The Devil's Tub

by Edward Hoagland

  Her room and a half had her marriage furniture in it, appropriately mismatched and in faded bright mummy-like colors. When there wasn’t another reason, my heart went out to her for the apartment alone, so unspeakably dismal and small, and she without even the subway fare to get out. The layers of paint and linoleum extruded dirt from tenancies fifty years past. The two beds took most of the space. The books were her husband’s Genet, the decorations her own sporadic attempts which she couldn’t get rid of when the mood left until she saved enough money to buy something else. I regarded the place as mine for loafing (“your doll house,” she said), and we still had rather happy, whimsical evenings sometimes, with billing and cooing, no barbarities. We lived on three different planes, mine being the mundane. Ida was in a shadow world, smelling life, smelling death, the surface realities scarcely a glimmer part of the time. She drew upon every ounce of her concentration to manage the details of Tony’s existence, yet he chirped out the window obliviously. He had the most marvelous shrieks and chirps, like nothing I’d ever heard before. I almost wanted the baby born. He shot with his gun out the window too much and chased the cat hard, had very pitiful moments, but mostly one wondered whether he wasn’t living on borrowed time, whether such glee in defiance of logic and of his surroundings wasn’t going to have to be paid for. Certainly in other respects he could go either way. He was slummy-faced, coarse, and tough for a while, as if growing up to be somebody I wouldn’t be able to care about. Then in the afternoon, maybe, his eyes would spread open, his face would go soft, as he listened to one of his mother’s tales of Aesop. He was precociously gentle whenever she reached her rope’s end, just as Ida after an incendiary couple of hours always stopped short and knelt down in order to make it up to him with an effusion of playful intuitive love.

  Twice the social worker dropped by unannounced for what was called a Complete Drawer Count. And the tenement pipes rang like railroad bells. “Just hold onto me,” she’d whisper, as crazy as eels. It was “Please don’t stare!” or else “You’re not looking at me!” when I was too anxious and pitying. The truth, as we waited for word from the doctor to act on, was that the danger that she’d have a breakdown was worse than the risk of any abortion. She was Catholic, and I rubbed her resisting back by the hour while she talked. I was a futile substitute, but she was afraid she’d lose Tony if she went to a priest, and she made me afraid to go to one too. Listening, I couldn’t fix on a plan for any of the eventualities. There were other shouts in the building but not pitched like hers, and she lay with her head in my lap, so that I saw the tears in her nose and the swollen blood vessels. Tony writhed on the floor.

  “I’ve taken so much and what have I got to show for it? I have you here, younger than me, almost a child really, because you were hard up, and now you like to think of yourself as wonderfully kind and honorable. I don’t care who’s with me. I don’t even know where I am. Have you ever felt neuter? Well that’s how I feel. I don’t feel like a man and I don’t feel like a woman. I’m dead, I’m an idiot, I don’t feel. I wish I were a tree, or have I read that somewhere? I must have. Nothing is original with me, is it? I don’t believe in God but I’m afraid of Him. I don’t particularly like you, but I loved you—that’s not original either. I don’t want to sleep with any more men or have any more babies but I don’t want to be sterile. I see horrible figures in dreams, but they’re the best company I have except for my son. I’d do anything not to die, but I want to die.”

  Just as dreaming of having a breakdown is said to tap off the pressure building towards one, when the janitor in our building cracked up Ida appeared to revive, to catch a kind of a second wind. It was a hectic long night. The guy was afraid his relatives were going to kill him and begged for help in heart-rending yells, but he was the one who was armed and they were only afraid for their lives. He ran into the tenants’ rooms for protection, and when we ran out, he followed, afraid to be left by himself. With his knives in his hands, he went down on his knees and begged us to spare him.

