V.

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Benny here talks guinea,” said Angel. “Say something in guinea, hey.”

  “Sfacim,” Profane said. The girls got all shocked.

  “Your friend is a nasty mouth,” one of them said.

  “I don’t want to sit with any nasty mouth,” said the girl sitting next to Profane. She got up, flipped her butt and moved down into the street, where she stood hipshot and stared at Profane out of her dark eyeholes.

  “That’s his name,” Geronimo said, “is all. And I am Peter O’Leary and this here is Chain Ferguson.” Peter O’Leary being an old school chum who was now at a seminary upstate studying to be a priest. He’d been so clean-living in high school that Geronimo and his friends always used him for an alias whenever there might be any trouble. God knew how many had been deflowered, hustled off of for beer or slugged in his name. Chain Ferguson was the hero of a western they’d been watching on the Mendoza TV the night before.

  “Benny Sfacim is really your name?” said the one in the street.

  “Sfacimento.” In Italian it meant destruction or decay. “You didn’t let me finish.”

  “That’s all right then,” she said. “That isn’t bad at all.” Bet your shiny, twitching ass, he thought, all unhappy. The other could knock her up higher than those arches of light. She couldn’t be more than fourteen but she knew already that men are drifters. Good for her. Bedmates and all the sfacim they have yet to get rid of drift on, and if some stays with her and swells into a little drifter who’ll go someday too, why she wouldn’t like that too much, he reckoned. He wasn’t angry with her. He looked that thought at her, but who knew what went on in those eyes? They seemed to absorb all the light in the street: from flames beneath sausage grills, from the bridges of light bulbs, windows of neighborhood apartments, glowing ends of De Nobili cigars, flashing gold and silver of instruments on the bandstand, even light from the eyes of what innocent there were among the tourists:

  The eyes of a New York woman [he started to sing]

  Are the twilit side of the moon,

  Nobody knows what goes on back there

  Where it’s always late afternoon.

  Under the lights of Broadway,

  Far from the lights of home,

  With a smile as sweet as a candy cane

  And a heart all plated with chrome.

  Do they ever see the wandering bums

  And the boys with no place to go,

  And the drifter who cried for an ugly girl

  That he left in Buffalo?

  Dead as the leaves in Union Square,

  Dead as the graveyard sea,

  The eyes of a New York woman

  Are never going to cry for me.

  Are never going to cry for me.

  The girl on the sidewalk twitched. “It doesn’t have any beat.” It was a song of the Great Depression. They were singing it in 1932, the year Profane was born. He didn’t know where he’d heard it. If it had a beat it was the beat of beans thumping into an old bucket someplace down in Jersey. Some WPA pick against the pavement, some bum-laden freight car on a downgrade hitting the gaps between the rails every thirty-nine feet. She’d have been born in 1942. Wars don’t have my beat. They’re all noise.

  Zeppole man across the street began to sing. Angel and Geronimo started to sing. The band across the street acquired an Italian tenor from the neighborhood:

  Non dimenticar, che t’i’ho voluto tanto bene,

  Ho saputo amar; non dimenticar . . .

  And the cold street seemed all at once to’ve bloomed into singing. He wanted to take the girl by the fingers, lead her to someplace out of the wind, anyplace warm, pivot her back on those poor ball-bearing heels and show her his name was Sfacim after all. It was a desire he got, off and on, to be cruel and feel at the same time sorrow so big it filled him, leaked out his eyes and the holes in his shoes to make one big pool of human sorrow on the street, which had everything spilled on it from beer to blood, but very little compassion. “I’m Lucille,” the girl said to Profane. The other two introduced themselves, Lucille came back up the stoop to sit next to Profane, Geronimo went off for more beer. Angel continued to sing. “What do you guys do,” Lucille said.

  I tell tall stories to girls I want to screw, Profane thought. He scratched his armpit. “Kill alligators,” he said.

  “Wha.”

