Man Who Was Not With It

by Gold, Herbert

  “Take it easy, Al,” I said.

  He hurried in his sideways shuffle to the lead trailer. It was Stan’s. He pushed me toward the slatted blind; I felt his elbow; then he retreated fast into the darkness. By the time my eyes finished blinking I knew that, yes, there was a flashlight working behind Stan’s closed blinds. I stretched on tiptoe to peek in.

  Then, through the slit at the bottom of the Venetian blind over the window in Bossman’s trailer door, I saw a dim light working back and forth, pulsing regularly. There was a body kneeling next to the refrigerator. Yes, Stan kept his safe there. The flashlight was moving and the body was swaying, counting, rocking as if in prayer. No, he wasn’t praying. Yes, he was working the lock.

  He stopped and began again. He was touching the lock, probing it, playing it. The swaying began once more. Back two, back four again, forward. No. Forward three, forward four, back. No. I watched over this black animal patience. He was touching and listening to the tumblers. He was trying and trying the lock. The shape grew clear to me as I watched on tiptoe outside, with the crickets shrill and an occasional night insect bouncing against my party pants leg and then away.

  Yes, yes.

  He listened to the tumblers and knew now that it was two forwards, then one back. Just the number forward to figure out.

  It was a marvelous patience he had. Thus far, thinking of it as a skill game, I remained contemplative and muffled by wonder that he could do it. He swayed over the safe like a priest at the sacrament. It was all work, all effort, which made him sway. This was the musical concentration which I looked for in my own life. Aching on tiptoe, worried for the thief about the sounds of laughter and eating at the tent, I peeked and put a stilling hand on the door.

  His skill and thoughtfulness and judging of the task were a marvelous thing to see.

  The thought came to me: What if Joy comes out to find us? Only then did I face my recognition of this crouched body and fall back onto my heels for a moment to ask myself what to do about it. The door came easily sliding open under my hand and he turned with the flashlight full in my eyes so that I could not see anything but the blinding light of him and I put my arm across my face in a movement of protection, but it did not stop my having the first words this time.

  “Hello, Grack. Did you know I got married tonight?”

  PART THREE

  You drink from the cup of wisdom? I fell into it.

  But I learned to swim.

  21. Let me tell now how I became a father to Gracchus

  YES, boy,” he drawled softly, holding the flashlight steady at my eyes, “but you never did invite me. I don’t care, I’m glad to see you. But I was just going good for getting this wall open—”

  I walked toward him like a blind man reaching for doors, my arms outstretched to keep his flashlight from my face. I touched him and he jumped away and I said, “You’re in bad trouble.”

  His laugh was answer.

  “Don’t mix with Bossman, Gracko. He’ll kill you if he surprises you. He’ll kill you if he thinks about it.”

  “Bossman got no other way, does he, Bud? Well, well.” He sat on the floor with his knees poking high in the air and put the flashlight in his lap and the harsh laughter went on. “Who’d you take to wife, kid? That little Joy? She’s nothing but a baby, she don’t know yet.”

  “How did you find out? No, she’s grown up fast, Grack. What do you need? How much? Listen, I’ll give it to you if you need it, Grack—all I got.” My eyes learning to see in the dim light, I squatted on the floor opposite him, the safe another face between us. He was thin; the wart, pricked up with hairs, had grown larger on the diminished skull. He cocked his head to study me.

  “She’s still wet from borning time,” he said.

  “You ever know a woman like that, Grack? I always find them plenty grown up,”—and grinned for this nice conversation on my wedding day. Night it was already, and not a night for discussing.

  He returned my smile in the wiry whining darkness where the carnival electric generator hummed. It was wedding time; they spent all those kilowatts on Joy and me while I listened to an angry Grack: “Dogsoup, son! Eat dogsoup if you like! Married!”

  He had grown gaunt, stretched-out, bony and fleshless. He had the look of a fanatic. For a moment I thought of that undertaker of a minister who had married us, but the blue pads of flesh beneath his eyes made me understand: He has a habit now. His hand on mine was stiff with that control which needs to be renewed through the large vein at the crook of the elbow. The old coals were lit in his eyes, but it was fever that crackled there now. It used to be that he turned his eyes on like searchlights when he needed something. He was a sick animal, and yet he was Grack, monumental in the dark, his teeth glittering with that Frenchie grin, happy to see me. “B’jour, kid,” he said, “you been growing up without old Grack.”

  “Grack, I said I’m glad to see you.”

  “I got the money, but why didn’t you answer my letter?”

  Pop did for me. I didn’t. I deserted you more than you know. “Grack, I can’t explain now, I had troubles. But I’m glad to see you. I’m answering you now, Grack.”

  He patted my hand. “That’s okay, kid. How’s business?” More than anything else, what made me see the change in him was the way he lipped his lips, which seemed to be cracked and dry, as if he had come a long way from the north and licking unhappily on that journey down home. Even the wart was dried now with stiff hairs. “You got your nut back?” he asked.

  “I took the store on sharecropping with Stan.”

  “He must have wrung hard.”

  “Sure, but that’s the only way I could do it.”

