The girls, now women of mature age, were Viola and Tina.
I remember Viola in her petticoat at the sink. Her mauve armpits glistened with soap. She sponged, and the suds returned to the tin basin where her hand was. The small spike of wet hair down which the water trickled was at that time eight years old and the armpit itself was twenty-two. The hair spread electrically while she was still in the convent about the time of the first flowering of the bloody roses. Her bodily beauty got her a professional man against whom at moments of extreme tension she still invokes the Church. Malcolm was a medical student not yet qualified. They lived in obscure furnished rooms at the east side of the city. She conceived for the first time defiantly, in squalor, and since that time, because her husband became a semi-invalid, her rooms have always been more or less obscure, and her attitude has been one of tearful defiance, more or less. As a child I was always in love with Viola.
Each time I saw Angus he was going to or coming from bed. He was an argumentative man of slow speech and a score of rocklike abstractions. When those were not questioned his utterances began, broke or ended with a yawn, and were often inspired by the weather. This last fact was strange because he had been on the night shift in a factory for fourteen years and the subtleties of the weather were for him little more than a memory. “It’s cold,” he said, or, “It’s hot,” or, sometimes, “It’s raining.” The other was most helpful when he commented on the state of the weather during the day. Angus narrowed his grey eyes and rubbed his prominent Adam’s apple. It was pale, pointed and bony, like the joint of a plucked chicken’s wing. If there was any discrepancy between the item of information furnished by the other and the meteorological report on the radio Angus became reflective. If the other man was still with him, he posed a question, his voice deliberate and high-pitched: “You said it rained all day?” The other nodded hesitantly. “That’s funny,” Angus said. “It said on the wireless it was showery with bright periods.”
The other sister, Tina, was married to Angus and she copulated with him on Sunday mornings after reading the Sunday newspapers. That was in the bed behind the green curtains in the parlour where, under the photograph of Elvira, Tina’s piano had stood since she became a woman of property. She owned a small general store which remained open sixteen hours a day including Sundays. It was hard after her father succumbed to coronary thrombosis, for in his latter years he worked only six days a week in the kitchen of a large canteen and was thus free to work in the general store on the seventh.
“He should’ve told us!” Aunt Hettie said after the last spasm.
There was a time when Tina was merely not beautiful. After she got goitre I visited her in the private nursing home where she had carried her shame, her boiled-egg eyes and humped throat, amidst a litter of hairpins, chocolate wrappings, filter-tipped cigarettes and ailing females, each in a sad way excited to be a victim amongst other victims and to indulge herself in toilet waters and expensive bed wraps such as that kind of invalid carries to that kind of place. Each was strangely flushed, with fats arranged nicely under silks and cashmere, and emitting an ambiguous odour of scents, illness and sweat. They were very fond of the nurses.
Tina is out now and about, but her eyes at odd moments slip silently out of alignment and she has the aspect of looking at the floor and the ceiling at the same time. When she remembers, she wears dark glasses, but she likes to be told that they are not necessary.
Hector, my boyhood friend, is the youngest member of the family. After his return from the army of occupation in Germany he worked as a commercial traveller. Like most of the younger salesmen, he was only “marking time”. But after a few months Hector brought to the most obscure mysteries his eye of a commercial traveller. No other eye was his to bring.
It all seems a long time ago now, and my father saying his brother’s house was just a bloody railway station.
5 A.M. TUG CAME for three of us before midnight. We moved line ahead over the dark water past Brooklyn towards Coney Island. My scow was at the stern of the tow. The Ferris wheel was still alight. I felt rather than saw activity there as we drew nearer. Faint sounds. Suddenly round the point on our starboard side the unutterable night of the Atlantic, big, black and menacing; there was no more light from the Jersey coast. From now until we gained the lee of Rockaway Point we were in open sea.
I’d heard about it from some of the other scowmen but I hadn’t thought much about it, how a flat-bottomed scow loaded down almost to the gunwales with a thousand ton of stone, and slung in a chain of scows behind a tug, moves when it is suddenly struck broadside by the black Atlantic.
