“You a pimp? I never would have thought you needed anything that bad, Grack.”
He adjusted the hat with a ticketstub for a feather and did not answer for a moment. Maybe he was busy blushing under the many-weathered reddish-brown grimace. “Here, give me back my pencil,” he said at last. He watched the Ferris wheel going up in the wino’s hands.
“Can I do it, Grack?”
“I’ll mash it out of you, kid.”
“Can I do it?”
“We’ll say goombye to the habit together, kid. I know how.” He pinched me and grinned and dragged his fingers along the little scabs from the hypo; they burned like ants on the blue flesh of my inner arm. I winced and my heart turned close inside me, because goombye to the mainline would give me the chance to goombye Grack, pocket-picking, and the spoiled life which was my fond own. He knew me.
“I like being with it and for it,” I said. I wanted to be with it someday like Grack, all there, hard, dark, and sure of himself under the sun with the marks turned up at him like daisies in a field. The fat wart on his nose was their moon, his eye their mortified sun.
Grack grinned and winked. “Tell you what, kid,” he said. “Nobody likes it.”
3. Kicked it near Grack’s knife in a cabin
ON the morning after Grack had decided for me I went swimming at the backed-up bend of a stream. It was a hot early morning, dog days coming; the carnie slept under dusty canvas just beginning to take on its suneaten scorched smell. The cooktent woke first after me—rattle of grates and coffee being measured. Maybe this would be one of my last mornings in the carnie, I thought, flapping and blowing water and pushing from the treehung mudbank to a gravelly shore a few feet away. My habit kept me cool, but the morning water was nice outside our lot. I could float half-submerged under the dapple and sparkle of sun through leaves on water.
Like a monkey little Joy came swinging down from one of the trees.
“Get away, I’m nekked,” I yelled to her. “What do you mean spying on me?”
“Not my fault, I was just sitting in the tree,” she said calmly. “I like watching you, anyway—ain’t my fault. How’s your nose in the wet? All grown over already?”
“Get away, brat!” I yelled, splashing her as she kicked off her moccasins and started to wade from the gravel side
“I already saw you, anyway,” she said. “You didn’t know I was watching, Bud, did you?” I windmilled water at her. She laughed with small white teeth. “Now listen, Bud, you’re getting me wet. This dress has the starch in it. Pauline got it for my birthday at that Sears in Ogden.”
It was true; she was a nice little birthday girl in her flowered $3.99 cotton instead of the usual kid shorts or blue jeans. I went on shoveling water until the dress was slicked down to her legs. “Oh! oh!” she said. “Now stop.”
“Then get.”
“Why? I like you.”
This made me stop. I ducked to my chin in the eddying water and said, as if repeating her why, “Why?”
“You let me fix up your nose. I like taking care of people. You’re nice to me.”
“That just ain’t possible, little girl.”
“I like you, Bud.”
“Get away from me now, you bother me. What are you, sixteen years old carnie brat and you got hot pants already?”
She ran crying to Pauline. When Pauline asked her why, she claimed stomach ache and Pauline answered she was too young for bicarb in the heart and would have to grow up. But she got mad at all us carnie heroes despite her jokes and there were some bad fortunes told that night.
A couple of days later Grack came visiting and said: “It’s time, Buddy boy.” He started it like a vicious mama and the baby’s bottles. “No-no,” he said, scowling off that long galled face. He broke my hypo in his hands and paid no mind to the skin cuts and the splinters. He let me see how he paid no mind, how he did it. He broke, pinched, crushed, and scattered. He even got rid of the powdered sugar which I had used (but less and less) to cut the dose. “All gone,” he repeated. “No-no, goombye.”
“Fine, fine,” I grinned for him.
“You like it fine now?” he asked. “Wait.” He watched me sideways and dusted his narrow hands together. “Wait.”
Then quick, while I was still cool and stepping dainty off my last mainline, he took me on the trip. He had rented a cabin there on the slope near Winter Park, Colorado. It was summer; I felt all in one piece under an eggshell sky. I didn’t care until I saw him pack our gear. He put in a knife, a long black hunting knife with a long white blade sharpened for funny hunting, for monkey business. He looked up to see my face on him, and the black wart shimmied. “What’s the matter, Grack?” I asked. “Something wrong? What’s funny?”
