Man Who Was Not With It

by Gold, Herbert

  “Ring again—you want me to?” she demanded angrily.

  “I’m sorry.” But she did it. I was thinking of her; maybe that’s why I didn’t want to ring. Why not just leave and forget about it? Why not just take off since Grack seemed to have skipped?

  Now I leaned on the button and listened to the thin buzzing upstairs. This time a sick blue light answered through the hallway, seeping under a door and perhaps through a keyhole, but no sound of movement. “There, there’s somebody,” Joy said. She rapped sharply on the plate glass. A cutting rasp from the ring I had given her.

  “Open up or we’ll break it down!” I yelled into the glass. Break-i-down, came the faint echo from the brick front of the warehouse across Key Street. The rustle under our car was of an eating rat in the decaying box.

  A buzz unslipped the door. We hurried up the frayed wooden stairway. Upstairs a long corridor was lined with offices for societies and probably a hall for meetings—Sons of Rumania, Lourdes Scholars, Antifluoridation and Cancer by Nicotine groups, the American Nationalist Party, things like that. Those stairs were splintered by dwarfs and pituitaries and by all the parade of the invisibly crippled who were Doc Purdy’s clients. What despair of profit he must have grown up with! He waited behind his door for a password. Cookie had not given it.

  “We’re looking for a friend,” I said to the blank door under which the blue light sifted. “Gracchus. You know him. Needed it bad, fierce.”

  Again, as if pitching us by tumultuous silence, as if raising our price, Doc Purdy listened without a sound.

  “Let us in or we’ll tear you down.”

  The voice behind the door, a sweet and reedy voice, took place without needing to clear its throat. “How many are you?”

  “Man and wife,” Joy said.

  A chair creaked and heavy footsteps started, shoes too heavy for the voice, heavy black shoes with shiny eyelets and a nice female voice, “It’s so late.” He unlatched but held the door on the chain and looked at us with a pocket flashlight. He admitted us into his cracked-leather, paper-piled, clinic-smelling roost—the blue light from a nightlamp crowding the room with dimness, filling the spaces between the auction warehouse furniture and the smears of wallpaper (did he sleep in an adjoining cubicle?) and the doc himself now sitting behind his desk with his cheeks in his hands.

  “You come back for it?” he asked wearily. “No way to change my price. I didn’t plan to go to bed this night, so no matter how late you come I’m ready. A stubborn man. Got to have stubbornness for staying so sick and living when you don’t have to anymore.”

  I held my breath to figure him, telling us his life’s story already, desire and illness and how he couldn’t taste the good of peaches and pears nowadays, dreaming us to go on like that. Joy’s start of comprehension at my side gave me all the sense we needed for him: Sure, a hophead himself, he made a moony wiseness. He and Grack had argued about price or about the powdered sugar in it or about something to do with getting, giving, or using. Now he thought the Grack had sent us back for bargaining.

  “Not when you do like this to an old man,” he said. “I’ll sell, business is business, but I don’t give no fear nor favors.” And he showed the bruised cheek and the brownish swollen eye. Was Grack going hot-crazy, beating up the pushers? The doc’s other eye, just normally swollen, closed to let us see. Holding it, he showed us that marvelous sad calm of the man with a heavy, heavy, satisfied habit. And the calm of a man with a weapon in his open desk drawer.

  “No, no,” I said, “all I want is where is he?”

  “Who?”

  “Our friend.”

  Doc wheezed, trying laughter. “You think I asked where he was going? He tried to hold me up, son. He hurt me.” He touched the eye and winked. “Lucky I had my protection.” It gave him a pleasure to be beaten up but to win anyway.

  I remembered Grack’s desperation. “You ought to know better’n to lift the tariff on a guy who needs it bad, Doc.”

  “Your friend ought to know better’n to try to fight down the price with his hands when he has the shakes already, son. Son,” he added with satisfaction.

  “Where’d he go?” Joy demanded.

  The doc spread his hands, who knows? “Look at my poor eye,” he said, “contusions. I don’t even want to show myself. Wouldn’t even be fun at all.”

