He Got Hungry and Forgot His Manners

by Jimmy Breslin

  The bum, his face still contorted with pain, started to tiptoe back toward the bucket of money.

  “Watch out!” the piano player suddenly called out.

  The bum kept coming toward the tub of money.

  The piano player held one foot out. “You’ll be eating this halfway down your throat!”

  Averting her eyes, Octavia looked across the street and saw this line of women and children in the dimness in front of the Coliseum. Thank the Lord, she thought, for she didn’t know what she would do if the piano player attacked the poor street man once more. “Oh, look,” she said to Golden’s wife. “They’re going on a skiing trip.”

  She and Golden’s wife strolled back across Broadway toward the gay young people on line. Abruptly, a young boy with a scarf wrapped around his face ran off and a woman in white sneakers turned around and shouted, “José! Ven acà!”

  Which caught Octavia and Golden’s wife in midstride, and they saw that the lines were all black or Hispanic. In the entrance to one bus, in the dim light, a black woman in an army overcoat stood on the step and ate a sandwich.

  Golden’s wife said, “Oh, there he is. Look at where my husband is. All the way over there.” She pointed at her husband a full block ahead and followed her finger away from this pack of blacks and Hispanics. Octavia Ripley Havermeyer knew she would feel far better if she, too, got away from all this, but as she walked through the lines of women and children waiting to get on the buses, she felt a little twinge. Yes, she said to herself, the heart does go out. And she knew that this was the thing that set her apart from the others, who were so glazed that they felt nothing. She could feel the pain of others. Of course, she knew that nothing really could be done tonight about the reasons for the pain, but that was not the point. She told herself that she did care.

  She stopped alongside a little girl and said, “And where are you going, dear?”

  “To see my daddy,” Roberta said.

  “Clinton Correctional, baby,” Disco Girl said.

  “And how long do you stay at this … institution?”

  “Eight hours to get there. Visit lasts eight hours,” Disco Girl said. “Then we get on the bus, come right back down here. Be here midnight tomorrow night.”

  “What does this poor child do all day?”

  “Sits on a chair across from her daddy.”

  Octavia, speaking in a little voice, said to Roberta, “And what did you bring with you to read?”

  Roberta became bashful. “Nothing.”

  “My word,” Octavia said. Turning to Disco Girl she said, “Do you have something for the little girl to read?”

  “Lights be out in this bus all the way to morning’,” Disco Girl said.

  “But certainly the little girl will become restless in the morning,” Octavia said. “Then she will spend all day in this one room. The little girl absolutely must have a book with which to occupy herself.”

  “Not allowed to buy books,” Disco Girl said.

  Octavia looked at her in puzzlement.

  “Bureau of Labor Statistics welfare grant say that people receive no money to buy things to read,” Disco Girl said.

  At first Octavia was going to remark that this was insane, but she stopped herself, for her memory told her that the statement was true. Yes, this young woman was right, the basic welfare grant did note that, on the one hand, the poor did not have to pay any income taxes on their checks, and therefore, on the other, they could not expect to have money included in their payments to buy such things as books.

  Here, on the dim sidewalk by the bus, it seemed unfair and absurd to Octavia, but she reminded herself that all these rules must be examined dispassionately, in an office far removed from squalling children, and only then did they begin to make sense, and almost always very good sense, too. In this case, there must be a good reason for their not receiving money for books, she thought. She remembered the other rule she had read, the one about day care being disallowed for any mother attempting to go to a four-year college and earn a degree. That one had been devised by somebody in a different social assistance office, in a different city to be exact. She remembered that, for she had read about the man who devised the day-care rule, for which he was the recipient of a government employee service award for the idea of withholding aid to these cheap frauds.

  If you listen to some of these … street leaders, they would have everybody believe that there was a conspiracy to keep these people down, Octavia said to herself. And out here, if you were to tell this to people, they would probably believe it. Why, most of the time when I first hear one of these silly charges, I believe what I’m told, Octavia admitted to herself. I must never say anything until I am back in my office and have it explained to me … reasonably. She smiled, for she was comforted by knowledge this time. Here we had two people who drew up two rules and the people were in different cities and did not even know each other. They had never spoken to each other. Why, this absolutely proves that there is no conspiracy to stop these people at all. Things just always work out this way.