“You,” he said, shrugging as if offering me a free throw: Try it, just try it once, Mister. If you win, fine; if not, well, the house pays, I mean the management.
“Me?”
“You’re the matter. Wait till that stuff wears off. You’ll want to eat the mountain down. You won’t be pretty, friend.”
“Sharpen it, Grack.” I even shared the laugh now in his need to protect himself from me.
“Don’t you worry, kid. Just remember.”
By the time we got to the cabin on the hill—far enough from brotherly love and its occasional nosiness so that I could bang my head in peace—I was jumping. I jumped. By the time we unlocked the door I was begging. I begged. By the time he unpacked the knife I was in the thirsty way. My mouth filled with crumbling.
“Maybe you brought something for me, Grack?”
“All you can do now is kick it,” he said calmly. “I’ll wait. Got nothing better.”
“Maybe you brought something in case I couldn’t do it? In case it got too rough? In case it was maybe hard on the heart?”
“Nothing at all, boy. But I aim to wait here with you.”
He had put the sheathed knife in his jacket pocket, trusting his eye to protect him, that Frenchie eye which had submitted to the voyage of his fingers and the adoration of the farmer-boy waggles. My legs were coming rubbery and I geeked out the first time: “Grack, I can’t make it.”
“Sit down, friend.”
“Grack, it wasn’t a good idea.”
“I like it.”
“Please, Grack, listen to me!”
“Sit down. Pretty soon you’ll start shivering, it’ll give you something to do. Lucky the carnie got rained out.” He stretched himself on a cot with his legs propped on one of the logs of the cabin wall. Now he held the knife handy on his chest. I kept looking at the wall and feeling my head ripe and tight and wanting to do this foreign thing in and break it the way you pop a pimple. Grack would stop me. He said I was the kind could kick a habit. I got through the first vomiting okay, Grack’s hand hard on my forehead, but my body let go everywhere else.
He waited for me with his eyes half-shut, wide-awake.
First shivers and gooseflesh, no blankets enough. Then fever and howling to ease the weight on my ears. I tore my clothes off because Grack wouldn’t help me unbutton; I remember how my belt cut me in half. Skinny ribs were mine, bare chest was maybe mine, heart cracking was someone else’s; and no strength to push lungs against those somebody ribs and no chance to unglue those someone eyelids and whose white dust on my lips? Fever’s! Mr. Fever’s dust!
“Help you to the faucet,” somebody said.
Under the roar of white water pasting my hair back, I gasped alive and said thanks. In that dripping instant, with the forced ebb of the fever under cold water, I was human and spitting bubbles, and thankful to Grack.
Two steps away, hair glued, the fever came up again and the water dried with a sizzle and crackling in my ears and it was no longer my body; and three steps away. Another. Another. A hand on the ribcage held me and guided me. Who was here with Mr. Fever and Grack? Not Bud, not Bud! The roar in my head had the gift of tongues, then suddenly came clear: “Let’s not and say we did,”—the puerile suburban voice of my child
hood. Then the gooseflesh again, and a whole day when I knew that the touch of cloth would kill me. And I begged him to kill me. Howling: “Oh my god help me someone.” Crying: “Help me someone.”
“You’re doing fine, kid,” he said.
My brains turned to soap and came out my ears. My legs turned crazy. Let’s not and say we did. His eyes were open and on me. I put my head down and stumbled to butt the wall. There was the sweet moment of an epileptic’s bliss when I came out of it enough to feel, not only hear, my head against a log. Grack picked me up and I squirmed wet in his arms and he threw me onto the cot. I felt myself sobbing but could not hear it. I twisted to the floor. I pulled myself up, Grack everywhere my eyes rolled, and went for the wall again. Grack everywhere! Then quick I turned—lucid now! sly!—and leapt toward the knife. His boot stopped me hard. He led me outside through a gray drizzle and held my forehead and then wiped the mud from my knees and wrapped me in blankets. It was night; there was no light in the sky but an airplane beacon toward which I had knelt. “Look at the scenery, kid, you did it all over the Continental Divide.”
