When Johnny got off, he always ducked into the Loco Club, had a Vodka Collins, then walked the half-block home. Sheila was waiting, and supper was ready in about twelve minutes.
But one night a week ago it had been different. The bus stopped at Scottsboro. The wacky Dude who looked like a barber, the little man who reminded you of an onion, both got off. But the nice, plain, blonde girl just sat there.
“Scottsboro, Miss,” said the driver.
“Thank you,” said the plain blonde girl, but she just sat there.
“You always get off at Scottsboro, Miss,” said the driver.
“Not tonight,” said the girl.
So the bus went on, but everybody was uneasy from the incident. The normal order of the world had fallen apart.
Then tonight it happened again. At Scottsboro the wacky Dude and the man who reminded you of an onion got off. And the plain blonde girl said, “not tonight.” This was not so startling as the first time it happened, but it did set Johnny O’Conner wondering. It was not as though the old joker with the face like an egg, the noble-nosed nabob, or the stylish old girl who looked like a lady-lawyer had not got off at Rambush. It was not as though Pauline Potter, fat George Gregoff, and the antiseptic gentleman with the contempt of the world were not even now getting off at Terhune.
“Terhune,” said the driver. “You always get off at Terhune, Mr. O’Conner.”
“Not tonight,” said Johnny. This statement startled him. He had not known he was going to say that. He had not known he would ride beyond his own corner. But the bus went on and Johnny did not even know where it was going. He had lived in a house for a year and had never even been to the next street.
“Urbana,” said the driver. And here there descended from the bus some of those creatures who before had seemed to have no habitation or true place in the world. The moon-faced man who always carried the Sporting News, the heavy smiling lady who was a picture of placidity, the pale vacuous youth who combined duck-tail and sideburns on one head, the shop-girl with the red hat and the shop-girl with the green hat got off here. And also the nice, plain, blonde girl, who when the world was normal, used to descend at Scottsboro. And Johnny O’Conner to his own amazement got off here, too.
Urbana was not too different from Terhune, although of course in a different world. Instead of the Loco Club there was the Krazy Kat Club Number Two. Johnny went in with only an instant’s wonder as to the location of Krazy Kat Number One. He had a Cuba Libra. Then he walked the half-block back to his house. He had never seen his house from this side before. It was like seeing the other side of the moon. And on that other side of the moon the paint had started to crack above one window, and the screen had begun to tear.
“Where have you been?” asked Sheila. “I was frantic.”
“How could you be frantic? I am home at the same time as always. Or within forty-five seconds of it.”
“But you didn’t get off at Terhune Street.”
“How do you know I didn’t?”
“Pauline Potter told me, and so did George Gregoff, and Mr. Sebastian.”
“Who’s he?”
She made motions with her hands, and he knew that Mr. Sebastian was the antiseptic gentleman with a contempt of the world. But Sheila was not finished.
“Where did you go? They all said you stayed right on the bus and rode right past your house. Why did you do it? You never did that before.”
“Honey, I just rode one block down and then walked back the half-block from the other way.”
“But why did you do it? What did you do down there?”
“I went into the Krazy Kat Club Number Two and had one drink, all that I ever had.”
“You went into a strange bar? Don’t you know that men can get into trouble in a strange bar? What did you drink?”
“I had a Cuba Libra.”
“Why did you do that? Only gamblers and seamen ever drink them. You aren’t going to run away to sea, are you?”
“I hadn’t given it a thought. But it might not be a bad idea.”
“Why do you say that? Are you really going to leave me?”
“Sheila, honey, that was only a joke.”
“Why do you do that? You never made a joke before. I just don’t know what to make of you.”
And even then it wasn’t over. At supper she kept it up.
“Promise me, Johnny, that you won’t ever do a thing like that again.”
“But I didn’t do anything. Only rode one block past my stop and walked half-a-block back home.”
“And went into a strange bar where there’s no telling what might happen to you. Promise me you will never go there again. I have a reason. Promise me.”
“I solemnly promise,” said Johnny O’Conner, “that I will never again go to the Krazy Kat Club Number Two. But if I ever come to that Number One Kat look out.”
“There you go, making a joke again. I just don’t know what has come over you.”
The next night Johnny was in a wayward mood. It wasn’t just that he had an unreasonable wife. Generally, he enjoyed his unreasonable wife. But a little bee was buzzing in his bonnet. He had had a glimpse over the top of his rut and he wondered what was in the world beyond. He had an almost overpowering compulsion to get off at Manderville where the untidy old duffer and the two young girls always got off. He barely mastered himself at Nassau, and as he passed Oswego it was with the gravest uneasiness. Then he decided in his mind, and he watched the plain blonde girl. If she goes past her stop I will go past mine, he thought. At Patrick, the bald-headed coot with hair in his ears and the frazzled cigar in the front of his face got out, and that was as it should be. At Quarles their party was diminished by Laughing Boy, by Dapper Dan, by the Sniffler, and by a person who may or may not have been Tug-Boat Annie.
