The Centaur

by John Updike

  My father said, “In your considered opinion, then, as far as tonight goes, my goose is cooked?”

  Mr. Rhodes confessed, “It don’t sound good, from how you describe it.”

  “There’s a little rattle in the back,” I said, “like two cog wheels spinning and just brushing against each other.”

  Mr. Rhodes blinked at me and brushed back his forelock. “It might be something in the axle. I’d have to get it up on the rack and take apart the whole rear assembly. Do you live far?”

  “Way the hell down in Firetown,” my father said.

  Mr. Rhodes sighed. “Well, yes. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help.” A long scarlet Buick, its paint a swirling cosmos of reflections, nosed in from the street and honked its horn: the blast totally possessed the low concrete cavern and Mr. Rhodes’ attention was deflected from us.

  My father said hurriedly, “Don’t apologize, mister. You’ve told me what you think is the truth and that’s the greatest favor one man can do for another.” But outside the garage, again walking in the night, he said to me, “That poor devil didn’t know what he was talking about, Peter. I’ve been a bluffer all my life so I can spot another. He was what they call talking through your hat. I wonder how he got to be manager of an important place like that; I bet he doesn’t know himself. He acted just the way I feel half the time.”

  “Where are we going now?”

  “Back to the car.”

  “But it doesn’t go! You know that.”

  “I know it and yet I don’t. I have the feeling it’ll go now. It just needed a rest.”

  “It isn’t just the motor being cold, it’s something in the body!”

  “That’s what that man was trying to tell me but I can’t get it through my thick head.”

  “But it’s nearly ten o’clock. Shouldn’t you call Mother?”

  “What can she do? We’re on our own, kid. The devil take the hindmost.”

  “Well I know perfectly well if the car didn’t move an hour ago it won’t move now. And I’m freezing.”

  As we walked down Seventh, I hurrying and continually failing to close that gap of a step which was always between us, a drunk slipped out of a dark doorway and capered along beside us. For an instant I thought he was the hitchhiker, but this man was smaller and further gone in degeneracy. His hair was wild like the mane of a muddy lion and it stood straight out from his head like the rays of the sun. His clothes were preposterously tattered and he wore a frazzled old overcoat around his shoulders in the manner of a cape, so that its empty arms waved and bobbled about him as he pirouetted. He asked my father, “Where are you going with this boy?”

  My father obligingly slowed his walk so that the drunk, who had stumbled in skipping sideways, could keep pace with us.

  “I beg your pardon, mister,” he said. “I didn’t hear your question.”

  The drunk exercised an elaborate, pleased control over his intonation, like an actor marvelling at his own performance. “Oh ho ho,” he rumbled softly but distinctly. “You dirty, dirty man.” He waved his finger back and forth in front of his nose and peered at us roguishly through this windshield-wiper action. For all his raggedness on this bitter night there was much that was merry about him; his face was flat and hard and bright and his teeth were set in his grin like a row of small seeds.

  To me he said, “You go home, boy, home to your mother.”

  We had to stop or else bump into him. “This is my son,” my father said.

  The drunk turned from me to him so quickly all his clothes fluffed up like feathers. He seemed to be not so much dressed as shingled in rags, layer on layer of torn multi-textured scraps. His voice was like that, too, hoarse and broken and indefinitely soft. “How can you lie?” he said sadly to my father. “How can you lie about a thing so serious? Now let this boy go home to his mother.”

  “That’s where I’m trying to take him,” my father said. “But the damn car won’t start.”

  “He’s my father,” I said, hoping this would make the drunk go away. But it brought him closer to us. His face under the blue streetlight seemed splashed with purple. “Don’t lie for him,” he said with exquisite gentleness. “He’s not worth it. How much is he giving you? I don’t care how much it is, it’s never enough. When he gets a new pretty boy he’ll throw you out on the street like an old Trojan.”

  “Daddy, let’s go,” I said, frightened now, and chilled clear through. The night went in one side of me and came out the other and encountered no obstacle.

