South Street

by David Bradley

  Mrs. Fletcher went into the kitchen and finished washing the dishes. She turned away from the sink just as the kettle began to boil. She pulled it off the heat before the strident whistle awakened Brother Fletcher, and made herself a cup of instant coffee. She sat down at the table and gazed out the window at the darkened street. In the living room the clock struck twelve. It was suddenly tomorrow. Mrs. Fletcher sighed. She had never understood midnight. She rarely saw it anyway; usually after listening to the eleven o’clock news and weather she roused a snoring Brother Fletcher so that he could hear the baseball scores, while she removed her teeth and put on her nightgown for bed. Occasionally she would wait up to watch the first half of the late show (she was almost always too sleepy to wait for the rest) or to see if there was going to be anyone interesting on the Tonight Show. But when she was watching TV, or dozing as she pretended to watch TV, midnight came and went with no more fanfare than a station break and five commercials. Those were almost the only times she saw midnight, except, of course, on New Year’s Eve when she and Brother Fletcher had always watched the ball slide down the pole on the Times Building until they had torn it down and built the Allied Chemical Building for the ball to slide down, and danced an awkward waltz in the confines of their living room to the music of Guy Lombardo. Mrs. Fletcher did not mind New Year’s Eve because the new year obviously had to start sometime. But midnight came every single day, and to Mrs. Fletcher a day was just different, not new like a year. It seemed reasonable that once a year she should be suddenly older, that she should have been married one year longer, but every day was too often, especially when she sat in the kitchen with a cup of coffee in her hand, looking at the street and listening to Brother Fletcher gently snoring down the hall. The clock would chime twelve times, like some awful army tramping heavily through her life. Midnight meant it was tomorrow already, and that meant it was morning already, which to Mrs. Fletcher seemed silly. Morning was light and the winos lining up in front of the State Store and shoppers lining up in front of the supermarkets, waiting for them to open, and Mrs. Fletcher watching them line up, through her window. Mrs. Fletcher did not approve of winos or of State Stores. She had no feelings about supermarkets beyond a vague distrust. Mrs. Fletcher reminded herself that she would have to go shopping tomorrow. No—today. Mrs. Fletcher hated to go shopping. Brother Fletcher had once offered to do it for her, but the result had been a minor disaster. Someday, thought Mrs. Fletcher, I’ll have somebody to go shopping for me. And to clean up after I make Fletcher his midnight snacks. And, thought Mrs. Fletcher, Harriette Fletcher is every bit as crazy as her husband. She smiled at the thought of a maid. She grinned at the thought of her ever having a maid. She chuckled softly at the thought of her thinking she would ever have a maid. It was, thought Mrs. Fletcher, a shame she couldn’t mention it to Brother Fletcher. But he wouldn’t understand. He was a man. He could never see her little daydreams as simple daydreams, understand that they didn’t mean that she was unhappy or uncontent. He would resent the imagined implication that he was not a good provider. He would feel ashamed and guilty. He would apologize for not giving her what she deserved. He would go out and mortgage everything they didn’t own to get her a maid or some other silly thing that she had never even thought about, to make it all up to her. God, thought Mrs. Fletcher, why do men take everything so seriously? If God made man in his own image, no wonder the world is in such a mess. Mrs. Fletcher smiled to herself. That bit of witty sacrilege was another little something she could never share with Brother Fletcher. He didn’t take himself as seriously as some people, but he took God more seriously than anybody, probably even God. Mrs. Fletcher smiled to herself once again.

