“Here,” Yancy said. “You need another rye.” He mixed it with water and pushed it across the bar. “You call me eloquent? I’m practically a mute, sonny.”
“It’s the rye, Yancy. It’s two ryes on an empty stomach. And maybe something else a little. I won’t say I haven’t thought about it, though. About what I’d like to do best the last thing. There are several things I’ve thought about, and the trouble with all of them is that they’re things that have already been done and can’t be done again. You know what one of the things is I’ve been thinking about and wanting to do? I’ll tell you. Listen to me and two ryes, Yancy. Two and a half ryes. I’ve been thinking about how I used to walk on hot summer afternoons out from town to the creek for a swim. That was when I was a little kid and lived in a little town, long before I got big and started living in this biggest of all big towns. I’d walk out about two miles on a country road, and the dust was white and hot under my feet, and it raised clouds around me as I walked. It got in my throat and made me very thirsty, and being thirsty was a great pleasure, because it made so much cooler and better the water that I drank from a well on the farm that the creek ran through. I drank the water from a tin dipper that hung from a nail driven into a tree a few feet away, and then I walked down across fields to the creek and swam naked, and afterward I came back and had another drink from the well and walked home. You can see that this is something a man might want to do again, Yancy, but you can also see that it’s something he can’t possibly do. Not again. He can’t do it again because it requires a certain time as well as certain circumstances, and time is something that can’t be done over.”
“Cut it out,” Yancy said. “Goddamn it, I was just suggesting it would be better for you if you went somewhere and did something that would give you a little peace and quiet and you could keep decent hours doing. I didn’t ask for any hearts and flowers, Goddamn it.”
“Excuse me, Yancy. I’ll have another rye.”
“The hell you will!”
“Are you refusing me service, Yancy?”
“Call it what you like. You’ve had three ryes already.”
“I know how many ryes I’ve had. I can count up to three ryes as well as anybody.”
“Three are plenty.”
“Am I creating a disturbance, Yancy? Have I given you any reason to discriminate against me? It seems to me that you are being very highhanded, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“I don’t mind at all. You can say anything you like, and you can drink as many ryes as you like, and I’m damned if I’ll try to talk sense to you ever again.”
“Thank you, Yancy. You’re a very understanding bartender.” “Superior, sonny. Superior’s what I am. I’ve been told by an expert.” Yancy supplied the fourth rye and water with a kind of angry abruptness of motion that plainly expressed his disapproval, and Joe looked into the tiny golden sea in a crystal bed and saw again the face of Charity smiling up at him with sad finality He lifted the glass and tipped it against his mouth, and she slipped over his tongue and down his throat as easily as an aspirin tablet. “Hey!” Yancy said. “Take it easy.”
Lifting the empty glass against the light, Joe looked through it, into and through the empty crystal bed of the vanished golden sea. He felt for a moment purged of his sins and wholly well, shriven by rye and cured of his ills by the swallowed vision. Then, instantly afterward, he felt terribly sick. He was sick to his stomach and afraid that he was going to humiliate himself by vomiting on the bar. Closing his eyes and mouth tightly, he bowed his head and sat very quietly until his stomach stopped churning, or stopped, at least, churning so violently. He became aware after a minute or two that Yancy was repeating something he had said before.
“You sick, Joe?” Yancy said. “You sick?”
“No.” Joe lifted his head and set the empty glass, which he had continued to hold, gently on the bar. “I’m all right.”
“The hell you are! You’re sick. You feel like fainting again?”
“I’m all right now, Yancy. Four quick ryes on an empty stomach are too many. You were right as usual. In a minute I’m going home.”
“I’ll tell you what. You go lie down in your back room, and I’ll drive you home after closing.”
“I can drive myself. Thanks anyhow, Yancy”
“You have one of those fainting spells while you’re driving, you’ll pile up and kill yourself, that’s what you’ll do.”
“Don’t worry about it, Yancy. I’ll get home all right.”
He slipped off the stool suddenly, and his stomach began to churn again immediately with the movement, and he stood gripping the edge of the bar until it and his stomach settled and became still in a precarious resumption of their proper places and conditions. Yancy watched him warily. Anger and anxiety were equal parts of Yancy’s expression.
“Okay,” he said. “Maybe I’ll read about you in the papers.”
“Not me.” Joe shook his head and managed a grin. “You’d never find a couple lines in all those pages.”
“Sure. Big joke. Go ahead and be a hero, sonny. See who gives a damn.”
“All I want to do is go home, Yancy. Does it take a hero to go home?”
“Go on home, then. Go on.”
“I’m going. Right now.”
He turned and started carefully across the room among the tables, some of them empty and some still occupied by the last sad dogs of the night. Yancy stood watching him for a few seconds, and then, prompted by remembrance of something he’d wanted to mention, he walked around the end of the bar and followed. In the short hall to the alley, he caught up.
“I don’t need any help, Yancy,” Joe said. “I keep telling you.” “Who’s helping?” Yancy said. “I just thought of something I wanted to tell you, that’s all.” “What’s that?”
