Joy once said she was a granddaughter of Pocahontas. Yes, I had said, from the Neapolitan branch of the family. You sold John Smith ice cream bars.
Drowning in fear, I recalled Grack’s brag of what he had seen. The carnie. Baptism in streams, the preacher up to his hips, dipping those ladies in his very own arms. The carnie. Hillbillies stood on the toilets, only way they knew how to use them. Quebec where they buried it for making the corn grow. Jail where the sheriff bothered the punks for sex: Nevada, that was. The carnie and the carnie.
What was my brag before Joy? How I gave my father what-for? Phyllis? One year of college? Belly slamming in the snow for prizes and the sidewalk play in touch? No, I knew it, how I kicked the habit and the carnie, how I took help from Grack, how I earned Joy. That was my brag before Joy.
“Goddammit please god hurry!”
The cabbie believed I meant it, but you can’t jump a ramp over the traffic. That too I had learned. This is a world of others always in the way. In the stream of cars, there’s nothing but figuring out better what to do when you get there. You have to reckon with the others. It’s best if you enjoy traveling with them, but no matter what, you have to reckon. There’s no way around except onto the sidewalk, where you smash the people and the stores. Just wait, just figure, just see the nice kids looking at Santa in the Christmas window.
Oh a good thing I never hurt my father with the knife I had ready for him!
I counted hotel doors from one identical room to the next. When I slammed into my room, Joy was spread out under a sheet. Grack was slumped into a sagging overstuffed chair with a flowered cotton cover. As I had sat before Belle.
“Did you hurt her?”
He shook his head no. He had a bruise the size of a prune under one eye. “Did you get for me?” he asked.
“Scardini’s on the way.”
At the bed I wondered why Joy lay so still under the sheet. Her face was pale, but just as Grack had a prunespot under one eye (his mark-taking eye), so Joy wore two small blotches of red, one on each cheek. “You missed it,” she said flatly. “I missed.”
“What?” The time spun around for Joy and me, whirling Grack with us. I thought, Given Brown’s cow! Given Brown’s cow! In the carnie we gave Brown’s cow when we cut the performance for a rapid turnover. The room had a stale greasy smell, like the counter of a frankfurt joint where the frying has gone on without cleaning. Joy’s face, like Mrs. Nancy’s, had the used look of the bereaved woman. It was inner-turned, but turned to me with her question. Where had I been?
She looked ill, Joy did, it had hurt. “We’re not anymore, Bud,” she said. “Where were you?”
This was our child made outdoors in Georgia on pine needles, this was our first fret-fingered, mum-mumbling babe who would never kick the day except for our kicking together then and Joy’s anguished straining here with Grack trying to serve her.
“Where?”
“What did you say, Joy?”
“We’re not going to have our baby now. What you been doing?”
I never believed in a connection between Nancy’s wife and Joy’s miscarriage, but I asked anyway, as if it mattered: “When?”
“Been happening almost since you left. Why were you so long?”
“Did Grack make trouble for you?”
“Right after you left, a little. I hit him. He stopped.”
Grack lay in the chair, watching me with one flaming, unblinking, terrified eye, waiting for Scardini with his arms struck against the restraining chair, needing Scardini as the diver needs the weight of sea when he is brought up too fast and his blood is like to explode. There was no way to hurt him now, no matter how I needed to hurt him. He watched but did not see me.
“Don’t worry, Bud, it wasn’t his fault. Wasn’t, Bud. It wasn’t carrying right, cramping like that. I was afraid about it all the time. I felt it coming even before.”
“Joy, Joy, Joy.”
“It’s okay now, Bud. Grack’s been helping—towels and tea and things. And he needed his stuff bad, but he’s been taking care … But where you been all this time?”
And where had I been for Grack? And what had I done for him except let Nancy and Scardini manage to make me watch poor Belle? Did he really believe he could make me see Joy any differently? He was at my back; I did not look at him—the collapsed watching in the chair, the bruise on his cheek, his serving Joy with towels and tea because I was not there. She moved and obliged me to admit what I did not want to see—the bloodied sheets, the packed towels between her legs, the mess of linen tossed in a corner of the room. Grack had tried to help her.
