“Where you from?”
“Scranton.” Liked the sound of it too.
“Huh?”
“Scranton, in Pennsylvania.”
“Oh. You’re a long way from home.”
There was an ex-wife back there, or somewhere, hopelessly attracted to sailors. There was a little boy named Nelson whom he missed desperately and about whom he made up plaintive country songs and sang them in his heart, or aloud when he drank too much or when he was standing alone on the empty highway and feeling about as wasted as dog piss on a telephone pole.
He is a veteran, but his service record would bristle the hairs on a Legionnaire’s neck; and he once served a thin slice of time behind Old Crossbars, but he never hurt anyone, not deliberately.
Ohio State had given him an excellent deal after high school, but one semester there proved to Ohio State that Beef Buddusky, even with the combined tutoring of an entire fraternity of athletes, would never average out at C. He stayed around campus for a semester anyway. There was nothing better to do, and he liked being around students. He liked to overhear them talking. They often spoke of very serious topics: war, religion, truth, man—things he didn’t like being left out of.
“You headed back there?” asked the driver of the Dodge. “To Scranton?”
“I gotta put some money together first.”
There was a time he had $6500 together, the net result of a night every man who’s ever warmed a set of dice between his sweaty palms has known in dreams. Six-five-oh-oh, in currency, and even then he knew that a man can hope to have a night like that only once in a lifetime. Fact is, a man can’t hope to have a night like that, not even once in a lifetime. A man has got to look at his sixty-five hundred in the green and say, “Moj anajomy, we’re gonna stick together, we’re gonna go somewhere,” but it was the money that went somewhere, gone, gone on a short series of long-legged, big-assed ladies who think a whole world of Beef Buddusky.
The thing to remember, though, is that he never hurt anyone, not deliberately. He never ran away from a fight (he said he never ran away from a fight), but he never hurt anyone deliberately. (He never did hurt anyone deliberately.)
It was 3 a.m. when they came into Colorado Springs. They stopped for a red light.
“How far you say you were goin’?” asked Beef.
“Pueblo,” said the driver.
“There’s a town between here and there, ain’t?”
The odd colloquialism threw the driver. He did not know an answer was expected.
“Ain’t?” said Beef.
“Not unless you count Fountain or Pinon, but there’s nothing there for a boy like you.”
“Hell, I’ll get off here.”
Beef opened the door and got out. He leaned back into the car. “Too bad about your brother. Thanks for the lift.”
He walked down Cimarron Street toward the town, looking for a mission or the Salvation Army. He paused at a well-lit drugstore window. He pulled himself away, but returned again to gaze through the window. Someday I’ll go home and all of this wandering will be over and I won’t be looking in the Rexall window, wondering why in the hell I want that big bright bowie knife, sharpened on both edges. Where would I get $29.95 anyway?
He found the Salvation Army, but it was closed. He went around the back to the alley and slept on some empty cardboard boxes. The night was chilly. In a dream he relived his earliest memory. “Papa, I’m ready,” calls the three-year-old Harry from the toilet. His father, suspenders over his bare torso and pleasantly smelling of rye, routinely comes to him and gets the paper and gently pulls Harry toward him. Beef remembers leaning forward and putting his head against the coarse cloth of his father’s trousers. How he loved that man!
In the morning he was hungry and his throat sore from the cold damp night. The dream on his mind, he called home collect, turning and raising his head so that his neck could draw some heat from the morning sun.
“Mama? It’s Harold, Mama. I’m in Colorado.”
“You sure get around, don’t you?”
“Can I come home for a while?”
“Sure,” said his mother flatly.
“I’ll need the fare.”
“Get yourself a little job in Colorado, Harold. Shape yourself up.”
“I just finished a job. It petered out.”
“Get another one.”
“I could use a vacation.”
“I don’t need nobody to take care of. It’s all I can do to take care of my ownself. You go off on your own now. Like your old boy.”
