by Trevanian
I was standing at the pump when an old-fashioned touring car came weaving down the road, its horn blaring. It narrowly missed the old dog, jumped the curb, skidded to a stop, and out piled two reeling sailors and a heavily made-up woman who couldn’t stop giggling because she had lost one of her shoes somewhere. They were celebrating the unconditional surrender of Japan. It was V-J Day! The war was over!
The next morning Mother appeared in her bright blue Bette Davis suit with the flopping bell-bottom slacks and set off down the dirt road in search of work. The only job she could find was in a cannery, cutting apricots for twelve cents a lug. At first, she could do only two lugs an hour, but by the time the apricots ran out, she had worked her way up to four, so a twelve-hour day of cutting apricots at full speed brought in five dollars and seventy-five cents. Experienced Mexican women could make twice that. In her effort to rush Mother repeatedly nicked her thumbs with the hooked, razor-sharp ’cot knife until they stung with the acid juice and throbbed so much she had to hold them up above her head to get some relief, so it was hard for her to sleep.
We ate lots of apricots during those first days, with effects on our bowels that one might imagine.
Two weeks later, the apricot harvest was over and Mother lost her job at the cannery. She hitchhiked to towns as distant as Haywood, but there was no work to be had anywhere and, because we had not lived long enough in California to merit public assistance, there was nothing anyone could do for us. What was left of our three hundred dollars would last only a few weeks. We tried to borrow money on the shack and discovered that it was worthless now that the war industry had collapsed and with it the demand for local housing.
I remembered Ben once saying, “Sometimes you almost feel thankful for a little bad luck, because if it wasn’t for bad luck, you wouldn’t have any luck at all.”
One hot, airless evening I was sitting on the front step of the shack. Out over the hills a condor soared, its bald head low between narrow shoulder blades, the tips of its wings fingering the air for up-drafts, its eyes relentlessly scanning for the crippled and the dead. And I suddenly came to the chilling realization that we were poor people. Through all the hard years on Pearl Street I had never thought of us as poor people. We had little money, sure, and we were temporarily down on our luck, but we weren’t poor people, like destitute characters in Dickens, or the wretched of Les Misrables. But now we were poor, really poor, because this rural poverty was heavier and more hopeless than poverty in a city with museums and libraries and streets that might lead to a bit of good luck. I now felt sure that we would always be poor, and there was no way out.
In response to Mother’s crisp, angry letters, Ben had written to say that he had applied for a hardship discharge from the army. As soon as it came through, he would come to Mission San Jos. But when would that be? How could we survive until he got there, and what could I do to help? Far from contributing to Mother and Anne-Marie’s maintenance, I was just another mouth to feed, so I decided to follow the Mexican crop-pickers north and send every cent I could spare back to Mother. I promised her I would write often and come home as soon as the apple harvest was over, but down deep I knew that my decision to hit the road had as much to do with escape as with filial self-sacrifice.
Mother must have known it too because, when my last morning in Mission San Jos came, she didn’t say good-bye. She just sat at the kitchen table staring into her coffee cup. I took the packet of sandwiches she had made for me and bent over to kiss her hair. She didn’t look up. I patted her shoulder and left.
After tying off my bindle I stood on the front step of the shack and looked out at the sunburnt hills. I had told myself that I would follow the crops only until Ben came back from Alaska and we could pick up our lives again. But in fact something subtle but irremediable was already happening: the bonds were falling away; the epiphany I had experienced in the golden lamplight beneath the pewter clouds of Snyders Corners was nearing fulfillment. I knew with a sur-logical certitude that I soon would be adrift, a drifter and free. I closed my eyes and a wave of bone-deep relief flowed over me.
Anne-Marie came with me down the dirt track to the main road. We walked side by side, our heads down, our shoes kicking up little dust puffs.
“I told you,” she said without looking at me.
“Told me what?”
“I said you’d go away one of these days, and I’d be left behind.”
