All Fall Down

by James Leo Herlihy

  Annabel said, “Well, I’m so glad Berry-berry doesn’t have those awful stumpy-looking hands that plumbers always seem to have.” She took hold of his hand and said, “Look at this, perfectly beautiful, an octave-and-four at least. Wouldn’t any piano player give his right hand—I mean . . .”

  Ralph said, “Well, maybe he wouldn’t go that far.” Then he and Echo laughed like Faust.

  But I was watching Berry-berry all the while. At first when Annabel took his hand, he got all tense. You could see it in his face. And then it was like he was telling himself not to spoil everything. “Come on, Berry-berry, don’t be such a selfish slob all your life.” I could almost hear him talking to himself. “To hell with how you feel for a change, make these people happy.” Then he kind of relaxed.

  It was plain that Annabel had something like that going on inside of her, too. But I don’t know what exactly. I can’t even guess. Women are cagey.

  The applesauce made a big hit with everybody. So Berry-berry got to talking about his orchard, and how he could get all the apples he wanted, just like these. He talked like he was not a plumber but a farmer, and proud of his crop. He talked so much about his apples that I almost left the table. I wanted to go hide out in the garage and cry for a while. Not that I was sad or anything. But I just stayed there at the table and thought about what big liars we all are, and in a way I hoped that none of us would ever tell each other the truth. It’s a lot better sometimes to just sit around the table till ten o’clock at night, with everybody lying his ass off. What the hell difference does a few little secrets make? I mean will the earth cave in or something?

  Because take right now for instance. I’m sitting up here in bed and if I want to I can write all night. Which I may do. I’ve got to get Berry-berry’s travels in here. But what I mean is, here I am in bed, and all these scads of other people are right here in the same house, all of them in their beds. And we’re all really crazy about each other. So just say that something terrible happened to me in the middle of the night. A nightmare or something. I don’t know what exactly. But terrible things do happen to people in the middle of the night. Then all I’d have to do is holler, and all these people would get into their bathrobes and come flying in here to help me out. And if it was them that hollered, I’d do the same. But I wonder what the hell I’d do if any of them died??????

  They won’t.

  And don’t get hysterical in the question-mark department.

  Now on to Berry-berry’s fantastic two years . . .

  Now it’s Sunday morning and I just woke up with this tremendous hangover from smoking. I counted twenty-two butts and it took me nineteen pages to get Berry-berry up-to-date, so I’m averaging a butt a page. Writing all that stuff down got me nervous, and I couldn’t sleep for a long time. I got to thinking about how all that time I was at the White Tower frying hamburgers to save up money to go traveling with Berry-berry, he was running all over hell beating up these women so they wouldn’t get any fancy ideas about having babies, etc. Which is not the way he explained it at all, but that’s the screwy way my mind was working in the middle of the night. I just don’t happen to have a lot of experience with prostitutes. Like I always thought they had false eyelashes and purple silk stockings, and squandered all their money putting their little brothers through school and paying hospital bills for old ladies that eat in cafeterias and all that. Which shows how naïve I used to be, because the fact is most of them are half nutty and too lazy to put on their shoes, and go around pestering some poor bastard like Berry-berry to gig them with knives and stuff. But that doesn’t sound exactly right either. Actually, I’m still a little hazy on this whole subject.

  So I went to sleep and had this crummy dream about Shirley and her little brother, Willy. They were both little children in the dream, and they were sitting in a candied-apple tree, way up on a high branch, singing songs and fooling around and having a high old time in general, like kids do—when all of a sudden a certain person came along and he started to climb up the tree. This is a really crummy dream. I don’t even know why I bother to write it down. Anyway, this stranger had a real wild look in his eye and you could tell he was the kind of a creep that absolutely despises all little kids. So Shirley got scared, and Willy started to cry. But this person climbed right on up anyway and started to shake this high branch for all he was worth. On purpose, too. I mean it wasn’t any accident. And then Willy fell out of the tree and got killed. The point is that this sinister person in the dream was quite a bit like—in some ways, only not really too much—I’d say he just reminded me of some people I’ve known casually in the past, but nobody in particular.

