Man Who Was Not With It

by Gold, Herbert

  Now in December, here in Ohio, alone with Grack and Joy’s unspoken presence between us, there was open winter farmland, brown and quiet beneath its snow. Well, I didn’t have enough lives for those board houses and barns with the rented space that said, “Richman’s Clothes” or “Meet Your Savior.” We stopped once for hot soup.

  “Got an upset stomach,” Grack said, “thanks.” We ate in silence at the counter, looking at each other in a mirror below the Campbell cans. Grack’s harried face, long and sick, the huge eyes swollen small, fried dust on his eyelashes, was consumed by secret and unexpressed understanding of me, of himself, of everyone—this comprehension deeply corrupting because unexpressed, because unmoving. He could know nothing by his own will now. He could only know how to devour himself, and tread lightly back to the car, skirting the blotches of snow with his thin pointy black shoes leaving no footprints, only a shadow.

  We paid and drove on. Although this was the last time we would sit and take food together, we had nothing in a hurry to be said. I could not repeat what I had so often thought: Grack saved my life, and now he’s worth nothing but the remembrance of a mighty nose, a wart, a trick of hand to eye. This thought, with the stale soda crackers that came with the soup, stuck in my mouth from Sandusky all the way into Toledo. Who can tell what was on Grack’s mind? Maybe his level gaze at the road ahead looked straight north to the Frenchies of Canada. At last he spoke of that.

  “Back to my Kiskeedees, that’s what they call us, that and Canucks. Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?”

  “But you learned English, Grack, and how to be a talker.”

  “I did. I did that. Don’t you think it’s funny how a Kiskeedee got to talk those marks from all over America into the corner of his eye? I see good out of that eye, but okay. Man, just let me brag a sec. Just try to think how it was for me, not believing this language, frenchifying it to myself, but pouring it on the town-monkeys with that sweet old lying sincerity. Man!”

  “You lived in it, Grack.”

  “No, not that far. Wasn’t my dwelling place, Bud. Never believed my own words.… I finished my brag now. You can put on the speed,”—and my foot on the accelerator assented. “I’m going home and they’ll tell me I’m an American up there. Don’t fit noplace but the funhouse, the flat joint, racked up front of the marks.… You not so mad about Joy? I didn’t mean a thing.”

  Not about her, I would have said if I could. About Nancy’s wife, poor Belle. About fixing it up with Scardini, that’s to be mad. But as to Joy, that was our business together.

  “Not much,” I said.

  In the bleakness of the lake road, Toledo suddenly announced itself with a City Limits, Kum Inn for Liquor, Save Our Children, a clamor of drive-ins, a last-chance-for-gas, a stop at our home cooking. There was a county fairgrounds to pass now, emptied by winter. We had never played this date, but Grack knew all about it—Frankie’s Truck Show, modified grift, quarter for the Legion, half for the sheriff. The kiddo whip, the crystal maze, the flat joints, and the War Horrors See It Now were all put away in Orlando, and the glass-ringed talkers, hairy-knuckled and faces oiled with coconut, were all scattered, sprawled in hotel lobbies, shuffling decks and awaiting the thaw when they could rub their mouths limber with their palms and again sing that lovely song, all for charity and the sweet sheriff: These Original Jap Tortures from the Muntz Collection! The secret they dare not tell you! No minors under sixteen without a mother or father—and girls, get yourself a boyfriend now! Too horrible to describe in words! Show starts in pree-cisely one minute!

  In the shade of the old Standard Oil refinery, yessir, fellas. Grab her quick, and if she hollers, tickle her tickler!

  I slowed passing the grounds. We both looked, sniffing for cotton candy and feet, putting the wet sawdust under slush, dragging out the cardtables, the splintered benches, and the franks steaming and skinny as worms on hot pavement. But now we had winter and no use to stop. A permanent Ferris wheel preened its bones to the Toledo sky, done up in grease but waiting like death. Passing and away, my tires gave me Ferris wheel music, klip klap, klip klap, pumparump, klip klap, pumparump, the revolving whir of the great cradle. Whatever happens, whatever love-making or death-making comes of it, the klipklap music falls from the motors and the shifting cages. We screwed down the windows and stared as if coming by chance on the house where we had grown up.