  Sighing, Mrs. Fletcher got up from the table and put her cup in the sink. She went into the bathroom and slipped her plate out and placed it in the pink plastic container next to Brother Fletcher’s blue one. She pulled her dress over her head and removed her underclothes, feeling her body sag comfortably. She slipped into her nightgown, turned off the light, crept softly into the darkened bedroom. She paused at the foot of the bed and looked at Brother Fletcher. He had kicked the sheet off him. Mrs. Fletcher readjusted it. Such a baby when he sleeps, she thought, looking down at Brother Fletcher’s face, soft in slumber, lips pursed, head pillowed on hands clasped as if in prayer—Mrs. Fletcher imagined him in a pair of light-blue sleepers. Mrs. Fletcher knew something was bothering Brother Fletcher. She wondered if it had anything to do with the Reverend Mr. Sloan. Mrs. Fletcher gritted her teeth at the thought of the Reverend Mr. J. Peter Sloan. Mrs. Fletcher considered Mr. Sloan to be the chief conductor on the express train to hell, and she refused to go near The Word of Life except when she absolutely had to. Reverend Mr. Sloan, thought Mrs. Fletcher, ought to be hung. She imagined the greasy little man, resplendent in his rich purple robes, swinging by his neck from the balcony of The Word of Life. Brother Fletcher would be in charge. Fletcher would like having his own church again; he hadn’t wanted to leave North Carolina. She’d have to help him of course. Fletcher had no head for business or for making money. But he could preach. God, could he preach!

  Mrs. Fletcher thought back to the first time she had seen him, at a Sunday School convention in a little dusty town called Swann Station. He had been fresh out of the seminary, the spiritual shepherd of four tiny churches on an obscure circuit. Nobody had paid any attention to him, but somebody had failed to show up to preach, and all of the older ministers had wanted the chance but none of them had been willing to see the honor fall to any of the others. So they had asked Brother Fletcher, who was too young and obscure and mild mannered to frighten anybody. Mrs. Fletcher had been in her second year at the Normal School, and was very proud of being in charge of the convention choir. She had been sitting in the front row of the choir that hot night, flailing at the air with a paper fan provided by a local mortuary, when suddenly Brother Fletcher stood up before her. He was extremely tall and frighteningly thin. His neck was bony, his shoulders slumped, and his pants had stopped just above the tops of his socks. All the girls in the choir had tittered a little, including Mrs. Fletcher, but she had stopped tittering, or even thinking about it, when Brother Fletcher had started to speak. She had sat immobile, her fan forgotten, the heat ignored, the hymnbook clasped tightly in her fingers, knuckles gone pale, listening as Brother Fletcher’s voice flowed out like a river, a flood springing from a well so deep it did not seem possible that it had been contained by Brother Fletcher’s bony body. Mrs. Fletcher had felt herself begin to drown. All through that summer and fall and winter she had managed to be in the vicinity of Brother Fletcher as often as possible. Not that he noticed. Her girl friends had noticed and said she was crazy. Her mother thought she was crazy, too. But Mrs. Fletcher could only hear his voice and think of the richness that had to lie behind it. God, could he preach!

  South Street slept, slumbering in alleyways and apartments and furnished rooms and burned-out storefronts and in the steamy boudoirs upstairs in the Elysium Hotel, snoring peacefully in a vast choral blend of soprano, alto, tenor, bass; in the light snores of children, in the heavy exhalations of fat, drunken men. The police route car made its leisurely tour, trolling slowly eastward, turning at the river, and speeding back along Pine Street to the all-night pizza joint that was only too happy to treat cops to free coffee and Cokes, out of civic appreciation and a desire for additional protection. Except for the squad car nothing much moved on South Street; the stumbling winos had found their homes for the night, and the whores had long since gone off duty and sent their customers home or out to be mugged and, occasionally, murdered in a secluded side street. But one shadow did move, steadily, slowly, east, toward the Delaware and the lightening sky.

  Brown crossed the asphalt expanse of Broad Street against the light, plunging through the strip of commercial prosperity, gratefully regaining the quiet rotting of South Street. He had hurried crossing Broad; now he resumed his heavy, plodding pace. He had been walking for hours, ever since the intima
te lighting of Frankie’s Place on Rittenhouse Square had gone up, signaling closing time, pushing Brown out onto the street like toothpaste out of a tube. He had walked west at first, crossing the Schuylkill by the Walnut Street Bridge, then, on the west bank, turning north to walk up past the walls of the zoo, to cross the idle tracks of the Penn Central. Then he had walked south on Fortieth Street and through the never-locked gate of the Woodland Cemetery to sit on a tombstone and stare for a while at the stars and the river, while sobriety sneaked up on him. He had walked past the Veterans Hospital, across the University Avenue Bridge, up Grays Ferry Avenue, and finally to South Street. It had felt strangely comforting, as if he had given in to the pull of gravity. Stepping onto South Street Brown had been tense and expectant, anticipating some magic transformation of the night and of himself; walking eastward he reached out around him with his fatigue- and alcohol-dulled senses, searching in the silence for some half-remembered rhythm, some dimly recalled melody, sniffing the air for an aromatic blend of all the odors of the night. But the silence had remained dull and random, and the smells of sweat and garbage and gasoline and wine and grease and asphalt had hung as separate and distinct stenches. Brown walked on, growing more and more sad, more and more sober. Finally he reached the end of South Street and still there was nothing beyond the simple realities of night and street and buildings and Delaware River. In a few minutes the delivery trucks would begin to move and the taxis would start to stream out of the Grays Ferry lot and the busses like mechanical cows would trundle forth from their barns and it would be morning.

  Brown turned away from the river, walked back along South as far as Seventh Street, then walked north to Market and on west to the donut shop between the Reading Terminal and City Hall. He sat at the counter and consumed half a dozen donuts, three cups of coffee, rose, paid, and despondently descended the concrete stairway to the Market Street subway. He sat on a slatted wooden bench and waited, his eyelids drooping. The train came. Brown stepped on, took a seat amid the curious mixture of people riding to early-morning jobs. It was far too early for office workers—these were maids bound for Thirtieth Street Station to take the Penn Central commuter trains to the big expensive houses in the tiny expensive towns along the Main Line, or for Sixty-ninth Street and the busses to Delaware County. Brown relaxed, content to let the train carry him westward, beneath the Schuylkill. He left the subway at Fortieth and Market, climbing the steps to the denuded corner that already burned in the heat. He crossed Market and headed south. He reached the tall building, passed beneath the broad awning, opened the heavy door, crossed the luxurious lobby, entered the elevator, and rose effortlessly upward. He opened and closed the apartment door with great care and headed directly for the bar. He picked up a nearly full bottle of scotch and carried it out onto the balcony.

  Brown stood looking out over the city, drinking from the bottle. His eyes followed a bus as it moved down Spruce Street, crawling an inch, stopping while it swallowed a few small dots and spit out a few others, then crawling on an inch, two inches, before stopping again. Brown wondered about the bus’s destination: either it was a forty-two, bound for Independence Hall, or it was a forty, bound for Front and South. When the bus reached Thirty-third and Spruce it did not turn but continued on across the river. Brown’s eyes followed it as it creeped across the bridge and dipped down onto South Street. Brown stared after it as it gradually lost itself in traffic, stood gazing into the smog long after the bus was lost to sight. Suddenly the whiskey he had drunk turned to acid in his stomach. He dropped the bottle and spun toward the living room, losing his footing and falling to his knees on the carpet. Lips pressed tightly together, Brown struggled to his feet, hung on the railing of the balcony, trying to decide if he could make it to the bathroom or should simply stay there, waiting for the sour vomit to rise. But as suddenly as it had come, the spasm passed, and Brown hung on the railing gulping at the clotted air. Gradually he stopped trembling. Brown took a deep breath and bent over carefully and picked up the bottle. It was almost empty—the liquid was on the balcony concrete, vanishing before the sun. Brown looked at the bottle. Then he leaned over the railing, opened his fingers, and let the bottle fall away, twenty-four stories, to shatter beyond recognition in the street below.

  The sun burned down into his reddened eyes, and Jake squinted. His eyes were permanently blurred—from sleep, from wine, from years, from countless mornings’ wakings with the sun in his eyes. He blinked and groaned, rubbed his stomach, groaned again. His head, which rested against two rusting garbage cans full to overflowing with rotting refuse, rolled forward, then back. The rusted metal emitted a dry crunching sound.

