Man Who Was Not With It

by Gold, Herbert

  “Joy! Come here and sit with me on the stoop.”

  “In a minute,” she said. “I have to hang up my stockings. And you got to finish what you’re thinking up about me before I sit with you.”

  And these bad moments passed; they came on a Thursday morning and a Sunday afternoon. I promised myself that the next Thursdays and Sundays would be different. I went to pull Joy back into the light with me.

  23. Some do, some don’t

  AND in still another pink neon and fake log motel, this time out of Harrisburg, Pa., when I realized how thin the cash was covering and how deep the habit was fixing itself, growing celebrationally and killing the tree, like mistletoe, I decided to put it to Grack again. The way you know about a habit is the going-away, the separation, the cutting of the circuits between people. Grack had that. It was not that he talked less and less; we are all like that sometimes. It was that his talk buzzed, clouded, and cooled in crystals about his head, meaning: no difference anymore. His mouth was pinched and white. The entire center of his face, badly burned over, was a bleak waste. He no longer touched his finger to his eye in that joyous gesture of domination which had brought us all to him.

  Just a fellow living off his friends—that’s still a hard way to put Grack in the box. He had a sly sideways looking at us, at Joy and me, because we liked to chatter and sit beside each other and touch and play. By Joy’s covert glance at him, I knew that she sometimes intended to prove that she was alone with me. His long staring at her gave me the chance to ask one evening, while Joy was off ordering some sandwiches before bed: “You always used to like Joy, Grack. Why do you have that grin about her now?”

  “She’s a good kid. She still is.”

  “You don’t act like—”

  “She’s turning into a wifey-dear, that’s true. But your fault more than hers.”

  “It sure is, Grack, at least as much. I sure hope so.”

  And I received that smile, sly and spiteful, full of flat yellow teeth and detaching itself more and more from our old sense about each other. I knew, I knew that Grack used to like me for real, when his smile was a stuttering thing, quick as light, not this long patience.

  I took a cigarillo from him. I remembered the way Grack had been and demanded an answer. “Why not?” I asked. “You once told me a habit is like a wife, but a nagging one that does no good and you can’t score or get rid of it. No dee-vorce, you said, remember? You got to grab it by the neck and strangle.”

  We squatted on our haunches at the stoop of the cabin. The metal furniture had just been hosed down; I got wet pants from trying a chair. We did most of our talking at these times in the outskirt evenings, near towns at nightfall, with jukeboxes and automobile exhausts from the road nearby reminding us about voyaging. Joy was saying a sausage, please, balonny, a Swiss cheese on rye if you have it, a bacon and tomato, three bottles of beer since this county ain’t dry. Iced. How much?

  “A habit is nobody and nowhere. You told me yourself, Grack.”

  He put his finger to his eye to try to please me with this dry and tired lifting; it said nothing. “What did you come back to the carnie for, Bud? Wait, I’ll answer. To make your nut. You wanted to count the marks in, then clean them out and be a nice boy till the show comes down. And that’s all you wanted. Is that being with anything? At least the carnie believes in the life.”

  “You don’t, Grack—”

  “Me? Me?”

  “And you don’t know what I was after, either.”

  “As to me, boy …” He stopped and showed his teeth. “Well, smart boy, you’re right. I don’t believe in the carnie no more, and that’s why I got me a habit,”—and he calmly waited and looked at the new muffler and tailpipe which we had put on the Dodge this afternoon to replace the rusted and busted ones.

  The man in a roadside garage smelling of gasoline and bag lunches had said, “Yes, sir, in an hour or better, sir,” and made humble washing movements with his hands. I had gone to the toilet to look at myself in the mirror and see why he had sirred me. Still long and bony, I had put on weight. The baby flesh had dropped from my cheeks; there were mouthlines and a fierce offside jut of broken nose. Kicking the habit and Pittsburgh, finding and taking Joy, these things had used my face. It was a shock to see that I could no longer be mistaken for a college kid. Each demand marked, desire and struggle were written into place on my head.