  What if we had stopped?

  Grack would say to the watchman, “I’m with it.”

  “Who, you?”

  “With it and for it.”

  “First place, she’s closed. Second place, you pay like everybody. Third place, sonnyboys, run off now before I run you off.”

  We wound through Toledo without stopping, licking our lips to talk, not talking. The Cherry Street Bridge—I remember its grillwork wong against the tires, finishing off our Ferris wheel music. Then, once again on the road, this time the busy trucker’s Number Twenty-four that leads from Toledo to Detroit, Grack said, “I got a daughter-a-mine, too, up there with the Kiskeedees. Want to see her picture?”

  “Why not?” I slowed down, but he did not reach for his wallet.

  “Just about your Joy’s age, too.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “I’m telling you the truth, you don’t have to say it’s nice. Thing I did as a kid.” And he stopped as if he had said nothing more than the weather or the time. He was drooping and distant down the seat from me, leaving space for our invisible Joy who had been patient so long up from the South. The carnie had given her that at least, patience, and not yet taken from her desire and will. At the same time, I could think of Grack without feeling the pressure of his body at the other end of the seat. The unhappy man is never present, never absent to himself. Like the carnie, never out of his own pocket. Like the carnie, never out of the mark’s pocket. Grack was whistling a little tune, not hearing it. A bent stick of winter corn, discolored, the fine nosewart now only one more bad kernel among teeth, eyes, bruises, blotches, liverspots, his cheeks cracked by winter, he shivered. He kept his hands between his legs. He watched me force the jalopy toward the end of our friendship, and whistled.

  Love makes a man both present and absent, as I was then, thinking of Joy, thinking of Grack, full of pleasure in the trials we passed, thinking of myself and knowing I was really there, taking Grack someplace, leaving Joy someplace, dropping him soon and returning to her. Near me on the seat a parched mouth tried to whistle.

  And so Detroit came to us, flat and brown and planed by car-bearing trucks, a huge prairie built over with cement and girders and spilling its burden of steel, rubber, and people at every change of light.

  “Marks every little one,” said Grack. “Look at the town-monkeys.”

  “No, only for fun. Other times they do things together, cars, kids, they make politics here—”

  “Politics now! You getting interested in that already, Buddy boy? You going to nominate or run or vote for some-body? That’s past the very end already, boy. I don’t believe in politics. I don’t care. I’m going to need another dose over there in Windsor, that’s all, but don’t you come with me, there’s likely to be trouble getting through.”

  “I’m not coming. I’m going back to Joy tonight.”

  He nodded. “I know, I’m not asking. I said no.” He took his hands from between his legs and cracked the knuckles. “I’m a little stiff from sitting. Skyooz. I said I don’t believe in those things anymore. I used to think you were my friend. Now I think I’ll go back to have a look at my daughter. I bet she’s a pretty one by this time. Run a bally together. She’ll take care of me if I can get by the border.”

  If.

  “If they ain’t got a good picture who did that doctor down in Fayetteville. Don’t I look different now, boy? I changed?”

  I looked to make sure that there was enough gas. The best thing would be to set him down without stopping. Knowing how much he had changed made it hard to tell him. Once a wart had been his honor, a waggle of immense
flaw! He had shrunk like corn in the winter weather.

  “If they’re not watching for me at the border—for that doc in Fagleburg … Wouldn’t you of helped me out, kid, in the old days? Now you stop ahead of the bridge, Buddy boy. Got to think of the little woman.”

  I thought hard: Joy is waiting. It was not enough to think it. “I’m going to get back to Joy tonight, Grack. She’ll be resting. She won’t be sleeping. I told her.”