“I’m not leaving you behind. I’ll be back in no time.”
She stopped and turned to me. She searched my eyes gravely. Then she smiled and shook her head.
I squeezed her hand and walked on. As I crested the hill I looked back, but Anne-Marie was no longer there.
And there’s the story’s natural closing image...the boy going down a patched tar road, walking out of childhood, into the rest of his life. But our lives are continuous and interwoven, and narrative fabric doesn’t tear neatly; there are threads to tie off, curiosities to satisfy.
After Ben got mustered out, he and Mother tried to make a go of things in Mission San Jos, but in the end they had to let the land go for taxes. The ‘ruptured duck’ lapel pin that showed he was an ex-serviceman was of no use in getting work. For about two years, while defense factories re-tooled, the job market was flooded by people thrown out of work at the end of the war. In addition, there were hundreds of thousands of returning veterans chasing the handful of jobs. The luckiest of these used their GI Bill loans for university or for technical training, and they emerged with qualifications for good jobs in the great consumer boom soon to begin. But Ben couldn’t take off two or three years to go to college. He had Mother and Anne-Marie to care for, and it wasn’t long before they had two sons of their own as well.
Mother never forgave Ben for squandering their money on that useless shack and scuttling her dream of success in Wyoming, any more than she forgave him for not being my smooth-talking, slick-dressing father. Despite his quick intelligence, his jack-of-all-trades skills and his willingness to work long and hard, Ben never managed to get ahead in life; in fact, he never quite managed to catch up. He chased scheme after scheme but he failed each time for lack of planning and capital, so they had to begin again at the bottom of the labor ladder until they managed to claw their way back out of debt and save up enough to launch themselves into another venture. By the time they ended up with a little subsistence farm on Puget Sound, their dreams had soured into bitterness, and communication had been replaced by the relentless guerrilla sniping of mutual recrimination.
One night, after years of adhering to his self-imposed rule of abstinence, Ben brought Mother to a New Year’s Eve party with neighbors where, to be sociable, he drank two hot toddies. Just before dawn, he committed suicide. He was not yet fifty.69
My mother always viewed Ben’s death as a desertion. She felt that he had run out on her, just as her first husband had...and her eldest son.
I met my father only once, twenty-four years after that day the three of us sat on the stoop and waited for him to come home bearing a green cake. We spent about three hours together in a grim tenement in South Philadelphia. He sat at a kitchen table breathing through a mask attached to an oxygen cylinder. He told me about his time with the carnivals, trying to impress me with the colorful and audacious scams he had run over the years. I’ll never know how he got my address, but I had received a letter from him saying that he’d been released from prison early on compassionate grounds (he was dying of emphysema) and he wanted to see me before he went ‘to work the great tip up yonder’. Curiosity had brought me across the United States on an Indian motorcycle manufactured in the year of my birth to meet this man whose absence had shaped my childhood. That, and the promise that if I came he would tell me tales the likes of which I’d never heard. As it turned out, I had heard most of his stories of scam and hustle because by then I had done a couple of seasons with the carnivals myself, and I knew the ways of
a con with his mark. But some of his yarns had bitter, ironic twists, and there were details of scams and stings I wasn’t familiar with, even a few old-fashioned carnie terms I didn’t know. He hadn’t anticipated that I might have been ‘with it’ myself, and he both resented this and was put off pace by it, as though I were trumping his ace by not being totally unacquainted with the world of con. It immediately became important to him to show me that he was the real carnie in this family and that, while I may have drifted with the shows for a couple of seasons, I was a mere ‘forty-miler’...a mark at heart. After all, if this dying old wreck wasn’t a better con man than the son he had abandoned, then what was he, for Christ’s sake?
