Tours of the Black Clock

by Erickson, Steve;

  The house goes up so fast I’m barely out the door in time. A white and blue, sound and certain light.

  In the light of the fire and the light of the moon Alice just lies on the ground. Philip still writhes where he fell.

  They’ve never seen such a light.

  30

  SHE ISN’T THERE WHEN I get back for her. Maybe she didn’t hear me when I told her I’d be back. But she isn’t there at any rate. None of the Indians is there. Indians that have been living here longer than I’ve been alive have up and left everything, all the huts deserted. The pyre of Jainlight rises like Babel in the north. In the dead of morning the shouts of the whole countryside to the sight of it can be heard. The shouts and laughter, the applause to God.

  God had nothing to do with it.

  I walk on, the moonlight before me turned dappled by the new clouds. I leave the valley. I’m ashamed that I’ve succumbed to the monstrous nature of a monstrous body. I would like to leave that nature in the valley behind me. If I could leave my body with it, I would. Eight miles out of Pittsburgh I catch a train going east.

  31

  I’M SITTING IN THIS boxcar with four other guys there in the dark. We’re not there very long because in the station at Pittsburgh men hired by the railroad go through all the cars and clear out the bums and hobos and vagabonds, which in 1933 must be about half the people in America. So as we’re coming into Pittsburgh we have to jump from the train, and we can’t wait until the train slows too much because guys with clubs will be right there on the outskirts looking for us. The trick is to get off the train when it’s still far enough outside the city, then make our way to the other side of the city to catch the train coming out. This is assuming one doesn’t wish to stay in Pittsburgh. I don’t wish to stay in Pittsburgh. There’s this other place I’m going and it’s called New York City.

  32

  IT TAKES ME ALL day to get to the other side of Pittsburgh and wait with some other guys, hunkering down in the brush waiting for the train heading to Harrisburg, where I’ll have to do this all over again. After Harrisburg I may be able to jump an express to Scranton, and after that another express that cuts across the top of New Jersey to my final destination. So about eight o’clock the train to Harrisburg comes by and about a dozen of us run for it like cats, desperate to catch it. The train’s fast. I set my sights on a handle at the end of one of the cars and push my legs to their limits, it’s all I can do to catch it in the dark. When I pull myself onto the side of the train the wind’s tearing through me and I’m breathing the cold of the night into me so as to freeze my heart. I look back over my shoulder and there’s still eight guys on the ground far behind us, eight who ran like I did but didn’t have the legs to make it. I can see their dark forms in the fields watching me go. For about ten minutes I settle into a nook between cars and get my strength back. Then I have to crawl on top of the car and make my way like a spider, trying to get to what looks like an open box three or four cars down. I’m six-foot-four and two hundred thirty pounds and one good wind would blow me to Ohio.

  In the boxcars are three other guys. They’re not among the ones who were waiting with my group in the brush outside Pittsburgh. It’s taken me twenty-four hours to learn that camaraderie among the dispossessed is the sort of nice idea that sixteen-year-olds believe in. Two days ago I was sixteen years old and I would have believed it too, but today I’ve killed my halfbrother with my own hands. I’ve studied in the college of mayhem and graduated when it had nothing left to teach me. These guys in boxcars, there are good ones and bad ones and no formula for figuring out which is which. Who knows what I have on me that one of these assholes wouldn’t slit my throat for as soon as I fall asleep? My belt buckle, my shoes. My coat. One of them maybe has an attraction to one of my ears, or one of my fingers. I doze a bit and sure enough, I wake to some guy hovering over me with a blade. He’s been on the other side of the car watching me in the dark, he doesn’t see whether I’m big or little or what, slouched here against the wall as I am. He just sees I look like a kid, so here he is breathing in my face. I have his face in my grip quicker than he can consider his love of living. “The problem is,” I explain to him in the dark, “you cut off one of my fingers, you got to take the other nine. I mean, you just have to. And if you take the other nine, it’s just imperative you take the hands. And you take the hands—” and he’s blinking at me now in utter black consternation, “—it’s simply a serious mistake not to take the stumps. And when does it end then?” I’ve got his face so hard in my grip he can’t answer, assuming he could think of one. “You just don’t know the havoc, buddy. My hands are just filled with it these days.” I push my body from the floor of the boxcar, catching my balance from the movement of the train, still holding onto him the whole time. His feet are dangling in the air for a moment and then I shotput him through the open door, and I and the other two guys can hear his scream in the night at least three or four seconds. Yeah, at least that. I don’t know that it actually kills him though. On the next train outside Harrisburg I try to let people know what they’re dealing with from the start, and I’ve drained my heart of havoc by the time we reach Manhattan, where my heart will need something stronger.