  He told her about the alligators; Angel, who had a fertile imagination too, added detail, color. Together on the stoop they hammered together a myth. Because it wasn’t born from fear of thunder, dreams, astonishment at how the crops kept dying after harvest and coming up again every spring, or anything else very permanent, only a temporary interest, a spur-of-the-moment tumescence, it was a myth rickety and transient as the bandstands and the sausage-pepper booths of Mulberry Street.

  Geronimo came back with beer. They sat and drank beer and watched people and told sewer stories. Every once in a while the girls would want to sing. Soon enough they became kittenish. Lucille jumped up and pranced away. “Catch me,” she said.

  “Oh God,” said Profane.

  “You have to chase her,” said one of her friends. Angel and Geronimo were laughing.

  “I have to wha,” said Profane. The other two girls, annoyed that Angel and Geronimo were laughing, arose and went running off after Lucille.

  “Chase them?” Geronimo said.

  Angel belched. “Sweat out some of this beer.” They got off the stoop unsteadily and fell, side by side, into a little jog-trot. “Where’d they go,” Profane said.

  “Over there.” It seemed after a while they were knocking people over. Somebody swung a punch at Geronimo and missed. They dived under an empty stand, single file, and found themselves out on the sidewalk. The girls were loping along, up ahead. Geronimo was breathing hard. They followed the girls, who cut off on a side street. By the time they got around the corner there wasn’t girl one to be seen. There followed a confused quarter-hour of wandering along the streets bordering Mulberry, looking under parked cars, behind telephone poles, in back of stoops.

  “Nobody here,” said Angel.

  There was music on Mott Street. Coming out of a basement. They investigated. A sign outside said: SOCIAL CLUB. BEER. DANCING. They went down, opened a door and there sure enough was a small beer bar set up in one corner, a jukebox in another and fifteen or twenty curious-looking juvenile delinquents. The boys wore Ivy League suits, the girls wore cocktail dresses. There was rock ’n’ roll on the jukebox. The greasy heads and cantilever brassieres were still there, but the atmosphere was refined, like a country club dance.

  The three of them just stood. Profane saw Lucille after a while bopping in the middle of the floor with somebody who looked like a chairman of the board of some delinquent’s corporation. Over his shoulder she stuck out her tongue at Profane, who looked away. “I don’t like it,” he heard somebody say, “fuzzwise. Why don’t we send it through Central Park and see if anybody rapes it.”

  He happened to glance off to the left. There was a coat room. Hanging on a row of hooks, neat and uniform, padded shoulders falling symmetrical either side of the hooks, were two dozen black velvet jackets with red lettering on the back. Ding dang, thought Profane: Playboy country.

  Angel and Geronimo had been looking the same way. “Do you think we should maybe,” Angel wondered. Lucille was beckoning to Profane from a doorway across the dance floor.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. He weaved between the couples on the floor. Nobody noticed him.

  “What took you so long?” She had him by the hand. It was dark in the room. He walked into a pool table. “Here,” she whispered. She was lying spread on the green felt. Corner pockets, side pockets, and Lucille. “There are some funny things I could say,” he began.

  “They’ve all been said,” she whispered. In the dim light from the doorway, her
fringed eyes seemed part of the felt. It was as if he were looking through her face to the surface of the table. Skirt raised, mouth open, teeth all white, sharp, ready to sink into whatever soft part of him got that close, oh she would surely haunt him. He unzipped his fly and started to climb up on the pool table.

  There was a sudden scream from the next room, somebody knocked over the jukebox, the lights went out. “Wha,” she said, sitting up.

  “Rumble?” Profane said. She came flying off the table, knocked him over. He lay on the floor, his head against a cue rack. Her sudden movement dislodged an avalanche of pool balls on his stomach. “Dear God,” he said, covering his head. Her high heels tapped away, fading with distance, over the empty dance floor. He opened his eyes. A pool ball lay even with his eyes. All he could see was a white circle, and this black 8 inside it. He started to laugh. Outside somewhere he thought he heard Angel yelling for help. Profane creaked to his feet, zipped his fly up again, blundered out through the darkness. He got out to the street after tripping over two folding chairs and the cord to the jukebox.