  “No, Buddy boy, like I was saying, you’re not with us anymore,” Grack finished with a long breath, straightening up and stretching.

  “I didn’t belong in the carnie this time, you’re right, Grack. But I got more good out of the second time—I got Joy. It wouldn’t happen if I was really with it. Grack, I’ll tell you, the closest thing to a lover in the carnie is old Cas ironing his money. Or Pauline, talking six different ways, trying to accommodate everybody. All right, Pauline then. Or Cas. He’s the only man who lives for somebody else, only the someone is the dollar bill.”

  “Go open a little store with your wife, Bud. Sell stationery and penny candy to the neighborhood kids. You’ll have kids of your own soon, too.”

  Okay, Grack. I shook my head because he meant this to be bad and ugly, but the taunt had no bite despite my present engagement in helping a former talker now with a five-dollar habit run from the cops. It seemed that they wanted him in Fayetteville (was that the place? I always forgot) for violence done on a peddling doc. I could not forget that part of it. We watched a truck fight in first up the hill. I helped it by straining forward.

  Grack held his knees, squatting on the stoop of this motel, while couples with big purses and no suitcases crept into their cabins and the doors shut softly. The tickling fumes of automobile exhaust arose in the evening breeze. Waiting for me to be and talk angry, Grack finally sighed, shook his head, and added: “I always lived for myself.”

  “Grack, you just said I was square for coming to the carnie for my nut and for Joy. You just said I wasn’t with it.”

  “Kadota!”

  “Then that makes us alike that way, no?”

  “No.” He grinned and tapped my hand. “But just supposing, would that be so good about you? Would it? No. And is it you against me? No again, friend. But yes, you’re right, I’m heading for the Kiskeedees, I’m not with it either now.”

  It was a mystifying thing, topsy-turvy and wrong and true. Once the best carnie on the lot, the man who held our midway together and made all those palms flash out with green, he was not with it and for it. He used to slap his fist into his palm with tales of the collect telegrams he had received. He used to. He was chief. Angry and pained by memory, putting it behind me, I said: “You were a friend to everybody, Grack.”

  “I lived for myself.”

  “You were good anyway, Grack.”

  “Tried to be for myself.”

  “But you were!”

  “Was, was …”

  Joy, unpacking loudly, rustling and unwrapping, played the sandwich like a bugle to remind me that she wanted me to come to her. She disliked to be interfering and interrupting, and I wanted to sit and munch the eats with my wife, and I stayed, learning how hard it is to be a husband, saying to Grack: “And you only got yourself, that’s all, when you do like that. But it isn’t true, Grack, you were good to me.” I looked at my arms as if reading it to him. The scars had vanished, but I still knew—and by heart—the invisible stiffness when I gazed into the crook of my elbow.

  “Don’t you remember how I told you? Sure, Bud, I wanted you to kick it then. I was nice because I liked you. That niceness was for friend Gracko, friend, just for me.”

  I gave him fake laughter for bad philosophy. Universal selfishness, eh? Look at me, I’m only good because it makes me feel good to be good—oh it’s nasty to be nice! … Nonsense. The medicine show grind is cleverer than that. “Don’t kid yourself into ugliness, Grack, we don’t need it. The way you talk it, everything’s for you. You felt good to help me out, but is that wrong? You’re sinning? Well, I’ll tel
l you, that kind of sin doesn’t scare me. What I want to see if I’m boss carnie of them all is how you do for us on earth, not how you explain it—”

  “Pick pockets, lad. Play the tumblers when I can. Pass rubber checks. Talk to the larceny in their dogsoup hearts.”

  Sweetly he smiled and waited. The smile showed his broad flat yellow teeth.

  “Never mind, that’s only business, Grack. But what you did for me—you meant it to be good to me. Fact. That’s what it meant to the world and to me, and Grack, listen”—I tried to close his smile on him—“Listen, it was, it was good to me. That was no kind of larceny there. Do you think you can take it away from me? No, no matter what. No. You did the good for me, Grack.”

  “Aah,”—a sick wet exhalation. His thumb jerked over his shoulder to where Joy was standing, hands on her hips, openly listening. Dis-missed, the thumb said.