It struck me as funny tonight that it should take place off Coney Island in sight of the Ferris wheel and all that crazy-motion machinery.
I had blown a joint and I was brewing a cup of coffee in the cabin when it struck. Somehow the helmsman of the tug misjudged his distance as he rounded a marking buoy and caused it to leap like a wild top between the linking lines of the tow. First I heard a sharp crack from somewhere up at the bows and then there was an unidentifiable scraping or gouging which seemed to approach my cabin with the shuddering noise of an express train. I moved quickly and as I opened the door an anonymous object like a huge Chianti bottle rose out of the spray, toppled quick and ghostly around my port quarter and hurled its way out of sight into the swirling trough of water astern. I was still wondering what the hell that was as I became aware of the Atlantic rising like a sheet of black ink high on my starboard and blotting out even the night sky.
I was standing in the wind, clutching at the doorway of my shack, the sea falling steeply away under my narrow catwalk, and for a moment I had the impression of tottering at the night edge of a flat world. Then I was going down like you go down on a rollercoaster, braced in the doorway, the cabin light flooding out round about me as though it would project me into the oncoming blackness. Black, then indigo as the horizon moved down like a sleek shutter from somewhere high above and flashed below the level of my eyes. A moment later the sea rose with a sucking sound and slid like a monstrous lip onto my quarterdeck about my ankles. It was icy cold. At that moment, staring down at it as it swirled round about the battened hatches, it occurred to me that I might be about to die.
It is surprising how after that split-second hesitation as one becomes adjusted to that possibility one moves at once to prevent it.
I had the sense of being adrift.
I locked the cabin door and climbed onto the roof where my storm lantern was creaking and dancing like a gibbet. Staring for’ard over the load it seemed to me that the long shadow of my own scow and that of the scow ahead were bending together in the night like a gigantic hinge.
I moved gingerly on the leeside along a lifeline towards the bows. I knew as I got there that my starboard hawser was gone and as I climbed round onto the fo’c’sle I saw that both crosslines had gone too. That left my port hawser. When that went, without power, my scow would be so much flotsam in the Atlantic. This had just occurred to me when the man on the scow ahead, the devil himself it seemed to me at that moment, an ageless taciturn German with a beard and wearing a sou’wester, struck two blows with a heavy axe and parted my port hawser.
I think I might have screamed, at least a dying curse, when a lighter line, his one remaining dockline, came snaking across my bows. I moved at once, aware in a side glance of the yawning distance between my scow and his, and thrust the eye of his line over my bollard amidships. I signalled frantically that it was secure and watched him stumble backwards with the free end of the line. He took a few quick (or slow) turns around his own port bollard and prepared to check it out slowly. I knew now what he was up to. You can’t control a single hawser manually in rough weather. If my last hawser had remained unparted we might have collided as castanets do on a short string. That anyway is the theory upon which he was prepared to risk casting me adrift. I clung to the capstan and watched him prepare himself for an unknown shock. At the instant at which the rope became taut
anything could happen. Fishermen know about this. The moment at which the rope takes the strain is the danger point. Check too strongly and the line will snap. Check too generously and a fish will run away with the longest line. I calculated that (if he hadn’t sold some to a junkman to buy lush) he still had about thirty feet of dockline to play with, and I felt that was very little for a give-and-take between two monsters on a rough sea. The tautening rope with spray darting from it emitted a dangerous singing sound which came to me by a strange species of sensory selection above all the other noises of wood, wind and sea. The first abrasive retch of the rope at his bollard and I knew that the rope was now running like a quick snake through his gloved hands.
“Take another fucking turn!”
I think he did so, for I could see now he was bracing himself. I watched him pay out a few more feet of line, and then he was checking hard, paying it out inch by inch. But I knew there couldn’t be much of it left. Not much of his line left, after which I in my weighted coffin would drift off alone into the night.
