“Splinters,” his father said, “there’s a fortune in splinters.” “Where’s the fortune in splinters already?” his father said. Looking at the collection, the card table, the two chairs, the room which for all its clutter seemed barren. “Look alive there. Your father, the merchant prince, is talking. What, you think I’ll live forever? We’re in a crisis situation, I tell you. I have brought the Diaspora this far and no further. Though I’ll tell you the truth, even now things fly outward, my arms and my heart, pulling to scatter. I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go. There are horses inside me and they are stampeding. Run, run for the doctor. Get cowboys with ropes. Talk to me. Talk!”
“What do you want me to say?” his son asked.
“Yielder, head bower, say what you mean.”
The boy didn’t know what he meant.
“It’s not moving, it’s not moving,” his father moaned. “Business is terrible. Are you hungry?”
“No.”
“Are you cold?”
“No.”
“Nevertheless, business is terrible. It stinks, business.” He brushed a pile of canceled stamps from the table. “Everything is vendible. It must be. That’s religion. Your father is a deeply religious man. He believes in vendibility. To date, however, he has failed to move the unsalable thing. The bottom has dropped out of his market look out below.”
They lived like this for three years.
For three years he was on the verge of fleeing his father. What prevented him now was not love (love goes, he thought) so much as an illusion that the Diaspora had brought him to an end of the earth, an edge of the world. For all that there were telephone poles about him, newspapers, machines, cars, neon in the windows of the taverns, he seemed to live in a world that might have been charted on an old map, the spiky spines of serpents rising like waves from wine-dark seas, personified zephyrs mump-cheeked and fierce—a distant Praetorianed land, unamiable and harsh. There might have been monkeys in its trees, burning bushes in its summers. He lived in a constant fear of miracles that could go against him. The wide waters of the Ohio and the Mississippi that he had seen meld from a bluff just below Cairo, Illinois, would have turned red in an instant had he entered them, split once and drowned him had he taken flight. There was the turtle death beyond, he vaguely felt, and so, like one who has come safely through danger to a given clearing, he feared to go on or to retrace his steps. He was content to stay still.
Content but embarrassed.
His father was famous now, and they seemed to live under the special dispensation of their neighbors. “I would make them eat the Jew,” he would confide defiantly.
Like anyone famous, however, they lived like captives. (He didn’t really mean “they” surprisingly, he was untouched—a captive’s captive.) It must have been a task even for his father to have always to come up to the mark of his madness. Once he bored them he was through. It was what had happened in Vermont, in Maine, elsewhere. Once he repeated himself—not the pattern; the pattern was immune, classic—it would be over. “There’s a fortune in eccentricity, a fortune. I’m alive,” his father said in honest wonder, weird pride. “It’s no joke, it costs to live. Consumers, we’re consumers. Hence our mortality. I consume, therefore I am.” He would smile. “I hate them,” he’d say. “They don’t buy enough. Read Shylock. What a wisdom! That was some Diaspora they had there in Venice.”
It was not hate, but something darker. Contempt. But not for him. For him there were, even at thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, pinches, hugs, squeezes. They slept together in the same bed (“It cuts coal costs. It develops the heart”). Awakened in the declining night with a rough kiss (“Come, chicken, cluck cluck cluck. If you cannot tell me, hold me”). Whispers, declarations, manifestoes in the just unhearing ear. Bedtime stories: “Your mother was a gentile and one of my best customers. I laid her in my first wagon by pots and by pans and you were born and she died. You think I hate you, you think so? You think I hate you, you took away my shicksa and a good customer? Nah, nah, treasure, I love you. She would have slowed down the Diaspora. We had a truck, and she couldn’t read the road maps. Wake up, I’ll tell you the meaning of life. Can you hear me? Are you listening? This is rich.” (At first he was terrified, but gradually he accommodated to madness, so that madness made no difference and words were like melodies, all speech as meaningless as tunes. He lied, even today. He said what he wanted, whatever occurred to him. Talk is cheap, talk is cheap.) “Get what there is and turn it over quick. Dump and dump, mark down and close out. Have specials, my dear. The thing in life is to sell, but if no one will buy, listen, listen, give it away! Flee the minion. Be naked. Travel light. Because there will come catastrophe. Every night expect the flood, the earthquake, the fire, and think of the stock. Be in a position to lose nothing by it when the bombs fall. But what oh what shall be done with the unsalable thing?”