With considerable relish, he described a scam he had run during the war when, impersonating a federal officer, he had confiscated illegal slot machines in peaville towns in Colorado and New Mexico, then he would con the owner of the bar into loading the slot machine into his rented car as ‘confiscated evidence’. (For the true con, inflicting a last humiliation on the mark, like making him grunt his slot machine into your car, is the cherry on the top of a genuinely satisfying scam...the last proof that the mark and the con don’t descend from a common primates ancestor. In carnie parlance, this final humiliation is termed ‘making the mark take his shoe off’.) Ray then drove out into the desert and broke the slot machine open with a sledge hammer...ideally one borrowed from the mark. The upshot of this scam was that Ray ended up with both the Feds and the Mob looking for him. And for what? For a little loose change and the thrill of the sting.
“In the end, I turned myself in to the Feds to avoid the Mob!” He laughed so hard that he coughed pink phlegm into a wad of toilet paper and had to spend a couple of minutes sucking at his oxygen. When he could speak again, he looked across the table at me, his eyes bloodshot and his lips blue. “You know something, kid? I’ve spent more than half of my adult life inside. All in short two- or three-year shots.”
“If you were such a scam maven, how come you did so much time?”
“The way I see it is this. The day I was born Malicious Fate condemned me to a life sentence. But my guardian angel had connections downtown, and she arranged that I do my time on the installment plan...five years down and a couple of years each decade.” He grinned. When I didn’t respond to this rehearsed bit of bitter wit, he became suddenly serious.
“Look here, kid. I asked you to come because I thought maybe you’d want to hear my side of things.”
“In fact, Ray, I don’t.”
“You don’t want to hear what I’ve got to say?”
I opened my hands in a gesture of ‘whatever’.
“I’m going to be up front with you, kid. I’m a drinker. That’s always been my problem. Unfortunately booze and stings don’t mix. I’d have some mark all sewn up, and I’d take a drink or two to celebrate, and then I’d get the urge to make the mark look foolish. Tease and bait him. Make him do what they call in the business...”
“...take his shoe off,” I said.
“Oh...you know about that, eh? Well, I’d play the mark, just to see how far I could rub it in without tipping him off. And inevitably the booze would make me push it just a little bit too close to the edge, and the next thing you know, I’m eating rice and grease in some Dixie can. Some people never learn. They say that life is the great teacher, but that’s crap. No really good teacher would give you the test before she’d taught the lesson.” Even while he was chuckling at this, he was examining me, hefting the moment, ready to make his sting. The tail end of his laugh blended into “...so, tell me, kid. Do you ever think about that Saint Patrick’s Day party I threw for you and your sister in Albany?”
“Is that what you remember? Throwing a party for us?”
“I spent hours stringing up green paper through those goddamned water pipes. And there were green plates and napkins and green pop and a green cake.”
“There was no green cake.”
“Sure there was! I went out to buy one. I remember like it was yesterday.”
“You went out to buy a cake, but you never came back. The party never happened.”
“What are you saying? I remember it! I can see you kids eating the cake and drinking the pop.”
“Some people get very good at conning themselves.”
“Tell me about it. A con’s got to be able to con himself, or he’ll never amount to anything. The only way to build up the confidence and sincerity you need to sell some mark the Brooklyn Bridge is to believe deep in your heart that you own it. Really own it. Know what I mean, kid?”
“I really hate this ‘kid’ business.”
“Do you?”
“H’m.”
“Sorry. You’re absolutely sure there was no party?”
I told him I was absolutely sure.
He digested this, then shrugged and said, “I’ll be damned. Ah, well, you survived it. You didn’t turn out so bad. Big motorcycle. Been to university. When I think of what I could have done with a university degree.”
“Why didn’t you award yourself one?”