  Soon we were to find out she wasn’t pregnant at all, but I’d sunk into a state where my laughing and joking were of no use. I couldn’t eat. I was worn out, bewildered and worthless as far as assisting her was concerned, and unable to pick myself up or take a sensible trip or take some good pills. There had been no chance to collect my wits and hunt uptown for a job. I thought I’d never get out of this, and the winter shut most people indoors, so that the suffering seemed that much worse. If you dodged past a barefoot beggar, the blood on his face had froze. The old Jews took temporary respites, but the bum pushcart pullers continued wretchedly. Many drivers hardly acknowledged their right to the street anymore, so long after the heyday of pushcarts.

  It may have been an impatient attempt to scare the man or a misjudgment because of the novelty. Maybe the cart didn’t register on the truck driver’s eyes, being neither a pedestrian nor a motor vehicle. Barreling along and simply not seeing it, he clipped the cart from the rear, spinning the man in front of him. He didn’t begin to brake or swerve until it was done.

  We called the police from upstairs. Darwin had bought some goldfish and was tinkering with the aeration. By now it was established he never was going to go down on the street if something was happening; and I didn’t object; I didn’t want to go either. But I’d seen the accident. The man was lying there with nobody touching him, and I still had a sense of being “medical”: in fact, appeals on those grounds were occasionally made to our window from down on the street.

  He looked dead from close up. I asked in the liquor store if we oughtn’t to phone for an ambulance. The fellow was doing paperwork.

  “Nobody can call an ambulance except the cops. You know that. What’s the matter with him?”

  “He was hit by a car,” I said. I’d disliked his preposterously sinister face for so long; he turned round and grinned.

  “Yeah? Well, probably you ought to call the cops, don’t you think?”

  I was unable to answer that. Outside, I looked up and saw Darwin worrying in the window, as were the printer and the two Puerto Ricans on our side of the street, although they had no apparent reason for worrying about me. A nervous tick in my cheek asserted itself; I realized I was bone-tired.

  “Phone for an ambulance,” I yelled to Darwin. The victim appeared quite decidedly dead, however. For all the illness I’d seen, he was my first dead man, and yet since he looked like hundreds of magazine pictures—the ragged refugee dead by the road—the sight could not have been more familiar. Every night going home I went by at least one drunk passed out, usually in danger of freezing. Dead as they looked, I went by assuming, like everyone, that somebody else was going to stop, because to see to them would have tacked on an hour or more to my day. This was absolutely routine, but I felt for a pulse with a sadness that had a momentum behind it—he was dead, I knew. Sick, shaky, I wanted to laugh. The pity I had withheld so many times had caught up with me.

  The traffic streamed by. A couple of the gas station men came out to wave it on so that their entrance wouldn’t be blocked, and the truck driver passed cigarillos around. He was very upset, an outspoken, balding person in a checked wool jacket. It was after four, nearly dusk.

  “They shouldn’t be let on a street like this. I mean it’s for stuff that’s going through, you’re supposed to go around twenty-five, thirty-five miles an hour. Poor baby. That never happened to me before. Right out of the blue, they step in front of you and you’ve killed somebody. Poor bastard. Jesus.” He walked around between us. I didn’t nod to agree but, on the other hand, didn’t find him objectionable. The difficulty was that I had an exact image of what I had seen. As crisp as a diagram, the truck had traveled in a straight line. The cart had been in the path of that line and at no time had the truck hesitated. The impact with the man was too searing to bring to the front of my mind but it was indelibly there. The daylight, dim to begin with, was rapidly vanishing.

  I went up to the lab, since I could feel myself get inc
oherent. The man was dead; no sense in gawking about. “Oh, all bashed to hell, that’s all,” I told Darwin. “Hit him from behind.” The truck had McMartin’s Scotch Whiskey on it and a pasteboard bottle, and the driver, we saw, walked into the liquor store and provoked enough interest that the proprietor at least poked his head out the door. The Texaco bunch toed the cart frame. “Vamose,” they said to a carload of Spanish, keeping the driveway clear.

