Man Who Was Not With It

by Gold, Herbert

  I put out the cigar, kissed her, and said, “What’s keeping him so long?”

  “Pass the smokes, friend,” she answered.

  “Joy, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but what’s to happen to him if the cops pick him up? What’ll he do if they got him now?”

  She looked at me full on, her face turned chin-forward to me, hard and more dark than I remembered it—no, I hadn’t been watching her these last days! so soon!—and she replied to my question with her own: “Yes, what will we do then, Bud?”

  Was this just an increasing selfishness of the body? The new wife’s resentment at the claims which her husband brought with him? There was a curious thickening of all the small bones of her face. The childlike Joy had passed quickly on this flight north. Maybe the sudden northern chill, I thought, maybe a weariness of traveling and nothing more angry. “He’s been gone about five hours, going on six,” I said.

  “He’s been with us for a week and more. We could have done this trip in days if you and he didn’t keep wanting to lay over here, lay over there, see a man in town the other place. Know how long we’ve been married? Long as he’s been with us.”

  “Honey, don’t get yourself a mad on. What can I do about it? You know how Grack did for me back then, you always knew it, so how could I—? Anyway, we were married before,” I said, putting my arm about her on the slipping springs of an overused mattress. Her back stiffened as I touched her. “Remember how we were married all that time on the show?” I was a young husband trying. I was a young husband learning. “Remember,” I said with the young husband’s eager, false, and hopeful smile, “remember, Joy, how we rolled up a boodle together? How we—”

  She pulled away against my arm, stiff but not pushing, reluctant it seemed, hoping that I could talk sweetly to her loneliness. “It’s that boodle we’re living off now”—and she leaned stiffly—“running like this, always running, carrying our baby with us.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Joy! Grack is a friend, we got to be good to him. He’s in such bad trouble, what can we do? He’s not a baby just because there’s trouble for him now, or we’d all be babies most of the time. This is hard on you, sure, it’s hard on me, too. It’s starting to rain. Whatever happened to him?”

  She moved my arm away and went to stand by the window, looking out through the first dusty splash on the glass. She clacked the slats of the Venetian blinds together to make a noise between us. “It’s true about the baby,” she said.

  “He’s not! Don’t talk about Grack that way.”

  There was a commotion of metal and rope at the window and the blind came down, hitting her across the breast as it fell. She winced but only moved to let it slam to the floor and she stood in the gray dusklight, before the thud of tires which followed us up the continent, telling me, “Think about your girl Joy for a minute, Bud. Hold on. Look at me. Grack isn’t the only baby we’ve got between us. I better see a doctor and we better have a test and read a book about living with a kid in a ten-year-old Dodge. My breasts hurt all the time.”

  Sometimes, at such a moment, the eyes clear out everything in sight—ashtray and motel dresser of deal and butts and wornout socks in a wastebasket and the rushing world of travel in the window—before the eyes focus back, all in an instant, on Joy the wife, this Joy who was my whole sense on earth and now more than only my life. I ran to her, laughing at my own tears, and pulled her back from the window and away with me, darling darling darling.

  She was dry-eyed, speculating. Such a different dry-eyed calculation from that of Phyllis! Forgive me, and she forgave. Her eyes were amazed: “You like it, Bud? You’re not angry?”

  “Forgive me!”

  “But why?”

  Dearest darling, I could say, darling dearest, and nothing more for that deep inner tolling of celebration. I was winning the prize, a child, my own blood, when I least expected it, and the thrill of reward is a pious thing, given without my deserving it: and then my sight came back to a single hard bright point: Yes, we do deserve it!

  She was tricked in smiles at my pleasure and touched my face. She let me fumble to tell about happiness, quick, quick, at her blouse where the breasts which hurt stood up at me now (hurting? hurting? But she smiled welcome!) and the tired day passed over to brilliant night as we shook ourselves together again.

  We both slept briefly. I was still sleeping when she moved away, saying, “Maybe we better find Grack.”