The old boy, gone since Beef was seventeen. He had been a coal miner. On Saturday mornings he had been a barber, and the kids came from all over the neighborhood, their quarters in their fists, and lined up in the yard, waiting their turn on the kitchen chair. People loved him without reason, for his face told them he would die an untimely, unkindly, unnatural death, and probably he did. Didn’t everyone say he would? The problem was that, if he did, he did not die at home. One day he was gone, only his lunch bucket left as legacy to a frightened son.
Beef has his bad teeth. The only gold he owns is in his molars. What’s more, he finds himself laughing cautiously, like his father, at things he knows are not funny. If the rest holds true he will finally vanish. Perhaps he already has.
“I’ll take care of you,” Beef promised his mother.
“I’ll take care of myself.”
He knew she would too. She needed no one. Beef was the one who cried when his father left. She immediately found work and made plans to live without him. When Beef himself left, she wished him well. She even gave him some money. Her strength, however, was her own, and others must find theirs or do without.
“Just for a while, Mama? This is no good, the way I’m doin’.” Begging her made him feel small, like a child.
“You gotta be a man. You gotta grow up.” She knew what he felt but had no time for it.
“I got about thirty cents.”
“Well, that’s a dime more ‘n me.”
Beef stroked his thrice-broken nose.
“Okay, Mama, I won’t keep you on the line. Are you feelin’ pretty good?”
“I’m all right.”
“Okay, then, I’ll be in touch. I don’t know where the hell I’m gonna be next. Like a yo-yo.”
“Be a good boy. Stay out of trouble.”
Beef hung up and rested his forehead against the phone, still holding the receiver with both hands, wanting to be home, home, to sit on the front porch and follow the patterns of smoke from the nearby stacks. To lie on the glider on his mother’s porch, nestled between the anthracite strippings, drinking Moxie and watching the high school girls walk by on their way to and from school. He wanted to see again the rattling coal trucks, dripping water from the breaker, on their way to customers. He wanted to sit amid the familiar comforting odors of home. He wanted to go down to the cellar, blow the dust off his father’s scattered tools, and finish the job abandoned so many years before. The place would need better lighting and a few more wall receptacles. He’d have to call in an electrician for that. The rest he could probably handle himself. It would be necessary to camouflage the furnace, maybe with a fake beaver-board wall. At one end he could build a bar, and if he could find an old refrigerator he could convert it to a beer tapper and have draft beer at home. He would have to lay some fancy linoleum over the concrete floors It would not take much to complete the room.
The Salvation Army had opened and Beef went inside and stood at a kind of sloppy attention before the counter, almost inclined to bring hand to brow smartly and say, “Reporting for duty, missus.” He eyed the coffee mess doggedly until the lady gave him a cupful. He swallowed and felt it sear through his chest. “I’m high and dry in town without any money, and I sure would like to do some work for a Christian employer.”
She consulted some cards and said, “There’s a lady wants her windows washed, dollar and a half an hour.”
“I’d ruther do yard work,” sai
d Beef, responding to a sensation in his palms.
“Do you do a good job of washing windows?” asked the lady. She had no yard work.
“I’m a window-washing maniac,” said Beef without enthusiasm.
She gave him the name and address of the lady who wanted her windows washed. It was a walk of some twenty blocks, toward plunging his hands into water and hearing the squeak of wet glass when it’s wiped. He was warm by the time he reached the apartment and sorry to have walked so far, because to wash the windows of this apartment unit would not earn him $1.50, even if he stretched the job. A dollar and a half would not cover what he could do to bread, pepperoni, and milk, his favorite meal on the road. And then what? Already he felt tired and without substance. He rang the bell.
The woman who answered was small, her head did not reach Beef’s shoulders. She smiled at him, a coy, studied smile. She was in that curious stage of her forties where beauty hung in the balance, where it might mature and stay until the end, or slip and vanish forever. Perhaps it would not go well for her; a hardness had taken hold around her eyes, and, under Beef’s gaze, she moved her hand to her throat, where the skin had grown coarse, like alligator hide. There was, however, something about her smile that sang to him softly, something from the cover of a schoolboy’s tablet of foolscap. Mona Lisa?