  With this, she patted little Roberta on the head and walked off to catch up with those going to the supper party. When she looked back into the doorway of the Coliseum and saw Cosgrove huddled with Great Big, sharing a cigarette, she hurried off the curb and crossed the street. There is the biggest drug addict I have ever seen, she said to herself.

  6

  WHEN THE BUS TO Clinton pulled out of Columbus Circle that night, Cosgrove, Great Big, and Baby Rock stood on the sidewalk and waved, and Disco Girl and Roberta waved back and the bus was gone. Baby Rock ran down the up escalator into the subway at Columbus Circle and came racing back up the down escalator and reported that there were too many policemen on the platform. The three then walked over to Seventh Avenue and went downstairs and there were no police and they took the train back out to East New York. Baby Rock, who said he was tired, stepped into his storefront and fell on his couch. Cosgrove and Great Big walked to the church. On one block the sidewalk was entirely covered with garbage and the two stepped out into the street. Suddenly, a Lincoln town car rushed at them and stopped with a scream.

  The young hood from the Chief’s restaurant, gold chains, chewing gum, called from the car to Cosgrove, “If you want to walk with niggers, do it on the sidewalk.”

  Cosgrove stepped out of the way. Great Big did not move quickly enough for the Chief’s man, who stepped on the gas and aimed the Lincoln town car directly at Great Big. This caused Great Big to jump away. But as the car passed him, Great Big brought both hands high into the air, locked them, and then brought them down with a tremendous crash onto the roof of the Lincoln town car. Great Big’s hands punctured the roof and caused the Chief’s man to swerve almost out of control. Halfway down the block, the car stopped and the Chief’s man shouted something that Cosgrove couldn’t hear.

  “That was the hand of God,” Cosgrove shouted back.

  The car pulled away and Cosgrove walked back to the church with Great Big. It is good that not too many people challenge him, Cosgrove thought. He remembered how Great Big had reacted when it counted in Africa.

  At dawn, the French priest who was being replaced by Cosgrove drove him in the Land Rover to the mission. They traveled on a dirt road, a path really. Sunlight blazing off the tin roofs of huts caused him to blink. Soon there were no tin roofs, only round mud huts with thatched, conical roofs. People were naked or did not wear enough clothes to matter. Cosgrove looked at the people, but they did not look at him. The heat and expanse and people everywhere on parched ground gave him the feeling that the African centuries would leave him covered by dry grass.

  His mission was a cinder-block church raised from the ground on rocks in a place where the bush country sat in the heat on the edge of loneliness. He found that the sun never set. Much of the time it was somewhere at the top of the sky, the heat wrapped around it like gauze, scalding the eyes of all who dared to stare. The sun appeared to allow the day to become night, but
it did so by fakery, crouching to create shadows and darkness, yet never allowing its great flame to as much as flicker. The sun’s flame burned through the day and burned through the night as Cosgrove, raised in the madness of the rain, now lived in so much heat that he awoke each day with the thought that he was sleeping on a bed of ashes.

  That first Sunday he was a little unsure of what the reaction would be to his French in an area where the natives spoke Yoruba, a language that had existed before the Romans. But it was the vastness of the place, as it sat in constant heat, that was unsettling. Outside, a woman walked in the steaming morning with wood for cooking fires strapped to her back. Bent over, she could have walked forty miles for this wood. Upon putting it down, she probably would not be able to stand erect. What was she — thirty? — and her back had collapsed forever from hauling so much wood over so many miles. Defeating herself and everyone around her, God bless her, Cosgrove thought. He came from land where tens of thousands had starved to death because the rains had drenched a soil so that only leaf diseases grew. And here in the sun in the bush, desertification was the enemy. The bush had little jungle and no rain forests. As rainfall usually originates in the area where it rains, and forests usually provide the standing water crop out of which rain is formed, each tree hacked down in the bush caused a death in the air around it. The sun baked the land until the soil lost its structure. Somewhere at the edges, where the grass turns yellow and becomes as thin as an old man’s hair, the land is claimed by monotonous sand, which is a tan blanket smothering the earth from bush in Africa to sea at the northern edge of the continent, thousands of miles away. The wind causes the sand to swirl, but this is only a rearranging of grains; the sand is there until the day God commands the earth to be gone.