It’s lovely cool country up there near Winter Park. The folks come to ski in winter, they say. Run special trains—hot coffee and college girls and lots of harmonizing around the fire.
Then I remember how he pulled the raspy Army blanket about my shoulders. He turned the cot over on me and sat on it to keep me down. All I thought to say was, “Oh my god help me Grack,”—and felt the running in my ears.
“Yep,” he grinned, bringing his finger to his eye to help me hate him enough to stay alive. This wouldn’t kill me whole, but the pieces of me were dying. He looked and swore to me that my ears were empty. He kept on promising me.
“Let’s do and say we did,” he murmured, grinning.
Then it was better. I think I slept. When I awoke he was eating, his jaw full of sandwich and making a click of eating work. As soon as he saw me looking, he swallowed, showed his teeth, said, “You got the jaundice, that’s your color, big chief. You’re pretty skinny, but it’s okay.” He took another bite.
“How long we been in this place, Grack?”
“Don’t run around till your liver grows back. Stay away from fries. Drink plenty water. Let the stomach work easy.”
“What you been doing all this time watching me, Grack?”
He swallowed and wiped his mouth with his hand and slapped the crumbs from his fingers. “Watching,” he said. “Waiting.”
“For what? What if I went and geeked out on you? What about this here fever I had? When did you ever sleep?”
Before answering he took a little whisk broom and swept up the crumbs on the floor about his stool. He touched them into his hand and wrapped them in the waxed paper from his sandwich. He put the wad in a trash can at the door. Then he started to boil water on the kerosene burner and put a tea bag in a glass with an inch of sugar. He came back to the stool and waited for the water to boil while I tried to sit up. I lay back on the pillow. The water fuzzed against the sugar and when it had dissolved he cocked his head at the glass and put in another spoonful. “Drink up. Sugar, no fat. Here, hold it by the rims, it’ll cool in a sec,” he said. “Listen, tzigane-boy, Pauline told me too you could do it. Treated me to the free advice, she did. And that there little kid Joy, she got the beguine for you, she just sat on her heels and nodded so’s to break her neck. Bit her tongue and said, ‘Ouch! Yes! Bud’s not like the rest of you.’”
Get me a new deck, Pauline must have said. Gypsy cards from seborrhea. Daughter-a-mine’s gone soft in the phrenology. Love-a-Pete, now you’re for insulting your momma, you poor little bastard. Oh darling, no father—you lost all those advantages.
I was not yet better to myself, but Grack showed me how good I was doing. He called me Indian, Gypsy, Fat Carnie Boss, all the names I liked to hear even as I relinquished them. He held the tea and sugar for me. He carried the knife from the table to a suitcase in the corner of the room near me. He trusted me! The tenderness of trust and the tender sign of trust were of equal value. While I slept he had moved the suitcase near me so that he could perform exactly this ritual with the knife. Sure, this was the ingenious devotion of con. Everyone had always needed protection from me except my dead mother, dead at my birth, and for her it was late to think of it. In my nightmares I had cursed, in turn, Phyllis, my father, Grack, and myself, but now I was near on being finished.
“Chop-chop?” Grack asked, handing a sandwich toward me.
I turned away. My cot was near the only window in the cabin. Outside the rain had stopped; the fog had moved in and out, leaving its sleek wetness; the mountains were all pink. A pair of horned deermice scrambled on the trashpile. I was afraid to ask how many days had passed, but I read them in Grack’s beard over the high cheekbones. Blue and oiled like the wart, riled but patient. “Water to drink or tea, I told you …”
Meanwhile, as to me, my cunning carnie body had kicked out in kicking the habit, something of the litheness gone and the itch for a brawl. My will to move on—and to the world behind Grack and the show—had brought the pieces back together again. The nose was still squashed flat.
“Now when they try to give you the stuff, just for joykicks maybe,” he said softly, “you can ha-ha in their faces.”
Hee, hee, hee—I tried to smile by thinking this phrase. All the graduates of his seminary together couldn’t have done what Grack helped me to do.