At Rambush it was egg-face, nabob, and lady-lawyer, and the world was rolling tolerably in its groove. But the end was not yet. For at Scottsboro the wacky Dude and the little man who was cousin of the onion got off, and the plain blonde girl did not. This is it, thought Johnny O’Conner. I’ll go past mine, too. I may go two blocks past and see what Vandalia is like. I may go all the way to the end of the world or the end of the alphabet, whichever one comes first. For Johnny was in a reckless mood.
At Terhune he endured the insulting sniff of Pauline Potter, the glowering of fat George Gregoff, the withering contempt of the antiseptic gentleman, now know as Mr. Sebastian. Johnny stared ahead and remained on the bus. The nice, plain, blonde girl got off again at Urbana, and Johnny got off there, too. The blonde girl went into the Krazy Kat club Number Two and Johnny broke his promise to his wife and went in also. He ordered a Sazarac to see what it was like and gazed with new eyes at a new world.
“I’m glad you came this evening,” the bar-maid told the nice, plain, blonde girl. “You’re the only one of my old friends who ever get this far out. This is a mean afternoon. I’m glad to see someone nice.”
“Is it mean out here? I thought after the places you worked this would be a breeze.”
“Girl, I have one screw-ball worse than anything I ever had downtown. That woman makes me ashamed. She has three different dates here every afternoon. The first one is with that fat, old bumbler. The way they carry on in a booth I told them today I’d have to call the cops if they didn’t tone it down. They both always get sloppy drunk, and when he leaves he always gives her money. As soon as he’s gone, there’s another one comes in that looks like a tough boy out of an old George Raft movie. This time she gives the money to him and they put on a little show that sure wouldn’t get past the censors. It’s real purple stuff those two put on. And when he’s pretty drunk he goes. And in about twenty minutes her third date comes in. They each drink three fast ones. Then they get in his car and are gone for an hour. When they come back, they each have three mor
e fast ones. He leaves then and she staggers back to one of the booths and goes to sleep.”
“How does she get away with it?”
“She says she has her husband trained. Has him so deep in a rut he can’t see over the top and never will catch on. But she’s smart. She’s never so drunk that the little clock inside her head doesn’t work. She hears that five-thirty bus when it squeaks to a stop down at Terhune. Then she jumps up, calls me a couple of dirty names just to keep in practice, and goes out the back door and down the alley to her house. She’s always there when her husband gets home. We had some tramps downtown but we never had any as bad as Sheila O’Conner.”
Johnny O’Conner shook and spilled his chaser. He had left his rut and now he could not go back to it. All he could do was go to the end of the alphabet or the end of the world. He had seen his home from the other side. He had seen the other side of the moon. And he was appalled.
THE UGLY SEA
Originally published in The Literary Review, Fall 1960.
“The sea is ugly,” said Sour John, “and it’s peculiar that I’m the only one who ever noticed it. There have been millions of words written on the sea, but nobody has written this. For a time I thought it was just my imagination, that it was only ugly to me. Then I analyzed it and found that it really is ugly.
“It is foul. It is dirtier than a cesspool; yet men who would not willingly bathe in a cesspool will bathe in it. It has the aroma of an open sewer; yet those who would not make a pilgrimage to a sewer will do so to the sea. It is untidy; it is possibly the most untidy thing in the world. And I doubt if there is any practical way to improve it. It cannot be drained; it cannot be covered up; it can only be ignored.
“Everything about it is ignoble. Its animals are baser than those of the land. Its plant life is rootless and protean. It contaminates and wastes the shores. It is an open grave where the living lie down with dead.”
“It does smell a little, Sour John, and it is untidy. But I don’t think it’s ugly. You cannot deny that sometimes it is really beautiful.”
“I do deny it. It has no visual beauty. It is monotonous, with only four or five faces, and all of them coarse. The sun and the sky over it may be beautiful; the land that it borders may be fair; but the old sewer itself is ugly.”
“Then why are you the only one who thinks so?”
“There could be several reasons. One, that I’ve long suspected, is that I’m smarter than other people. And another is that mankind has just decided to deny this ugliness for subconscious reasons, which is to say for no reason at all. The sea is a lot like the subconscious. It may even be the subconscious; that was the teaching of the Thalassalogians. The Peoples of the Plains dreamed of the Sea before they visited it. They were guilty dreams. They knew the sea was there, and they were ashamed of it. The Serpent in the Garden was a Hydra, a water snake. He ascended the river to its source to prove that nothing was beyond his reach. That is the secret we have always to live with: that even the rivers of Paradise flow finally into that evil grave. We are in rhythm with the old ocean: it rises irregularly twice in twenty-four hours, and then repents of rising; and so largely do we.”
“Sour John, I will still love the sea though you say it is ugly.”