  On Sunday, the white cassock, which came down to his ankles, was sticking to him and it had been over his body for only a few moments.

  “You can say Mass in an undershirt here,” the old French priest he was replacing said.

  Cosgrove went through his suitcase for the white surplice with a gold cross on the back. He dropped it over his head, arranged it at his shoulders, and draped a stole around his neck, giving him three layers of starched cloth.

  “You will boil to death,” the Frenchman said.

  As Cosgrove’s foot hit the altar, his shoulders squared and his chin rose and he cared not about language or the number of people in the church; he was a man following his calling. He turned around to face the congregation and the heat dealt him a glancing blow. He held on to the altar for support. He was in the middle of the Confiteor when he and his three layers of heavy vestments went down like an accident victim. They got his clothes off, threw a bucket of water over his head, and put him under a tree where he looked out at women with bare breasts and tried to ignore them as he immediately swung into his sermon. “Celibacy is the calling of Christ until you become married.”

  One woman, her arms folded under her breasts, causing Cosgrove’s startled eyes to look at the ground, then the sky, said to him, “Celibacy?”

  “By that I mean not fornicating,” Cosgrove said.

  “What do I do if I sleep with my man every night?”

  A man said to him, “How do you expect me to marry my woman until she has shown me she can give me a son?”

  “It is a sin to sleep with her before you are married,” Cosgrove said.

  “It is a greater sin for me to marry her and she does not have a son for me,” the man said.

  When Cosgrove finished, one huge man at the rear of the crowd applauded. Cosgrove saw that the man might be as tall as eight feet. When Cosgrove gave out communion under the tree, the man opened a mouth so wide that Cosgrove felt he would lose his hand to the wrist if the mouth snapped shut.

  Later the French priest drank a bottle of beer and said to Cosgrove, “Are you usually this insane?”

  “I know, to dress like that,” Cosgrove said.

  “Not what you wore. What you said.”

  “Sins of the flesh,” Cosgrove said.

  “You are deteriorating already in this heat,” the Frenchman said. “I will tell you what is an important sin in this country. A broken sprocket is a great sin. If you have a broken sprocket, then you cannot use your bike to get food. Let them chew themselves to shreds in their beds! God understands. It is our duty to pray that their sprockets do not break. The priest who can protect sprockets, and fix them, will be the true patron saint of Africa.”

  “I did not come here to negotiate my religion,” Cosgrove said.

  “I can assure you, dear man, that if you persist like this, you shall be sent home in a cage.”

  One day following this, Cosgrove walked through dirt alleys between huts in search of a woman whose middle was so filled with fluid that death, too, was around looking for her. From off to the right came a hollow sound of people beating on trees. It was the sign that death had found her, and the people were trying to chase death away.

  Cosgrove went to the hut, anointed the woman’s body, and, feeling ill, went to the last hut of the village and started across a field of grass so dry that it crackled underfoot. The path went in the direction of Idjebo, the witchcraft village whose saying has been the same through the centuries: “The stranger who arrives here in the morning becomes the sacrifice by sunset.” Nearly everybody uses a circle route to bypass Idjebo. Cosgrove started across the field, in the middle of which rose the large man who had clapped so hard in church. He rose from the hot ground like a spire. Cosgrove walked through grass so stiff that it sounded against his ankles. The huge man called out in Yoruba, which Cosgrove did not understand, and then in French, which Cosgrove did understand, that the grass was a stockyard for snakes. Cosgrove retreated.