I thought of preparing a line of my own, but it was pointless. I could only make out the vague shadow of his stern now and I couldn’t have thrown it that far in the wind.
I became aware again of the Atlantic, big, black and endless, and wished to hell I’d had a fix. If I’d had a fix in the cabin I think I would have struggled back along the lifeline. I hope the fucking tug knows what’s happened back here, I thought. I was still clinging to the capstan, shivering in a T-shirt and shorts, and then, as suddenly as the first noise, I felt myself picked out like a wet insect by a searchlight.
Another tug was moving swiftly alongside.
A laconic voice came through a megaphone:
“What d’you use for hawsers aboard that boat of yours, Mac? Your brassiere?”
I watched a deckhand throw a line skilfully over my port bollard. I looked at the bridge: “Fuck you, egghead!” I screamed.
There is no story to tell.
I AM UNFORTUNATELY not concerned with the events which led up to this or that. If I were my task would be simpler. Details would take their meaning from their relation to the end and could be expanded or contracted, chosen or rejected, in terms of how they contributed to it. In all this, there is no it, and there is no startling fact or sensational event to which the mass of detail in which I find myself from day to day wallowing can be related. Thus I must go on from day to day accumulating, blindly following this or that train of thought, each in itself possessed of no more implication than a flower or a spring breeze or a molehill or a falling star or the cackle of geese. No beginning, no middle, no end. This is the impasse which a serious man must enter and from which only the simple-minded can retreat. Perhaps there is no harm in telling a few stories, dropping a few turds along the way, but they can only be tidbits to hook the unsuspecting with as I coax them into the endless tundra which is all there is to be explored. God knows it’s a big enough confidence trick to make someone listen to you as you gabble on without pretending to explain how Bella got her bum burnt. I said to myself: “Well now, here’s a nice barren wilderness for you to sport and gambol in, with no premises and no conclusions, with no way in and no way out, and with nary a trail for the eye to see. What more can a man want to fill his obscene horizons?” Drainage trouble in your home? Drainage trouble? A stopped-up sewer may be to blame. I drank a bottle of cough syrup (4 fluid oz., morphine content 1/6 grain per fluid oz.) and took a couple of dexies21 and felt better. Nothing like a short snifter to buck you up when you find yourself near Perth Amboy, New Jersey, sitting on the hand pump on the port quarter of your scow whose starboard side is swinging just free of the docks, and the dung-coloured water sliding away smoothly, horizontally, before your eye. On it, a tanker. Beyond it, and to either side of it, low brown and green countryside, low bridges, concrete piles, elevated roads with automobiles like little ladybirds running across them, and squat and strutted things, trucks, gas tanks, telegraph poles, scows, gravel, endless concrete, low, flat, dispersed, representing, dear reader, man’s functional rape of unenviable countryside, marginal flat and bogland. As the afternoon wore on the sky was becoming thin and milky-white and the water gleamed blankly in reflection. To walk beyond it all would have taken how long, one pillbox after another through the skeleton factory, mile after mile flat and deserted? The nearest bar, I was told by the last dockhand before they knocked off, was just over a mile away beyond that underpass; that the first evidence that man was not only a working animal, and yet really not much more than a filling station between there and the next bar a mile further on, and so on, and so on. It reminded me of the North Sea in a fog, of Hull or Sheerness, places like that on the east coast of England.
I left the scow after dark around ten-thirty and walked through a brickyard to reach the path leading up to the road. I walked slowly along a single railway track overgrown with weeds and found myself amongst brick kilns like the kind of sandcastles you make by inverting a child’s sand pail. The furnaces of two of the kilns were going full blast, casting a red glow which threw my shadow in black on the wet gravel. – I am walking through hell or Auschwitz, I thought. And then the dreary climb up beyond the underpass. It was spitting rain.
It took me an hour and a half by bus, ferry and subway to reach the Village. I bumped into Jody in MacDougal Street. We walked towards Sheridan Square. Jody was wearing blue jeans and a cheap, imitation-leather jacket, powder blue in colour. Someone gave it to her. She disliked it but it was at least warm and all her own clothes, so she had told me, were locked away in two suitcases, impounded by some landlady uptown to whom she owed rent.
