Man Who Was Not With It

by Gold, Herbert

  “Hiya, Bud,” she was saying, “good to see you again,”—the cast-ridden eye calculating my disarray. “You haven’t told me anything yet.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Close the door.”

  “It’s a long story, the carnie’s hard to tell,”—while I turned impatiently to her, thinking of Grack and the scars on my arm and the hazards of a rusty Ferris wheel and Pauline and old Popolous and his lost ironing. And how I teased my way into the pockets of a thousand marks or two, and squeezed their larcenous hearts in my fist until they squirted green money. “Save it, honey, save it, some other time, Phyl.”

  Curl-lipped, petulant, she exhaled through her smile. “That’s not what I mean, Bud. Oh dear me, of course I want to know all about it—” She pouted maliciously, but not with malice. “I mean, I mean about me …” I took her to kiss, as she wanted to be taken. This was the story she needed me to tell, and the rest was hurry-up, was patience, was the dance of blood which the world and nature require. Even Count-store Bud responsible to it! Even this electric-headed black Phyllis! “Oh dear me oh dear you …”—with her schemes and her cast-eyed ways.

  “You’re a funny critter.”

  “I fancy you,” she whispered. She twisted and fooled like a coy child because this was a costume party for her. (I was a machine for judging: I know that costume parties are important to children.) Engaged to a lawyer, she celebrated her blood with me although, pious in a way she did not guess of herself, the ritual signified more than advance and retreat, supplication and avowal, a drinking from the cup and an eating of the bread. Turning, turning, she kissed and pulled under the throb and pulse of a neon flare: “Oh! Hurts! Now tell me about me!” I shook my head. I was unwilling to return to what I named the world in order to play a part in a dance, even her pious dance, even the one that was our bounty since we had discovered ourselves in each other behind a willow in a suburban field.

  I have often been mistaken about human beings. I must be wrong about her, too. As you can see, I need to be wrong about her.

  A shower was not reason enough to leave me then. We kissed once more, but not enough.

  “In just a minute,” she said.

  “Stay again, please.”

  Despite her soft yielding within the arm thrown across my chest and her hard hot holding as she opened and closed her eyes next to mine, the eye each time was overwatchful. “I’ll be back in a minute, ten at the most.”

  “Don’t go, Phyl.”

  “But it’s been so sticky tonight.”

  “Stay with me, Phyl.”

  “But I want to be clean.”

  “Don’t go now, Phyl.”

  She let the odd clothing fall from her body before stepping over the tricks and straps and little lace into the bathroom. This was to keep me busy while I waited. Congested with health, she moved briskly away from my own scrawny, hairy, unripe, and renewed readiness. She grinned at her one hand’s gesture of shame, but then used it to reach for a handkerchief and said nothing. When she blew her nose, with conviction, her hips seemed to expand. She returned my handkerchief and went to the shower.

  I waited to this hiss of water beyond the door and, in my unleashed revery, to its brisk steaming off the tanned partial face of her body. Flesh is a face. After silence and longing it must think of love before soap. She should not have left me there. She should have decided me quiet first. Exhausted, red neon in my head, I went again to look at the mailbox. There was no letter; there was no box. I knew the cabin; I moved quickly in it. I coughed, astonished and agape, to find no letter. Where had I lived in a cabin like this one? Not with Phyl, no. I spat into the swept-up heap of rubbish in the fire-place.

  Grack had thrown a cot over me and sat on it to still my writhing, and then he had trusted me with his knife because I could kick a habit. I heard her singing while the prickles of water invaded her domain, the proud flesh rising on her round arms and down the long, tennis-playing, suburban legs. She should not have left me then, even for a shower.

  I thought of Grack watching me while I butted my head against a cabin wall. His smile had helped me; the knife was only warning. My eyes swarmed, my sight eclipsed, I had a headache, I was sleepwalking. She was sloshing about and soaping herself and working the soap in her soft places. She should never have left me.

