taken him for one of the old men who sit in parks and tamper with the healthy they meet there.

  He got up to go. “ ’Bye, mister,” the girl said.

  He looked to see if she was mocking him.

  He started toward the corner. He could catch a bus there. With a panic that startled the worm sleeping in his stomach and made it lurch forward, bringing him pain, he realized that in leaving the hospital he had given no thought to where he would go. He understood for the first time that when he had gone into the hospital not to be cured but to die, he had relinquished a sort of citizenship. Now he had no rights in a place given over to life. People did not come back from the grave. Others wouldn’t stand for it. He could not even stay in the park, unless he was to stay as one of the old men he had for a moment feared he had become.

  He could go home, of course. He could kiss his wife and explain patiently to her what had happened to him. He could tell her that his disease had been a joke between the doctor and himself—not a joke in the sense that it didn’t really exist, but merely a sort of pale irony in that while it did exist, it did not behave as it had in others; that he was going to die, all right, but that they must both be patient.

  He saw a large green and yellow bus halted at the stop light. He did not recognize its markings, but when it came abreast of him he got on. He sat up front, near the driver. When the bus had made its circuit two times, the driver turned toward Feldman.

  “Okay, mister, end of the line.”

  “What?”

  “You should have slept it off by this time. End of the line. Far as we go.”

  “But there are still people on the bus.”

  “Sorry. Company rule.”

  “If I pay another fare?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Look,” he started to say, but he was at a loss as to how to complete his thought. “All right,” he said. “Thank you.”

  He got off and saw that he had come to a part of the city with which he was unfamiliar. He could not remember ever having been there before. It was a factory district, and the smoke from many furnaces forced on the day, still in its early afternoon, a twilight haze. He walked down a block to where the bare, unpainted shacks of the workers led into a half-commercial, half-residential section. He saw that secured between the slate-colored homes was more than the usual number of taverns. The windows in all the houses were smudged with the opaque soot from the chimneys. The brown shades behind them had been uniformly pulled down almost to the sills. Feldman sensed that the neighborhood had a peculiar unity. Even the deserted aspect of the streets seemed to suggest that the people who lived there acted always in concert.

  The porches, their peeling paint like dead, flaking skin, were wide and empty except for an occasional piece of soiled furniture. One porch Feldman passed, old like the rest, had on it a new card table and four brightly chromed, red plastic-upholstered chairs, probably the prize in a church bingo party. The self-conscious newness of the set, out of place in the context of the neighborhood, had been quickly canceled by the universal soot which had already begun to settle over it, and which, Feldman imagined, through that same silent consent to all conditions here, had not been wiped away.

  Behind the window of each tavern Feldman passed was the sign of some brewery. They hung, suspended neon signatures, red against the dark interiors. He went into one of the bars. Inside it was almost dark, but the room glowed with weird, subdued colors, as though it were lighted by a juke box which was burning out. The place smelled of urine and beer. The floor was cement, the color of an overcast sky.

  There were no other men in the tavern. Two women, one the barmaid, a coarse, thick-set woman whose dirty linen apron hung loosely from her big body, stood beside an electric bowling machine. She held the hands of a small boy who was trying to intercept the heavy silver disk that the other woman, probably his mother, aimed down the sanded wooden alley of the machine.

  “Let me. Let me,” the boy said.

  The mother, a thin girl in a man’s blue jacket, was wearing a red babushka. Under it, her blond hair, pulled tightly back on her head, almost looked wet. The child continued to squirm in the older woman’s grasp. The mother, looking toward a glass of beer set on the edge of the machine, spoke to the woman in the apron. “Don’t let him, Rose. He’ll knock over the beer.”

  “He wants to play.”

  “I’ll break his hands he wants to play. Where’s his dime?”

  Feldman sat down on a stool at the bar. The barmaid, seeing him, let go of the child and stepped behind the bar. “What’ll you have?” she said.

  “Have you sandwiches?”

  “Yeah. Cheese. Salami. Ham and cheese.”

  “Ham and cheese.”

  She took a sandwich wrapped in wax paper from a dusty plastic pie bell and brought it to him. “You must be new around here. Usually I say ‘What’ll you have?’ the guy answers ‘Pabst Blue Ribbon.’ It’s a joke.”

  Feldman, who had not often drunk beer even before his illness, suddenly felt a desire to have some. “I’ll have some ‘Pabst Blue Ribbon.’ ”

  The woman drew it for him and put it next to his sandwich. “You a social worker?” she asked.

  “No,” Feldman said, surprised.

  “Rose thinks every guy wears a suit he’s a social worker,” the blond girl said, sitting down next to him. “Especially the suit don’t fit too good.” The child had run to the machine and was throwing the silver disk against its back wall. The machine, still activated, bounced the disk back to him.

