“Don’t you say nothing about my religion!”
“I’ll bet if I called you a son of a bitch you’d say I insulted your mother.”
“Don’t you say nothing about my mother!”
“How about your father?” John asked.
He watched Keith carefully, gauging the amount of pressure in Keith’s increasingly rabbity motions. The object of experiment again assumed the predicted role, came close and leaned menacingly.
“Think you’re wise, huh?”
“Compared to you, Buster, I’m the brightest star in all the firmament.” He judged that if he used one more word Keith could not understand, or tried to stand up, Keith would have to fight. Several bystanders had caught the meaning of Keith’s ceremonial struttings, and now observed.
“You watch your mouth!” Keith said, stuttering, pumping up his rage.
“Don’t you remember that you can’t beat me up alone?” John asked.
“You little bastard, I ain’t taking nothing from you! You don’t scare me none!”
“Ayuh,” John said, “only I can see you’re scared of something. It must be my piercing eyes. I can smell it on you. You stink of fear like a whipped dog.”
Ten or more men had gathered now, Howard among them. John tried to make up his mind before his own rage made it up for him. Keith seemed frozen in his menacing stance, but one word could break the spell. If he made the slightest move toward getting up, Keith would swing. If he merely sat still, Keith would think up the worst insult he could—something about yellow—deliver it and go home. This seemed unsatisfactory. Yet a grubby, rolling-around fight would be even worse. He’d just have to end the fight neatly, and he wasn’t sure he could. At least he knew what Keith would do first—try to hit him as he stood up. He decided to stand.
Keith was no fighter. His fist came slowly, almost hesitantly. It had always been that way with him. He didn’t telegraph his punches; he wrote letters. His bullying had been that way too—weirdly harmless and picky, at first; then savage and cruel.
After the fist passed by, John helped the arm along, turning Keith all the way around. Then he put a simple stranglehold and a hammerlock on him. These carefully applied, he sat down on the bench with Keith completely helpless in his lap. As he expected, he was much stronger than Keith, who cursed in a high, spitty voice. John found that by regulating the pressure of the stranglehold he could make peculiar bagpipe effects with Keith’s sounds. Some of the spectators seemed to find these amusing.
When Keith stopped screaming John asked calmly, “You had enough?”
More incoherent curses, stopped this time by pressure on the hammerlock.
“Say ‘Uncle’ again for old time’s sake,” John suggested.
“I’ll kill you!” Keith screamed.
John had been working one foot up behind Keith’s back, balancing Keith on his other knee, the stranglehold exchanged for a double hammerlock. Suddenly he braced his back against the bench and kicked Keith down the driveway. Keith got up slowly, examining a long tear in the knee of his satin pants.
“He tore his pretty pants,” John said. He sat calmly on the bench.
“Don’t overdo it, Johnny.” It was Bob Paquette, who had come out of the firehouse with the others to watch. Junior Stevens stood beside Bob, a fierce, interested smile on his red face.
Keith came slowly and ominously back toward John, who still did not get up. “You want the next lesson?” John asked.
He braced himself as Keith charged, arms flailing. At the last moment Keith shut his eyes and landed sitting down, two dirty footprints on his chest.
“I ought to kick your guts out,” John said.
Keith raged as he scrambled away. He was crying, or nearly crying backward. From his bawling, disintegrated face issued a coning backward. From his bawling, disintegrated face issued a continual, hoarse, incoherent blat. It was still audible half a block away.
Howard sat down next to him, a surprising amount of admiration in his eyes. “That was about the most conclusive fight I’ve seen since Louis and Schmeling,” he said. Billy Muldrow had been watching, too. He came diffidently through the crowd and put a hand on John’s shoulder.
“Oh, Johnny!” he whispered. “You showed that son of a bitch! You did it so beautiful. Cool? You never even got up off your ass, God damn it all!”
“What started the fight?” Howard asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You was cool!” Billy said.
“Cold, I’d say,” Howard said.
Bob Paquette hadn’t come over, hadn’t done more than look at John before turning away. When John met Bob’s glance no sign of recognition had passed between them. He had turned back into the firehouse with the others. Inside, the phone rang steadily for a long time and then there was a longer silence, until Mr. Bemis’ voice called out, “Where?”