Madness made no difference. It was like living by the railroad tracks. After a while you didn’t hear the trains. His father’s status there, a harmless, astonishing madman, provided him with a curious immunity. As the boy became indifferent to his father, so the town became indifferent to the boy, each making an accommodation to what did not matter. It was not, however, that madness made sense to him. It was just that since he’d grown up with madness, nothing made sense. (His father might even be right about things; he was probably right). He had been raised by wolves, he saw; a growl was a high enough rhetoric. But he could not be made himself. Perhaps he did not have the energy for obsession. He had lived so close to another’s passion, his own would have been redundant. “You have a locked heart,” his father told him. Perhaps, perhaps he did. But now if he failed to abandon him (“When do you go?” his father sometimes asked. “When do you embark, entrain, enbus? When do you have the shoes resoled for the long voyage out? And what’s to be done with the unsalable thing?”), it was not a sudden reloving, and it was no longer fear. The seas had long since been scraped of their dragons; no turtle death lay waiting for him. The Diaspora had been disposed of, and the tricky double sense that he lived a somehow old-timey life in a strange world. It was his world; he was, by having served his time in it, its naturalized citizen. He had never seen a tenement, a subway, a tall building. As far as he knew he had never seen a Jew except for his father. What was strange about there being a cannon on the courthouse lawn, or a sheriff who wore a star on his shirt? What was strange about anything? Life was these things too. Life was anything, anything at all. Things were of a piece.
He went to a county fair and ate a hot dog. (Nothing strange there, he thought.) He chewed cotton candy. He looked at pigs, stared at cows. He came into a hall of 4-H exhibits. Joan Stizek had hooked a rug; Helen Prish had sewn a dress; Mary Stellamancy had put up tomatoes. He knew these girls. They said, “How are you, Leo?” when they saw him. (Nothing strange there.)
He went outside and walked up the Midway. A man in a booth called him over. “Drop the ring over the block and take home a prize,” he said. He showed him how easy it was. “Three tosses for a dime.”
“The blocks are magnets,” he said. “There are tiny magnets in the rings. You control the fields by pressing a button under the counter. I couldn’t win. There’s nothing strange.”
“Beat it, kid,” the man said. “Get out of here.”
“I am my papa’s son,” he said.
A woman extended three darts. “Bust two balloons and win a prize.”
“Insufficient volume of air. The darts glance off harmlessly. My father told me,” he said.
“I’ll guess your birthday,” a man said.
“It’s fifteen cents. You miss and give a prize worth five. Dad warned me.”
“Odds or evens,” a man said, snapping two fingers from a fist.
He hesitated. “It’s a trick,” he said, and walked away.
A sign said: LIVE! NAKED ARTIST’S MODEL! He handed fifty cents to a man in a wide felt hat and went inside a tent. A woman sat naked in a chair.
“Three times around the chair at an eight-foot distance at a reasonable pace. No stalling,” a man standing inside the entrance said. “You get to give her one direction for a pose. Where’s your pencil? Nobody goes around the chair without a pencil.”
“I haven’t got one,” he said.
“Here,” the man said. “I rent pencils. Give a dime.”
“Nobody said anything about a pencil,” he said. “It’s a gyp.”
“The sign says ‘Artist’s Model,’ don’t it? How you going to draw her without a pencil?” He narrowed his eyes and made himself taller. “If you ain’t an artist what are you doing in here? Or are you some jerk pervert?”
Feldman’s son put his hand in his pocket. “Green,” he said, showing a crayon from the inventory. “I work in green crayon.”
“Where’s your paper?” the man said. “Paper’s a nickel.”
“I don’t have paper,” he admitted.
“Here, Rembrandt,” the man said. He held out a sheet of ringed, lined notebook paper.
“Are we related,” Feldman’s son asked, handing him a nickel.
He joined a sparse circle of men walking around the woman in a loose shuffle.
The man at the entrance flap called directions. “Speed it up there, New Overalls.”
“Hold your left tit and point your finger at the nipple,” a man in a brown jacket said.
“That’s your third trip, Yellow Shoes. Get out of the line,” called the man at the entrance. “Eight-foot distance, Green Crayon. I told you once.”
“Spread your legs.”
“Boy, oh boy, I got to keep watching you artists, don’t I, Bow Tie?” the man said. “You already said she should grab her behind with both hands. One pose, one pose. Put the pencil in the hat, Yellow Shoes. You just rented that.”