  From the gestures, a consensus was forming by which the pushcart man was to blame. Nobody checked him again, and I wondered if I hadn’t been too quick in presuming him dead. Though this was nonsense, I came down. They were by the truck, looking for damage. Without much basis, I got the idea the guy might have handed out a few bottles as I was coming downstairs. The cart man, in Raggedy-Ann clothing, was partly thrown on his side, with his head bloodied and his seat all cut up from a bottle of wine that had been in his back pocket. Amazed, I recognized him as the one who had sat and chattered to us about the DEW Line in such an incongruously lively way. All of that spunk and spark smashed up like a broken doll—it revolted me.

  “They shouldn’t let them out on the street, or you’ll even see them up on the sidewalk. No light on him, no way to see him,” the driver complained. The others wanted to drag the cart over a bit to let the traffic pass by faster. “Leave it. It’s way the hell out there,” he said. But with a scared, guilty face like mine might have been, he swung back to me as if I was the one he wanted to convince because I was next to the body.

  “Nevertheless he was on the street,” I said.

  “Nevertheless?” He sounded the word, mixing respect and sarcasm. “What are you, a doctor?”

  “No, he’s not a doctor, he’s just a Nosy,” chuckled the thin mechanic. I’d always been glad it wasn’t one of his huskier partners who had taken the special dislike to me, but I saw he could beat me up easily.

  “I knew him a little,” I said.

  “You knew him?” Bolder, the driver asked with his eyebrows why I knew him. I hunched by the body, feeling righteous and safe. After walking off, he came back and stared down at the man in sad disapproval. He leaned with a nervous snort, touched the man’s rear, and smelled the alcohol on his finger. “Maybe the noise frightened him.” His hands did the noise, then the cart veering into the traffic suddenly. Charades over drunks were so commonplace, one had to remind oneself that this fellow was dead; and although I was glancing for suspicious bulges on them—the way the garage crew was looking at me, I might have been the man who had run the bum down.

  “I knew him. Yeah,” the store owner said, leaving his doorway. “All the bums around here.” He puckered his mouth, looking down, as if to convict any customer of his. The driver asked who delivered his liquor to him.

  Why was I being so punctilious, I wondered? I’d sympathized with the driver at first—why get him in serious trouble when nothing constructive would come of it? The man would be just as dead. In the same way as the gas station bunch had taken his side partly to spite me, wasn’t my attitude the reverse? With their long-flanked red faces and their choo-choo-choo vigor, I’d never seen them so close before. It was like bars being removed. Here they were next to me, no barriers. And they all had the camaraderie of living in Queens and shaking their heads at the neighborhood. The dynamic, blocky, all vigor guy kept leaving to heave himself onto the fender of the Pong’s Produce truck and practically disappear inside its motor. “You live in that place?” he asked me, pointing.

  “I work there.”

  “You work there?” He laughed at the building facade with its blotchy camouflage curtains and the wreaths around MARY.

  “I’m a medical laboratory technician,” I said, trying to invoke the immunity more than the prestige.

  “Where do you live?”

  They listened, these people I had been pointing at, judging and needling for months. It was too late to leave and I saw that by staying here to argue this issue I had lost whatever effectiveness I had been having up in my window. It was like the police interrogation would be. When they heard where I lived they guffawed.

  The cart had carried junk cardboard, ground almost to powder by the traffic by now, and pedestrians pumped past as thick as the cars. By standing still I got the sensation of managing some kind of a show. The most touching detail was a handful of wooden letters the size of a child’s blocks, O’s and H’s, which were strewn alongside the gutter. In warm weather the cart must have been used as a hot dog wagon.

  “Tell me something. Why are you all the time sticking your hand out the window? Are you trying to make a U-turn?”

  We all laughed. The all-vigor fellow pushed up on his arms from the Pong’s Produce motor to hear it repeated. A postman in a truck made a pickup, dragging his sack past the body. Infuriated that I was trembling, I searched for the top of the bottle, thinking that if the seal was still on I might prove the man had been sober. The early darkness was very confusing.

