Because he liked her, and because her unspoken criticism stung a little, he let her lead him back to the small office where a harassed-looking woman interviewed him.
“We don’t pay very much,” she apologized, “and we can’t guarantee you any set number of hours a week or anything like that.”
“That’s all right,” Raphael told her. “I just need something to do, that’s all.”
She nodded and had him fill out some forms. “I’ll have to get it cleared,” she said, “but I don’t think there’ll be any problem. Suppose I call you in about a week.”
He thanked her and went back out into the barnlike salesroom. The girl with the dwarfed arm was waiting for him. “Well?” she asked.
“She’s going to call me,” Raphael told her. “Did she have you fill out any forms?” He nodded.
“You’re in then,” she said with a great deal of satisfaction. “Do you suppose I could look at some chairs now?” Raphael asked, smiling.
vii
His world quite suddenly expanded enormously. The advent of the chair enabled him to see the entire neighborhood in a way he had not been able to see it before. Because standing had been awkward and painful, he had not watched before, but the chair made it easier—made it almost simpler to watch than not to watch. It was a most serviceable chair—an old office chair of gray metal mounted on a squat, four-footed pedestal with casters on the bottom. It had sturdy arms and a solid back, and there were heavy springs under the seat that enabled him to rock back to alter his position often enough to remain comfortable. The addition of a pillow provided the padding necessary to protect the still-sensitive remains of his left hip. The great thing about it was that it rolled. With his crutches and his right leg, he could easily propel himself to any spot on the roof and could watch the wonderful world expanding on the streets below.
Always before they had seemed to be quiet streets of somewhat run-down houses only in need of a nail here, a board there, some paint and a general squaring away. Now that winter had passed, however, and the first warm days of spring had come, the people who lived on the two streets that intersected at the corner of the house where he lived opened their doors and began to bring their lives outside where he could watch them.
Winter is a particularly difficult time for the poor. Heat is expensive, but more than that, the bitter cold drives them inside, although their natural habitat is outside. Given the opportunity, the poor will conduct most of the business of their lives out-of-doors, and with the arrival of spring they come out almost with gusto.
“Fuckin’ bastard.” It was an Indian girl who might have been twenty-three but already looked closer to forty. Her face was a ruin, and her arms and shoulders were covered with crudely done tattoos. She cursed loudly but without inflection, without even much interest, as if she already knew what the outcome of the meeting was going to be. There was a kind of resignation about her swearing. She stood swaying drunkenly on the porch of the large house two doors up from Tobe and Sam’s place, speaking to the big, tense-looking man on the sidewalk.
“That’s fine,” the tense man said. “You just be out of here by tomorrow morning, that’s all.”
“Fuckin’ bastard,” she said again.
“I’ll be back with the sheriff. He’ll by God put you out. I’ve had it with you, Doreen. You haven’t paid your rent in three months. That’s it. Get out.”
“Fuckin’ bastard.”
A tall, thin Negro pushed out of the house and stood behind the girl. He wore pants and a T-shirt, but no shoes. “Look here, man,” he blustered. “You can’t just kick somebody out in the street without no place to go.”
“Watch me. You got till tomorrow morning. You better sober her up and get her ass out of here.” He turned and started back toward his car.
“You’re in trouble, man,” the Negro threatened. “I got some real mean friends.”
“Whoopee,” the tense man said flatly. He got into the car.
The Indian girl glowered at him, straining to find some insult sufficient for the occasion. Finally she gave up.
“Fuckin’ bastard,” she said.
“Oh, my God!” the fat woman trundling down the sidewalk exclaimed. “Oh, my God!” She was very fair-skinned and was nearly as big as Sadie the Sitter. Her hair was blond and had been stirred into some kind of scrambled arrangement at the back of her head. The hair and her clothes were covered with flecks of lint, making her look as if she had slept in a chicken coop.