“Spread your legs,” Feldman’s son said. Nothing strange there, he thought.
“Keep it moving, keep it moving. You’re falling behind, Brown Jacket.”
He left the tent, still holding the unused sheet of notebook paper that had cost him a nickel.
There was an ox-pulling contest. He found a seat in the stands near the judge’s platform and stared at the beasts. Beneath him several disqualified teams of oxen had been unyoked and sprawled like Sphinxes, their legs and haunches disappearing into their bodies, lush and fat and opulent. He gazed at the behinds of standing animals, seeing their round ball-less patches, slitted like electric sockets. They leaned together in the great wooden yokes, patient, almost professional.
“The load is eight thousand-five hundred pounds,” the announcer said, drawling easily, familiarly, a vague first-name hint in his voice. “Joe Huncher’s matched yellows at the sled for a try, Joe leading. Willy Stoop making the hitch. Move those boys back there, William. Just a little more. A little more. You did it, William. Clean hitch.”
The man jumped aside as the oxen stamped jerkily backwards, moving at a sharp left angle to their hitch.
“Gee, gee there, you.” The leader slapped an ox across the poll with his hat. He beat against the beast’s muzzle. “Gee, you. Gee, gee.”
“Turn them, Joseph. Walk them around. Those lads are excited,” the announcer said.
The leader looked up toward the announcer and said something Feldman’s son couldn’t hear. The announcer’s easy laugh came over the loudspeaker. He laughed along with him. I’m a hick, he thought. I’m a hick too. I’m a Jewish hick. What’s so strange? He leaned back and brushed against a woman’s knee behind him. “‘Scuse me, Miz Johnson,” he said, not recognizing her.
“Hmph,” she said.
Spread your legs, he thought. Touch your right tit with your left instep.
The oxen were in line now and the farmer stepped back. “Gee-up,” he yelled, waving his hat at them. “Gee-UP!” The animals stepped forward powerfully, taking up the slack on their chain harness. They strained at the heavy sled, stumbling, their muscles jumping suddenly under their thick flesh. “Gee-UP! Whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh, whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh!” The burdened sled nine feet forward in the dirt.
The crowd applauded, Feldman’s son clapping with them.
“Thataway, William, good work there, Joe,” he called. Hey, Willy, yo, Jo, he wanted to call aloud. Hey hey. Hi yo. Hee hee. Yo yo. Hey hi yo hee ho! Whoosh, boys. Whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh.
“I thought I saw William spit there, Joe. No fair greasing the runners,” the announcer said.
Feldman’s son laughed.
“All right, folks,” the announcer said, “next up’s a pair of brown Swiss from the Stubb-Logan farm over county in Leeds. That’s George Stubb up front, Mr. Gumm at the hitch. You been feeding them roosters, George? They look to me like they did some growing since the last pull.”
At 9,500 pounds only Huncher and Stoop and the Leggings brothers were still in the contest. The matched yellows, his favorites because they were the crowd’s, were unable to move the sled even after three trys.
He applauded as Joe Huncher led the team away. He leaned forward and cupping his hands shouted down at them: “That was near five tons on that sled there, Joseph. Hose those boys down now, William. Hose those boys down.” Stoop waved vaguely toward the unfamiliar voice, and Feldman’s son smiled. “A man works up a sweat doing that kind of pulling,” he said to his neighbor.
The Leggings brothers led their oxen, sleek and black as massive seals, toward the sled to make the hitch. They maneuvered them back carefully and one brother slapped the ring solidly onto the peg.
“Come,” the other brother commanded. “Come. Come. Come.” The two beasts struggled viciously forward. It seemed they would strangle themselves against the yoke. They stretched their necks; their bodies queerly lengthened. There was a moment of furious stasis when Feldman’s son thought that either the chain must break or the beasts themselves snap back against the sled, breaking their legs. Then he saw the thick wooden runners scrape briefly sideways, and the animals dragged the load five feet.
The announcer called the brothers up to collect their prize.
“Just a minute. Hold your oxes,” a voice called. It was his father, standing in front of the judge’s stand looking up. “Your Honor,” he called, “Your Honor.”
The crowd recognized him, laughing. The boy heard his father’s name repeated like a rumor up and down the grandstands.
“What is it?” the announcer asked over the loudspeaker.