“What’s happened?” Howard said, listening.
John got up stiffly, knowing that he must go down to the yard to relieve his father, and nearly bumped into Eightball, who had come running out. “Started up again!” Eightball said, grinning slyly. Billy pushed Eightball back.
“Goddam moron,” Billy mumbled.
Bob Paquette ran out ahead of the crowd. “Poverty Street’s caught again. The fire crossed over. Don’t ask me what they’re going to do now!” The men all climbed on the Northlee pumper and chugged off around the square, leaving John alone on the sidewalk. He walked down River Street toward the yard.
He’d let the goddam town of Leah burn to the ground. They made him seem vicious; they disapproved! He wondered if Bob Paquette had disapproved, in high school, when Junior and his buddies tormented John Cotter. Maybe Bob just stood there then with the same expression of superior distaste on his face: the expression of Leah secure in its own rituals. But how did John Cotter, born with a fair amount of brains, the possessor of perhaps a good amount of strength for his size—how did he manage to separate himself from this set of rituals? Nobody had bullied Bob Paquette; nobody bullied some of the flagrantly superior idiots of high school, the apple polishers, the ass kissers. Why John Cotter? Maybe one little incident in some forgotten time at the beginning of memory had begun the irreversible progression—perhaps that time when he was four years old and filled his pants at the playground and smeared the slide. One thing was increasingly certain—the problems of high school could not be solved thirteen years later. He had just picked a fight with and degraded a thirty-two-year-old man, a veteran of his country’s wars, the father of three children. It was too late to explain to Leah that the seeds of this harvest of rage had been planted long ago.
He should have fought so hard, so bitterly, so dedicatedly—once upon a time—that they would have had to leave him alone. It could only have happened once: the first time. Instead, he had given up his right to be a fighter and an inviolate person, and the result had been a long education in the ways of sadism. He could see it even in the faces of strangers. One night in Paris an incident had brought him straight back to Leah. It was on the corner of rue du Four and rue des Canettes, by a bakery. A small woman in a bright blue plastic raincoat had come around the corner toward him, and for a moment he thought it was a young girl, because of her light, skipping walk. She turned around to face a man who followed her; and it was then, with a familiar dread, that he saw that she was middle-aged, and that her skipping walk was a taut dance of fear. The man hunched down and made a tearing, growling noise in his throat. She whimpered, but didn’t run away—couldn’t run. The man turned her with his eyes and she walked back ahead of him—to what room of pain and execution? In spite of a lust so terrible he couldn’t speak, the man must take her inside before he hurt her. Sadism picked its scene as rage did not, could not. Perhaps the man needed a certain audience—his children…? As he watched the two of them go down the narrow sidewalk of rue des Canettes he’d been nearly smothered by memories of Leah.
As he crossed the railroad siding on Water Street he picked up a heavy
clinker and threw it as hard as he could against a clapboard wall. The loose boards slapped together with the hollow boom of a shotgun, and part of the clinker stuck in the wood and stayed there. His finger began to sting—the sharp edge of the clinker had bruised and cut. A small glob of blood grew alongside his nail, and as he crossed over to the lighted office he wiped it on his dirty shirt.
CHAPTER 17
In the Spinellis’ kitchen Jane sipped her wine and heard the indecision of the wind as it changed. No indecision appeared in Mrs. Spinelli’s watching eyes. Black in her Indian’s face, they moved to inspect the order of her kitchen; pots and pans, the oilcloth on the table, Jane sitting across from her. She still caressed her pillow.
“Father Demon,” she said.
“Father Desmond,” Jane said, startled. “You know Father Desmond.”
“No good.” The old woman kneaded her pillow.
“It’s all right not to like him, Mother. Lots of people don’t like him too much, but he tries to do the right things. Where did you hear that ‘Father Demon’?”
“Somebody told me.” Then she whispered, “They trick me.”
“Who tricks you?”