She clutched a tabloid paper in her hand and had an expression of unspeakable horror on her face. “Oh, my God!” she said again to no one in particular. “Did you see this?” she demanded of Sadie the Sitter, waving the paper.
“What is it?” Sadie asked without much interest.
“Oh, my God!” the woman Raphael had immediately tagged “Chicken Coop Annie” said. “It’s just awful! Poor Farrah’s losin’ her hair!”
“Really?” Sadie said with a faint glint of malicious interest. Sadie was able to bear the misfortunes of others with great fortitude. “It says so right here,” Chicken Coop Annie said, waving the paper again. “I ain’t had time to read it yet, but it says right here in the headline that she’s losin’ her hair. I just hadda bring it out to show to everybody. Poor Farrah! Oh, poor, poor Farrah!” “I seen it already,” Sadie told her.
“Oh.” Annie’s face fell. She stood on the sidewalk, sweating with disappointment. “Me ‘n her got the same color hair, you know,” she ventured, putting one pudgy hand to her tangled hairdo.
“That so?” Sadie sounded unconvinced.
“I gotta go tell Violet.”
“Sure.” Sadie looked away.
Annie started off down the street.
“Oh, my God!” she said.
Their cars broke down continually, and there were always a half dozen or so grimy young men tinkering with stubbornly exhausted iron brutes at the curbs or in the alleys. And when the cars did finally run, it was at best haltingly with a great deal of noise and smoke, and they left telltale blood trails of oil and transmission fluid on the streets behind them.
They lost their money or their food stamps, and most of the men were in trouble of one kind or another. Each time a police car cruised through the neighborhood, back doors slammed all up and down the street, and furtive young men dashed from the houses to run down the alleys or jump fences and flee through littered backyards.
Raphael watched, and gradually he began to understand them. At first it was not even a theory, but rather a kind of intuition. He found that he could look at any one of them and almost smell the impending crisis. That was the key word—crisis. At first it seemed too dramatic a term to apply to situations resulting from their bumbling mismanagement of their lives or deliberate wrongheaded stupidity, but they themselves reacted as if these situations were in fact crises. If, for example, a live-in boyfriend packed up and moved out while the girl in question was off at the grocery store, it provided her with an irresistible opportunity to play the role of the tragic heroine.
Like a Greek chorus, her friends would dutifully gather around her, expressing shock and dismay. The young men would swagger and bluster and leap into their cars to go importantly off in search of the runaway, forming up like a posse and shouting instructions to each other over the clatter of their sick engines. The women would gather about the bereaved one, commiserating with her, supporting her, and admiring her performance. After a suitable display of grand emotion—cries, shrieks, uncontrollable sobbing, or whatever she considered her most dramatic response—the heroine would lapse into a stoic silence, her head nobly lifted, and her face ravaged by the unspeakable agony she was suffering. Her friends would caution each other wisely that several of them at least would have to stay with her until all danger of suicide was past. Such situations usually provided several days of entertainment for all concerned.
Tobe was roaring drunk again. He staggered out into the yard bellowing curses and waving his wine bottle. Sam came
out of the house and stood blearily on the porch wringing his hands and pleading with the little man to come back inside.
Tobe turned and cursed him savagely, then collapsed facedown in the unmowed grass and began to snore.
Sam stumbled down off the porch, and with an almost maternal tenderness, he picked up the sleeping little man and bore him back into the house.
Mousy Mary lived in the house on the corner directly opposite Raphael’s apartment and right beside Tobe and Sam’s house. She was a slight girl with runny eyes and a red nose and a timid, almost furtive walk. She had two children, a girl of twelve or so and a boy about ten. Quite frequently she would lock herself and her children in the house and not come out for several days. Her telephone would ring unanswered, sometimes for hours.