  Crouched behind the brownstone balusters of the front stoop he saw a great mob of Playboys milling around in the street. Girls were sitting on the stoop and lining the sidewalk, cheering. In the middle of the street Lucille’s late partner the board chairman was going round and round with a huge Negro in a jacket that read: BOP KINGS. A few other Bop Kings were mixing it up with the Playboys at the fringes of the crowd. Jurisdictional dispute, Profane figured. He couldn’t see either Angel or Geronimo. “Somebody is going to get burned,” said a girl who sat almost directly above him on the steps.

  Like tinsel suddenly tossed on a Christmas tree, the merry twinkling of switchblades, tire irons and filed-down garrison belt buckles appeared among the crowd in the street. The girls on the stoop drew breath in concert through bared teeth. They watched eagerly, as if each had kicked in on a pool for who’d draw first blood.

  It never happened, whatever they were waiting for: not tonight. Out of nowhere Fina, St. Fina of the Playboys, came walking her sexy walk, in among fangs, talons, tusks. The air turned summer-mild, a boys’ choir on a brilliant mauve cloud came floating over from the direction of Canal Street singing “O Salutaris Hostia”; the board chairman and the Bop King clasped arms in token of friendship as their followers stacked arms and embraced; and Fina was borne up by a swarm of pneumatically fat, darling cherubs, to hover over the sudden peace she’d created, beaming, serene.

  Profane gaped, snuffled, and slunk away. For the next week or so he pondered on Fina and the Playboys and presently began to worry in earnest. There was nothing so special about the gang, punks are punks. He was sure any love between her and the Playboys was for the moment Christian, unworldly and proper. But how long was that going to go on? How long could Fina herself hold out? The minute her horny boys caught a glimpse of the wanton behind the saint, the black lace slip beneath the surplice, Fina could find herself on the receiving end of a gang bang, having in a way asked for it. She was overdue now.

  One evening he came into the bathroom, mattress slung over his back. He’d been watching an ancient Tom Mix movie on television. Fina was lying in the bathtub, seductive. No water, no clothes—just Fina.

  “Now look,” he said.

  “Benny, I’m cherry. I want it to be you.” She said it defiantly. For a minute it seemed plausible. After all, if it wasn’t him it might be that whole godforsaken wolf pack. He glanced at himself in the mirror. Fat. Pig-pouches around the eyes. Why did she want it to be him?

  “Why me,” he said. “You save it for the guy you marry.”

  “Who wants to get married,” she said.

  “Look, what is Sister Maria Annunziata going to think. Here you been doing all these nice things for me, for those unfortunate delinquents down the street. You want to get that all scratched off the books?” Who’d have thought Profane would ever be arguing like this? Her eyes burned, she twisted slow and sexy, all those tawny surfaces quivering like quicksand.

  “No,” said Profane. “Now hop out of there, I want to go to sleep. And don’t go yelling rape to your brother. He believes his sister shouldn’t do any jazzing around but he knows you better.”

  She climbed out of the bathtub and put a robe around her. “I’m sorry,” she said. He threw the mattress in the tub, threw himself on top of it and lit a cigarette. She turned off the light and shut the door behind her.

  II

  Profane’s worries about Fina turned real and ugly, soon enough. Spring came: quiet, unspectacular and after many false starts: hailstorms and high winds dovetailed with days of unwintry peace. The alligators living in the sewers had dwindled to a handful. Zeitsuss found himself with more hunters than he needed, so Profane, Angel and Geronimo started working part-time.

  More and more Profane was coming to feel a stranger to the world downstairs. It had probably happened as imperceptibly as the fall-off in the alligator population; but somehow it began to look like he was losing contact with a circle of friends. What am I, he yelled at himself, a St. Francis for alligators? I don’t talk to them, I don’t even like them. I shoot them.

  Your ass, answered his devil’s advocate. How many times have they come waddling up to you out of the darkness, like friends, looking for you. Did it ever occur to you they want to be shot?