  The man walked barefoot through the grass to Cosgrove. He had shoulders of such width that to fit through a doorway he would have to go on the oblique. Underneath his shoulders, his body fell away, and his ribs hung like Venetian blinds. Evidence of how often he had been forced to live on himself, like an old bear in a tree stump, while the ground around him produced nothing but dust. His face, too, was hollow under cheekbones that sat in his face like iron bars.

  He gave an initial appearance of great meanness, but this dissolved as he came closer and Cosgrove could see that his eyes were sad as he listened to the wooden death sound coming from the woman’s hut. He told Cosgrove his name, which in English turned out to be Great Big. He took Cos-grove to a mud hut that was a long walk through fields and bushes with dead leaves and in the midst of a clump of trees that somehow had been chopped down. In the fields around the trees was Great Big’s cash crop, peanuts, most of whose plants were withered. Great Big produced a goatskin bag that had first been used in the African sun when persons in places like England and France lived by the spear. Great Big held up the goatskin bag to the hot sky and let a clear liquid run into his mouth.

  “Good water,” he said.

  Now he put the spout to Cosgrove’s mouth. Cosgrove had been raised around poteen, homemade whiskey, and felt that an African home brew such as this one would be nothing more than a soft drink. Great Big stood over Cosgrove and tipped the goatskin. “Good water,” Great Big said, insisting that Cosgrove have more.

  The elation that comes with drinking came and passed so quickly that Cosgrove was wondering what had happened to it, and after one particular swallow Cosgrove noticed that some of the alcohol dribbled from the corner of his mouth and he wiped his chin to prevent the pure alcohol from dribbling onto the thick, precious rug that he suddenly saw under his feet. Cosgrove pointed to the rug and told Great Big to be careful of spilling on it. Great Big said he could see no rug. A long bare foot stamped on the ground to prove this. Cosgrove said of course there was a rug and as he said this, a hand wriggled out from under the rug and smacked him in the face.

  When he woke up hours later, Cosgrove found himself naked inside Great Big’s hut. He reached out and felt his clothes, which were in a damp bundle beside him. For some reason he did
not want to pick himself up. He stretched his legs, his hips swiveling his front against a mat over the dirt floor. A delicious feeling came through him. He saw nipples of lovely breasts. Not the black breasts from church. Those he saw now were white and pink and above them was the face of the lovely young woman from the courtyard of the school in Toome. Cosgrove suddenly lifted his head. The Devil had followed him to Africa.

  Streaming past the mission at all times were silent groups of people who looked like toothpicks and swayed from all the miles they had walked from their homes in bushland that was becoming desert. Some of the refugees wanted nothing more than a place to die with some order. When Cosgrove found that most of these people had never been baptized, he baptized all who would agree and even kidnapped some: a child with glazed eyes and a potbelly squalled with the little strength it had left as Cosgrove carried him into the church, where he splashed water and prayed fervently. When he was finished he turned around and found there were no hands to accept the child. Cosgrove carried the baby into his cubicle and put him on the mattress on the floor. Like everybody else, Cosgrove was eating once a week, his meal consisting of rice and tomatoes and tiny shreds of chicken, which he fed to the child who, drugged with food, fell asleep.

  “This is not an orphanage,” Cosgrove scolded himself. “You must think of a thousand souls and you cannot be tied down to one.”

  Returning to the mission church one day several weeks later, Cosgrove found that the postal service had delivered two large cardboard cartons from Dunboy Bay. The first box held a crackling new, handmade quilt thick enough to keep out a thick blizzard. Pinned to it was a note that said the Rosary Altar Confraternity Society had made this quilt and would continue to send articles for the black babies of Africa. The second contained a wonderful hand-knit Irish fisherman’s sweater, the cable stitching of such thickness that a full drenching by a cold wave would not be enough to soak through to the body inside the sweater. The sweater was baby-sized. The note inside said it was from the Dunboy Bay Men’s Catholic Club. The envelope contained many pound notes, which, when stuffed into his pocket, produced in Cosgrove a feeling of exhilaration.