  He rolled to one side, moaned, grabbed the rim of the can, and tried to haul himself to his feet, but the metal, weakened by wind and rain and the acid from decaying garbage, crumbled beneath his fingers. The can caved in, and he fell to the cobblestones, lay there, panting. A black-and-tan torn cat came prancing down the alley toward him, and he watched it come without moving anything but his eyes. The cat stopped ten feet away, sniffed, mewed, and moved on, giving Jake a wide berth. He smiled bitterly, shoved himself along to the building that made a dead end of the alley. He put his back against the wall and, using his hands and friction, got to his feet. He groaned with the effort, and sweat appeared on his brow, but he was standing. He swayed slightly but kept his feet. Slowly he walked out of the alley; passing his fingers through his grizzled hair, patting his clothes into some semblance of order, he emerged onto the street.

  South Street at 9 a.m.: the last of the cars from the daily traffic jam emptying off the expressway and speeding blue-suited businessmen through the gauntlet of crumbling tenements on their way to the steel-and-concrete central city, past Jake standing at the mouth of his alley, the drivers’ faces white blurs as they forced their cars through steaming streets, emotions torn, worrying, wondering what might be said about their late arrival. Two children, their clothes grimy from an hour’s play, rolled past on skates, calling to him to get the fuck out of the way. Jake smiled after them, then suddenly doubled over in agony. He needed a drink, and he started to turn back into the alley, where he kept a bottle hidden for emergencies. The pain stabbed at him again, but it wasn’t so bad this time, and he decided to save the emergency bottle. He started walking. It took him twenty minutes to cover the four blocks to the liquor store.

  Jake stood before the wire-screened glass and looked inside. The store was empty except for two clerks who stood behind the counter and stared boredly out at the street. Jake looked up and down but found no sign of the other regulars and breathed a sigh of relief; he was in no mood to share. He squared his shoulders and pushed open the door. One of the clerks roused himself. The other gave Jake an amused sneer and returned to his perusal of the street. Jake stood shivering in the chill from the air-conditioning. Then he approached the first clerk.

  “What’ll it be?” said the clerk, automatically reaching down beneath the counter to where the cheap spirits were kept. Jake looked at him, eyes slightly glazed. The drops of sweat on his brow, chilled by the air-conditioning, dribbled into his grizzled eyebrows and were absorbed for a moment before reappearing at the corners of his eyes, trickling along the wrinkles in his face like rainwater running along the cracks in a field of sun-dried mud. The clerk shifted impatiently; his hand danced over the bottles, his other hand drummed on the counter. “C’mon, c’mon,” he said, “what’s it gonna be? Bali Hai? Ripple? C’mon, old man, I ain’t got all day.”

  Jake looked at him. “You ain’t got nobody else to wait on.”

  The clerk glared. “I ain’t gonna be spendin’ the whole mornin’ waitin’ for some old wino to make up his mind does he want the seventy-cent rotgut or the seventy-five-cent rotgut, neither.”

  The other clerk chuckled without taking his eyes from the street. “Maybe this cat’s a big spender. Maybe he gonna be wantin’ the eighty-cent rotgut.”

  The first clerk chuckled in his turn. “Okay, pops, wha
t’s it gonna be?”

  Jake glared at him. He reached out and grasped the price book which lay on the counter, encased in a worn black binder. Ignoring the clerks’ snorts, he leafed through it.

  “Domestic shit’s in the front, pops,” said the second clerk, still not looking away from the window. He smiled at the street outside, his pink gums and strong white teeth shining in his dark face. “Or maybe you got your mind set on some French champagne to impress your, ah, girl friend?” Both clerks chuckled.

  Jake thumbed the book, found the page he wanted, ran his forefinger down the list of unpronounceable names in Italian, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese while his eyes went down the list of prices until he found one he could afford. He twisted the book around so that it faced the clerk. He pointed, thumping his finger heavily beside the name.

  The clerk’s eyebrows rose slightly. “That there’s a dollar forty-five.”

  “I know it,” Jake snapped.

  “That ain’t a half gallon, now, that ain’t nothin’ but a bottle.”