  He thought back to the one he’d chased solo almost to the East River, through Fairing’s Parish. It had lagged, let him catch up. Had been looking for it. It occurred to him that somewhere—when he was drunk, too horny to think straight, tired—he’d signed a contract above the paw-prints of what were now alligator ghosts. Almost as if there had been this agreement, a covenant, Profane giving death, the alligators giving him employment: tit for tat. He needed them and if they needed him at all it was because in some prehistoric circuit of the alligator brain they knew that as babies they’d been only another consumer-object, along with the wallets and pocketbooks of what might have been parents or kin, and all the junk of the world’s Macy’s. And the soul’s passage down the toilet and into the underworld was only a temporary peace-in-tension, borrowed time till they would have to return to being falsely animated kids’ toys. Of course they wouldn’t like it. Would want to go back to what they’d been; and the most perfect shape of that was dead—what else?—to be gnawed into exquisite rococo by rat-artisans, eroded to an antique bone-finish by the holy water of the Parish, tinted to phosphorescence by whatever had made that one alligator’s sepulchre so bright that night.

  When he went down for his now four hours a day he talked to them sometimes. It annoyed his partners. He had a close call one night when a gator turned and attacked. The tail caught the flashlight man a glancing blow off his left leg. Profane yelled at him to get out of the way and pumped all five rounds in a cascade of reechoing blasts, square in the alligator’s teeth. “It’s all right,” his partner said. “I can walk on it.” Profane wasn’t listening. He was standing by the headless corpse, watching a steady stream of sewage wash its life blood out to one of the rivers—he’d lost sense of direction. “Baby,” he told the corpse, “you didn’t play it right. You don’t fight back. That’s not in the contract.” Bung the foreman lectured him once or twice about this talking to alligators, how it set a bad example for the Patrol. Profane said sure, okay, and remembered after that to say what he was coming to believe he had to say under his breath.

  Finally, one night in mid-April, he admitted to himself what he’d been trying for a week not to think about: that he and the Patrol as functioning units of the Sewer Department had about had it.

  Fina had been aware that there weren’t many alligators left and the three of them would soon be jobless. She came upon Profane one evening by the TV set. He was watching a rerun of The Great Train Robbery.

  “Benito,” she said, “you ought to start looking around for another job.”

  Profane agreed. She
told him her boss, Winsome of Outlandish Records, was looking for a clerk and she could get him an interview.

  “Me,” Profane said, “I’m not a clerk. I’m not smart enough and I don’t go for that inside work too much.” She told him people stupider than he worked as clerks. She said he’d have a chance to move up, make something of himself.

  A schlemihl is a schlemihl. What can you “make” out of one? What can one “make” out of himself? You reach a point, and Profane knew he’d reached it, where you know how much you can and cannot do. But every now and again he got attacks of acute optimism. “I will give it a try,” he told her, “and thanks.” She was grace-happy—here he had kicked her out of the bathtub and now she was turning the other cheek. He began to get lewd thoughts.

  Next day she called up. Angel and Geronimo were on day shift, Profane was off till Friday. He lay on the floor playing pinochle with Kook, who was on the hook from school.

  “Find a suit,” she said. “One o’clock is your interview.”

  “Wha,” said Profane. He’d grown fatter after these weeks of Mrs. Mendoza’s cooking. Angel’s suit didn’t fit him anymore. “Borrow one of my father’s,” she said, and hung up.

  Old Mendoza didn’t mind. The biggest suit in the closet was a George Raft model, circa mid-’30s, double-breasted, dark blue serge, padded shoulders. He put it on and borrowed a pair of shoes from Angel. On the way downtown on the subway he decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in. Because he felt now as if he were living in some private Depression days: the suit, the job with the city that would not exist after two weeks more at the most. All around him were people in new suits, millions of inanimate objects being produced brand-new every week, new cars in the streets, houses going up by the thousands all over the suburbs he had left months ago. Where was the Depression? In the sphere of Benny Profane’s guts and in the sphere of his skull, concealed optimistically by a tight blue serge coat and a schlemihl’s hopeful face.