“The Salvation Army sent me, missus.”
“Onward Christian soldiers,” she replied, still smiling. She had the voice of a seventeen-year-old, an unnatural, slightly annoying bit of acting. Yet he liked it. He laughed politely.
She stepped back, opened the door wider, and Beef walked inside. Another woman was seated at the coffee table, a cup and saucer in front of her. She was an old woman, a very old woman, whose bamboo cane lay across her legs.
The apartment was overly tidy and tight with heavy furnishings, everything to make Beef self-conscious of the dust and sand he carried on his back and the smell of his body that could usually be ignored on the road.
“This is my friend, Mrs. Lister,” said the woman. “And I’m Mrs. Wynn, but you call me Ginny. Better call her,” indicating her friend, “Mrs. Lister, if you want an answer out of her.”
Beef stood silent. He expected to have no reason to call either of them anything.
“What’s your name, Bomba?” she asked, giggling at her ancient friend.
“They call me Beef.”
“I should say so,” she said seductively. She put her hands around his bicep, covering the tattoo there.
“I’m here to wash the windows,” he said, to establish his duties definitively. He had no objection to sleeping with a woman like her, provided they meet in a bar when they are both too drunk to care.
“You low on money?” she asked him.
“I’m flat. Hitched in last night from Nebraska.”
“A traveling man, huh?” She seemed happy about that. “I’ve been around too, Bomba, just like you.”
“Better ‘n me, I hope. Why you callin’ me Bomba?”
“Don’t let present circumstances fool you. I’ve come up the hard way.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Beef never met anyone who had come up any other way.
“I didn’t always have a nice place like this. When I was a kid we lived in a shack on the flats, Kansas. That’s the only thing you could call it, a shack. I wonder the wind didn’t blow it away. We nailed old tobacco cans against the holes in the walls. Lived like that till I was fourteen and starting to develop nice.”
“Is that right?” said Beef, as he had to so many other life stories that were of no interest to him.
“Bomba, you’re with friends here, do you know that?”
“No, ma’am, I didn’t know that.”
“You look like you could stand some breakfast.”
“I could always stand some breakfast, I don’t care if it’s ten o’clock at night,” said Beef Buddusky.
She laughed at his wit and sat him at the table in the dining alcove. Mrs. Lister, the old lady who did not speak, hobbled to join them, fiddling with her fingers as though counting calluses.
Ginny took a ham from the refrigerator. Beef’s eyes followed the magnificent piece of meat.
“A fella can overcome his birth, though, if he keeps his ear to the ground,” she said as she cut the ham and tossed the thick slices into the frying pan. “You don’t see any tobacco cans nailed to the walls here, do you?”
Involuntarily, Beef turned around and looked at all the walls. The apartment was nothing special, but what she said was true. He could not locate tobacco can one. “No, ma’am, I don’t,” he said.
“Damned right, you don’t.” She stabbed the ham pieces with her fork. “This is our own furniture, you know.”
“Good, good,” he said.
She put the ham aside and opened two eggs into the frying pan. She looked again at Beef, smiled sweetly, and cracked open a third egg.
“I can handle it,” Beef assured her.
Mrs. Lister sat across the table from him and watched nothing.
“A fella,” said Ginny, “has to size up the situation and...you thought I was going to say make the most of it, didn’t you?”
Beef hadn’t even heard her. He was listening to the eggs sputtering in grease. “Yes, ma’am, I did at that.”
“Well, that’s where you missed the boat. You’ve got to size up the situation and change it.”
“I’m gonna remember that.”
“I wish you would.”
She took the full breakfast plate and placed it before him. He looked down at it in wonder, and from somewhere four pieces of toast appeared. He took one of them and pushed it into the iris of the egg. He fell to eating, the plate trapped within the corral of his hefty forearms,
The two ladies sat and watched him.