  My father began to push around him and the drunk lifted his hand and my father in answer lifted his own hand. This made the drunk take a back step and he nearly fell. “Knock me down,” the drunk said, smiling so broadly his cheeks gleamed. “Knock me down when I want to save your soul. Are you ready to die?” This made my father jerk still like a halted movie. The drunk, seeing his triumph, repeated, “Are you ready to die?”

  The drunk nimbly sidestepped to me and put his arm around my waist and gave me a hug. His breath was like the odor the seniors taking chemistry sometimes left in Room 107 before we came in for Thursday study hall—a complex stench both sulphurous and sweet. “Ah,” he told me, “you’re a good warm body. But you’re all skin and bone. Doesn’t the old bastard feed you? Hey, you,” he called to my father, “what sort of an old lech do you call yourself lifting these poor boys off the street with empty stomachs?”

  “I thought I was ready to die,” my father said, “but now I wonder if anybody ever is. I wonder now if a ninety-nine-year-old Chinaman with tuberculosis, gonorrhea, syphilis, and toothache is ready to die.”

  The drunk’s fingers began to gouge under my ribs and I jerked out of his grasp. “Daddy, let’s go.”

  “No, Peter,” my father said, “this gentleman is talking sense. Are you ready to die?” he asked the drunk. “What do you think the answer is?”

  Squinting, shoulders back, chest preening, the drunk with pigeon dignity stepped into my father’s tall shadow and, looking up, told him carefully, “I’ll be ready to die when you and everybody like you is locked up in jail and they throw away the key. You can’t even let these poor kids rest on a night like this.” He looked over at me under frowning eyebrows and said, “Shall we call the cops, kid? Let’s kill this old nance, huh?” To my father he said, “What about it, chief? How much is it worth to you not to have me call the cops and have you picked up with this flower?” He inflated his chest as if to shout, but the street dwindled northward toward infinity without upholding another visible soul—just the painted brick fronts with the little railed porches characteristic of Alton, the stone stoops now and then bearing an ornamented cement flower-pot, the leafless curbside trees alternating and in the end mixing with the telephone poles. Parked cars lined this street but few passed down it because it met a dead end at the Essick’s factory wall two blocks away. We stood beside the long low cement-block back of a brewery warehouse; its corrugated green doors had slammed tight shut and the memory of the clang seemed to make the air here hard. The drunk began to pluck at my father’s chest, rubbing his thumb and fingers after each pluck as if disposing of a louse or a piece of lint. “Ten dollars,” he said. “Ten dollars and my mouth is”—he pressed three blue fingers against his swollen violet lips and held them there as if testing how long he could hold his breath. At last he lifted them away, exhaled a huge feather of frozen vapor, smiled, and said, “So. Ten dollars buys me, lock, stock, and barrel.” He winked at me and asked, “Is that a bargain, kid, or not? What’s he paying you?”

  “He’s my father,” I insisted, frantic. My father was kneading his spotted hands together under the lamplight and the uprightness of his posture seemed a stiffness, as if he had been poleaxed and in the next instant would fall.

  “Five dollars,” the drunk quickly said to him, “five lousy dollars,” and without waiting for an answer he dropped to, “one. One little bitty dollar bill so I can get myself a drink and stop freezing to death. Come on, chief, give me a brea
k. I’ll even tell you a hotel where they don’t ask any questions.”

  “I know all about hotels,” my father said. “In the Depression I took a job as night clerk at the old Osiris, before they closed it down. The bedbugs got to be as big as the prostitutes so the customers couldn’t tell ’em apart. I guess the Osiris was before your time.”

  The drunk lost his grin. “I come from Easton originally,” he said. It occurred to me with a shock that he was much younger than my father; indeed he was virtually a boy like me.

  My father dug into his pocket and brought out some change and gave it to the young man. “I’d like to give you more, my friend, but I just don’t have it. This is my last thirty-five cents. I’m a public school teacher and our pay scale is way behind that of industry. I’ve enjoyed talking to you, though, and I’d like to shake your hand.” And he did. “You’ve clarified my thinking,” he told the drunk.