  He smiled happily and squeaked around in the chair to the full-length mirror behind him. He kept one hand in the drawer.

  “No use,” Joy said. “He isn’t going to tell us anything we need to hear. Let’s go.”

  “Oh I could tell you young folks lots of things,” Doc Purdy cried out. “The life I’ve had! Ruined! Only thing, of course, I can’t tell you where your friend is now.”

  “Come on.”

  “Was the brightest boy in my class, high school, second or third smartest, little college I went to, then medical school and I fell in love—” I stood listening for a moment, dreaming of my own habit while the man talked, knowing it for the reason I looked for Grack and the reason for waiting without looking while this goof goofed on us and my wife’s ankles swelled and could get varicose veins from the burdens I had given her. The doc said, in deep amazement, shading his hurt eyes: “It never did stop ’em before when I held up for price, not if they really wanted it, unless he knows another pusher.” A shrug of what might once have been scientific curiosity: “Now what do you suppose kind of habit he got, he could turn reluctant over a few bucks? And then not get it at all.” Holding his sore cheek, he shook the gray unshaven medical head over such a phenomenon. His silence was philosophical about how it requires brains to push heroin and they ought to require only the highest types for it, men of standing who don’t mind a fractured nest of capillaries in the cheek now and then.

  “Come on, no use here,” Joy said.

  “You tired, honey? Let’s give it up for now.”

  “Yes, I’m tired, Bud. Yes, indeed.”

  Without getting up from his chair, Doc Purdy called out behind us, “You don’t want to buy in case he didn’t find it anyplace else? You don’t want to make sure? You don’t even want to say goodbye?”

  26. Round and round, the trick of want

  LET’S go back,” Joy said. “Maybe he’s back there already.” I could not argue for looking when we didn’t know where to look. Joy’s face was cold and small with fatigue, her mouth drawn larger, like the muzzle of an indoor animal left outdoors. I had done it to her. If Grack had not found his way back, I could leave and again go looking for him. The steady drizzle over Baltimore, steaming off heated roofs down all the streets of the quiet town, made it impossible to hide her weariness. She had the right to rest now. Even the weather conspired. And where was there to look?

  Here in Baltimore I only then thought of how close we were to Pittsburgh and how Dad and Joy would blush and stammer to meet. Well, Dad had waited; he could wait longer, until I saw this carnie business through. And if Grack had carried his doc-fighting habits somewhere else? Trouble, real trouble, trouble enough to forget my pa. But now enough for Joy to let me forget her, knowing that I wanted only to remember. She did know it, I believe, despite the hardness of knowing under Grack’s sight.

  “Right now,” she said. “I need to go home, Bud—home to the motel.”

  I know directions. We found our place without a false turning, passing through a lovely square on the way, the red brick wet and all the patterned walls joined. I slowed down the Dodge and said to Joy, “Nice town—someday you like to live here?”

  “We passed it coming already, didn’t you see?”

  “You’re really beat, Joy.”

  No, she wasn’t thinking houses yet. That’s a mother’s job, and she wasn’t quite a mother, although tired. It’s also a father’s job and I thought of it the second time we passed the square.

  There was no light in our cabins side by side when we finally drove up, sticky to the skin and worrying, nothing except the nolight glare of the spotlights which mark
the parking places of a BEAUTYREST MOTEL. You come blinking out of the car, eyes shrunk by blaze of white, and it was so we came. Grack’s cabin was dark. Not there. Ours was dark. We ran with heads bent to the rain. No, a cigarette burned straight up at our pillows.

  I knocked open the door with a kick and yelled, “For Christ’s sake, Grack!”

  “Been out on the town?”

  “Been out looking for you, goddammit!”

  He should have swung around when Joy and I came in, keeping his feet high so as not to let them dirty our bed, and he should have sat up and offered us a cigarette. He lay there in the long trough made by his body in the used-up mattress, smoking and peaceable, waiting. I put Joy in a chair, then furiously turned back to him: “What the hell were we supposed to think?”

  “Calm down, friend, I’m satisfied. I got what I needed.”