  I went on stubbornly. Joy knew anyway. This was the affair of all of us now; Joy had joined me; I said: “You’re thinking zig-zag, friend, you want to think yourself soggy. Don’t change what was, you can’t. I won’t let you, Grack.”

  “That true you’re a loverboy like they say, Bud? No kidding?”

  “Ziggety-zaggety, Grack. Maybe I take that from my pa and my ma was a lover to Dad before she died. Now she isn’t anything. But—”

  “Maybe I was a choir boy before I died. Now I’m a former gash-hound. Now I’m a monkey with a habit. I’m not much good, whatever you say, never was. Never was no good to myself, either, so why not a habit?”

  “Best talker on the show, Grack, and you were fine to me.”

  He paused and made none of his slow scratchings for attention. This time I felt that he had listened. He said: “The show scores without me, Bud. You got yourself a Joy. I got no others and no score either.”

  I got no others, no score either, got no others, got no others: And the throb of traffic on the great highway answered, Truth, truth. The screech of tires about the graded curves came shrilly at us, Truth, truth, he got no others. The tires and the leaning springs shrieked because the curves were graded, but graded not steep enough for the speed of America. We were all careening around curves and shrieking against them and following the grading with a brakeslip of unwillingness. But there is a difference between the crazy straining joyriders and me with my Joy: I had an idea about going home to that home I did not have. I would make it, and I would make it with children, of which Papa Grack seemed to be first. He got no others (truth, truth) because he did not know that I could be a friend to him. But I was. I know it. I had someone.

  A place in the world of men is hard to make. I would not be slotted in like a nickel whirling in the bank’s machines; neither would I scurry forever like a rat in the bank’s cellar.

  Truth, truth. We need gas? Service station coming up.

  Grack was saying, “Even when I helped you kick the habit I was doing it. I was making you liable to me.”

  No matter how he said no to himself, he could not destroy what he had been. I would be stubborn to guard it for him.

  “You were getting another habit, Bud, the habit of liking Grack—that’s what I was doing to you—”

  “All right, Grack.” We crouched like the hillbillies we used to see, dragging sticks in the gravel or whittling or just resting against their violence like that. “I don’t mind, Grack. I want to have obligations.”

  “I was weakening you. I was making you grateful.”

  “Grateful didn’t weaken me, Grack.”

  He stood up angrily, shaking off our oldman’s rambling. “Idiot!” he said, and dusted his pants. But he did not go away and leave me with Joy. His chin was crammed to his breastbone.

  Dizzy, swaying in my crouch, I looked up to smile and nod because I couldn’t stare at the floor and say nothing. I preferred to look at him, although a few months ago I would have either counted the cracks on the floor or hit him (close to the same thing) for calling me an idiot. The floor could be a safe place to look and the eyes the unsafest of places. I looked at his eyes, thinking that Joy would be pouting and angry with me for leaving her alone so long and she would wait for me to ask her for something so that she could refuse and we could quarrel and then forgive each other. Dear ritual of family love! Although Joy was first for me, Grack came first into my life and I owed him greatly. Though he might cost me something with Joy, I had to fight him through as far as we could go.

  While I watched and thought of Joy, he must have read my thoughts. Abruptly he turned and was ambling downhill on the road into town without saying what-for or when-back. I ran after him.

  “Grack! What’s on your mind? You want me to drive you someplace there?”

  “I got a friend in town,” he said, “friend I never seen before, but I got his address. I’m walking.”

  “What you going for? You don’t like friends.”

  He grinned at my catching him that way. “This friend has something for me, I hope.”

  He was moving faster and I had to hop to keep in step with him. “Grack, I’ll help you, I’ll do everything, I’ll make you kick the habit, Grack! Remember how you did for me in the cabin in Colorado?”

  Half-turning in his stride, he winked. This meant: You have to kick it by your lonesome, boy, I already told you that.

  “Grack, don’t go into town now!”