  My father turned and walked back the way we had come, and I hurried to follow. The things we had been trying to reach—the black car, the sandstone house, my distant and by now, surely, intensely worried mother—tugged like weights within my skin, which seemed stretched transparent by starlight and madness. Walking this way we met the wind that had arisen, and a glass mask of cold was clipped onto my face. Behind us, the drunk kept calling, like an eagle muffled in a storm, “You’re O. K.! You’re O. K.!”

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “To a hotel,” my father said. “That man brought me to my senses. We gotta get you into where it’s warm. You’re my pride and joy, kid; we gotta guard the silver. You need sleep.”

  “We must call Mother,” I said.

  “Right you are,” he said. “Right you are.” The repetition left me with the impression that he wouldn’t do it.

  We turned left into Weiser Street. The wealth of neon there made the air seem warmer. One place was grilling hot dogs in the window. Figures liquid in the light poured past, shoulders hunched, faces hid. But they were people and their existing at all exhilarated me, came to me as a blessing and a permission to live myself. My father turned into a narrow doorway I had never noticed. Inside, up six steps and through a blank double door, a surprisingly high open space contained a desk and an elevator cage and some massive stairs and a few frayed chairs all sunk in on themselves and creased. On the left a kind of screen of potted plants held voices and a systematic clink of glass on glass, like a flat bell ringing. There was an odor I had not smelled since, as a child, I would be sent on a Sunday evening to buy a paper pail of oysters at the place, half-restaurant, half-general store, called Mohnie’s. Mohnie was a great sluggish Dutchman in a buttoned black sweater and his place was a whitewashed stone house that had stood here along the pike when the town was called Tilden. A bell rang when you pushed open the door and rang again when it shut behind you. Glum counters of exotic candies and tobaccos ran along one wall and in the rest of the space square tables with oil-cloth tablecloths waited for supper customers. In the meantime a few old men sat in the chairs, and I had supposed that the smell of the place was something they brought in with them. There was chewing tobacco in it, and wrinkled shoe leather, and wood cured in dust, and the oysters themselves; carrying the slippery little pail home, its top cleverly folded like a napkin at Sunday dinner, was like stealing a section of Mohnie’s air; I used to feel that I was trailing behind me in the bluish evening air a faint brownish trail, a flavor of oysters that made the trees and houses of the pike subaqueous. Now here the smell was again, fresh.

  The clerk, a hunchback with papery skin and hands warped and made lump-knuckled by arthritis, put down his copy of Collier’s and listened, crinkled head cocked, as my father unfolded his wallet, elicited identification cards from it, and explained that he was George W. Caldwell, a teacher at Olinger High School, and that I was his son Peter, and that our car had broken down beside the Essick’s plant and our home was way the hell over in Firetown, and that we would like a room but did not have any money. A tall red wall stood in the forefront of my skull and at its base I prepared to lie down and weep.

  The hunchback waved my father’s cards away and said, “I know you. I have a niece, Gloria Davis, goes to you. She thinks the world of Mr. Caldwell.”

  “Gloria’s a hell of a nice girl,” my father said limply.

  “A little wild, her mother thinks.”

  “I never noticed that.”

  “A little too fond of the boys.”

  “She’s always been the perfect lady with me.”

  The other man turned and selected a key tagged with a great wooden disc. “I’ll give you a room up on the third floor so the noise from the bar won’t be a bother.”

  “I certainly appreciate this,” my father said. “Can I give you a check now?”

  “Why not wait till morning?” the little bent man asked, the dry skin of his face twinkling as he smiled. “I guess we’ll all still be here.” And he led us up a narrow stairway with a lightly twisted bannister whose varnished surface undulated under my hand like a cat ecstatic at being stroked. The stairs wound around the caged elevator shaft, and vistas of spottily carpeted halls seemed to open at every landing. We went down one hall and our footsteps rattled in the gaps between carpets. At the end of the hall, beside a radiator and a window overlooking Weiser Square, the clerk applied the key to a door and it opened. Here was our destination: all night in ignorance we had been winding toward this room, with its two beds, its one window, its two bureaus, its one naked overhead bulb. The clerk switched the light on. My father shook his hand and told him, “You’re a gentleman and a scholar. We were thirsty, and ye gave us drink.”