“Everybody. Not you, Janie. Good girl.” She smiled. “You come when I need you. You make that no-good Irish go away and leave me be.” She got up and came around the table, patted Jane on the head and took Jane’s glass to refill it from the half-gallon bottle on its stand beside the refrigerator. She dropped her rosary and absently scooped it up again. The Virgin’s candle guttered low, and she replaced it, lighting the new one from the old and then pushing it firmly into the soft wax in the ruby tumbler. When she settled in her chair again she gave a long, theatrical sigh and tilted her head as if from weariness.
The electric clock in the shape of a teapot buzzed, and the little square eye in it blinked black and white. Jane drank her wine as she waited, the grapy fume of it familiar and nostalgic—everything gone for good was missed in some way. She knew herself to be the kind who never visited just to visit, or even visited out of vague duty. If it hadn’t been for the fire she wouldn’t have come to the Spinellis’ again until one of them died, and she was afraid it would be Cesare Spinelli who died first. The quick and the caring ones died first, not the confused, pottering old women. She would probably be one of the latter herself.
But it was a kind of talent not to be daunted—really daunted—by anything, to do the usual, necessary things day after day in spite of any tragedy; to just plain live. Mrs. Spinelli would not leave her kitchen, she said. But she would if she had to, and her husband would pay for it. He would suffer the grand, satisfying (to the woman) fuss, and after it was over the woman would come back screaming and crying and get a big meal for everyone in sight. Refreshed by it all, she would continue to live on her husband’s energy.
Well, if living itself were a kind of simple talent, she herself had better learn to settle down to it. She wondered what would happen to her. Did John Cotter figure in any plan at all? Perhaps she would live on like the old, old people of Cascom Corners, who were so careful that they just dried up and died only when the last little bit of moisture had evaporated out of them. She might live on and on at her grandfather’s farm until he died and Mrs. Pettibone died, until Aubrey died and Adolf learned enough English to go to the city, until the farm went all back to wildcats and foxes and woods.
It was eleven o’clock when the steam whistle on the firehouse started screaming again. Mrs. Spinelli didn’t seem to hear it. If she did, her only reaction was to nod her head. She was primed and ready for disaster. “They ain’t going to take me away,” she said calmly.
Jane had been hoping that Cesare Spinelli, or even the priest, would come back before the old woman changed her mind about being calm, but it was Sam Stevens who crunched the porch boards and pushed open the kitchen door.
“How do, Mrs. Spinelli,” he said, standing solidly inside the door. “Your husband’s on his way over, so don’t git worried. I don’t guess you’ll have to move for a while now. Janie? How you doing?”
“I just heard the whistle again,” she said.
“Oh, I guess we’re going to lose the whole of Poverty Street, both sides. But the wind’s changed, and we got to git back to Cascom. They’s a fire coming round the other side of Cascom Lake. They got the State Police, National Guard, Salvation Army, Red Cross and God knows what-all heading out to save Cascom and Leah from the other side, now. Goddam wind won’t make up her mind which way she’s going to blow. State Police are taking over so Atmon can’t mess things up too bad.” He sighed and sat down on a spindly kitchen chair. A glance at Mrs. Spinelli had evidently convinced him that she would not object.
“Did anybody get hurt in the fire?” Jane asked.
“Feller got his leg crushed when a stove fell on him. They kind of think an old couple name of Bouchard—French—never got out. Can’t find ’em anywheres. Let’s see, now—Keith Joubert got hurt some, too.”
“Keith? What happened to him?” She couldn’t understand why her grandfather smiled.
“Seems he got into a argument with your boy friend”—he looked quickly at Mrs. Spinelli, saw that she hadn’t been listening, and went on—”Johnny Cotter. I never seen nobody took care of in such short order.”
“Who got taken care of?”
“Why, Keith Joubert, strange to say. I never would of predicted that. I’ll tell you something. You don’t want to fool around with John Cotter in a fight. I never seen such a cool feller in a fight.”
“John Cotter?”
“Correct. He never even hit the other feller. Shot him down the see-ment and tore his pants, kicked him flat on his bee-hind and sent him home quicker’n you can say ‘scat.’ Damnedest thing I ever did see.”
“They had a fight?”
“Warn’t much of a fight. Keith Joubert run home with his pants tore and his elbows all scraped.”