“So will I. I did not say I did not love it. I only said it was ugly. It is an open secret that God was less pleased with the sea than with anything else he made. His own people, at least, have always shunned it.
“O, they use it, and several times they have nearly owned it. But they do not go to sea as seamen. In all history there have been only three Jewish seamen. One was in Solomon’s navy; he filled a required berth, and was unhappy. One served a Caliph in the tenth century; why I do not know. And the third was Moysha Uferwohner.”
“Then let us hear about Moysha.”
“Moysha was quite a good man. That is what makes it sad. And the oddest thing is what attracted him to the evil sea. You could not guess it in ten years.”
“Not unless it was a waterfront woman.”
“That is fantastic. Of all unlikely things that would seem the most unlikely. And yet it’s the truth and you hit it at once. Not a woman in being, however, but in potential (as the philosophers have it); which is to say, quite a young girl.
“Likely you have run across her. So I will tell it all.”
* * * *
This begins ten years ago. Moysha was then a little short of his majority, and was working with his father in an honorable trade not directly connected with the sea, that of the loan shark. But they often loaned money to seamen, a perilous business, for which reason the rates were a little higher than you might expect.
Moysha was making collections and picking up a little new trade. This took him to the smell of the sea, which was painful to him, as to any sensible man. And it took him to the Blue Fish, a waterfront café, bar, and lodging house.
A twelve-year-old girl, a cripple, the daughter of the proprietor, was playing the piano. It was not for some time, due to the primacy of other matters, that Moysha realized that she was playing atrociously. Then he attempted to correct it. “Young lady, one should play well or not at all. Please play better, or stop. That is acutely painful.”
She looked as though she were going to cry, and this disconcerted Moysha, though he did not know why it did. Half an hour later the fact intruded itself on his consciousness that she was still playing, and still playing badly; but now with a stilted sort of badness.
“Young lady, this is past all bearing. I suggest that you stop playing the damned thing and go to your bed. Or go anywhere and do anything. But this is hideous. Stop it!”
The little girl really did cry then. And as a result of it Moysha got into an altercation, got his head bloodied, and was put out of the place; the first time that such a thing had ever happened to him. Then he realized that the seamen liked the little girl, and liked the way she played the piano.
This does not seem like a good beginning for either a tender love or a great passion. But it had to be the beginning; that was the first time they ever saw each other.
For the next three days Moysha was restless. A serpent was eating at his liver and he could not identify it. He began to take a drink in the middle of the day (it had not been his custom); and on the third day he asked for rum. There was a taste in his mouth and he was trying to match it. And in the inner windings of his head there was an awful smell, and it made him lonesome.
By the evening of the third day the terrible truth came to him: he had to go down for another whiff of that damned sea; and he possibly could not live through another night unless he heard that pretty little girl play the piano again.
Bonny was pretty. She had a wise way with her, and a willful look. It was as though she had just decided not to do something very mean, and was a little sorry that she hadn’t.
She didn’t really play badly; just out of tune and as nobody else had ever played, with a great amount of ringing in the ballad tunes and a sudden muting, then a sort of clashing and chiming. But she stopped playing when she saw that Moysha was in the room.
Moysha did not get on well at the Blue Fish. He didn’t know how to break into the conversation of the seamen, and in his embarrassment he ordered drink after drink. When finally he became quarrelsome (as he had never been before) they put him out of the place again.
Moysha lay on a dirty tarp out on a T head and listened while Bonny played the piano again. Then she stopped. She had probably been sent to bed.
But instead she came out to the T head where he was.
“You old toad, you give me the creeps.”
“I do, little girl?”
“Sure you do. And papa says ‘Don’t let that Yehude in the place again, he makes everybody nervous, if someone wants to borrow money from him let them borrow it somewhere else.’ Even the dogs growl at you do
wn here.”
“I know it.”
“Then why do you come here?”
“Tonight is the only time I ever did come except on business.”
“Tonight is what I am talking about.”
“I came down to see you.”
“I know you did, dear. O, I didn’t mean to call you that. I call everybody that.”
“Do you want to take it back?”
“No, I don’t want to take it back. You old toad, why aren’t you a seaman like everybody else?”
“Is everybody else a seaman?”
“Everybody that comes to the Blue Fish. How will you come to the Fish now when Papa won’t let you in the place?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you give me one of your cards I’ll call you up.”
“Here.”
“And if you give me two dollars and a half I’ll pay you back three dollars and a quarter Saturday.”
“Here.”
“I can’t play the piano any other way. If you were a seaman I bet you’d like the way I play the piano. Good night, you old toad.”
“Good night, Bonny.”
And it was then that the dismal thought first came to Moysha: “What if I should be a seaman after all?”
Now this was the most terrible thing he could have done. He could have become a Christian, he could have married a tramp, he could have been convicted of embezzlement. But to leave his old life for the sea would be more than he could stand and more than his family could stand.
The R a Lafferty Fantastic Megapack Page 20