“But you’ll dream about the sugar yet. You’ll wake up hot for it. No joypopping, hear? Stay off, kid.”
I thought the word cheese to help make a smile for him.
“You don’t need me no more,” Grack said.
No, fact, I didn’t want the carnie anymore. Even a nice living picking pockets isn’t such a nice living.
“You need to be square,” he said. “I want you to get out of this world. Get.”
“I’m going, Grack.”
The carnie is a feudal domain, with rules of easy power and Grack the courteous lord at the top. I named my desire Gratitude, and said goombye. My ambition, uncured of hope, dreamt of the wide world away, in my father’s house and near Phyllis and where the marks whom we scorned did better than the best skillo man in the business. I felt strong enough for this republic of markdom which Grack and the others derided; you might put it that I lacked their energy of despair. As you like it about me.
“Scram. You got somewheres, kid. You need out. I got noplace but to the seminary twenty years ago. Get the hell out.”
“It’s a long way on the bus,” I said, as if he should pack me a lunch for it, the complaint read correctly by him as: Why do this thing for me?
“That’s all right. You’ll do it for the Grack maybe someday. I like giving one more push instead of the kick. That’s all.”
“You got some long black ideas in your head, Grack.”
“Think so? You too, kid, but maybe it’s all tongue. We’re buddies now.”
This time I could smile for him without any tricks about it. “Then why do you want me to get?”—what could he give me that was surer than that junior word, buddies?
“Scray-out, kid. Beat it. Get from the life. I said already it’s for Grack, too, and I can see by the fuzz in your ears you heard me. Listen, I can tell it to myself how I did it once before it was too late. Keep me warm winters. Keep me sleeping sometimes nights, a trick like that. Listen, I want to send one back just for me, for the Grack.”
“One what?”
“One you. Just one. You’re the one I’m sending back to mama for me, kid.”
Now the smile came for true, for no fun, with teeth. “Grack, you might be making a mistake.” I really wanted to warn him. “I never had no mama.”
The dark face winced and turned shrunken with frown like a monkey’s or a newborn’s head. “Never had a mama? Kid, they been telling me a lot in my day, but that’s one for the geeks. I don’t want you even kidding me on that one.”
“Fact. I’m kidding on the square, Grack.”
“Shut up. Shut up. You’re going home now and big Gracchus is sending you back, kid, and shut up now,”—the fury taking his dark face and twisting it and breaking the voice, so that I said only:
“It’s a long way on the Greyhound.”
I bought a cardboard suitcase to carry an Indian blanket East to my father. Grack didn’t say goodbye although he took me to the bus stop. He had shaved. He whistled and rubbed his dry hands, but did not touch his eye. He gave me a paper bag with the knife inside: “For going away quick, kid.” It helped me that he wanted me to go, and his whistling said: I’m sending you for me, kid. His Adam’s apple and the wart were all wiggling; then he swayed from behind in the nervy carnie dance of breaking down the show. Goombye, I thought back to him. The knife was sharp enough to be wrapped in underwear so that it wouldn’t poke through the suitcase, across half a continent in the presence of many other travelers, on a long ride back to Pittsburgh.
4. Then visited from the jungle to jungles
WHERE you been?” That’s what my father said to me. “Hello, boy, where you been all this time?” But, fluttering his thick oily lashes, he got out of his chair to take my hand in both of his. There were gray pouches under the eyes. His eyes had the scared longing of a man still a male but living without a woman. Noisy with feeling, his breath came over me as he touched my hands, my arms, my shoulders. When he pulled me toward him I leaned away and he stopped. He sighed and croaked, “What you been up to?”
“On the road,” I said. That tied up three years of it for him.
“What you got to show for it, son?”
“Nothing much.”
“Not even money?”
“Just only penny-one.”
He tucked in his undershirt over the heavy gray flesh as if greeting a creditor—petulance, unease, but none of the anger I needed from him. “You never even wrote me but one little tiny old postcard. That’s all right, now you’ll settle down. That’s something is worth priceless, son. You have gained you some experience. What the devil did happen to your nose?—used to have one like mine, a nice nose. But you didn’t bring back any cash?”
Man Who Was Not With It Page 3