“Matter of fact, I did. A couple of times I was professor this or doctor that.” He looked at me sidewards, then his voice shifted to a huskier, more sincere timbre. “Jesus, kid, you’re right. There was no Saint Patrick’s Day party. No green cake. Funny how you can wish something had happened so much that you actually stash it into your memory. I went out that morning meaning to get a green cake, but the first thing you know, there I was, walking along...marks on the street corner...action in the bars...and I was free, white and stepping out. I wanted to go back to that cheap apartment, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t do it, kid. I loved your mother. I really did. I love her to this day. She was a great gal. Full of life, and a heart as big as all outdoors. Did you ever see her dance? She was what you call life-embracing. That was what she was, life-embracing. And I loved you kids, too. I mean, I didn’t really know you kids, but I loved the idea of you. My own kids. But...some men have just got to be free, kid. Know what I mean?”
I didn’t answer. He was still looking for the right moment to run whatever graft he had in mind.
He gave me a couple more stories of his experiences on the hustle, one of which I had heard half a dozen times while I was with the shows, each story-teller claiming to have been there when it happened. (For the old carnies among my readers, it was the tale of Jimmy Straights, the bucket-game, and the Ferris wheel.)
Then, with just a hint of quiver beneath a brave, stiff-upper-lip tone, he said, “I guess you’re surprised to see how low I’ve fallen. Living in a rat hole like this. Tied to this goddamned air bottle.”
I didn’t answer. Here it came.
“Well, this is not the lowest a man can fall. There’s lower. A lot lower.”
“Is that right, Ray?”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, a man can fall so low that he tries to hit up his kid...his own kid that he hasn’t seen since he was a baby...for a couple of bucks to buy a bottle of cheap hooch. Now that’s low.”
“It’s pretty low all right.”
“But that’s how low I’ve fallen, because I’m sitting here and I’m looking you in the eyes and I’m asking you to leave a little something on the table so your old man can get drunk tonight and forget that he’s dying, forget that his lungs aren’t worth a damn and that one of these days soon, he’ll just stop breathing and never wake up.”
I nodded. It was a potent shot, aimed as far below the belt as he could reach. How could anyone turn down a dying drunk’s last request? Turn down the man who gave you the gift of life? And this really didn’t have anything to do with the money. It was all about proving to himself, and to me, that he was the real carnie, and I was just another mark.
“Well,” I said, getting up with a grunt. “I guess I’d better be going. I don’t want to be in this neighborhood after dark.”
He looked at me o
ut of the corners of his eyes. Then he chuckled. “You’re tough, kid. I got to hand it to you, you are really tough. All bone and gristle where other people got heart.”
I almost said something corny, like: I learned from a master.
“Yeah,” he went on. “Look at you! Young, smart, tough and on your way to the big party I just got home from. Have fun, kid. Life’s a gas.”
I nodded and left.
I was down on the street, checking my mill over to make sure the kids I’d found standing around it hadn’t screwed anything up, when my father appeared at the front door of his tenement, gasping and wheezing from being disconnected from his oxygen. He tried to call out to me, but the effort made him gag and cough, so I walked over to him.
“What?”
“I...ah...just...” Clutching the door frame, he swallowed and blinked. “I just wanted to say that...” His voice clogged up. He raised some phlegm and spat. “I just realized that I never took you to a ball game, kid. Can you believe it? I never took my own son to a ball game!”
I looked at him levelly for a long moment, then I said, “You’re really good. You play cards that most people don’t even have in their deck.”
He grinned. “So who’s the real con here, kid? Tell me.”
“You, Ray. You’re the real con.”
He nodded. “I’ll see you in hell, kid.” He winked and turned back into the building.
I rode out of Philadelphia. Early the next morning, I rolled in for coffee at What Cheer, Iowa, a one-dog town whose name had snagged my eye each time I passed it as I drifted back and forth across America. Sitting over a mug of thin hot coffee in an archetypal mid-American diner with its obligatory sprinkling of retired farmers wearing caps that advertised farm machinery, I jotted down a few swatches of dialogue for a tale about a man meeting his carnie father after many years, and the old man trying to touch him for a few bucks, just to prove that he was the better con.