  “Who asked what you say to her all the time, Buddy boy?”

  We were threading through the city and near. In Paradise Valley, that swarming sharecropper land, chicken shacks, orange crate street fires with black kids dancing for warmth, frosting exhaust of used cars, we passed a walled city cemetery. The old ofays had not moved their dead, anyway. Grack saw that there was no more stopping. We had had our last ham sandwich together, had stopped in our last beautyrest motel, were finishing up forever and closing down the show. Grack peeked over the wall, raising his long tendoned stalk of a neck. “You ever think of the graveyard for peace of mind, Bud?”

  “I’m not with that there permanent attraction yet, Grack.”

  “Just a place for resting is all. Member I was a kid, I used to eat sandwiches there—summer, you know, used to get a kind of polar heat even in Kiskeedee land. Air never once moved, that dark summertime, friend.”

  “Not yet I don’t want to get with eating sandwiches in that place, Grack.”

  He peered about him as, honking, I switched lanes again. “Jeez, boy, you’re in a hurry. How you know the way in this traffic?”

  “Just follow the map first, Grack, then the signs. They show how to zag to it. Can’t you see the signs?”

  It was a mean thing to say, somehow, and put him in silence. With his hand he eased the places at his cheeks where I had hurt him. I should have been hot for sentiment during these last minutes. It was practically Christmas, too, with all the Santy Clauses peddling in the streets, the loudspeakers doing Bing Crosby’s “O Come All Ye Faithful,” the sidewalks thick with women, the streets blue with cops—tires, tinsel, tinkle, gray snow, brown snow, muddied cars waiting for lights and the walkers to cross, the great city procession aiming toward the winter holiday. Of course, both Grack and I were oddballs outside Christmas.

  “Lookit them marks, boy!” He jittered on the seat, racing awake now. “Great love for each other, chacun l’enfant naturel du bon Dieu, great cost. God’s bastards, I said, kid! Rich! Thighs under their coats, women, why not? But not for me, I wasn’t brought up to pleasure. Lookit that girlie got her buttons spattered! Stay off the streets next time. Lookit—” It was the scratchy, jumpy place in a high, a Christmas itch of heroin, and it was still Grack meaning what he said: “Lookit those windows—all pretty! Don’t hurry, Bud, it’s goodbye. I had a serious-minded mother, don’t care much for girls. My own kid and your Joy excepted always, you know.”

  “Take it easy, Grack.”

  “I never talked the truth, let me do it now. It’s goodbye.” And indeed the windows were rich and lovely for Christmas, the plastic mannikins in stiff gestures under their clothes, the shoppers shuffling in a hurry, wearing rubbers or pliofilm galoshes on their shoes. Grack admired Christmas and went on more quietly: “Maybe that’s why I could lie so good. Truth is only my own way of talking, but you can say anything in English, it was a talk I learned. It didn’t matter. I didn’t belong with you.”

  “Yes,” I said, “it’s goodbye pretty soon, Grack.”

  “You, Bud, you felt bad about the marks—you’re a holy joe at bottom—it makes you look crooked at the eyes and they don’t trust you. That shiftiness people talk about—it’s conscience. The real con makes a fellow happy, sleeps nights, functions regular. Yes, I know it’s goodbye down the next block, Bud. I saw the signs. Goodbye.”

  “Not all that hurry.”

  “Yes, all that hurry. Listen”—and the finger conned his eye—“Listen, you better write it down, Bud, you like talking. Or maybe you want to forget it?”

  And now the line of cars was formed for the International Bridge. Grack knew that I would let him walk over, passing the inspection himself, taking him to the edge and that was all, because there was noplace left for him with me on earth and noplace for me to follow him. There was no longer a fair for us, and no cabin in Winter Park.