  “Don’t scratch the surface,” the woman behind the bar yelled at him. “Look, he scratches the surface, the company says I’m responsible. They won’t give me a machine.”

  “Petey, come away from the machine. Rose is gonna break your hands.” Looking again at Rose, she said, “He don’t even carry a case.”

  “Could be he’s a parole officer,” Rose said.

  “No,” Feldman said.

  “We ain’t used up the old one yet,” the blond woman said, grinning.

  Feldman felt the uncomfortable justice of these speculations, made almost as though he were no longer in the room with them. He finished his beer and held up his glass to be refilled.

  “You got people in this neighborhood, mister?”

  “Yes,” he said. “My old grandmother lives here.”

  “Yeah?” the woman behind the bar said.

  “What’s her name?” the blond girl asked suspiciously.


  Feldman looked at the thin blonde. “Sterchik,” he said. “Dubja Sterchik.”

  “Dubja Finklestein,” the girl said. She took off her blue jacket. Feldman saw that her arms, though thin, were very muscular. She raised her hand to push some hair that had come loose back under the tight caress of the red babushka. He saw that the inside of her white wrist was tattooed. In thin blue handwriting, the letters not much thicker than ink on an ordinary envelope, was the name “Annie.” He looked away quickly, as though inadvertently he had seen something he shouldn’t have, as though the girl had leaned forward and he had looked down her blouse and seen her breasts.

  “I don’t know nobody named Dubja Sterchik,” Rose said to him. “Maybe she drinks across the street with Stanley,” she added.

  He finished the second glass of beer and, getting used to the taste, asked for another. He wondered whether, had they known he was a dying man, they would have been alarmed at his outlandish casualness in strolling into a strange bar in a neighborhood where he had never been. He wondered whether they would be startled to realize that he had brought to them, strangers, the last pieces of his life, giving no thought now to reclamation, since one could not reclaim, ever, what one still had, no matter how fragile or even broken it might be. He held the beer in his mouth until it burned the soft skin behind his lips. It felt good to feel pain in an area where, for once, it was not scheduled. He felt peculiarly light-hearted.

  He turned to the girl beside him. “Your husband work around here?”

  “A1?”

  “Yes, Al. Does Al work around here?”

  She nodded. “When Al works, he works around here.”

  Feldman smiled. He felt stirrings which were now so unfamiliar to him he had to remember deliberately what they were. The death rattle is starting in my pants, he thought, dismissing what he could not take seriously. It would not be dismissed. Instead, the warmth he felt began to crowd him, to push him into unaccustomed corners. You’ve got the wrong man, he thought. He was not sure, however, which instincts he encouraged, which side he was on.

  Feldman was surprised to discover that he really wanted to talk to her, to tell her that he had come with his disease into their small tavern to die for them. He thought jealously of the blond girl’s husband, the man Al, with lunch pail and silk team bowling jacket. She rubs him with her wounded wrist, he thought, excited.

  “Would you like another drink?” he asked the girl haltingly. “Would you?” he asked again. He looked at her shabby clothes. “I just got paid today,” he added.

  “Why not?” she said lightly. The little boy came over to her, drew her down and whispered something in her ear. The woman looked up at Feldman. “Excuse me,” she said, “he needs to pee.”

  “Of course,” Feldman said stiffly. She took the child through a little door at the back of the tavern. When the door swung open Feldman could see cases of beer stacked on both sides of the lidless toilet. He turned to the woman behind the bar. “I want to buy a bottle of whiskey,” he said to her. “We’ll sit in that booth over there.”

  “I don’t sell by the bottle. This ain’t no package store.”

  “I’ll pay you,” he said.

  “What are you, a jerk, mister? I run a nice place. I don’t want to have to throw you out.”

  “It’s all right. I just want to talk.”

  “She’s got a kid.”

  “I just want to talk to her,” he said. “Here, here,” he said quietly. He reached into his pocket and pulled out two loose bills and flung them on the counter. The woman laughed at him.

  “I’ll be damned,” she said. She handed him a bottle.

  Feldman took it and walked unsteadily to the booth. When the woman brought two glasses, he poured a drink and swallowed it quickly. He felt as though a time limit had been imposed upon him, that it was all right to do anything in the world he wanted so long as he did it quickly. He saw the door at the rear of the tavern open and the girl step out. She leaned over her son, buttoning his pants. Feldman bit his lips. She straightened and, seeing Feldman sitting in the booth, glanced quickly at the woman behind the bar. The woman shrugged and held up the two five-dollar bills. The girl took the boy to the bowling machine and put a dime into its slot for him. He watched her as she came slowly toward his table. He was sure she wore no underclothing. He motioned for her to sit down. “There’s more room,” he said apologetically, indicating the booth.

  She sat down and Feldman nodded toward her drink. “That’s yours,” he said. “That’s for you.”

  “Thanks,” she said absently, but made no effort to drink it. Feldman raised his own glass and touched hers encouragingly in some mute toast. She continued to stare at him blankly.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m bad at this. I don’t know what to say to you.”

  She smiled, but said nothing.

  “I want you to understand,” he went on stiffly, “I’m not trying to be funny with you.”

  “Better not,” she said.

  “I know,” Feldman said. “That girl behind the bar said she’d throw me out of here.”

  “Rose could do it,” the girl said. “I could do it.”

  “Anyone can do it,” Feldman said glumly. “Look, do you want me to go? Do you want to forget about it?”

  “No,” she said, “Just be nice is all. What’s the matter with you, Jack?”

  “I’m dying.” He had not meant to say it. It was out of his mouth before he could do anything about it. He thought of telling her a lie, of expanding his statement to something not so preposterously silly: that he was dying of boredom, of love for her, of fear for his job. Anything with more reason behind it than simply death. It occurred to him that dying was essentially ludicrous. In any real context it was out of place. It was not merely unwelcome; it was unthinkable. Then he realized that this was what he had meant to say all along. He had no interest in the girl; his body had played tricks on him, had made him believe for a moment that it was still strong. What he wanted now was to expose it. It was his enemy. Its sexlessness was a good joke on it. He could tell her that.

  “I’m dying,” he said again. “I don’t know what to do.” He could no longer hear himself speaking. The words tumbled out of his mouth in an impotent rage. He wondered absently if he was crying. “The doctor told me I’m supposed to die, only I don’t do it, do you see?”

  “Go to a different doctor,” the girl said.

  She joked with him. It was impossible that she didn’t understand. He held the worm in his jaws. It was in his stomach, in the hollows of his armpits. Pieces of it stoppered his ears. “No, no. I’m really dying. There have been tests. Everything.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes. You don’t know what it’s like.”

  “You married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Got kids, I suppose, and a family?”

  “Yes.”

  “They know about this?”

  He nodded.

  “Don’t care, probably, right? Hey,” she said, “look at me sitting and talking to you like this. You ain’t got something contagious, have you?”

  “No,” he said. “Where are you going?” The girl was standing. “No, don’t go. Please sit down.”

  “I’m sorry for your trouble, mister. Thanks for the drink.”

  “Have another. There’s a whole bottle.”

  She was looking down at him. He wondered if she really meant to go, whether her standing up was merely a form, a confused deference to death. She leaned toward him unexpectedly. “What is it, mister?” she said. She came to his side of the booth and sat down. “What is it, mister? Do you want to kiss me?” He was sure he had not heard her correctly. She repeated her question. She was smiling. He saw now that she had made a decision, had determined to cheat him. He didn’t care.

  “Yes,” he answered weakly. “Would you kiss me?”

  “Sure,” she said, her voice level, flat. Her eyes were nowhere. She sat closer. He put his hand on her warm
thighs. They were hard and thin. She put one arm around Feldman and ground her lips against his. Her kid was staring at them. Feldman could taste the girl’s breath. It was foul. He put his hand inside the girl’s skirt and touched her thighs. He felt nothing inside himself. There was no urgency. The girl, incorrectly gauging Feldman’s responses, took his hand in one of hers and began to squeeze it. She held his wrist. Her hands, as Feldman had known they would be, were powerful. She dug her nails into his wrist. He could not get free. He tried to pull his wrist away. “Stop it,” he said. “Stop it, you’re hurting me.”

  “See?” she said. “I’ll break your wrist.”

  Under the table he kicked at her. She let go of him.

  “You son of a bitch, I’ll break your face for that.” She started to scratch him. He struck her wildly and she began to cry. The little boy had rushed over and was pulling at Feldman’s suit jacket. The woman behind the bar came over with a billy club she had taken from some hiding place, and began to hit Feldman on his neck and chest. The girl recovered and pulled him from the booth. She sat on his chest, her legs straddling his body as a jockey rides a horse, thighs spread wide, knees up. Her body was exposed to him. He smelled her cunt. He saw it. They beat him until he was unconscious.

  The men from the factories lifted him from the floor where he lay and carried him into the street. It was dark now. Under the lamplight they marched with him. Children ran behind and chanted strange songs. He heard the voices even in his sleep, and dreamed that he was an Egyptian king awaking in the underworld. About him were the treasures, the artifacts with which his people mocked his death. He was betrayed, forsaken. He screamed he was not dead and for answer heard their laughter as they retreated through the dark passage.

  Before he died Feldman awoke in an alley. The pains in his stomach were more severe than ever. He knew he was dying. On his torn jacket was a note, scribbled in an angry hand: STAY AWAY FROM WHITE WOMEN, it said.