  33

  MY FIRST NIGHT IN New York I spend on the streets huddled with a whole colony of men like me around a garbage can that burns in the middle of a block of West 34th over around Eighth Avenue. It isn’t until daylight that I see the city’s edifices black and wet like the watermark of a tide that rolled through in our sleep. At dawn the colony scatters a bit. I hunt down a roll of bread or a cup of soup off a line. Most of the day I’m hungry because I’m still learning everything, how you scout the lines early and maybe wait the whole night so you’ll be far enough up front to get something the next morning. Then you wait the whole day for a bed in a flophouse. I hear about a pretty good one down around the Village, where the floors are clean and there’s heat most of the night. It takes me a while to figure out where the Village is, though.

  Then you learn where the trucks roll in at six in the morning and nab guys for work, guys who look like they’re just desperate enough to work for almost nothing but not so broken they don’t have the spirit for working at all. The pickup points change from week to week or maybe even day to day depending how fast the word gets out and how big the crowds become. A crowd of men angry to work, that’s just plain unruly. But the whole city’s unruly as far as I can tell, forty-eight hours of it tell me that. You keep looking around for who’s in fucking charge, and there’s just nobody like that at all. The cops just ride their horses back and forth through the park, up and down Fifth Avenue. Who the hell’s angry on Fifth Avenue, that’s what I want to know. Guys in black cars with machine guns roar by, laughing. All night is the sharp splash of guns, you can stand in the middle of Broadway and see their fire blossom like wild sunflowers in the dark. Roosevelt and LaGuardia are heroes but only in the way God’s a hero: you know they’re up there somewhere but you never figure they’re ever actually going to do anything that has anything to do with a life as little as yours. Instead every street roils and churns with union men shouting at you from corners and telegram boys pouring out of Grand Central, running up and down 42nd calling out the names of people you’ll never see, bringing wires with no words dated in years you can’t remember, never delivering them to anyone until by the end of the day the gutters are filled with them, blank Western Union messages discarded by wandering lost telegram boys who wind up drinking beer in Coney Island. Those of us who don’t get picked out for work in the mornings just hang around the streets watching the telegram boys or listening to the union guys or telling a joke to someone who just told it to us five minutes before, or sometimes someone will pull a radio out of the scrapheap somewhere and jimmy it so we can listen to the Yankees. When the weather gets warmer it isn’t as bad. But you’re tired of the street and the snarl of your stomach, and every day you have a choice between waiting all night for the soup or a jo
b in the morning or all day for a bed that night in a flophouse, in which case if you’re sleeping in the flophouse you’re obviously not in line for the job or the soup. You make these choices all the time between what you feel the worst, hunger or fatigue or enough desperation to gamble on tomorrow holding some future.

  34

  I’M LIVING LIKE THIS a week and a half or so, it’s hard to tell, when I start getting work. Let’s say that in a crowd I stand out. The trucks pull in and the foremen are looking for big guys who can do some serious labor, and I’m made to order. For another three weeks I’m loading freezers in the packing companies downtown, where every thirty minutes they have to let you break because the cold robs your arms and fingers of feeling. This work goes from seven in the morning until nine at night. I can afford to buy food in a store and I could afford to buy a bed in a flophouse except all the beds are taken by the time I get off. I have the bright idea of just reserving a bed for a week with the money I’m saving but somehow it doesn’t seem right, having a job and a meal and a bed all at once. Then the packing company lays a bunch of us off. I get another job delivering packages in the garment district, this lasts about eight days when the customers start complaining that I always look like someone who’s come to put the rub on them.