As we approached the lights of the intersection her hand went automatically to her hair. It was fine brown hair, cut short and close at the ears, and cut short like that it made her finely chiselled features look hard and sculpted. This impression was intensified by the wide sweep of her plucked eyebrows and by the mockery which came often into her beautiful pale brown eyes.
She lived with a girl called Pat who loved her and paid the rent. That was Jody’s way. Jody’s share of the rent, if she could have brought herself to pay anything, would have been less than the price of staying high for a day. But for some reason or other Jody never paid. She invented excuses. She had lost it. It had been stolen. She had been burnt. Pat was a square, a lush... why pay her anything? And if it wasn’t Pat it was someone else, even myself at times, and Jody could always find a word to cap her victim and justify the unseemly executions. There was the time she took twenty dollars from me to cop and didn’t return until the following evening high out of her mind with a full-blown story of a big bust and shit flushed down toilets and arm inspections and Malayan elephants and she had been lucky to get away at all. (Not just one little taste for me, Jody? The iris closing. You hang me up for twenty-four hours waiting for shit, you come back zonked and expect me to think it’s lucky you got back without it? Aw, Joe, I couldn’t help it, honest. Let’s blow some pot, Joe, just you and me... I didn’t burn you, Joe, honest... I told you it was a bust, honest...)
I met her first through Geo. I was staying at Moira’s place. Moira had gone away for a fortnight. The blinds were drawn all the time. I scarcely left the apartment. It was a time of fixing and waiting and being and fixing and waiting. Jody made all the runs. She had a good contact. She came with Geo and when he left she stayed, like some object he found too heavy to carry away. How do you do, Jody? It seems you’re living with me. The atmosphere became much less tense the morning Geo left to return to his scow. Jody asked me if I would like a cup of coffee. And she went out and brought back some milk and a few cakes. Jody loved cakes. She loved cakes and horse and all the varieties of soda pop. I knew what she meant. Some things surprised me at first, the way for example she stood for hours like a bird in the middle of the room with her head tucked in at her breast and her arms like drooping wings. At first this grated on me, for it meant the presence of an element unresolved in the absolute stability created by the
heroin. She swayed as she stood, dangerous as Pisa. But she never fell and I soon got used to it and even found it attractive. One time she turned blue and I carried her over to the bed and massaged her scalp. She came round almost at once. It might have been the increase of circulation in her head. Or it might have been the fact that Jody didn’t like anyone to touch her hair, or indeed, any other part of her. She was always at the mirror, arranging her hair. It had to be perfect, that and her makeup. Sometimes when she was high she would spend as much as an hour in front of the bathroom mirror.
“Does it never occur to you that you spend a helluva time each day in front of a mirror?”
She was immediately, you might say understandably, on the defensive. A shadow crossed her face, the secret closing of the iris.
Her skin and her colour suggested delicate, fragile china. The clearly marked eyebrows, the finely curved cheek, and the dark, accentuated beauty of the eyes, heightened this masklike effect. Her lips were dull, soft, red, hard, full; the nose aquiline, curved smoothly and sharply, like all the other aspects of her face. Her pupils were often pinned and shadowy, her delicate nostrils tense.
In a way she was always abstracted. I have described a beautiful face, but the beauty was not at all conventional. In fact there were moments... when she was stoned in the flesh and tired by the use of too many drugs, by too little sleep, by a hard coil of inner desperation which caused a certain latent vulgarity that was hers to come to the surface... when she looked cheap and ugly. Below the mask then a stupid confusion was evident. It showed in her whole manner, particularly in the nervous movement of her hand arranging her hair, a movement which was indistinguishable from the fatuous gesture a cheap whore might make as she stood up, caught sight of herself in a wall mirror, and prepared a face to leave the bar with.
Cain’s Book Page 12