  “I made you an offer from Utah, why didn’t you answer? Not want to go in with old Grack?”

  “Just didn’t, that’s all, Grack. You want me to explain?”

  He shook his head. “Never,” he said. This casual acceptance, without reproach, without prying to find out if I had done the best I could, came of a deep fatigue. He had always tried to look after me. He must have guessed that Stan had combed my hair good and left me only the lice I hid for dandruff. “Well, well,” he said. “News.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “Through the woods, boy.”

  “Where you going, Grack?”

  “On my way. Maybe back to Canada. I don’t think about it.”

  “What they pick you up for, Grack?”

  He twisted a knuckle in his funny pink small-little ear, shell-neat and shell-shiny and close and not made for listening. “Mopery with intent to gog,” he replied, chanting. “Spitting on hermits without a permit and stabbing a streetcar and stealing a transfer and gross graping of grapes while forgetting to peel it. The usual. Hotel dining. Wading on the High Seas. Loneliness across the State Line. You got business with me so’s you have to hear?”

  This, of course, is the carnie word for: Mind your own!

  Even in the dark I must have showed white knuckles and hurt white eyes at being treated like a nosy first-of-Mayer with an itch for lifting pots and prying. You don’t tell a friend to bag his head that way. He was sorry and said, “Bud, poor Bud, listen to me. Old Grack got himself some troubles, but it was old Grack himself got himself swindled up. I’m sorry. Don’t make me chop it up tonight.” He looked at me close and squinting and said very softly, making me listen hard, saying it once, I believe, with just his lips and then finally aloud:

  “I’m tired, boy. Later maybe.”

  All right for that, Grack, I tried to tell him by nodding. But there was another question besides history. Was he on the sidewalk or did they have his picture at the postoffice and why did he lean away from light and honest con work and using words to tell just a little truth? And so I risked repeating myself.

  “But what’s the matter now, Grack?”

  He sighed. He put his arm out to me, smiling his invitation. “You know. You tell me. I’m on.” He gave me the flashlight. I squinted at his face, trying to see noth
ing but what I remembered, trying not to know, and then I leaned forward and lifted the sleeve. The blue skin at the crook of the elbow was crawling with black antspots and red, half-healed scars. He smiled and shook his head at me and I wanted to cry. There was no sense in his taking my place. There was no need for that. I wanted to rub my hand on his arm to erase this history of desolation, this fever and chills and the floating coolness which crashed to a bone-breaking horror, but it couldn’t be done that way. He was tied to being without now; the addict has grown up without, and then gives to heroin or whatever all the love from which he has had no reply. Heroin is a silent lover, a bad one. I could not touch her away by stroking his arm.

  Pretty soon Joy would come looking for me. Al would send her out. I had to stop him from clipping Stan even if I hit him myself. That kind of trouble would kill him—the image of Grack in some dripping Georgia jail, or picking peaches for some drunken sheriff, made my stomach churn.

  “I got money,” I said.

  “Quit signifying.”

  I buttoned the sleeve for him. “Listen, Grack, we’re going to use that cash. It isn’t like the last time in Pittsburgh. I’m answering your letter now. Listen to me. We’re going to kick your habit—”

  Tickled, tired, he waved the flashlight in the air to mean glee. “Boy, listen, you never cure the addict type, for God and our mamas made us that way.” His effort at laughter made me think about what he had done for me in that cabin in Colorado and whether he was now Indiangiving his gift. Could Grack have changed so much as to wish me this evil all over again? Could I have changed so much for him that now he wanted me to be with and for a habit only? I would tell him anyway. I would ask him, “What about me, Grack?” and I did.

  “And what you used to say about me, Grack? How I was the kind but myself anyway and could kick it and get out? Don’t you remember?”

  “You’re not the kind anymore, kid. You’ve done something to yourself.” He squatted cross-legged now with the flashlight in his lap. Muffled through the humid Georgia air, sounds of singing rose and fell from the tent where they celebrated my wedding. Joy would be wondering if I were sick or only thinking. Grack said: “I don’t forget, kid. I remember how you were. I was another way, too, but I see how it is for you. You changed yourself, you cured yourself that way, kid.”

  “You helped me, Grack.”

  “You did it yourself.”

  “I needed you.”

  “Well, well.…” And he stood up in that dreamy boneless way a habit gives you. He had lost the swell primping and posings of the carnie with a boodle in his pocket. He stooped to the safe. “Back to work now,”—and he listened to the clicking tumblers as he tried them.

  “Listen, Grack, don’t do that. You know Stan’ll kill you. We got to get out of here now. What are you after?”

  The face turned to mine was drawn in stiff creases, the wart dead, the great black eyes washed of that immense command which had brought the marks buzzing to him. “Get the cash,” he said. “Get home to Canada. Go to the country I came from, where all we ever made was quintuplets. Did that from shivering in a block-of-snow woman, I’ll bet he did. Run back like a licked dog to finish myself out.…”

  I put my hand against his and had nothing to stop him but my will to be his friend. No, no, Grack. He shook me off with an angry shrug. No, a gesture not enough. Again he felt for the combination of the safe. I put my hand on his again, my fingers confused with his. Ah! came his shallow breathing, hot and dry and exhausted.