  So I’m back hanging around the streets, this time for something like a month. The federal projects pass me over as someone who can get a job somewhere else because I’m big, and the foremen in the trucks start looking right through me when they’re picking their crews in the morning. It’s funny. The only thing I can think of is that someone my size just can’t be counted on to submit to everything there is to be submitted to these days, or maybe it’s that these days anything big is immediately on the wrong side of things, at least down here in the street. I guess I understand it. It’s like this city itself that’s hovering over you everywhere you go and anytime you go there, but only the part of it that exists at eyelevel below the watermark is the part of the city that’s on your side. The rest of it’s your enemy, or dead to you. Sometimes I get the urge to stand still and look up at this huge city hovering for what seems miles above me, and wonder who the hell is really up there on all those floors far away behind windows most of us will never see through. I can’t imagine the buildings anything but empty up there, or maybe a stray soul wandering room to room wondering where everyone else went. The whole top of the city isn’t even here. It isn’t even now. It’s another city from years ago, the image of its life only now reaching us, the light of its extinction having taken place sometime since, and which we can only now wait to witness. Maybe that’s the way the guys in trucks see me, as a bigness that they know has died even though the vision of its death is still busy traveling up through time to the moment all of us, including me, can see it. I say bullshit. I say they’ve got a long fucking time to wait.

  35

  NOW IT’S THE SPRING of 1934. And one day one of those things happens, one of those small things that when it happens no one could possibly know will be important. I’m standing around a newsstand up at 49th and Broadway, a number of us are there trying to bum cigarettes off the customers who just bought some. The man who runs the stand is Jerry. He isn’t happy about us being around and he’ll come out sometimes and shoo us like cats, and the boys just stand there with their hands in their pockets. I’m less interested in the cigarettes than the newspapers and magazines, but if I so much as touch one, Jerry goes berserk. So I stand reading the front page of the papers in the racks, actually I only get to read the top halves and am left to wonder at the bottom. The magazines I can only stare at, with these black and red and blue covers, amazing women in shredded clothes and gangsters whose faces are always shadowed with someone else’s dying. I sometimes actually consider the luxury of buying one of these magazines for a dime or fifteen cents or whatever it’s going for. But I never do. I just stand around with the others watching life there on the corner of 49th and Broadway, and most of it is life that’s not so unlike me, but sometimes it’s the life of theater people going by in taxis, actresses on their way to rehearsals in the day and patrons on their way to the shows at night, and financiers and office workers and men in suits in black cars.

  The small thing that happens is one day someone comes running up to Jerry with news that his wife has had a stroke and been taken to the hospital. Jerry’s frantic. “I’ll watch things for you if you want, Jerry,” I say, and maybe if he’d been thinking straight he’d have just closed up the stand and I’d have just wandered off to another corner, and the rest of my life would have been different, and the world and the Twentieth Century would have been different. But he isn’t thinking straight and these are times when closing up work just for a day constitutes a sacrifice, and so my proposal that seemed nuts ten seconds ago is quickly evolving into a hopeful longshot. He breathes deeply and runs back into the stand and collects most of the money, leaves me some change and gives me a nod. Then he just runs off to his wife in the hospital without a word about when he’ll be back or what to do if he doesn’t come back. Maybe he’s thinking it doesn’t matter, the odds are I’m going to steal him blind anyway, and if he comes back later and anything of his life is still salvageable at all, he’ll be lucky. As it happens he’ll be luckier than even that. His wife will pull through and I don’t have any plans at all to steal him blind, I don’t even care much what he pays me, I just want to read one of those magazines and anything behind the top half of the first page of a newspaper, like this Philly paper I’m reading that has this story back around page eleven about how in Pennsylvania they’re looking for this crazed kid who killed one brother, crippled the other, paralyzed the father, terrorized the mother and burned down the house. He sounds like one insane son of a bitch to me. Then I get to the part where they say his name and it’s only then it occurs to me who they’re talking about.