  And then I heard the sound of my habit: a low wail of someone tormented in sleep and unable to wake. There, there again. I listened with my head twisted for the enemy. The shower hid it from her. Once more: and this time no mistake. It had come from my own chest. Now I needed Grack to protect me from that dreaming which is too real to be known without the coolness of morphine’s double sleep.

  It could still be warned away. There was silence as she moved onto the shower mat. “You there, Bud?”

  How could I answer yes?

  “You there now?”—and she must have been dripping and rubbing with a towel in her hands and her back arched. Soon she would open the door, cool with water, hot with it, and come for me with her woman’s huge-faced body, the eyes palpable, yearning and blind, the mouth mannered in its secrets. She should have stayed with me in the room all the time.

  I heard the bite of gravel under my heels and the thin harangue of hillbilly laughter from the roadhouse. LIQUOR! STOP HERE! I fled back to put five dollars on the table for her taxi home, and then out, into the automobile, and roaring down the driveway and back to Grack’s letter. Only much later did I imagine what she had thought, naked within a towel while a moth headed furiously into the light, when she saw the money weighted under a hotel ashtray on the bed-table near where we had stood and been together.

  7. Decisions as we like them: My regretful imagination sees true

  I SEE the letter this way. Pa comes home panting in the heat, already unbuttoning his shirt on the sidewalk before he enters and rubbing the sticky gray belly-hairs. The air is not that hot, but the afternoon has been long for a man with a son lazing at home on his money. He mumbles it this way: “A no good, no account boy I raised. I raised him, poor kid he had no mama, I did it to him—that goddamn bum,”—a man soft because his son is his only chance at lasting beyond his days, hard because his son is to blame, being present and an instrument of all the bad tidings of his life. And worse than either the hardness or the softness was the dread of seeing these things naked, love or hate, in a moment which would fix them forever. The love he could not speak was as hateful to me as the slow seepage of detestation for which I feared him, worried him, and from which I drew all hope for him and for me. “A tramp, a drifter is all he is. Why don’t he come to work for me? He knows I’ll give it all to him someday. Waiting for me to pass on. How do I know he ain’t just home hiding out like I seen it in the movies? Poor kid, he’s still a baby—what can an old no-good like me do for him?”

  He is shading his eyes and looking to the window for me. I don’t stand and wave to him; I’m not home. He sees, he thinks he sees my shadow.

  Up the front steps, the stain spread and crusted under his arm, the tip of the evening paper tickling his bared chest, he is still murmuring to himself, a heavy old man, sick with no one to talk to since his wife was taken away. The mailbox, that outpost of magic, replenished each day: Shirts Factory to You! Are you insured against Acts of God? Pick your own Pattern! Our subscription manager is thinking of you, Mr. Alert Citizen, in the events that lie ahead. Satisfied Users say (and we quote from unsolicited comments in our files). Ignore this notice if you have already complied.

  But Grack’s letter, the return address a jail in Kearns, Utah, has already caught him and he lets the others trail down across the rug as he goes to sit hunched over it at the kitchen table, the bare bulb behind him hot on his bare head. We were not rich except in desires toward each other: the bulb is uncovered; the linoleum bumps itself under the stove; the light switches go click, not softly squashing themselves into place as in some houses I have seen.

  He studies the envelope and turns it over in his h
ands with no design at first but the passive one of awe. That my boy should get a letter from a jail.… That these should be his friends. That he never speaks of these people, of anybody anymore, that kid. A father should know his son’s friends, shouldn’t he? A boy that wants to be a son to him, normal thing to be.