  It really makes me feel like a turd to put all these crummy things down. But lately I get this crazy feeling when I look at an empty page. It’s like the face of a blind man who doesn’t even have any eyes. And if I don’t fill it up with this stuff, the poor bastard will never be able to see at all, as long as he lives.

  Which doesn’t exactly lighten my worries. Because I wonder if people that have such thoughts don’t eventually just flip altogether?

  Berry-berry doesn’t seem to ever get bothered with these thoughts. When we were sitting in that beer garden out near Apple Mountain, and he told me all the things that happened to him, once in a while I butted in and asked him why he did this or that, or why somebody else did. And all he’d say about it was, “Oh, it just happened, that’s all.” Or else he’d say, “I don’t know, but isn’t it wild?”

  He just doesn’t happen to have this analytical mind the way I have. Because the way I analyze the whole thing is that he’d be better off if he got a real job and had a wife. It seems to me even washing cars is a lot less wear and tear on your nerves, etc., not to speak of the dangers of ending up on a chain gang or with some kind of a disease. And then he wouldn’t always be behind the eight ball, borrowing money from Ralph and all.

  But what I’ve got to remember is that everybody in the world is a separate person, with different ways of being nutty. For instance, maybe Berry-berry has got whores in his blood just like the way I always put everything down in this notebook.

  I hear people stirring around in the kitchen. I better get the hell down there and see what’s going on.

  The Williamses and Echo O’Brien went for a long drive in the country. They took iced tea with them and hard-boiled eggs, and Ralph had some liquor in his pocket. They drove past places where horses and cows grazed, and past big fields where corn and oats and alfalfa grew. They looked at silos and barns and farmhouses, at country churches and hillside graveyards. They took off their shoes and stopped at a creek to go in wading. They shopped at an open roadside place that sold tomatoes so cheap they wondered how the farmers made any profit. After dark, Echo O’Brien started to sing The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, and then the Williamses got into it, and they sang all the way home. Before long the Williamses were home in bed with a fine Sunday behind them. And Echo was on her way back to Toledo.

  On Monday, there was trouble waiting for Berry-berry at the farmhouse in Apple Mountain. Two of his women complained that the business, which had hardly even got started in the first place, had gone to pot altogether. They were not making any kind of money at all. Berry-berry offered a few feeble promises, but he had no real heart for the enterprise. By the end of the week, these two women left the place altogether, and there remained only the French-Canadian named Dorothy. Dorothy was in no way an ambitious girl. She was content to stay on in the place, sharing Agricola’s bed with him in return for her board and the use of his television set. Berry-berry maintained his quarters in the attic room, making use of them during the weekday nights.

  Agricola seemed relieved that these whores had left the place. By the following Monday, he had sobered up and had put Dorothy to work cleaning up the house. Berry-berry had a telephone installed and set out to get some plumbing work for Agricola and himself. He had no experience whatsoever in this trade, but Agricola promised to teach him everyt
hing he would need to know. He placed a large advertisment in the Apple Mountain Record:

  BACK IN BUSINESS

  APPLE MOUNTAIN PLUMBING CO.

  • no job too big

  • no job too small

  • guaranteed satisfaction

  • free estimates

  BERRY-BERRY WILLIAMS

  VINCENT AGRICOLA

  DIAL 4140

  The next day there were two responses, and the Apple Mountain Plumbing Company repaired a toilet tank in a boardinghouse and installed a sprinkling system in the grounds of a private residence.

  On Friday a letter was delivered to the farmhouse, inviting them to submit a bid to a contractor who was building a small housing development for a nearby township, Ashton Wells. Berry-berry learned from Agricola that this contractor was related by marriage to the township’s official inspector and that all the subcontracts would be assigned on the basis of graft payments to the inspector. Agricola had no real talent for skulduggery; he was inclined to ignore the invitation altogether. But Berry-berry, for his part, felt that his underworld experience might stand him in good stead, and these shady details even added a certain spice to his first legitimate venture.