  Then, while the traffic roared by, heavy trucks and light cars, booming and hissing, straining up the hill and flitting down, he told me what we were in for. He explained all his hints so that we could no longer pretend not to know. Patiently he repeated that he was pretty sure he had killed a man in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He didn’t know for certain sure, and he didn’t altogether wish him dead, but he believed it had happened. It was a doctor who tried to dig him for more money, a doctor known as a distributor. “Not much of a doc,” Grack said, “probably one of those Texas baby-doctor schools. But he could get his paws on what I needed. Was a wholesaler, he was.”

  Of course it would be like that. I watched the vans go by, milk, furniture, hunched interstate express. And the sedans with their salesmen and valises, the mothers with kids from school, the delivery boys, the great ever-moving tread back-and-forth on the highways. We walked amid the hot vapors off asphalt and the stench of weed-burning from a lot down the road near the motel. No, Grack could never kick the habit now, but I would have to help him still.

  “It’s so easy, boy, after you do it once. Before that it’s hard. You sweat. You do in your pants. You crawl around like an animal switching its tail and making up its mind. You’re stupid. You got no sense but what you got to do.”

  “You were mad at him, Grack?”

  He squinted sideways at me with fantastic disbelief. “Don’t you remember anymore, boy, what it was like when you want it? I didn’t care about him. I just needed, and he was dumb enough to try to hold me up. Wait, talk, argue. A guy in his business should know enough not to discuss cash unless he got a gun in his hand. This doc, he was a little skinny Texan with a big hat and nothing but huzzanga in it—”

  “He got scared? Knew what was coming?”

  “Boy, not even Grack knew what was coming. I just needed, that’s all.”

  “I thought you said you figured it out, Grack.”

  He was silent and walked. “True, true,” he answered, frowning. “Slipped up. But I figured on how to get snowed, not the rest. Later I knew from the sweat and the pee what I was really thinking. I just wanted it bad, that’s all.”

  “No sense at all, Grack.”

  His hoarse harsh all-for-self laugh, and: “Yes, member? Remember? You had no sense once either. That there doc kept it locked up. Maybe that was why he didn’t worry. Thought a lock could stop me,”—and he stroked the narrow tips of his fingers in a wiping gesture. We walked a few steps further before he finished the story. “After I hit him and hit him and finished hitting him, I unlocked. I got smart fingers even when I’m nervous. That lock didn’t need more than a few educated twists, lad.�
��

  So we had to run with him from that.

  There was no sense following him into town. This was the same old outside-of-town America, neon and drive-in and bill-board, fruitstands and DRINK MORE MILK BY THE GALLON and unfinished brick houses at the end of mud driveways—Baltimore now. We followed a crazy route, north from one pusher to the next, and then sometimes back south a half a day, because Grack had to go in for his purchase where he knew someone who knew someone.

  Joy was alone back at the motel, and what if I were picked up with Grack? And Joy all alone back there? I left him with the word to come back quick. No, there was no helping him break his habit the way I broke mine. His habit had taken hold because of his deepest need, and there was not a way through to his need now. He dwelled in it.

  24. Patience is for those who know

  IT should have taken him an hour or two, four at most, and the day went by. Motels down roads and a motel here, we waited at another motel. I worried just to park where the patrolling state police might grow curious, maybe only wanting to check the brakes and seeing something wrong on our faces—we stopped like vacationers at a motel.

  Grack was not back yet.

  I had taken to smoking those sweet cigarillos. I let Joy share the rest of the bad news about Grack and felt better. She sat with me on the bed and fed me matches when the cigars went out. “Poor dumb Texas doc,” she said. She had a small full mouth and a way of rolling her eyes with a perverse, solemn smile when we had trouble together. We waited, we waited.

  The afternoon, that new chill northern afternoon, was graying away at our window and Grack still gone.

  Joy tried to make me feel her sharing. I ached from sitting. “I like the taste,” she said, “when you kiss me, that is, Bud. When I don’t have to do all the work myself. I like the taste when you’re thinking about me.”

  “I’m sorry, Joy.”

  “Try again. Otherwise the taste gets stale and I might as well smoke it firsthand.”