“A guy was in here asking about you. Last Thursday, it was. A fat slob with a bald head with little scars all over it. Ugly bastard. You know him?”
Joe stopped just inside the alley door, thinking and shaking his head.
“I don’t think so. I can’t think of anyone I know who looks like that.”
“Well, he was in here asking about you. Where you were. When you were expected back in town. Things like that.”
“Maybe he wanted to sell me some insurance or something.”
“More jokes. More big laughs. You in the market for insurance?”
“Not quite. I’m not considered what they call a good risk.”
“Just be careful you don’t get to be an even worse one.”
“Worrying again, Yancy?”
“Over you? Hell, no. I told you it wasn’t worth the trouble. Anyhow, he’s probably just a guy who’s got fat and dropped his hair since you knew him somewhere sometime, and since you don’t seem to give a damn who he is or why he was here, I’m sorry I bothered to tell you. Go on home.”
Yancy turned and went back through the hall to the front room and the bar, and Joe, opening the door and pulling it shut behind him, stepped out into the alley and stood for a moment breathing deeply of the night air. Even the effluvium of things that gather in alleys seemed crisp and pure and invigorating after the stale air of the club. Lifting one arm, he placed the hand flat against a brick wall, and a coolness crept from the brick into the hand and seemed slowly to move up the arm into his body. He wondered if it were true that the coolness did so move into him, or if it were only, instead, a matter of suggestion. His stomach was feeling much better. He was reasonably sure now that he was not going to be sick after all.
Letting his arm drop to his side, he began to walk carefully along the wall toward the space in which he had left his car, and he had reached the space and almost the car when two men took shape in the darkness and moved toward him. He thought at first that they were merely going to separate and pass on either side and go on, but they stopped abruptly with him between them, and he was forced to stop also by strong hands gripping his arms. He understood then that the positions were acco
mplished by design and that the two men were in effect the jaws of a sprung trap in which he was caught for a reason not yet clear.
• • •
One of the men was a kind of exemplary average. He could have walked all day on a hundred streets without being particularly noticed or remembered at all, and even now, in the dark alley, he was not impressive, except that he was, in his implicit purpose, a threat. The other man was, on the other hand, a monstrous deviation from the average. He was the result of a terrible joke played by a gland on an organism, and if he had walked one street for one-half of one hour, he would have been noticed and remembered reluctantly by everyone he met. His appearance was brutish. Huge head with jutting stony jaw. Enormous hands and feet that swung and shuffled with a suggestion of anthropoid power. The total effect was one of deformity, distortion and disproportion of bones, and there was a name for it, this glandular joke, but Joe couldn’t think of the name or precise cause, only that the soft bones of extremities continued to grow when other bones did not.
“Hello, Lover,” the monstrous man said. “We thought you were never coming. We waited and waited and we thought you were never coming.”
He pronounced the term of endearment lingeringly, fondling it with his tongue as if he were loathe to release it, laughing softly afterward as if it were a joke at least as good as the one that had been played by a gland on him. Average laughed too, a brief burst of air that was more like a snort than an expression of amusement
“Cupid’s a comedian,” be said. “Always with the humor, that’s Cupid. You’ll like him.”
Joe stepped back, trying to release his arms from the hands that held them, but he was not strong, could not hope to prevail or even compete, not even with the unusual strength that is created by the strange chemistry of fear.
“What do you want?” he said.
“You, Lover,” Average said. “Like Cupid told you, we been waiting and waiting.”
“Why? What do you want with me?”
“Well, it seems you been a bad boy. It seems you been keeping company you had no business keeping, and someone figures you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Someone figures you ought to be taught what happens to bad boys who keep the wrong company.”
Cupid lifted his enormous free hand and cupped it beneath Joe’s chin, tipping the head back and looking down into the tilted face with an expression that was a caricature of affection. His voice was an incongruous croon.
“I like you,” he said. “We’re going to be good friends. Lover and Cupid are going to get along fine.”
Average laughed again, the explosive snort, and Joe felt shriveled and incredibly old and sick with shame, knowing now that what he had thought was dead had yet to be killed. Park Avenue ending in an alley. After the North Shore and Connecticut, violence and degradation in some dark corner. Most shameful of all in the evaluation of himself, a fear of physical pain that he had never accorded the anticipation of death. Despite this, aware of what was certainly coming, be felt a desperate and inconsistent urgency to get it over with as quickly as possible.
“All right,” he said. “If you’ve been hired to give me a beating, why don’t you do it?”
“No, Lover.” Average gave Joe’s arm a little squeeze. “We can’t do it that way Not here in the alley. We got a nice place all set up for it. You can see how it is. You been doing someone wrong, and this someone wants to be sure you get what he figures is coming to you. Since he’s paying for it, he’s got a right to be sure. You admit that’s fair? Come along quietly now with Cupid and me. We’ll take you to this nice place where no one’ll bother us, and everything will be fine. You’ll see. Everything fine.”