  On Saturday at noon, when he arrived on Seminary Street wearing a necktie and a new summer suit, and at the midday meal displayed to the Williamses and Echo O’Brien the advertisement he had clipped from the Record, and read aloud to them his company’s invitation to bid on the Ashton Wells project, Clinton excused himself and went upstairs to make this brief entry in his notebook: “Berry-berry’s whorehouse has folded up!!!!”

  But when he went to bed that night, Clinton felt somewhat less inclined to indulge in exclamation points.

  [Clinton’s Notebook]

  Saturday Night.

  Well, every day can’t be perfect. And I’m not complaining either. Nor am I going to sit here and write a lot of vomit. I’ll just tell everything the way it happened.

  We roasted weenies in the back yard, the whole five of us, and we played cards and worked jigsaw puzzles on the front porch. We all move around in this wonderful kind of a cluster, like one big person with ten legs and five sets of teeth. All the neighbors were sitting on their porches. They kept glancing over here, and they all looked kind of glum to me. I think they wanted to get in on all this activity we had going on. That big old German woman who’s always sucking her teeth and lives in that weird-looking purple job, the second door from the corner, she walked past here about forty-five times, and each time she slowed down, trying to get an earful. The way I figure her, she’s some kind of a scout they send out in this neighborhood to get information about us. Which I don’t blame anybody. Because if they had these strings of fantastic cars lined up in front of their places, I’d probably go nuts wondering what was going on. So this one time when she went creeping by, I gave her a big smile and said, “How do you do, ma’am?” She glanced at me like somebody caught at the keyhole, and went scooting up the street like a rocket. I actually like the old broad, though. And I wouldn’t mind getting her to fill out a few questionnaires about some of the other odd-balls I’ve seen on this street.

  Well, tut-tut.

  Tonight I got a sniff of some real trouble ahead. Oh, I’ll get through it. Ye gods, what am I? And I’m not going to go racing into the bathtub with any goddam razor blades either. Nor am I sore at anybody. Because nothing even happened. But I’ve definitely got grounds for being depressed. Berry-berry and Echo are driving each other crazy. They’re in love.

  Of course he hardly ever looks at her. And vice versa. They don’t even talk much, except in cases of politeness, like lighting cigarettes for her, etc.

  I wouldn’t even have noticed that all this was going on between them—if it hadn’t been for what did not take place at the drive-in movie tonight, which as far as I’m concerned, completely puts the frosting on my little cake. The whole thing is tragic. I hope the full realization of it never really hits me. Thank God I’ve got a sense of humor.

  But at the time, which lasted about three years (they make these endless movies nowadays), I was praying science would come up with some new shriveling-up powder that would make a person about the size of a snail. Because personally, my presence was about as useless as a brass monkey’s—well, I’ll be damned if I’m going to be shoved into that kind of cheap metaphor just because for the mere reason that it’s appropriate. However, tut-tut, there I was, sitting square in the middle, with Berry-berry on one side and Echo in the driver’s seat, and Vera Ralston and George Brent and Constance Bennett running in and out of jungles and hotel lobbies, like a bunch of neurotics, right in the middle of the Amazon.

  Meanwhile there’s this big loud nothing going on back and forth between Berry-berry and Echo. Not a word. It was like a fuse burning and we all three sat there pretending we’d never even heard of dynamite, and stared at the screen. In the first place, the picture was about as entertaining as having a boil in your armpit. Because I, for one, have never heard about them having all these big flashy hotels in the middle of the Amazon before, and I get fed up with movies where people like Vera Ralston are always getting the short end of the stick. Which I think she got, but I’m not sure. And now I must admit they did have an airplane trip somewhere in the middle of this picture, so it’s just possible the goddam hotel was supposed to be in Paris or Baghdad or some other lousy place. Besides, I wasn’t paying any attention to the damn picture. How could I with Berry-berry’s arm in front of my face, reaching over to light about three cartons of cigarettes for Echo, who has never struck me as the helpless type, with her pocketbook full of wrenches. And you could hardly class Berry-berry as a real out-and-out cigarette-lighting type either. As a matter of fact, I get the impression that hordes of women have burnt their little pinkies lighting his for him. Well, to hell with it. I’m not sore about all this. I just don’t happen to get a thrill out of sitting there right under my very own nose being a fifth wheel, that’s all.