  “Grack, don’t, please,” I said. “It’ll make a trouble none of us can help you with.”

  “I already got that much trouble, Bud.”

  “No, no, I’ll carry some of it for you now, Grack. Listen, I’m going to stick by you now. Forget about that letter you wrote me. There were reasons I couldn’t say or answer. Listen now, Grack, I’m with you—”

  “You got yourself a wife, Mr. Williams.”

  “Joy is with me all the way, too.”

  He stood up. He drooped from all the limbs of his body, like a wornout plant. He had stretched out taller and skinnier since I had seen him last, unhealthy loosening taxing him at the joints. His feet, his hands, his nose seemed swollen. He nodded assent, he nodded submissiveness. I told him that I would go to explain to Joy and that we would get him out of the South, out of his trouble, up to Canada if that was where he wanted. I didn’t enter his habit in my argument, but I thought it hard at him. He was to hide outside in the woods until morning, behind Cas’s half-truck, and we would come for him in our jalopy and no one would know. He wanted to see no one. Al would keep quiet about it. That was important to him.

  He didn’t fight me.

  Jail and no job and the wanders and the habit are hard on a man like Grack. They’re hard on anyone, but the one used to a crowd which flies straight to his beckoning eyes is put down hardest. All right, I thought, we’ll stand you up again, Grack.

  If he saw the look of pity, he helped me to cure myself of that, too. The broad, malicious, black-toothed grin took his face, and he lifted his head with its enormous eyes, and it was like the sun coming up. He nodded. He said nothing. He gave me the smile and the wart. He opened Stan’s door and loped past the crescent of carnie trucks and disappeared in the darkness. I knew he would wait.

  I went to get Joy. The party had picked up. Our friends all hooted when I invited her for a walk. “Don’t catch the rooma-tiz,” Pauline yelled after us, and the braying and titters followed us onto the debris of the midway. Joy took the news that we would have company on our wedding trip as she took everything, with that wait-and-see caution which comes of the risky life on a lot. You can’t help surprises, it seems to say, but you can wonder about it. Her flushed face and her slightly swollen lips were those of happiness, however, possessed and possessing—even if the bitten pout came of holy matrimony’s kiss before all those oddball buddies and that black-coated undertaker in tennis shoes.

  “Let’s walk.”

  “What happened?”

  “This your woman’s intuition already, Joy?”

  She looked at me straight on and said, “We only just been married, Bud, but I won’t take you coming sly on me just because you got some kind or other of trouble. I’ve seen trouble before. Tell me quick now.”

  I tried to say thank you to her without speaking, but she only laughed at my squirming and added:

  “I accept the nice apology.”

  Then rapidly I explained, taking care to circle her away from Casanopopolous’s half-truck and the patch of woods where Grack might be watching for us. She already knew all I could tell her about my debt to Grack. She saw that I was asking that she help to repay it. She took my arm tightly and reached her hand around to rest on my sleeve. She accepted. Yes, yes, Bud, I’m with you all the way.

  And with you, Joy.

  We would carry Grack with us, not knowing all the trouble he was in, and try to set him down in Canada if that was where he needed to go. He had never, in that other time, asked to know what trouble came with my habit. Nodding yes, nodding, Joy said to accept the gift of a nuptial boodle from Pauline which we had both first decided to refuse. We would repay it later: friendship under hardship is a constant making and repaying of debts. Pauline could do without fresh glass for this season while we carried Grack, afraid and backward-looking, crouched on the floor of our jalopy. We would do what we could for his habit. We would go easy. He must have had reasons. Willing to pay the debts which I had incurred, Joy understood that I was what those debts had made me. She had not wed a carnie; she had married a man with a history.

  I kissed her behind a truck to seal our bargain.

  She pulled away and let loose with what was on her mind. “Don’t close any deals with me, Bud Williams! I don’t want you kissing me like that—kisses ain’t contracts.”

  “What? Joy! I thought you’re with me all the way—”

  She armed me away. “Never you mind that, I’m with you. Yes. But listen to me, Bud,
I’m not saying it’s right. I’m not even saying we should. I know you have to. Yes. I don’t think it’s the beginning of being married, it’s just before the real beginning. Yes, but I know we have to.”

  It was that we which I heard most surely: we have to. “Sure,” I said, trying to see it the way a woman would, “sure enough, dragging Grack along in the back seat on our wedding”

  “That’s not all I mean. I don’t mean just Grack, I mean bringing your debts with us. You’re not free yet to be married only to me.”

  “Yes, yes, Joy, I know what you want to say. But marriage is a new critter, that joining makes something new—still I go along with what went before. No husband comes to his wife absolutely free that way—”

  “And the wife?”

  “And the wife,” I admitted.

  Now she stretched on her toes to kiss me. “Well, we love each other. We’ll cop out together. Maybe now on this trip we’ll see Niagara Falls anyway, the way you’re supposed to.”

  What she had said and what there was in our marriage for Joy was something to learn out of the days to come. Mysteries, puzzles, and nothing permanent except desiring! No, also the possibility of giving within time an adequate response to desire—that was marriage.