  36

  I’M WORKING AT THE stand three days, never leaving but sleeping behind the counter, before Jerry comes back. He couldn’t be more amazed to find me and the money still there. “How’s the wife,” I say, and he answers she’s doing better but he’s going to have to stay with her awhile. “So you want this job for a time?” he asks and I say all right. I have the job a couple of weeks and I don’t mind it. Mostly I read the magazines.

  One of the customers who rolls by in his Packard every day is John “Doggie” Hanks, who runs a big part of uptown Manhattan all the way to Harlem. He was a gangster up until a year ago when Prohibition ended and gangsters were either legalized out of business or frozen into legitimacy. Hanks is legitimate now more or less, or at least as legitimate as he can stand to be. He wears a nice suit and sits in the back seat of the car while someone else drives. In his early forties he has curly blond hair and a face shaved as smooth as a swimmer’s legs except for the pockmarks around his temples. His driver has hair that stands up like a brush and a nose that points like a compass, except his brain tilts in the south direction as far as I can tell. “What happened to Jerry?” Hanks asks the first day, and I tell him his wife’s sick. He gives me some money for her. “I hear Jerry didn’t get it,” he says, “and I’ll come looking for you. You don’t look so difficult to locate either.” I give the money to Jerry the next time he comes by. As with a lot of people, Jerry’s feelings about someone like Doggie Hanks tend to be a bit confused. He’s too awestruck and terrified to be purely grateful. “You tell Mr. Hanks,” he instructs me very carefully, “that I say thank you very, very much. You got that?”

  “Sure,” I answer.

  “Thank you very, very—”

  “All right, all right.” It’s disgusting. Hanks comes by later that day. “Jerry says to tell you ‘Thank you very, very much.’”

  “OK,” he says, taking his paper through the car window.

  “You got the correct tone of that?” I ask. “‘Very, very much.’ Solicitous as hell.”

  “‘Solicitous’?” Hanks looks at his driver. “Billy, the kid says ‘solicitous.’”
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  “Yes sir, Mr. Hanks,” says the driver with the beak.

  “What do you think of it,” says Hanks.

  “It’s somethin’ all right,” Billy says tersely.

  Hanks laughs. He points at Billy and says to me, “Billy says it’s somethin’. He’s got a way with words just like you.” He stops laughing after a bit. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty,” I say.

  “Ha ha,” says Hanks. He says to Billy, “He’s got a way with numbers too, huh? Eighteen maybe.” He waves, still laughing, and they drive off. Every day after that, when he comes to get his paper in the backseat of his car, he says to me, “So how about a ten dollar word today,” and I give him one off the top of my head. This goes on for a week and a half. Sometimes he’ll say, “How old are we today?” and I get a little tired of it. “Today I’m fucking retirement age, Mr. Hanks,” I say, “today I’m moving to Florida to live with the grandkids.” Hanks loves it. “Hear that, Billy?” he laughs, and Billy says, “Punk’s got a mouth if you ask me, Mr. Hanks.” Hanks just laughs more. “Billy’s not too happy with you,” he explains, “I’d never let him smartass me like that.” Finally one day Hanks makes his offer. It’s the middle of the afternoon and he’s just bought some cigars. “I have a club on the upper west side,” he tells me. He gives me a card that reads Top Dog, and there’s an address. “I can use a doorman who’s big as a damn wall and smarter than he looks. You come tonight around seven if you want it. Needless to say, you’re twenty-one if you take it. It’s a step up from peddling cigars, huh?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, just gives me a small salute as though to say it’s understood I’ll be there, and I have half a mind not to show up because of it. But that’s silly. I pick a guy out from among the drifters hanging around the corner like I was doing not too long ago and give him my job; today I’m retirement age, like I said. I roll up an issue of the pulp I’m reading called Savage Nights and stuff it in my coat pocket.