  Big pause here.

  Because Berry-berry just this minute left my room. We had a conversation that lasted about sixty seconds, but in that little bit of time, the whole world changed.

  He walked in and leaned on the doorframe.

  “Clint. I got to talk to you.”

  “Come on in and shut the door.”

  He sat in the little rocking chair with his arms and legs sprawling all over the room. Then he looked right at me, and for some crazy reason, I got nervous as hell.

  “Clint. I want her. And she wants me.”

  “Yeah, I know it.”

  “Well, what do you think?” he said.

  “What do I think?”

  “You saw her first.”

  “I’m sixteen,” I said. “She’s thirty-one.”

  “Clint, I won’t even look at her, unless you say the word.”

  Then I had two thoughts: I thought about Echo’s eyes, how immense they are, and lonesome, and how, that day at the airport, she kept filling her eyes up with everything she saw, so when it was over she’d have something left. And the second thought I had was about this tremendous power I had in my hands.

  “Berry-berry,” I said. “You love her, don’t you?”

  Love is an embarrassing kind of a word, but sometimes you have to just say it. Anyway, he looked at the picture of Abraham Lincoln. Maybe I’ll take that picture down someday, just to see what the hell people would do with their eyes when they don’t want to look at me.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I guess I do.”

  Then he got up and started fooling with the junk on top of my bureau, and all of a sudden I got scared. I thought if I said, “No, leave her alone,” then Berry-berry would think I didn’t trust him. And then I’d lose both of them. Echo, because I’m too goddam young, let’s face it, and him, because of not trusting him enough. Besides, they wanted each other. And he was decent enough to ask me first, which is a big improvement over just snatching her right out from under me, which he could have done without a
ny trouble.

  So I just said, “Treat her nice, will you?”

  “What the hell you think I’m gonna do?”

  “You sore?”

  “Sore at you? Why should I be sore at you?” he said.

  ” ‘Cause I didn’t mean anything,”

  “What’re we talking about?” he said. “I don’t even know what we’re talking about any more. Do you?”

  “Huh-uh.”

  “I better get to bed,” he said. “Thanks, Clint. You hear me?”

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?” he said.

  “For talkin’ to me about it.”

  “G’night.” And then he went to his room. Now they’re all in bed. I really feel pretty good about everything actually.

  A few weeks ago I was practically a mental case, couldn’t even get out of bed like a normal person. And now my ship has come in and all my old wishes have come true. Plus I’ve even got a job, and have greatly curbed my appetite for reading Annabel’s mail, etc. (I still read it, but I don’t always copy it down any more.) So what kind of a person would I have to be to get sore just because Echo O’Brien, aged thirty-one, doesn’t happen to be passionately in love with me, aged sixteen? A nut? I’d have to be some kind of a neurotic for godsake! Besides, how many people have these fantastic sister-in-laws sleeping in all the spare bedrooms? And brothers that are so wild they’re practically crooks, and then all of a sudden turn into tame ordinary people with neckties and big plumbing corporations?

  Well I, for one, happen to feel just sensational about this whole thing, practically.

  Tomorrow I’m going on a health binge, get some filter cigarettes and start doing push-ups every night. Maybe I’ll do some right now, to make myself sleepy. Because I’ve got about forty-seven big knots in my chest, and they hurt.

  Au revoir, notebook, old pal, old thing. You’ve had it. This is my last entry. If Berry-berry can go straight, so can I.