“Your Honor,” Feldman said, “the contest ain’t over.”
“Of course it’s over. What do you mean it’s not over?”
It sounded like a routine. The son wondered if it was. “It’s part of the show,” he turned around and told the woman behind him. “It’s part of the show, Miz Johnson.”
“Now what’s the meaning of this interruption, Isidore?” the announcer asked.
Yeah, Izidore, what? the son thought. Vat iz diz?
“These Leggings brothers are waiting for their check,” said the announcer.
“It’s not fair,” Feldman shouted. “Anyway, the little one pushed from behind.” The crowd roared. “Let it stand, but give a man a chance, Your Honor.”
“What are you saying, Isidore? You mean you want to be in the contest too?”
His father flexed his arm, and the crowd laughed harder than before.”
“Do you folks think Isidore Feldman here should take his turn?” They cheered. “All right, Isidore, let’s see what you can do then,” the announcer said.
Feldman walked past the sled and looked at it for a moment but did not stop. “Cement,” he called roughly, pointing to the massive blocks chain-belted to the sled. “Cement for sale. Cash and carry.”
“Make your hitch there, Isidore,” the announcer called. He seemed annoyed. The son had an idea now it might not be an act.
Alarmingly, Feldman suddenly began to run. As he ran he shouted up to them, blowing out his phrases in gasps. “Wait, wait—while you’re here—I’ve got—something to show you.
” He ran across the small stadium and pushed open a gate in the low wall. Feldman’s son recognized the wagon, piled incredibly high. His father placed himself inside the long wood handles and bent far forward, like one in a storm. A tarpaulin had been spread over the load, so that it looked like a mountain. He seemed heroic. The people gasped as the wheels began slowly to turn and the wagon, the mountain inside it, began to move. He came steadily forward. “Talk about strength,” he intoned as he came, “heavy as earth, terrible tons, see how I pull it, drag it along, I break all the records, an ant of a man, prudent as squirrel, thrifty as greed, they’ll be a winter, who’ll make me warm?”
He brought the wagon to rest a few feet from the grandstand and straightened up. He turned around, and grabbing one corner of the tarpaulin, pulled at it fiercely. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, shouting, “THE INVENTORY!”
“Things,” he called, “things here. Things as they are. Thingamabobs and thingamajigs, dinguses and whatsits. Whatdayacallits, whatchamacallits. Gadgets and gewgaws. Kits and caboodle. Stuff. Stuff here!” He stood beside the pile, studying it. “What’s to be done with the unsalable thing?” He pulled at his sleeve like one reaching into dishwater for a sunken spoon and slipped his hand with gingerly gentleness into the center of the pile. “Teakettle,” he said. He pulled out a teakettle.
“We will trade together,” he said seriously. He advanced to the railing at the foot of the stands, the small kettle swinging like a censer before him. “Diaspora,” he called. “America, Midwest, Bible Belt, corn country, county fairgrounds, grandstand. Last stop for the Diaspora, everyone off.” He recognized his son in the stands and winked hugely. “All right,” he said, “I just blew in on the trade winds, and I’m hot see, and dusty see, and I’m smelling of profit and smelling of loss, and it’s heady stuff, heady. I could probably use a shower and a good night’s sleep, but business is business and a deal is a deal.” He held out the kettle. “All right,” he said, “This from the East. All from the East, where commerce begins. Consumers, consumers, purchasers, folks. I bring the bazaar. I’ve spared no expense. Down from the mountains, over the deserts, up from the seas. On the hump of a camel, the back of an ass. All right. Here is the kettle, who drinks the tea?” He leaped over the low rail and rushed into the stands. “Buy,” he demanded, “buy, damnit, buy, I say!” He chose a farmer and thrust the kettle into the man’s hand. He waited. The man tried to give the kettle back, but Feldman’s father wouldn’t take it; he folded his arms and dodged, bobbing and weaving like a boxer. “Pay up,” he shouted, “a deal is a deal.” The man made one more attempt to give it back. “All sales final,” his father said. “Read your contract.” At last the man, embarrassed, dug into his overalls and gave him a coin. His father held it up for the crowd to see. “Object’s no money,” he said scornfully. Passing his son, he took the sheet of notebook paper the boy still held. He sold it, then returned to the wagon. “Come,” he said over his shoulder. “Come. Come. Come.” Several followed him.
A Bad Man Page 5