  There is no decision to open the letter. His hands simply pull it apart. (There is no impulse to steam it, to read it through the light, to woo his son by ruse or trick.) The sheet from a child’s school tablet comes flat in the horny blackened fingers. He is breathing heavily through pursed lips which help with the reading, but his eyes are slotted against the glare of light off ruled paper. His mouth breathes with it. Grack is asking money to get out of jail. His lips are moving:

  —a run of luck and stuck with the fuzz. But I know a fellow needs another store, we could do it together, friend. I’ll buy in for the both of us, that’s how I’ll piece you off square. Come on in. We can really ride it high together and get on fresh in the springtime—

  I imagine the letter that way. He needs the money bad, so bad that he offers me a friendship which means pulling me back—it turns out that to send me away had judged and cost him too much. My father understands what the letter asks. This is enough for him.

  In my father, as in me during that time, there is little capacity for decision. We learned from ourselves, if we learned at all, by observing what we had already done. He sees himself—as I see him now—opening, reading, putting his hands on his hairy forearms while he knows what it means for me to receive such a letter. It means I would go. It means loss; it means his final bereavement. He looks up to find the letter stained with fat as he clings to the rough paper with his fingers. The penciling is oiled and smudged.

  Now look! he is tearing the paper in his hands. He is rending it into scraps. He pedals the garbage can and lets the pieces fall among the sodden summer refuse of a week’s eating. Here is the brutal willfulness which I need: this turning of my back on a friend, because not to turn meant my fall into the pit from which I could only climb once. Grack had lifted me out. But I have not opened the letter, and my father makes for me the heartless decision that a father can arrogate to himself. I have left out one event from this argument in the kitchen, a decision which I could not imagine because I hoped my father altogether risen to the cruelty needed for the love of fathers and sons. He too, like the rest of the world, moved about me as an idea among other ideas.

  I did see that he picks the scraps from the garbage can after a moment, finds them dripping already and rusty with decay, and tries to burn them. They will not burn. He crushes them back into the unemptied can.

  I have said that these kitchen doings were decisions as I like them. I aspired, as I imagined these events, to a moral brutality of judgment. It is a duty to allow a man the privacy of his thoughts, his friends, his mail. Displeased by my terrorized agility before Phyl, my fright and my flight, I was calmed by the parallel act of disloyalty to Grack which my tenacious and overtender father could perform for me. By such confrontations—I prayed for my father—he might master his loss and his contrary passions. Living in the hope of this and of my own acquiescence, by such evasions might I separate myself from Grack.

  I parked the automobile and heard the comforting squash of my rubber heels against cement as I strolled through the midnight yard. My fright had been stilled in power over the automobile, and I could imagine now without revulsion the thrust of Phyl’s heels in the gravel near the roadhouse as she waited for a taxi. I went to the heap of mail and dealt through it.

  Hushed and creaking, the apartment lay swaddled by darkness. I knew its furniture. Step here, step there, don’t crack your shin. The hoarse breathing of my father was soft in this womanless place. Everywhere lights were out, and the reflection of the clear September sky outside on the belongings of our life made me remember what almost was, when I might have had a mother and my father a wife. I tiptoed to his door. It was ajar. He stirred, busily feigning sleep. No words between father and son, no sign. But I stood in gratitude for his confirmation of my wish, and went to bed at peace with Grack and Phyl.

  I slept the sleep of a dutiful son in the late summer’s heat. As I imagined my father then, so I assented to him.

  8. Came with it one more time

  MY wrath was a foot gaff. I diddled it and tossed; it could not stop the wheel on anything but a number which lost for the house. My sleep was a skillo owned and operated by a carnie with stiff joints when the wheel most needed to be stopped. Night after night I crawled into bed toward the practical sleep of the just, fell sound dead at once, and awoke an hour later with the morphine gooseflesh hard on my limbs and my sleep no good to me. But I was cold for another answer this time. No morph, no! I had really kicked that one, and would do my own traveling from now on. Self-dread, self-loathing, these shudders took me; the memory of Grack was a honed belt tightening about my middle. Once I even whispered, as earlier in the cabin with Grack: “Oh my god help me someone.” Whispering myself awake: “Oh help me someone.” The wailing in my chest had put another habit hard upon me: the habit of conscience. I called it regret; I called it the willies. (Phyllis, someone said, had left town to marry her lawyer in New York. Or maybe it was Washington.)