“Why was John fighting?”
“Well, now, Janie, you got me there! Oh, well, thank you, Mrs. Spinelli!” The old woman had brought him a glass of wine.
“This here’s what you call ‘dago red,’ ain’t it? I never had none before.” He held the glass up between two huge fingers, looked through it at the light and drank it in one gulp. “Damn’ good. Kind of sour, though, ain’t it?”
Mrs. Spinelli smiled and filled his glass again. “Watch out!” he said, “you’re going to git me drunk!”
“Take a lot of wine, get a big man like you drunk,” she said, and was laughing as Cesare Spinelli came in. Cesare immediately began to laugh too.
“What’s funny?” he asked, smiling and chuckling.
“I swear your wife’s trying to git me drunk on this here grape-juice,” Sam said.
“That’s good! That’s good! I’ll have a glass myself!” Cesare pulled a chair up to the table and sat smiling at everybody. “I never seen such a fire, Mama,” he said hopefully.
“Going to lose the whole of Poverty Street, I reckon,” Sam said. This seemed to have a bad effect on Mrs. Spinelli. She began to look around for her pillow.
“She’s kind of shook up by it all,” Cesare said.
“Can’t say as I blame her none. It ain’t easy what she’s been through.”
“I know it,” Cesare said, clenching his hands.
Yes, Jane thought. It’s the man here who suffers most. But why shouldn’t she identify more with the woman, the mother who had been bereaved? She felt that perhaps it was because she herself had never suffered very much in her life. She should at least have had to take her woman’s chances with death, the death of someone she really loved.
CHAPTER 18
But the office wasn’t empty. Madbury and William Cotter crouched on the floor above a six-foot square of old fiberboard, their bloody hands working amid the ruins, the silvery, twitching ruins, of hundreds of mutilated bullfrogs. Rows of pearly, skinned legs grew on one side and piles of limp skin, like kid gloves turned inside out, grew damply on the other. The pi
erced frogs quivered legless in a box; the bag of uncleaned frogs oozed and palpitated, its neck held shut by a cinderbrick.
John was too shocked by the first glare of red gore to speak. His father looked up guiltily.
“Frogs’ legs, Johnny!” he said.
“Hundreds!” Madbury said, his childish old face screwed up tightly as he tried to kill a frog by repeatedly shoving his knifepoint into its head. The frog croaked a little but didn’t seem to mind too much.
“Nearly done,” William Cotter said, his arm gory to the elbow as he pulled it out of the burlap bag.
“Poverty Street’s on fire again. They’re going to lose both sides of it,” John said.
“Wind’s changed, though,” Madbury said without looking up. He couldn’t kill the frog so he cut off the legs anyway and threw the front part into the box. “Cats’ll take care of the mess. We just stick the box out in the shed and we’ll have every dang cat in Leah down here.”
“There’s going to be a lot of hungry cats around, from Poverty Street,” John said.
“Lots of hungry people, too,” William Cotter said.
“They’re mostly all taken care of. They opened the National Guard armory, for one thing. The town’s taking them all in somewhere or other. They’ve even got the Salvation Army up from Boston.”
“Well, that’s nice,” William Cotter said.
“Salvation Army’s all right,” Madbury said. “Don’t care for the Red Cross much.”
“That’s because he doesn’t care much for Mrs. Rutherford,” William Cotter said, winking at John.
“Goddam old busybody,” Madbury mumbled.
“Red Cross. Fresh Air. She keeps busy, does her best,” William Cotter said, grinning.
“So don’t everybody. Old bitch.”
“Done! Throw the bag away. It stinks,” William Cotter said.
“I could use this here piece of fiberboard,” Madbury said.
“Take it! What a mess!” William Cotter seemed to be a little tired of frogs. He and Madbury divided the legs and wrapped them in advertising flyers. Madbury took the fiberboard, the box of gore and his frogs’ legs, and went home. William Cotter went to the basement washroom to clean up. The office reeked of the half-fishy, half-ammonia odor of frogs. Before his father came back upstairs John opened a couple of sooty windows and let the burned tar stink of the fire mix in with it.
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