“Huh, Mrs. Lister?” said Mrs. Wynn, nudging her. “Huh? Old Bomba can whack away the groceries, huh?”
Old women, it seemed to Beef, always got a thrill out of watching young men eat well. He could not understand it, but such a phenomenon was in his favor. It was as solid a basis for friendship and mutual admiration as any other. What a breakfast! Ain’t this livin’!
“More, Bomba?” offered Mrs. Wynn when he had finished his second plateful.
He had four more slices of toast and jam. “Now I’m ready for the windows,” he said.
“Well, as you can see, they’re sure ready for you,” she said. “I’m a very good housewife, but for the life of me I can’t wash windows. Everybody has his little quirk, the one thing he can’t do.” Suddenly she was nervous. “Do you have anything you can’t do?” She waited a second for his answer, then spoke quietly, as if she did not want to hear it. “Some women can’t iron, some can’t vacuum. Me, I can’t wash windows, can’t bring myself to do it.”
“I’m your man, then. Don’t bother me at all.”
She looked at him long and closely. “I believe you may be,” she said, relaxing again.
He slapped his hands on his knees, indicating his readiness.
“But dirty as those windows are,” she said, “I think you’re one up on them.”
Beef lowered his head in humiliation. “Not many comforts on the road,” he said.
“Up!” she shouted and scared Beef to his feet. She took his elbow with both hands and led him across the room. “You march right into this bathroom and have yourself a long, hot tub.”
“Hold on, now, missus,” objected Beef, but the thought of relaxing in hot water overtook his initial embarrassment.
“Go on, go on.” She pushed him into the bathroom. “You hand your clothes out here and I’ll send them with Mrs. Lister to the laundromat.”
“That’s okay, you don’t have to go to any trouble on my account,” he said through the closed door. He did not want the ladies to see the holes in his dingy underwear.
“Hand them out,” she insisted.
“Won’t have you goin’ to any trouble,” said Beef.
“Guess I’ll have to
come in and get them,” she said. “Here I come, ready or not.”
Beef quickly handed out his clothes. She sure gets her way, he thought.
He turned on the hot water. He heard them mumbling and heard the door shut. He lowered himself slowly into the comforting water. He leaned back and shut his eyes. Wonderful!
Soon he was dozing. The sound of the calliope, all the way from the fair in Nebraska, drifted into his head, but as quickly faded away again. Forever, he hoped.
“Ready for your back?” came her voice from the other side of the door.
He came out of his reverie. “Huh?” he asked.
“Ready to have your back scrubbed?”
“No, my back is just fine,” he answered. “Don’t need any scrubbing on my back.”
She opened the door and walked in. He quickly covered his organ with the washcloth.
“Smart as God’s supposed to be,” she said, “you’d think He’d give us something to scrub our backs with.” She took a sponge from the side of the tub and knelt behind him. “Course, could be He meant for us to scrub each other’s.”
She soaped his back. “Doesn’t that feel good?”
Beef had to agree it did. She rubbed for a moment longer, then asked, “You know about lye?”
“Lye? What about it?”
“Well, it’s pretty powerful stuff, isn’t it?”
“I guess it is,” said Beef.
“What would happen if there was a dead body in your bathtub, let’s say, and you covered it up with lye?”
Beef grew apprehensive. He did not know this woman and her friend, they did not know him; but he was thousands of miles from home, in a place where no one knew him, except for others like him, who knew from instinct.
“Why do you want to know a thing like that?” he asked her.
“Just curiosity. Wouldn’t the lye dissolve the body and float it right down the drain? Wouldn’t that be the perfect way to get rid of a body?”
“Jesus.”
“And it’s getting rid of the body that always trips them up,” she said.
“Oh, I get it. You’re a cops-and-robbers enthusiastic.”
“I should say so.” She rinsed his back with a sponge and finally massaged him sensually with her two hands.
The Accomplice: The Stairway Press Edition Page 2