And then a woman Raphael assumed was her mother would show up. Mousy Mary’s mother was a small, dumpy woman with a squinting, suspicious face. She would creep around Mary’s house trying all the doors and windows. Then she would return to her car and drive slowly up and down the streets and alleys, stopping to jot down the license numbers of all the cars in the neighborhood. Once she had accomplished that, she would find a suitable spot and stake out the house, sometimes for as long as a day and a night. The blinds in Mousy Mary’s house would move furtively from time to time, but other than that there would be no sign that anyone was inside. When it grew dark, no lights would come on, and Raphael could imagine Mary crouching in the dark with her children, hiding from her mother.
“I wonder if I might use your telephone,” Mousy Mary’s mother said to Sadie one afternoon. “What’s the problem?” Sadie asked.
“I have to call the police,” the old woman said in a calm voice that seemed to indicate that she had to call the police quite frequently. “Somebody’s holding my daughter and her children hostage in her house there.”
“How do you know?” Sadie sounded interested.
“I’ve checked all the evidence,” Mousy Mary’s mother said in a professional tone. “There’s some tiny little scratch marks around the keyhole of the back door. It’s obvious that the lock’s been picked.”
“That so?”
“Happens all the time. They’ll probably have to call out the SWAT team.” Mousy Mary’s mother’s voice was dry, unemotional.
In time the police arrived, and after they talked with Mousy Mary’s mother for a few minutes, one of them went up on the front porch and knocked. Mousy Mary answered the door immediately and let them in, but she closed the door quite firmly in her mother’s face. In a fury the dumpy little woman scurried around the house, trying to look in the windows.
After a while the police came out and drove away. Mousy Mary’s mother stomped up onto the front porch and began pounding on the door, but Mary refused to open it.
Eventually, the dumpy woman returned to her car and continued her surveillance.
“Couldn’t you at least look into it, Raphael—for me?” Frankie’s lower Up trembled.
Raphael, sitting in his chair on the roof where they were talking, rather thought he might like to nibble on that lip for a while. He pushed that thought away. “I was a student, Frankie,” he said. “I can still do that. I don’t need both legs to study.”
“Our records show that you were a worker in a lumber mill.”
“That was a summer job back home when I was in high school and junior college. It wasn’t a lifelong career.”
“I’m really going to get yelled at if I don’t get you into vocational rehabilitation,” she told him. “And there are support groups—people to see and to talk to.”
“I’ve got a whole street full of people to see, Frankie.” He waved his hand at the intersection. “And if I want to talk with somebody, I can talk with Tobe and Sam.”
“But they’re just a couple of old alcoholics. We gave up on them years ago.”
“I’ll bet they appreciated that.”
“Couldn’t you at least consider vocational rehab, Raphael?”
“Tell you what, Frankie.” He smiled at her. “Go back to the office and tell them that I’ve already chosen a new career and that I’m already working at it.”
Her eyes brightened. “What kind of career are we talking about here, Raphael?”
“I’m going to be a philosopher. The pay isn’t too good, but it’s a very stimulating line of work.”
“Oh, you,” she said, and then she laughed. “You’re impossible.” She looked out over the seedy street. “It’s nice up here.” She sighed. “You’ve got a nice breeze.”
“I sort of like it.”
“Wouldn’t you consider the possibility of shoe repair?” she asked him.
That was startling. He remembered the Goodwill store and the girl with the dwarfed arm. Coincidence, perhaps? Some twist of chance? But the prophet on the downtown street had said that there was no such thing as chance. But what had made the words “shoe repair” cross Frankie’s trembling lips? It was something to ponder.
It was not that they were really afraid of him. It was merely that there was something so lost, so melancholy about his dark face as he walked with measured pace and slow down the shabby streets that all sound ceased as he passed. They did not mention it to each other or remark about it, but each time Patch, the one-eyed Indian, walked by, there was an eerie hush on the street. They watched him and said nothing. Even the children were still, suspended, as it were, by the silent, moccasin-footed passage of the dark, long-haired man with the black patch over one eye.
Raphael watched also, and was also silent.