“Why didn’t you get a doctor?”
“Money, time, no time, and anyway it’s okay, it stopped now. Pauline told me all about it. She had it all the time. I was the one that didn’t happen on a towel.”
“Why didn’t you call me at—”
“Nancy’s? But you said you’d just be picking up the stuff for Grack, just be coming back.…”
She shut her eyes. She would let me replace the towel. Grack knew how to put it to her, she said, but she didn’t need a fresh one yet. She didn’t want to move. It was stopping.
I sank down onto the floor by the bed and put my hand on her head. It was warm with a low steady fever. Grack lay waiting in his chair. She seemed to fall asleep. Too tired to worry about Grack and think about the struggle between Grack and Joy, I decided only that it needed to be that way. Grack had to be Grack; it had nothing to do with what he could choose. I could choose, I can make my life; but Grack could only watch slyly for me to leave and then, shivering with his habit, dry as a bone, paw toward my Joy. Ugly for sure. He had been a sly pincher when a hero in my world. And a hero and ugly when he saved me and my habit broke in two and the pieces stuck to him and grew there. (But he told me I had broken it myself! But all the same, it was Grack who told me.) Without sense, without fun, without the deep agreement of flesh, he had tried to take her and they had knocked the furniture about in a furious whispering and she would have missed anyway. It wasn’t Grack’s fault to be Grack. I moved my hand in Joy’s hair.
Now I was tired and we rested, touching and near, until Scardini came looking in. He nodded to Grack. Grack was up in an instant, gasping for his mainline. I opened one eye to look at them. It was a private matter, like love, to peel up the shirt and open the swollen blue vein, first heating the needle over a wick, swabbing the arm with alcohol, nursing the stuff in through its hypodermic stinger and waiting the breathless instant for the big kick of death-in-life. I opened one eye, but I would not know if Grack squeezed out a single thick tear like the one that was my habit when the sugar hits blood with its wow. These two, Grack and Scardini, left us for this business. One eye cocked, I winked at my brother Grack’s new brotherhood with Scardini—the dry spitline of sick digestion dividing the inner membrane from the outer lip.
They left us alone.
“Are you for loving me, Joy?” I asked her.
She did not answer. She slept.
Nancy’s wife meant no more than Phyllis, though Phyllis was for the failure in my life and now Belle for the new richness of spending. “I’m for loving you,” I said to Joy’s wide sleeping forehead.
And sitting on the floor amid the mess of bleeding, within the sight of a drop of blood near my leaning knuckles, I closed my eyes and dozed. Scardini and Grack must have had their heads together. They returned in the space of a short dream.
“How you feel now, Joy?” Grack asked her. He was lean and springy as the old carnie now with his newly spiced blood. He bounced and sang into the room.
She opened her eyes without speaking.
Grack pulled open his own eye with his finger and looked it at her, at me, at the room and the mess of towels. He could see that Joy was going to be okay now, that she should eat liver and red meat and then be okay. He started to laugh, a high carnie cock-a-doodle-oo of roosterish glee. The wart shimmered. I got up. He danced and tweaked my ear. I waited. He said:
> “That Bud of ours, Joy, what a fella! He laid Nancy’s crazy wife, that hot hillbilly bitch, and Scardini here says they didn’t even take time to close the bedroom door. A carnie takes his piece where he can get it, quick with it and for it, that right, Bud?”
Head thrust forward, Scardini was breathing softly through his wisp of a mouth.
“Nancy works hard for his peace of mind, supplying that wife of his with fresh meat, I mean,” Grack gasped, having trouble with his breath, “but you could have shut the door!”
He was shrilling his laughter even while I swung on him. He fell and I fell with him, clawing and slapping at his face. He laughed like a cock in a barrel. Scardini, behind him, did not move. Scardini grinned and passed gas at the doorway. He said: “Please, please, I can’t call the bulls after all this. A respectable house I keep. Please, dear friends,”—but pleased, delighted, sparkling and digesting with rapid satisfaction. I heard everything. I heard the television down in the office, the car tires on Prospect, even the movements of Christmas weather in Cleveland. The rush of blood to my ears was nature.