They walked together down the alley to a side street and got into a waiting sedan, Average behind the wheel, Joe and Cupid in the back seat. Average drove slowly, apparently in no hurry to get to the nice place or anyplace, and after a few minutes he began to whistle cheerfully through his teeth. Cupid leaned back and opened his mouth in the shape of a laugh, but he began to make, instead of the sound of laughter, a very soft crooning sound, oddly musical, that might have been made by a mother to comfort her child. The sedan, under the guidance of Average, turned many corners and traveled on many streets, and after a while Joe no longer had any idea of where they were or might be going, except that the streets were narrow and littered and dark, lighted at long intervals by inadequate lamps at the curb.
Average whistled and Cupid crooned, and the shameful fear of physical pain was a malignancy in Joe’s mind. Watching Cupid from the corners of his eyes with a slyness made acute by growing fear and diminishing time, he began to think positively of escape, how he might accomplish it, and then, all at once, in a slight change of circumstances in his favor, he was acting instinctively without slyness or calculation or any regard for chances or consequences. The sedan slowed for a corner, turning left, and in an instant he was clawing at the handle of the door beside him, in another instant was sprawling headlong into the street. Vaguely conscious of fire in his flesh where it was seared by asphalt, he doubled and rolled and came onto his feet running.
• • •
Ahead of him was a high board fence stretched between two shabby buildings, and in the fence a wide gate sagged open on a length of chain. Hardly slackening his speed, he slipped through the opening and ran down an aisle between high piles of scrap iron and steel to another board fence at the rear. He ran along the fence to his right, pounding the boards with his fists in search of a gate, but he reached the juncture of fence and building, and there was no gate. Reversing himself, he ran back along the fence the other way, still pounding the boards, now beginning to sob softly, but still there was no gate. He looked up to the top of the fence, but it seemed incredibly high and impossible to scale, and there was, moreover, no time to try, for Average and Cupid were coming into the yard from the street, and it was imperative to hide from them at once.
Sinking to his hands and knees, he crawled along the building behind the piles of scrap, and after half a minute he found a sanctuary, a small hollow in one of the piles, and he crawled into this and vomited and lay very still, sucking in his breath between clenched teeth and releasing it slowly, a little at a time, to avoid making the slightest noise.
Average and Cupid ran down the aisle to the rear fence. Joe listened to the pounding of their feet and measured the distance between him and them by the sound. He knew very well that now was the time to act, that he should now get up and make a break for the front gate and the street and perhaps someone on the street who would save him, but he couldn’t move, could find nowhere in himself the strength or will to take what was plainly his best chance, and so he continued to lie quietly in his false sanctuary, sucking his breath between his teeth, the sour taste and smell of his own vomit on his tongue and in his nostrils. He could hear Average and Cupid examining the length of the fence. He could hear their footsteps, hear their fists beat upon the wood for evidence of a gate or a loose plank through which he might have gone.
“Maybe he went over the top,” Cupid said.
“No,” Average said. “I don’t think so. It’s a high fence, eight feet at least, and we’d have seen him going over. Probably he’s hiding somewhere in this junk.”
“It’s not nice of him to cause us so much trouble,” Cupid said. “Why did he want to run away and hide and cause us so much trouble?”
“Never mind that,” Average said. “What we got to do is find him. If we don’t, we’re in big trouble. Chalk don’t like guys to fumble a job. It’s bad for business. You take one side of the yard, and I’ll take the other. He’s got to be in here somewhere.”
Obediently, Cupid started through the piles of scrap on the side of the sanctuary. His huge feet shuffled slowly, scraping against the hard ground and disturbing a piece of metal now and then with a sharp clatter. Coming closer and closer to the sanctuary, he began to talk in his soft, incongruous crooning way.
“Come out, Lover. This is Cupid, Lover. Come
out to Cupid, Lover.”
The crooning voice was more terrifying than a curse as a threat of evil. Joe pressed his face against the ground and covered his ears with his hands, and then he could not hear the terrible soft threat any longer, could not hear the shuffle of feet coming nearer and nearer, and after a few moments in the silence and darkness achieved by hands and closed lids he began to have a strange sense of peace and security, and he was lying so, in the false security of the false sanctuary, when great hands took hold of him gently and lifted him up and held him erect.
“Here’s Lover,” Cupid crooned. “Poor Lover’s dirtied himself. It wasn’t nice of you to run away and hide and cause Cupid so much trouble, Lover. Cupid’s angry because you ran away.”
Average came across the aisle from the other side of the yard. Saying nothing, he took Joe by one arm and started immediately toward the street. Joe did not resist. He had no longer any desire to resist or to suffer again the unbearable ordeal of escape. In submission, he achieved a kind of miraculous detachment from whatever was happening or might happen to Joe Doyle, an emotional immunity to Joe’s fear and Joe’s pain and Joe’s ultimate end, whatever it turned out to be. In the car, he leaned back beside Cupid and closed his eyes and sank briefly into exquisite physical lethargy. Charity was waiting for him in the vast, illimitable night behind his lids. She smiled at him sadly, and he could see, shining like traces of phosphorous in the darkness, the paths of tears across her thin cheeks. He nodded and returned her smile and tried to make her understand without words the miracle of acceptance and submission that had made all right everything that had been, a few minutes ago, all wrong.
Park Avenue Tramp Page 15