  Once the cops came it was the trial in advance, acquittal quickly a certainty. They copied the license number on the tail of the cart. They shared with the gas station people that extraordinary beefiness found in the city. The owner of the liquor store emerged to touch the victim’s rear end and convey the idea that he had been drinking, and the expression on the dead bum was no help. Besides being so very surprised-looking, he looked haughty and quarrelsome compared to when he had chattered to us about Hudson’s Bay. It was the face of a man with freezing wet feet, with scarlet, goose-pimpled hands and neck, who was trying to ignore the shouts from the traffic and ignore his misery. When I drew my mind back to those moments before he’d been hit, I remembered no drunken appearance. He’d pulled like a dutiful, suffering horse that knows that its work is the lesser of evils. Now he looked like a crunched gutter mouse made up for the role of a bum, with the stubble and stock ruby nose.

  “Old bums like that, they don’t carry a light, can’t hardly control what they’re pulling, and they turn their ankle or they slip where it’s wet—had a little too much—and out he goes in the lane. It’s a crime when they’re out like that,” said the thinner garage man.

  “Actually, the light was pretty good then,” I argued in a despairing tone to the police. “I work right across the street, and he was coming down very fast, right by the curb. The poor guy was right in front of him. I don’t think he ever did see him. It was much lighter than this, plenty of light. He didn’t have his headlights on, himself, as a matter of fact, so it doesn’t make any difference if the cart had a light of its own because it wasn’t dark enough yet to need one.”

  Hoots from the witnesses. The scorch-faced owner of the liquor store said, “No, he had a load on.”

  The driver glanced over to where he was parked. “Well I turned ’em off, naturally, but I had ’em on, they were on.”

  “Sure, his lights were on.”

  I was chilled by the gas station group, for whom until now I had been pretty much of an abstraction, up in an upper story. They were giving me total attention. The stream of Santas climbed out of the subway, limping by us, and the ambulance came; another mail pickup was made. When the body was gone it required an effort to remember there even had been a body. As in the rehearsal, when they talked to me the police turned to look at my building. With their faces trained neutral, they asked how I’d seen through the camouflage cloth.

  “I’m a medical laboratory assistant. We don’t have that. We have the sign about blood tests in the window.”

  My home address registered badly again, as it would have in court, and perhaps I hammered too hard at the light being so good. Also, their first impression of me was marked by my searching look as to whether we’d crossed swords before, a look which must often betray petty criminals—that and the way I dropped my head like an exhausted bull in the ring, very small, windedly quivering. The uniform looked different to me. That charcoal blue—business blue. It had become almost impossible for me to talk to police without being hostile or supercilious, and so it wa
s like a job interview, where my name was being written down but I knew I would never be hired.

  I left work right afterwards, in a tumultuous funk. The killing, the codger gabbing away happily in our office only the week before, and everybody’s closing over the facts of the accident—I felt as if I had flu. Darwin seemed queer as a coot with his star on his hand and his goldfish and mice and heavyweight name, and I wanted out.

  As I crossed the Lower East Side, the record stores blared, the peddlers’ trucks jingled, mocking me with a storm of sounds. A priest in an overcoat walked up and down on Elizabeth Street, since he hadn’t a cloister, holding a flashlight over his breviary and whispering the words. Kids were clouting a ball. They towered it up seven floors, then tried to spot it before it fell. A cat was making love to a dog. The light was so mutedly rich in night colors that my eyes led a life of their own. The vivid neons had a handmade gleam more stimulating than neons uptown, and the squint I’d developed, the squint of a person who couldn’t walk five or six blocks without seeing a man slugged, an arrest, or a beggar, widened out in spite of itself. My eyes crowed. I heard Hindi, Rumanian, Cantonese, Polish, each lilty. A guy was thocking an oud with a spoon. Two beatniks had hung a piece of cardboard on their fire escape to communicate with the girl opposite “Hey, Sweet!” Children spilled whooping across the sidewalk, and the off-Broadway theaters seemed like opera houses up in the Yukon, dowdy, primitive structures, newly white-washed, in the midst of a wilderness boom.