Grack tried to heave me off his chest. I knelt by his side, however, and slapped his face, back and forth, forth and back, careful not to touch the nose but hurting as much as I could. One ear, then the other, slivered against the floor. He chortled his glee. “Hit me! Hit me! You been mousing Nancy’s wife!” Without fully knowing what I did, I closed my fist. His face, dead white, a brackish white at the beard, turned blue and richer colors where I hit him. My hands hurt. There was spit on them. The knuckles felt huge and heavy and wanted me to stop. His laughter was immense and that of a broken chicken. I thought of breaking the hard Adam’s apple, that talk thing, that crazy bony deadbox of racket.
A low voice occurred, occurred. It was Joy. “Bud,” she repeated, “I can’t get out of bed or it’ll start again, but stop. Stop now. Stop.”
I looked at my hands. I stood up with my hands heavy and the fluids puffing up the skin over my knuckles. Lymph. Grack was spitting blood and whispering shrilly, “Didn’t hurt me at all, Joy, not at all, didn’t a bit.” And a whispering flutter of laughter. He lay with his lips ballooning. He did not move, although the long chest jerked.
I stood above him with his head between my shoes.
I stooped and held him under the armpits and began dragging him across the floor. I kicked open the door.
“Don’t make a fuss. Don’t spoil my business,” Scardini said.
I lifted him gentle over the sill and dropped him outside the door. He did not laugh loudly enough to spoil Scardini’s business. Scardini started to help me, then to remember, then to back away. I just stood and waited until he backed out the door. I closed the door and turned, very tired, to look at Joy. She sat up in bed with the bloody sheets and towels gathered between her legs. Her face was working silently, lips moving, eyes fixed, in that bereaved fatigue which I had now found twice today, the first time on Belle’s tormented head. Women bereaved! I moved to say something, moved to move, and fell in a faint.
The best thing for a faint is just to stay there and rest. Joy knew enough and had patience. She let me rest and watched only to see that I had not crumpled something under—an arm, a leg, a chance for the future where we need all the limbs we have or can acquire.
She waited for my good time to sit up.
When I did and felt all right, I ran cold water over my head, bending over the sink to rub it into my hair and over the back of my neck. Then, still working a towel and my teeth beginning to chatter, I returned to the bed and asked: “Do you believe him, Joy?”
No answer.
“Tell me. He’s worse than a mark! A county fixer!”
She watched me dry my face and ears carefully, tenderly, with my bruised hands at the towel. Frowning, she remarked, “Grack’s no different because he said that. Always wanted—”
“Do you believe him?”
“It’s all right, Bud.”
“Do you believe him?”
“Never mind, Bud.”
“Tell me!”
“What do you want me to say now, Bud? No? You might notice how I couldn’t help hearing—”
“But it’s not true, Joy! He’s not telling the truth! Scardini didn’t see it and it didn’t happen—it didn’t happen like that—it wasn’t—”
“Never mind, never mind.”
I stood up and raised my fists to make her believe me. “I swear it, Joy! I know I shouldn’t have—I couldn’t—I don’t know—oh I wish I’d stayed here with you! Maybe I’m not—believe me, damn you!”
“Please don’t threaten me,” she said. “Hush up now. Sit down.”
“Tell me you believe me!”
“You’re for me, Bud, you are, exactly. It’s just you had a funny look, almost a soft look, when he said that woman’s name. It doesn’t matter.”
“You believe me?” I asked, sitting close to her.
“No matter.”
“Do you love me the same?”
“Do you love me, Bud?”
“Yes,”—my yes.
“Yes,”—hers.
“Then why do you say it doesn’t matter?”—and now I was jealous of her unconcern. It should matter.
“It was a bad thing if you did it, but it’s done. The baby is done, too. Maybe that’s what I’m thinking about. Do you guess maybe it was a boy? It’s no matter now. It was a bad thing to do, Bud. But I’ll tell you more later.… What are you going to do about Grack?”
“Get rid of him fast.”
“Do just like you wanted to do before. Makes no difference, Bud, I knew it was getting to something like this. But now you know.”
I stroked her hair, damp at the forehead.
“All this was there before,” she went on, “only not love yet. Just there in a different way now, Bud.”