  “Wh-what?”—and catching myself in the sighs of my father’s waking sighs. The window was black and the jeweled flash of headlights rising, headlights falling, informed me and carried my father away again with them. The sleepy wh-wh-wh chomping stopped and I remembered Joy and brushed her cheek with my lips. I remembered myself awake to her.

  But not to why she had awakened me. I was dreaming of how she had fought alongside, then healed the broken nose, saying, Soda paste is good for burning.… Let me heal by myself! … Soda paste is good to cool you.… Leave me alone! … I’ll help you, Bud.…

  “We better go hunt him up now, Bud.”

  I blew and stretched, wanting only to talk. “Joy, you did it so fast, we did, I mean—a kid already! And you know, just a while back I was a kid myself, playing touch football in the streets, nothing more than that—it’s a game where you duck the cars until you—”

  Patient, severe, she insisted that I climb all the way from sleep. She swung my arm back and forth, very gentle, very reminding. “He might be in trouble. He shouldn’t be this late.”

  Bad. I splashed cold water on my face and arms, dressed from the heap of clothes, hitched my Army surplus belt tight, all the time figuring where to look. I would buy a sandwich and ask the referral, a geek in a diner, as usual, and leave the sandwich for some Andy or some other hitchhiker. Dressing, Joy had her back to me, that fleshly womanly back bending, buttocks and lovely new creases. Then, in blouse and skirt, and narrow narrow waist, she didn’t seem to have room in her belly for a sandwich even with the cheese sliced thin. “I’m going with you,” she said.

  “Stay here!” No, no, that wasn’t the way: “I mean why don’t you stay here, Joy? What if he comes back while we’re gone?”

  “We’ll leave a note. He’ll just have himself a sleep and wait, that’s all.”

  “Why you want to come into town?”

  She blushed, darkening as she did, and turned away. “Be with you,” she said, but this was for loneliness more than love. She was ashamed. She combed, lipsticked, and used her hand to fluff out her hair.

  “You’re not tired?” I asked. “Why don’t you stay and rest, take a bath or something, take it easy. I’ll get you a magazine.”

  And she stood by the fallen Venetian blinds still scattered like kindling over the floor. This time the tears drooped soft as rain; she let them come, she opened to them. The kid, the dark gypsy at Pauline’s wicket, the perky girl, that happy creature was now a woman and miserable. My breath got caught and made me laugh it free: Joy jealous! While she carried our baby, I turned away to go hunting Grack in town someplace: jealous face tussling with tears!

  “Why Joy honey,” I said, holding and tugging at her—really married, all this marrying us, this the ceremony now: “Why Joy honey, listen, come on with me into town, will you?”

  “No!”

  “Please, honey. Aw, honey.”

  “No, n-no,”—plus tears and pouting. “You want to be alone with Grack, that’s how it is,”—not a question, but a question anyway.

  Yes, she was getting to be a wife, and with a memory like the Lord’s for slight and wrong. It had once been true that Grack had seemed a person to me and Joy only a girl, only a woman, a need and pleasure, but now there could be nothing better in life than to stroll down the streets of Baltimore with my honey, looking into windows, dawdling and vain about her beauty, taking the air together, with no plans but to sharpen our appetites and then use food and a smoke.

  But we could not check our baggage, none of it, and Grack the heaviest. To ge
t him to the border and safe until he did himself in was a responsibility we could not shake loose; Joy and I owed it to each other. “Come on, honey,” I said, “let’s go look for him.”

  “You want me along? You just saying that?”

  “Why should I go in if you’re not with me, Joy?”

  “That’s better. Don’t call me honey because you’re afraid I’ll cry.”

  “You know I have to learn, Joy, but I want to be good to you. You know that. Our kid will have a real mother and father, no fooling—”

  And she interrupted me to answer, “I love you. It takes a girl longer, but you’ve made me do it. You men, you con yourself into love all of a night, and we’re supposed to follow. But it takes time. Sometimes we manage. Can I go dressed like this?”

  “You’re beautiful.”

  “Looks all right?”

  I turned her around and smiled until she smiled and I kissed the end of her nose.

  Poor Grack, he was as I used to be. Maybe I could be the way he never was. Now I understood how this was a matter which could come between Joy and me. There are risks to every responsibility.

  “Okay, then I’m ready,” she said.

  25. How to be absent

  OF course, we had an idea of where to look, but we gawked anyway like hillbilly marks down a midway as we drove past those fine, red-bricked stands of the English squares of Baltimore. Were they really English? As much as we were really hillbillies. Almost looked it, friend, built to the sidewalks on which men as long as rolled umbrellas hurried through the drizzle under fogged streetlamps. When I climbed out of our jalop at a corner to look this way and that for the diner where Grack might have been, I heard the water sizzling off our overheated motor. There was a stench of rubber gone wrong from the fan belt. Fan belt trouble was all we needed more.

  I climbed back in, wet and steaming, rain and sweat and purly wool, and went off slowly again in second. Joy’s hair glistened from sticking her head out the window. She had to crane for streetsigns. Windshield wiper didn’t work; her curls were plastered straight, sleek, and tight.

  Funny, eh?

  Funny if you’re not sick looking for Grack, and sick of looking for him; tired of moving, tired of wet Baltimore; fan belt frayed and trouble to fix it. What would we be looking for when we found Grack?

  I laughed and Joy puzzled over me with smiles. “You a funhouse talker?” she asked.

  “Not that,” I said, steering and squinting, “it’s something else. Reminds me, you sure your belly doesn’t hurt?”

  “That what it reminds you?”

  “No, something else funny. Was before I knew you, three-four years maybe …” I had been hitchhiking, not free as John Peel but starved as Andy, when I saw this Model T driving down the dusty Georgia highway. It was flying at twenty miles an hour, having a time for itself, in a buzzing, spinning cone of dust. I started to hang out my swollen thumb, then jerked it back fast. That Ford was bouncing toward me with no driver at all, and then it stopped, a few yards ahead, and opened its door. “Listen, Joy,” I told her, “I’m a brave man at times, but I’d have run, only my old pop never told me to watch out for the old phantom Model T.” Anyway, it was a kid inside driving, not more than nine years and four months old, if he remembered correctly. We figured it all out together. “How can you see?” I had asked him.

  “Cain’t,” he said.

  “Whyn’t you sit on a pillow?”

  “Ain’t got no pillows yet,” he said. “Paw gonna send away to Sears for Christmas. To set on.”

  “How do you know when you’re on the road?”

  “Easy, feel it in my pants,” he said, and gave me one of those smartkid grins that even a cracker can drum up when his pellagra is cured. “See them telephone poles? Jist keep my eyes on the top of them poles and stay down the middle.”

  As respectfully as I could, I had inquired of him, “Like me to drive awhile, sir?”

  Joy put her head near my shoulder and we both felt better, although I still didn’t know where to put this little mother and just where to find Grack and what to do about him when I found him. But it was good to go shares with my wife.

  Grack’s contact man cooked in a diner on the seafood coast of Baltimore, near the market where the pumpernickel grows, all humid sawdust and plump butcher arms and German beer in there through the swinging door. The universe of grackhunt still drizzled, darkened, but the coffee smell inside was pleasant even though cookie wasn’t. I smelled him right first-off after the coffee. Joy came sniffing in with me and brushed at her hair with her fingers before the cigarette vending machine mirror.

  “Hiya,” I said, “seen my friend Gracchus?”

  “Who and why? Never heard of him.”

  “Grack, has a kind of mole, a funny way, you know—”

  He shrugged and stared up and down at Joy. Many men look with desire at her, with cockeyed grins maybe, but he was busy tailoring her for a policewoman’s wool next to the skin and looking for Enna Jettick shoes.

  “Never mind, she’s with me,” I said. “Listen, this Grack came in today, long fellow, touches his eye—”

  “What you care for?”

  “He’s a friend, that’s all. Looking for him. Now you listen here to me, I’m not saying you’re a pusher or anything at all, fellow.” Patiently I explained. No use pricking him up more, jealous as he was already about the pretty Joy I carted along with me. After all, I was asking a risky favor—to trust me without getting a cut of anything, not even Joy, and to admit that he had sent Grack where he could buy what he needed. “Come on, mister, you know my buddy Grack—tall like I say, skinny, big blue hickie on the face, one eye limps sometimes, came in here this afternoon for a coffee and a bit of conversation with you and didn’t finish his doughnuts.” I grinned for friendship. This was a job of talkeroo for a carnie, only our cookie was no mark—a fat-armed cookie with speckled baldness on his biceps, a raw meat face steamed apart, no facebones to speak of, silver-rimmed glasses and button eyes hiding deep in the diner-fed flesh. The fat on his finger had grown almost all the way around the wedding band.

  “Lots a guys come in for chatter and java, friend,” he remarked with a delighted smile. “I used to be a regular bartender before I got me this diner. I prefer food better—steadier thing in a nice neighborhood.”

  Yes, I could guess. A contact bird finds it less complicated not to have the liquor inspectors coming around with salt shakers for his tail. What could be more innocent than a diner, a feathered nest with Campbell’s Soup and steamed stringbeans? He probably had kids, too, all plump and unclean like papa.

  “So?” he said.

  “So you know the man I mean. Needed it real bad. Listen, he’s a friend of ours, he’s with us—”

  “In the life with you-all?”

  “Yes.”

  He grinned at Joy. “I say no,” he murmured. “Now you and your lady like a couple hotcakes? Fresh batter today.”

  The smile was overcurved and mean around the too-small teeth. It just didn’t want to say. Maybe cookie thought we were federal investigators, only because we didn’t look it; maybe he thought we were police stoolies—wet enough; maybe he just didn’t like to open his mouth unless someone put a coin in it. And after all, there is business ethics and his duty to protect the doc who sold the stuff.

  “Friend, listen, we’re not hungry, let me explain it again,” I said. “This Grack is moving with us. You remember. He needed it very bad. I’ll explain once more how—”

  At this point Joy, who had been keeping quiet, suddenly cleared her throat and put her hand on my arm to stop me. Her eyes narrowing, darkening under the thick fringe of lash, she said sweetly, “For your good too, Mister.”

  “Miss?”

  I looked at her intently. It’s how to get the audience. I turned and frowned. I shilled for my wife.

  “Personal favor to you, sir,” she repeated. “What if they pick up our pal in a bad way? Think he’s not going to say who his last referr
al was? If he’d have found it, he would be back with us now. Don’t you think you better help us get him off your hands and out of town?”

  That was the line all right, smart talker of a wife. The cookie said, “Doc Purdy, seventy-six Key Street, fourth floor. Listen, I don’t even know if he went there, that’s why I didn’t tell you. Don’t blame me—you come in here like this, not a word from anybody. But listen, Doc don’t answer his phone. All kinds of funny business with Doc …”

  We shook off the steam of that place without even asking where Key Street was. A gas station could tell us. I was scared—Grack’s bad way with funny docs. What if the doc tried to hold him up? Why didn’t he answer the business phone?

  Cookie was already talking with a new customer: “How are you?”

  “Swell.”

  “The wife?”

  “Swell.”

  “Got some of that blueberry pie today.…”

  In the street I pulled Joy’s wet face to me for kissing and the angry eyes opened away. Smart good girl she was.

  Now hurry.

  Purdy’s office on Key Street was in one of those trading neighborhoods which, evenings and Sundays, are as dead as mined-out mining towns. Heaped slag of storefront and echoing canyon of retreated affairs. At first we drove down Key Street without finding him. Then, the second time through, we caught his sign on a glass door between a surgical support store and a place that rented typewriters (Rental Price Applies to Purchase). The door let into an unlit stairway:

  DOCTOR PURDY

  By Appointment Only

  My Pittsburgh sense of propriety made me remark to Joy that he should have a first name, or call himself M.D.—it makes dignity for a dope pusher. She looked at me and said to ring the bell. I peeked up the long hallway and thought there was no light, no one home. She reached around me and poked the bell.

  No answer.

  We stood on that empty street in the drizzle, our faces shiny with smoke and mist and hurry, needing a wash, needing a rest, and what would we find when we did find Grack? I listened to the wet movement of a corrugated box under the wheels of the Dodge.