And then in a troop, a large, rowdy group of more or less young men and, with a couple of exceptions, younger women moved into the big old house from which the tattooed Indian girl and her black boyfriend had been evicted.
They were nearly a week moving in, and their furniture seemed to consist largely of mattresses and bedding. They arrived in battered cars from several different directions, unloaded, and then drove off for more. They were all, for the most part, careful to be away when the large, tense-appearing man who owned the house stopped by. Only the oldest woman and her five children—ranging in age from nine or ten up to the oldest boy who was perhaps twenty—remained.
After the landlord left, however, they would return and continue moving in. When they were settled, the motorcycles arrived. In the lead was a huge man with a great, shaggy beard who wore a
purple-painted German helmet. The front wheel of his bike was angled radically out forward, and his handlebars were so high that he had to reach up to hold them. Two other motorcycles followed him, one similarly constructed and ridden by a skinny, dark-haired man in a leather vest, and the other a three-wheeled affair with a wide leather bench for a seat and ridden by another thin fellow, this one with frizzy blond hair and wearing incredibly filthy denims. None of the motorcycles appeared to be equipped with anything remotely resembling a muffler, and so the noise of their passage was deafening.
After they dismounted, they swaggered around in front of the house for a while, glowering at the neighborhood as if daring any comment or objection, then they all went inside. One of the young men was sent out in his clattering car and came back with beer. Then they settled down to party.
Their motorcycles, Raphael observed in the next several days, were as unreliable as were most of the cars on the block. They bled oil onto the lawn of the big old house, and at least one of them was usually partially or wholly dismantled.
With the exception of the big, bearded man in the German helmet, whom they respectfully called Heintz, the bikers for the most part appeared to be a scrawny bunch, more bluster than real meanness. In his mental catalog Raphael dubbed the group “Heck’s Angels.”
At his ease, sitting in his chair on the roof, Raphael watched them. From watching he learned of the emotions and turmoil that produced the dry, laconic descriptions that came over the police radio. He learned that a family fight was not merely some mild domestic squabble, but involved actual physical violence. He learned
that a drunk was not simply a slightly tipsy gentleman, but someone who had either lapsed into a coma or who was so totally disoriented that he was a danger to himself or to others. He learned that a fight was not just a couple of people exchanging a few quick punches, but usually involved clubs, chains, knives, and not infrequently axes. As his understanding, his intuition, broadened and deepened— as he grew to know them better—he realized that they were losers, habitual and chrome.
Their problems were not the result of temporary setbacks or some mild personality defect, but seemed rather to derive from some syndrome—a kind of social grand mal with which they were afflicted and which led them periodically to smash up their lives in a kind of ecstatic seizure of deliberate self-destruction.
And then they were taken over by the professional caretakers society hires to pick up the pieces of such shattered lives. Inevitably, the first to arrive were the police. It seemed that the police were charged with the responsibility for making on-the-spot decisions about which agency was then to take charge—social services, mental health, the detoxification center, child protective services, the courts, or on occasion the coroner. Society was quite efficient in dealing with its losers. It was all very cut and dried, and everyone seemed quite comfortable with the system. Only occasionally did one of the losers object, and then it was at best a weak and futile protest—a last feeble attempt at self-assertion before he relaxed and permitted himself to be taken in hand.
Raphael was quite pleased with his theory. It provided him with a convenient handle with which to grasp what would have otherwise been a seething and incomprehensible chaos on the streets below.
And then Patch went by again, followed by that strange hush that seemed always to fall over the neighborhood with his passage, and Raphael was not so sure of the theory. Into which category did Patch fit? He was totally unlike the others—an enigma whose dark, melancholy presence seemed somehow to disturb the losen as much as it did Raphael. Sometimes, after he had passed, Raphael felt that if he could only talk with the man—however briefly—it might all fit together, the whole thing might somehow fall into place. But Patch never stopped, never looked up, and was always gone before Raphael could call to him or do anything more than note his silent passage.
The Losers Page 11