I stroked her hair and asked, “How do you feel about me now?”
“Later. I’ll tell you more later, Bud, hold me now. What I have isn’t catching.”
She stretched with the smile of her trouble and pale thoughts on her lips, suddenly drawn, thinned, her mouth calmed by steady pain. But her movement was of yearning. She had to lie still with her legs bent to put the bleeding to sleep. Her face and hands were open to receive my face and arms. And that’s the way she made it for us, the way it should be even in time of trouble, forever and ever, although the risks of marriage can never all be known or predicted:
More later, love now!
32. We ask to be admitted
IN the morning Joy said that she would not go, would not move, would wait. She would rest a day or two at the G. Washington Motel in Cleveland while I carried Grack the hundred and eighty miles to Detroit and the International Bridge leading toward Windsor in Canada. Bruised and mashed, Grack wished us a good morning. He came in with coffee and toast for us. His long talker’s mouth smiled as if it knew a secret between us. The head huge and swollen, lolling on the skinny sprung stalk of a neck, underfed in his habit, he wore his beating with no comment except, pointing to the adhesive tape on his neck: “Cut myself shaving.”
And the yellow-toothed smile. And the wart’s fat squiggling on his nose.
“I’m sorry, Grack,”—while Joy and I reached greedily for the pot of coffee, the bowl of cream, the heap of toast and four kinds of tropical jams in little paper cups and butter spilling over itself. It’s fine to eat after an illness. When I looked at my sore hands, Joy took the toast and buttered it for me.
Grack stood there while we ate, munching and reaching, clinking tools and spreading jam, covering and uncovering ourselves with the sheet as we used knives and spoons, busy. We leaned for butter, creamed, lifted cups. He said: “I’m going.”
“Where?”
“Canada.”
“And don’t I know? We’ll start out soon’s I stow some vittles in me.”
“No I mean right now.” He studied my swollen hands and said, “I can make it alone, boy. Eat hearty. I don’t need you.”
&
nbsp; “No!” Joy, already recovering, sang this no as if to welcome her returning health. “Why no, Grack, Bud will see you through to the bridge, that far exactly.” She popped a bit of toast into her mouth. “And then he’s mine. Try this kumquat, I think it is, hon.”
Grack shifted and turned away, his addict’s eyes squinting, granulated, red-rimmed. “Okay, just get me to Detroit so I can cross over.”
“To the bridge,” Joy said.
“But he don’t need to.”
“To the bridge exactly.”
“Okay, I heard you, carnie girl. Come on then, let’s get this truckshow moving,”—and he lifted his thin shoulders in a high humorous shrug over our domestic breakfast with crumbs on the bed, and his forehead wrinkled, and he smiled and turned his palms out. I had not seen resignation in Grack before. “Okay,” he said, “let’s roll.”
But of course the old knockdown Grack could no more jump into his clothes at the snap of an hour. The mainliner jerks, but turns so slowly—so-oo, just like that—like a Ferris wheel on its last strange run against the sky, bare of lovers, turning to be dismantled for scrap. He squeezed his eyes, trying to force the cooling fluid from the ducts, but they remained parched and cracked.
And we made this drive alone down Ohio Route Two along Lake Erie, past the tall flimflam captains’ houses with the wooden roosts at the top where they stood watch with their pipes over the frozen lake, through this stiff gray Ohio farmland in December, with the chicken-and-steak shacks shut in the suburbs of Cleveland and the kids out of school but attentive before their blue-glowing teevees in one cold town after the next, Bay Village, Avon-on-the-Lake, Sandusky.… The country is strange to me. No matter how long I worked the carnie, no matter how badly I once needed to eat grass after Pittsburgh, pastureland remained the queerest of towns. I didn’t see farms on the land; I saw motels and burg joints. A show is a metropolis with portable skyscrapers and willing women who dawdle by the funhouse, a many-faced ashy mob of strangers, sweating and tricky with whim, a rush of urbanity even in blue jeans. City things happen in private city ways within the crowd. Ashes to ashes, sawdust to sawdust. He leads her under the ropes and behind the tent.
Man Who Was Not With It Page 24