  “That isn’t what I said. I didn’t ask how are you! How was I supposed to know how nice you feel? You tell us you’re running, you tell me you need us to keep you hid, you tell us you’re scared—”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t of said that.”

  “You tell us you’re scared and then you scare us sillier’n the kids in the House of Murder by disappearing for a day like this. How do I know you’re not picked up? How do I know the fuzz aren’t waiting back here to tie on a rap for Aiding and Abetting?”

  He breathed slowly, working his contentment around in his mouth. “Who you scared for, kid? Me or who? You didn’t do nothing. I’m just a friend taking a little honey-moon trip with you, is all I am. Pauline knows you just got married—everybody does. So what’s that aiding and abetting?”

  One of the habits of a man on habit is not to worry about what used to worry him. The past is far past and behind, the future is far ahead and away. He was my friend; he had helped me; I had rights at anger—and yet there was no way to get to him. He floated on the springs with an unreachable smile. Human, yet less than human under a habit, he could not be found with reproach. Blind and protected, he lay puffing his cigarette with his blind and protected eyes amused over us. And Joy was watching me.

  Having learned, I was ashamed for all those like Grack who fed without eating, loved without loving, died in advance. Yes, ashamed for myself too, but all for him as he lay without the will to kick himself free and giving no twitch of desire. (Yes, he wanted things better; yes, he wished, he was alive.) You might think I would diddle my toes in my shoes for shame and look at them. I looked at Grack’s feet crammed into his black pointed shoes—too tight they were—and I thought as the carnie thinks: Feet hurt, head hurt. Poor man with not enough sense to buy shoes that fit him, just for wanting pointy feet. Still thinking feet, I said, “You can’t do this kind of thing to us, Grack—running off to fret us like that. You can’t. You’re asking for trouble. Why get it from us?”

  Yes, us. Joy and me.

  I said: “You must be hurt bad, Grack.”

  He answered, “Wrong and right, Bud. I love the smell of my bandages, that’s how bad I’m hurt and how long.”

  “You’re not my friend anymore?”

  “You’ve got yourself a wife.”

  “It ain’t such a kind of being friends, Grack, that it couldn’t be with Joy, too.”

  “You mean because she let me come along for the wedding?”

  “No, no, no.”

  Joy’s moving and breathing in the darkness behind me let me know that she was replying. There was a small hurry of thought in her fine balance and grace. She did not need to say it when she heard me speaking for her.

  “Sure, things are different, Grack, always are. But we can still be friends like—”

  “No! You can’t play that one with me, Buddy! When you come to the carnie you don’t want things ever to be different. There’s only one life when you’re in it. We never change! The carnie is with it, enough!” Thrashing, agitated as a fevered man, he barely moved in his trough. His voice was cold and thin, a telephone voice from the never-changing past that I could no longer believe in. He turned his cheek on the pillow. “I’m no different,” he murmured. “What you mean, pal-o, is you don’t want the life no more. You’re not with me.”

  Joy breathed her assent. I did not speak. To be not with it was once so sad!

  I watched him on the bed, tough as a crisp-shelled beetle—but step on the beetle only if you are fond of gore. “Grack,” I said finally, “we’re with you to get you home. Isn’t that where you’re wanting?”

  How can I say that he died in that instant of the word wanting? He wheezed, he choked, the cigarette flamed, Joy stood by my side; his eyes rolled and stared and the hatred and despair swelled to bursting within him—and the moment passed. Maybe it was only the moment of the passing of his high, but with its passing, the paroxysm of the beast, I could never again think of him as anything but a dying creature. We are all moving toward death, true; but we can carry life curled in our bellies, nicely squatting there, or swimming and ready to spurt forth for pleasure and the future. We have things left to do. Not Grack.

  “You feel all right, Grack?”

  “How about you?”

  “You sleepy, Grack?” Joy asked.

  “Why, you want to be alone with your loverboy? Use the other cabin, I’m tired,”—and true that he was thin and dim and very tired.

  And I thought: He has no right to age Joy like this! And said: “How the devil’d you get back here? How’d you get the stuff? Where?”

  He did not answer.

  “I don’t feel so well,” Joy said. “I got the cramps. My back hurts. I’ll wait for you.” She searched my face solicitously before she left. Grack’s death in my sight had not escaped her. She did not fear, but worried about our burden in her belly.

  “Grack,” I began again, “we’ve got to get along, you see? Otherwise you better take a train. We got to get you there and that’s all, otherwise … Listen, Grack! We’re going to have a baby.”

  He grinned. “You and the girl?”

  “Try to understand what I’m saying now, Grack. It isn’t like that time when I couldn’t answer your letter. Didn’t. I’m telling you straight on now. It’s not just for me. You remember when you told me that? How you helped me kick the habit not just for me? How you sent me back to home not just for me? There are others, Grack.”

  “There’s the marks, sure.”

  “There’s Joy! There’s our kid!”

  His sallow face turned with the grin. “There’s my ma, too, but she ain’t with it. Old lady wanted me to go for priest. In French. Learned me to talk, anyway.”

  Trying hard to be calm and fast, I could feel Joy’s bellyache near me; she would not lie down until I came to lie beside her. “You hear what I’m telling you, Grack? We got to cross that bridge soon.”

  “Detroit to Windsor,” he answered to the everlasting highway headlights flicking across the motel walls. “What’s there to giving birth? Once when I was a kid I put acorns in the pocket of my lumberjacket—fat ones for carving. Went into the woods for them. Ma laid my jacket up for me, and next spring when I went for that jacket the pockets were crawling with little white worms and the acorns were slick and died to dust when I pinched them.…”

  Joy returned as I stood by his bed. “He’s sleeping,” she whispered. “Let’s go.”

  “Sure I’m sleeping, girlie. Let me pinch you in my dreams. So Mama will say, Bon jour, Grack, tu viens enfin? That’s Canuck for you ain’t been a son to your ma. Can’t you see by my skin and bones—I’m sick, I got a habit—I ain’t my mama’s anymore? She almost dead already—head gone. I’m just wanting back, that’s all. Her milk is black. Hear me? You always in a hurry?”

  In his addict’s faint sleep he was crossing over to nowhere and to get away. Black milk was all. Joy and I went out on tiptoe. He slept.

  27. She had a right

  JOY slept out her cramps of the two-inch fish which measured our marriage within her, measured it by climbing and changing and sounding for union in our blood with a
note deeper than the carnie haw and the chime of my loyalty to Grack. I watched over her and brooded and murmured comfort as incomplete as that of the radio on Sunday afternoon.

  “I’m going to give you something nice to sleep in,” I said. “Don’t be sick. Just lie still. I’m going to buy it first time I get in town, lace on it, real pretty.”

  “That’s so lovely of you. Please kiss me now, Bud.”

  “I’m going to put the money for it in a special pocket. I won’t forget.”

  “That was nice, Bud. You already gave me nice things. Oh my legs are cramping.”

  I tried to make my own legs cramp, couldn’t. “Do you want to sleep and then we’ll get started again?” She lay white and still under the folded top sheet. I had not believed so much whiteness possible in this small and tanned, ankling, earth-scattering carnie creature who was Pauline’s dark daughter; but now ice-whiteness, sheet-whiteness, bleeding-whiteness in her still and scared face. “No, Joy, you’re not doing so good today.” She gave me gratitude in a smile because I had seen it without being told. “I’m finding a doctor, Joy.”

  “Don’t you move. I just need rest and it’ll stop by itself. Too much running and wet, riding the car, that’s all,” she said. “It’s okay, Bud, Pauline told me all about everything. Same thing happened to her when she was carrying me. Had to lay overnight and give up the reading of palms for Friday to Monday, but don’t worry, it was all right and it turned out to be me who was born that way, with just a little birthmark to show for it. That okay, Bud? I’m cold.”

  I lay down by her side. She said:

  “I like the way you take care of Grack. Will you take care of me that way, too?”

  “Let me go find a good doctor.”

  She threw her arm across my chest. “And leave me alone? No, no. We had enough with doctors already. Anyway, listen, I know, Pauline told me. It’s just my day of the month and even when you’re carrying you sometimes feel it bad. A little blood means a boy, that’s all.”