  Grack appealing, I had refused. My father had turned my back. Soft for me, he knew that I could not resist the word from another world. He had saved me by heeling me; there was sickness in my stomach; I thought of killing him. I loved him—that he could do this hard thing was a glory to me. Even Grack had failed to be devoted and cruel enough. My sense for Phyllis, for Grack, for my new-found father revolved in my head and chest. I was busy with people; this was a step. The people were all inner folk—the rest, the outward touching, was yet to come, if it would come. I even thought of Pauline and that shy treadmiller, Joy. And I could think of them now because of my father. One evening he had been magnificently mean for me, and then could go on grumbling at suppertime about sand in the two-ton’s transmission and the guts of Standard Oil. We heard bells from the Ukrainian church on the next block and he had said: “Funny thing, son, how you sometimes notice and sometimes don’t—”

  “When you know a thing well,” I had answered.

  It was working. In the hard-awake aftersleep I arose silently to rummage in the clothes, my feet cold on the floor. I sat in the kitchen on the chair like a child after punishment, wise to hari-kari, stealthy and grinning, holding the knife Grack had given me. In a way he had taught me, I practiced a kitchen stunt: sharpening the long knife against a glass tumbler. And considered: Did my father have the right to do what I had asked of him?

  Even a priest would have made me read the letter, I decided, unless, in full avowal, I pleaded aloud to be spared this knowledge-the-pride, knowledge-the-sin. Never enough words for us. At least one Canuck priest would have taught me to know and to sin with pride. I had run from it; I had seen Grack’s finger against his eye. Some slaves, they say, came back at the sight of the master’s eye. And then penance.

  No morph now, not this time, not that blind fleeing with the naked white back exposed.

  The white steel zipped like a pantleg against pantleg in the silvery night as I sharpened it on glassware. I had worked it to slicing the hair from my arms. Sometimes I went back to bed and sometimes I slept. Many nights together I practiced to find that with which I had begun: my heavy-fleshed father had conquered Grack for me. In destroying the letter unopened, he had done for me what I needed to do: spit in my love and anger, all to be collected with the garbage and digested in a truck. Again I returned to bed with the glass left on the table and the knife under my mattress. Often I thought: no! And then: yes, yes, this is the way. I could forget Grack now.

  Phyllis, or someone like her?

  A job of work, or something like it?

  For the moment I found a place as dispatcher in a Greyhound station: “Ambridge, Beaver Falls, Youngstown, and Warren. Cleveland. Sandusky. Toledo. De-troit. All a-bohrrd.” I sat on a hi
gh stool in an air conditioned booth with a microphone in my hand and the cord between my knees.

  Dad had done happily for me, and I carried a lunchpail and whistled my way to the bus. The fast money and the dirty money of our carnie otherworld belonged to those mouse-biting geeks out there; as for me, I took an interest in union politics. This was better than pocket-picking in a countstore, pedaling the skillo, or any of the other short-con moments of which Grack had told.

  Then one day I came home earlier than my father from our separate corners. Jaunty in my cap, a lunchpail in my hand and a pay envelope heavy in my pocket, I manipulated a familiar thought. Grack would have approved of this way, the sanitary no-reply which pretends that the absent burden is dead in another life. I was no longer with it and for it. Grack must have understood, I decided, and served out his thirty days in friendship to me. He at least would have felt as tact my father’s brutality, and ascribed it to me, thinking: I never knew the kid could do like that.… Pride swung my pail for me.

  At the mailbox I found another letter. Grack wrote to thank me:

  I figure you’re just too busy in business joining out the odds or some monkey business to say hello, but that’s all right, we had ourselfs some times together, you sent the money. Real sweet of you, kid.

  A cool reciprocity in this acknowledgment: