“Ah, Slud,” I say, “I’ve seen him run.”
“He has beaten the horses in the park. It’s very beautiful,” Slud says.
“He’s handsome, isn’t he, Clob?” Clob looks contagious, radioactive. He has severe acne. He is ugly under his acne.
“He gets the girls,” Clob says.
He gets everything, I think. But I’m alone in my envy, awash in my lust. It’s as if I were a prophet to the deaf. Schnooks, schnooks, I want to scream, dopes and settlers. What good does his smile do you, of what use is his good heart?
The other day I did something stupid. I went to the cafeteria and shoved a boy out of the way and took his place in the line. It was foolish, but their fear is almost all gone and I felt I had to show the flag. The boy only grinned and let me pass. Then someone called my name. It was him. I turned to face him. “Push,” he said, “you forgot your silver.” He handed it to a girl in front of him and she gave it to the boy in front of her and it came to me down the long line.
I plot, I scheme. Snares, I think; tricks and traps. I remember the old days when there were ways to snap fingers, crush toes, ways to pull noses, twist heads and punch arms—the old-timey Flinch Law I used to impose, the gone bully magic of deceit. But nothing works against him, I think. How does he know so much? He is bully-prepared, that one, not to be trusted.
It is worse and worse.
In the cafeteria he eats with Frank. “You don’t want those potatoes,” he tells him. “Not the ice cream, Frank. One sandwich, remember. You lost three pounds last week.” The fat boy smiles his fat love at him. John Williams puts his arm around him. He seems to squeeze him thin.
He’s helping Mimmer to study. He goes over his lessons and teaches him tricks, short cuts. “I want you up there with me on the Honor Roll, Mimmer.”
I see him with Slud the cripple. They go to the gym. I watch from the balcony. “Let’s develop those arms, my friend.” They work out with weights. Slud’s muscles grow, they bloom from his bones.
I lean over the rail. I shout down, “He can bend iron bars. Can he peddle a bike? Can he walk on rough ground? Can he climb up a hill? Can he wait on a line? Can he dance with a girl? Can he go up a ladder or jump from a chair?”
Beneath me the rapt Slud sits on a bench and raises a weight. He holds it at arm’s length, level with his chest. He moves it high, higher. It rises above his shoulders, his throat, his head. He bends back his neck to see what he’s done. If the weight should fall now it would crush his throat. I stare down into his smile.
I see Eugene in the halls. I stop him. “Eugene, what’s he done for you?” I ask. He smiles—he never did this—and I see his mouth’s flood. “High tide,” I say with satisfaction.
Williams has introduced Clob to a girl. They have double-dated.
A week ago John Williams came to my house to see me! I wouldn’t let him in.
“Please open the door, Push. I’d like to chat with you. Will you open the door? Push? I think we ought to talk. I think I can help you to be happier.”
I was furious. I didn’t know what to say to him. “I don’t want to be happier. Go way.” It was what little kids used to say to me.
“Please let me help you.”
“Please let me—” I begin to echo. “Please let me alone.”
“We ought to be friends, Push.”
“No deals.” I am choking, I am close to tears. What can I do? What? I want to kill him.
I double-lock the door and retreat to my room. He is still out there. I have tried to live my life so that I could keep always the lamb from my door.
He has gone too far this time; and I think sadly, I will have to fight him, I will have to fight him. Push pushed. I think sadly of the pain. Push pushed. I will have to fight him. Not to preserve honor but its opposite. Each time I see him I will have to fight him. And then I think—of course! And I smile. He has done me a favor. I know it at once. If he fights me he fails. He fails if he fights me. Push pushed pushes! It’s physics! Natural law! I know he’ll beat me, but I won’t prepare, I won’t train, I won’t use the tricks I know. It’s strength against strength, and my strength is as the strength of ten because my jaw is glass! He doesn’t know everything, not everything he doesn’t. And I think, I could go out now, he’s still there, I could hit him in the hall, but I think, No, I want them to see, I want them to see!
The next day I am very excited. I look for Williams. He’s not in the halls. I miss him in the cafeteria. Afterward I look for him in the schoolyard where I first saw him. (He has them organized now. He teaches them games of Tibet, games of Japan; he gets them to play lost sports of the dead.) He does not disappoint me. He is there in the yard, a circle around him, a ring of the loyal.
I join the ring. I shove in between two kids I have known. They try to change places; they murmur and fret.
Williams sees me and waves. His smile could grow flowers. “Boys,” he says, “boys, make room for Push. Join hands, boys.” They welcome me to the circle. One takes my hand, then another. I give to each calmly.
I wait. He doesn’t know everything.
“Boys,” he begins, “today we’re going to learn a game that the knights of the lords and kings of old France used to play in another century. Now you may not realize it, boys, because today when we think of a knight we think, too, of his fine charger, but the fact is that a horse was a rare animal—not a domestic European animal at all, but Asian. In western Europe, for example, there was no such thing as a work horse until the eighth century. Your horse was just too expensive to be put to heavy labor in the fields. (This explains, incidentally, the prevalence of famine in western Europe, whereas famine is unrecorded in Asia until the ninth century, when Euro-Asian horse trading was at its height.) It wasn’t only expensive to purchase a horse, it was expensive to keep one. A cheap fodder wasn’t developed in Europe until the tenth century. Then, of course, when you consider the terrific risks that the warrior horse of a knight naturally had to run, you begin to appreciate how expensive it would have been for the lord—unless he was extremely rich—to provide all his knights with horses. He’d want to make pretty certain that the knights who got them knew how to handle a horse. (Only your knights errant—an elite, crack corps—ever had horses. We don’t realize that most knights were home knights; chevalier chez they were called.)
“This game, then, was devised to let the lord, or king, see which of his knights had the skill and strength in his hands to control a horse. Without moving your feet, you must try to jerk the one next to you off balance. Each man has two opponents, so it’s very difficult. If a man falls, or if his knee touches the ground, he’s out. The circle is diminished but must close up again immediately. Now, once for practice only—”
“Just a minute,” I interrupt.
“Yes, Push?”
I leave the circle and walk forward and hit him as hard as I can in the face.
He stumbles backward. The boys groan. He recovers. He rubs his jaw and smiles. I think he is going to let me hit him again. I am prepared for this. He knows what I’m up to and will use his passivity. Either way I win, but I am determined he shall hit me. I am ready to kick him, but as my foot comes up he grabs my ankle and turns it forcefully. I spin in the air. He lets go and I fall heavily on my back. I am surprised at how easy it was, but am content if they understand. I get up and am walking away, but there is an arm on my shoulder. He pulls me around roughly. He hits me.
“Sic semper tyrannus,” he exults.
“Where’s your other cheek?” I ask, falling backward.
“One cheek for tyrants,” he shouts. He pounces on me and raises his fist and I cringe. His anger is terrific. I do not want to be hit again.
“You see? You see?” I scream at the kids, but I have lost the train of my former reasoning. I have in no way beaten him. I can’t remember now what I had intended.
He lowers his fist and gets off my chest and they cheer. “Hurrah,” they yell. “Hurrah, hurrah.” The word seem
s funny to me.
He offers his hand when I try to rise. It is so difficult to know what to do. Oh God, it is so difficult to know which gesture is the right one. I don’t even know this. He knows everything, and I don’t even know this. I am a fool on the ground, one hand behind me pushing up, the other not yet extended but itching in the palm where the need is. It is better to give than receive, surely. It is best not to need at all.
Appalled, guessing what I miss, I rise alone.
“Friends?” he asks. He offers to shake.
“Take it, Push.” It’s Eugene’s voice.
“Go ahead, Push.” Slud limps forward.
“Push, hatred’s so ugly,” Clob says, his face shining.
“You’ll feel better, Push,” Frank, thinner, taller, urges softly.
“Push, don’t be foolish,” Mimmer says.
I shake my head. I may be wrong. I am probably wrong. All I know at last is what feels good. “Nothing doing,” I growl. “No deals.” I begin to talk, to spray my hatred at them. They are not an easy target even now. “Only your knights errant—your crack corps—ever have horses. Slud may dance and Clob may kiss but they’ll never be good at it. Push is no service animal. No. No. Can you hear that, Williams? There isn’t any magic, but your no is still stronger than your yes, and distrust is where I put my faith.” I turn to the boys. “What have you settled for? Only your knights errant ever have horses. What have you settled for? Will Mimmer do sums in his head? How do you like your lousy hunger, thin boy? Slud, you can break me but you can’t catch me. And Clob will never shave without pain, and ugly, let me tell you, is still in the eye of the beholder!”
John Williams mourns for me. He grieves his gamy grief. No one has everything—not even John Williams. He doesn’t have me. He’ll never have me, I think. If my life were only to deny him that, it would almost be enough. I could do his voice now if I wanted. His corruption began when he lost me. “You,” I shout, rubbing it in, “indulger, dispense me no dispensations. Push the bully hates your heart!”
“Shut him up, somebody,” Eugene cries. His saliva spills from his mouth when he speaks.
“Swallow! Pig, swallow!”
He rushes toward me.
Suddenly I raise my arms and he stops. I feel a power in me. I am Push, Push the bully, God of the Neighborhood, its incarnation of envy and jealousy and need. I vie, strive, emulate, compete, a contender in every event there is. I didn’t make myself. I probably can’t save myself, but maybe that’s the only need I don’t have. I taste my lack and that’s how I win—by having nothing to lose. It’s not good enough! I want and I want and I will die wanting, but first I will have something. This time I will have something. I say it aloud. “This time I will have something.” I step toward them. The power makes me dizzy. It is enormous. They feel it. They back away. They crouch in the shadow of my outstretched wings. It isn’t deceit this time but the real magic at last, the genuine thing: the cabala of my hate, of my irreconcilableness.
Logic is nothing. Desire is stronger.
I move toward Eugene. “I will have something,” I roar.
“Stand back,” he shrieks, “I’ll spit in your eye.”
“I will have something. I will have terror. I will have drought. I bring the dearth. Famine’s contagious. Also is thirst. Privation, privation, barrenness, void. I dry up your glands, I poison your well.”
He is choking, gasping, chewing furiously. He opens his mouth. It is dry. His throat is parched. There is sand on his tongue.
They moan. They are terrified, but they move up to see. We are thrown together. Slud, Frank, Clob, Mimmer, the others, John Williams, myself. I will not be reconciled, or halve my hate. It’s what I have, all I can keep. My bully’s sour solace. It’s enough, I’ll make do.
I can’t stand them near me. I move against them. I shove them away. I force them off. I press them, thrust them aside. I push through.
COUSIN POOR LESLEY AND THE LOUSY PEOPLE
I went home to see my mother and to visit with the lousy people.
My mother showed me a photograph. It was of myself, my cousin Lesley and Lesley’s sister, taken when we were kids. I hadn’t seen Lesley for years but I had no trouble recognizing him. There he was, in the picture, inevitably its center, looking directly into the camera, staring at it—as he stared at everything—as though perhaps he did not understand what he was looking at, as though the camera were some strange object which could be stared into comprehension. His eyes wide, the expression vaguely blank, troubled, the thick dry lips of the mouth breather slightly parted, his face suggested that there was danger an unspecified number of feet in front of it. The big body, not heavy but giving the impression of bloat, was at an awkward, stiff attention, and his arm, partially extended like a patrol boy’s at an intersection, shielded his huge-breasted sister—perhaps from the forgotten photographer. He looked like someone standing at the edge of a jungle clearing staring into brush which had suddenly moved. The picture had been taken years before when we had visited Lesley’s family in Chicago.
“Poor Lesley,” I said.
“A good boy,” my mother said.
“I heard his sister is engaged.”
“Maybe engaged. Maybe not engaged,” my mother said.
Of course I did not see them often—they lived in Chicago, too far from The Bronx—but there had been a time when I saw Lesley’s sister a lot. We went to the same Midwestern university. Her brother had been at the university before her and she was there, I think, because he had been there. She took a room in a place next to Lesley’s old boarding house, and this proximity, and the knowledge that there were still people at the school who had known Lesley, must have been a comfort to her, like the arm in the photograph.
She used to come over to talk about her brother. She would sit on the couch across the room from me, her posture stiff, uncompromising, and tell me, trusting mistakenly in my interest, of Lesley’s life. Always in the purse which she held primly in her lap was some long letter of Lesley’s from which she could quote endless passages of brotherly sententiae. He called her Sister and advised her in clinically sensuous terms of the baseness in men’s hearts. The letters were absolutely pornographic.
Less embarrassing, but duller, were our talks when Lesley’s sister returned to school after a vacation at home. She had total recall about her brother and she would come, her mind brimming with anecdotes of Lesley, to tell me of some new suit he’d bought, of what humorless thing he had said to the clerk when they went together to shop for it. She spoke of Lesley’s disappointment in the advertising agency he’d taken a job with after graduation, of vague plans he had to return to school to study law, of his new girl friend who was always, in his sister’s description of her, not beautiful, but sensible. Sometimes she would offer a picture of an anonymous, almost featureless girl in health shoes. Invariably the girls looked feckless, tired.
What bothered me most in all this was the picture I got of Lesley’s horribly distorted picture of himself. I knew him to be completely without humor, massively stolid, as though the imagination were a finite organ which he, somehow, had been born without. Yet his view of himself as revealed to me through his sister was romantic—there is no other word for it—cavalier. Advertising. Law. In his letters to his sister, Lord Chesterfield.
Then, in her last year at the university, his sister came to tell me that Lesley had joined the Marines. I was astonished. Our family, not even counting Lesley, is not what you could call a United States Marine family. Ours is more a Certified Public Accountant family. We seem to have been born between wars. For Lesley deliberately to seek out the Marines struck me as an incredible gesture, almost heroic, a declaration that though it would cost him dearly, he must assert ultimately and irrevocably what he had long and mistakenly felt himself to be. For the Marines to accept him was no less impressive. It seemed crazily reciprocal, and in the instant that his sister told me about it I had a senseless vision of two forces—expansive, drunkenly ge
nerous.
After this, Lesley’s sister came to me even oftener, but the tone of the visits and of her manner changed.
Before, she had been enthusiastic, quickened with optimism at her brother’s impossible plans for himself. Now she was clearly not so sure, saddened, and though she still carried Lesley’s letters in the clumsy pocketbook which self-consciously she held, guarding herself, against her foolishly large breasts (once I said to her, “What have you got there anyway?”), she no longer quoted directly from the letters, but instead gave long rambling resumes of what he had written. I got the impression that he must have been very lonely. Once she showed me a picture of Lesley in his Marine uniform. He looked startled, bewildered, like someone who had gotten lost while swimming.
When she spoke of her brother now she always prefaced his name with the adjective “poor.” “In Chicago I saw a movie with my parents,” she’d say. “Poor Lesley would have liked it. One thing about the service though, poor Lesley says they get all the latest pictures. Even before downtown.” Or, “Poor Lesley’s in Tokyo now. He says there’s a place he can get kosher food whenever he wants. He says there are lots of Japanese Jewish people who eat lox and rolls and they’ve got this delicatessen on the Ginza Strip. Poor Lesley says you have to take your shoes off when you go inside.” I got the idea that she used the word superstitiously, as though by openly insisting on Lesley’s helplessness nothing would come of it.
I even had a theory about the origin of that word. I think that sometime, on one of her holidays in Chicago, she and her mother and her father and her grandfather who lived with them must have sat down to dinner. The maid must have brought in the main dish. I like to think it was chicken. On its steaming platter, set down at the center of the table, the golden chicken, snug in its brown-potatoed insularity, luxurious as old gold against the thick white cloth, glowed like a household god in the awed silence. Someone, perhaps the grandfather, must have said, “Such chicken! Poor Lesley would have liked such chicken.”
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