  The police on the bridge were careless, but cops all the same. There were the Canadians and our own, with the same bored policeman faces and breathing the same international exhaust fumes. I tried to take Grack’s hand. “I won’t forget you, Grack. I’m with you. I won’t forget the good things you did for me, all the way back there—”

  He pulled away angrily. His harsh laughter sealed off my wish to make a healing, softening farewell after his talk of last night and my hitting him. The dark wart on his nose was swollen and doubled, a pale second wart of infection joined below it; with the shudder of false life in a sick woods animal, it moved when he moved. He cupped his hands to light a skinny cigar. “Forget it, you’ve forgotten already. You don’t even talk carnie anymore, but write it down. You’re with her and with yourself now, nothing else. You weren’t born to be with it, Bud. Don’t even get out of the car with me. I’ll turn the tip myself.”

  “I’ll be watching you, Grack,” I said.

  He climbed out with a cigar in his grin and reached into the back seat for his cardboard suitcase. Before he started walking, he paused and, thinking of the letter from jail to which my father had replied, I said, “Need a few extra bucks, Grack?” He was terribly shrunken and yellow. His face was shriveled to the bone, sharp Indian elevations in his cheeks, a mass of wasted cartilage supporting the blooming wart.

  He leaned back to my window. “Need nothing at all. Need to get hiking. You turned the bed over on me, Bud. Now need to get with it.”

  And he was moving down the sidewalk toward the control booth at the bridge. I watched. In the sight of his walk, that tall swaying amble of the tricky carnie, nimble and free, for an instant my thigh twitched and my spirit assented to him in the old way, Yes yes yes. And then he kicked through a pool of muddied slush, not knowing where he was going: No. It was only my one leg that had wanted to join him, and it only from memory.

  Near the control booth, he started to run, wobbling crazily from side to side. He was a wanted man. It was a marko giveaway to run. Two policemen in square hats with big cop rumps came out shouting. Whistles. Traffic stopped. They drew their pistols and shouted. He went on running with his blind addict’s waddle. They yelled again. One banged into the air and the bullet made an awful warlike screech. It was not necessary to shoot him. He dodged phantoms and careened off a railing. For an instant it seemed that he would clamber up and jump. No, no, he bounced and ran.

  There, five steps more.

  A boy, a third kid cop, brought him down with a flying block at his legs, and he did not even try to get up while they stood over him and decided what to do with this live beat body waiting to be done to. It wiggled on the ground. It had been hurt, but it started to talk in an old habit. The talker-tongue worked. I could not hear from where I watched, pushing close now, but I saw the clop-clopping of pleading and, while the body writhed with a brutal between-the-legs kick, the arms flew about and one finger came to an eye to pull down the lid and show the hoarse angry cops, stamping out of cold and nerves, a gaze of red fury, malediction, and dreamy persuasion.

  The persuasion for me. Clean out now! the eye commanded, streaming tears, and the mouth went on entertaining the cops. One had removed his hat, the better to scratch his head. They had never before heard this high gobble of cajoling song from a man floored, kicked, and head-first into trouble.

  He turned the tip for me. He talked and talked and pulled his eyelid at me. The ring of policemen closed about him. Grack was right. Now there was nothing left that I could do for him but to go back to Joy.

  All the same, he had been a friend. Joy and my own father came to be good friends to me, too, and stayed that way because the
y could be friends to themselves. We found a job in the trucking business in Pittsburgh, and a place to live, and Joy and I got with a child again. Grack’s troubles went on, but he would not answer my letters. Dad asked me please to never mind, just bring up my son to be with it.

  Joy and I had other ideas. We will not—and cannot—pull our son out of the way of our own hard times. They go on. There’s a good and with it way to be not with it, too.

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  in association with

  Workman Publishing Company

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © Copyright 1954, 1956 by Herbert Gold

  New introduction © Copyright 1987 by Herbert Gold

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for a previous edition of this work.

  eISBN 9781565128767

  Second Edition Books

  CALE

  a novel by Sylvia Wilkinson

  with a foreword by Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

  THE MAN WHO WAS NOT WITH IT

  by Herbert Gold

  with a new introduction

  by the author