  The clerk gestured with a shiny crippled hand. “The bathroom’s behind that door,” he said. “I think there’s a clean glass in there.”

  “I mean, you’re a good Samaritan,” my father said. “This poor kid here is ready to drop.”

  “I’m not at all,” I said. Still irritated when the clerk had gone, I asked my father, “What’s the name of this awful place?”

  “The New Yorker,” my father said. “It’s a real old-time flea-bag, isn’t it?”

  Now I had to argue with him on the other side, this seemed so ungrateful. “Well he was awfully nice to let us in when we didn’t have any money.”

  “You never know who your real friends are,” he said. “I bet if that Davis bitch knew she did me a good turn she’d be screaming in her sleep.”

  “Why don’t we have any money?” I asked.

  “I’ve been asking myself that for fifty years. The worst of it is, when I write them a check it’ll bounce because I have twenty-two cents in the bank.”

  “When do you get paid? Isn’t this the middle of the month?”

  “The way I’m going,” my father said, “I never will get paid. The school board reads that report Zimmerman wrote they’ll be asking me for money.”

  “Oh who ever reads his reports?” I snapped, angry because I did not know whether or not to undress in front of him. I was shy with him about my spots, because the sight of them seemed to trouble him so. But then, he was my father, and I draped my coat over a rickety, wired-together chair and began to unbutton my red shirt. He turned and gripped the doorknob. “I gotta get on the move,” he said.

  “Where are you going now? Why can’t you stay still?”

  “I gotta call your mother and lock up the car. You go to sleep, Peter. We got you up too early this morning. I hate to do that, I’ve been trying to catch up on sleep since I was four years old. Can you go to sleep? Should I bring your books back from the car so you can do some homework?”

  “No.”

  He looked at me, and seemed on the verge of apology, confession, or a definite offer. There was a word—I did not know it but believed he did—that waited between us to be pronounced. But he only said, “I guess you can go to sleep. You don’t seem to have the jumps like I did when I was your age.” Tugging the door a touch impatiently, so that the half-retracted latch raked the wood, h
e went out.

  The walls of an empty room are mirrors that double and redouble our sense of ourselves. Alone, I felt highly excited, as if abruptly introduced into a company of the brilliant and famous and beautiful. I went to the room’s one window and overlooked the radiant tangle of Weiser Square. It was a web, a shuttle, a lake where carlights trickling from all quarters of the city dammed. For two blocks Weiser was the broadest street in the East; Conrad Weiser himself had set the surveyor’s sticks, planning in the eighteenth century a city of width, clarity, and ease. Now here headlights swam as if in the waters of a purple lake whose surface came to my sill. The shop-fronts and bar signs made green and red grass along the banks. The windows of Foy’s, Alton’s great department store, were square stars set in six rows; or like crackers made of two grains, the lower half of light yellow wheat and the upper half, where the tan shade was drawn, of barley or rye. Across the way, highest of all, the great neon owl by means of electric machinery winked and unwinked as a wing regularly brought to its beak, in a motion of three successive flashes, an incandescent pretzel. Beneath its feet, polychrome letters alternately proclaimed:

  OWL PRETZELS

  “None Better”

  OWL PRETZELS

  “None Better”

  This sign and the lesser signs—an arrow, a trumpet, a peanut, a tulip—seemed to possess reflections in mid-air, to shimmer on the transparent plane that extended over the square at the height of my hotel room. Cars, stoplights, twinkling shadows that were people, all merged for me in a visual liquor whose fumes were the future. City. This was city: the room I stood alone in vibrated on its paper walls with the haloes of advertisement. Well back from the window, seeing but unseen, I continued to undress, and the patches of scabbed skin I touched seemed the coarsely mottled outer petals of a delicate, delicious, silvery vegetable-heart I was peeling toward. I stood in my underpants, on the edge of a swim; reeds and mud took the print of my bare feet; Alton seemed herself already bathing in the lake of the night. The windowpane’s imperfections rippled the wet lights. A virginal sense of the forbidden welled over me like a wind and I discovered myself a unicorn.