“Board!”
Ruth skirted the man and strode toward the ramp. The hiss and chilling dampness from the track level billowed down the ramp to envelop her. Pale lights, wreathed in steam, stretched away in seeming infinity—unreal, offering nothing to compete with her thoughts.
And her thoughts nagged, making her imagine an annoying, repetitive sound—a man’s cough. Louder and louder it grew in her mind, seeming to echo and amplify in a vast stone vault.
“Board!”
Ruth turned, and ran back down the ramp. In seconds she was leaning over the old man, loosening his collar, rubbing his wrists. She laid his slight frame out at full length, and placed her coat under his head.
“Redcap!” she shouted.
“Yes’m?”
“This man is dying. Call an ambulance!”
“Yes ma’am!”
Horns honked as Ruth walked against the light. She took no notice, busily upbraiding in her mind the insensitive men and women in the railroad station. The ambulance had taken the old man away, and now Ruth, having missed her train, had four more hours to spend in Ted’s hometown.
“Just because he was ugly and dirty, you wouldn’t help him,” she told the imagined crowd. “He was sick and needed help, and you all went your selfish ways rather than touch him. Shame on you.” She looked challengingly at persons coming down the sidewalk toward her, and had her look returned with puzzlement. “You’d pretend there was nothing serious wrong with him,” she murmured.
Ruth killed time in a woman’s way, pretending to be on a shopping errand. She looked critically at window displays, fingered fabrics, priced articles, and promised salesgirls she would be back to buy after looking in one or two more shops. Her activity was almost fully automatic, leaving her thoughts to go their righteous, self-congratulatory way. She was one of the few, she told herself, who did not run away from the untouchables, from unclean, sick strangers.
It was a buoyant thought, and Ruth let herself believe that Ted was sharing it with her. With the thought of Ted came the image of his formidable mother. The buoyance grew as Ruth saw how selfish Mrs. Faulkner was by comparison. The older woman would have sat in the waiting room oblivious to everything but the tragedy in her own narrow life. She would have muttered to a ghost while the old man hacked his life away.
Ruth relived her bitter, humiliating few hours with the woman, the bullying and wheedling in the name of a nightmarish notion of motherhood and an armful of trinkets. Disgust and the urge to get away came back full strength. Ruth leaned against a jewelry counter, and came face-to-face with herself in a mirror.
“Can I help you, madam?” said a salesgirl.
“What? Oh—no, thank you,” said Ruth. The face in the mirror was vindictive, smug. The eyes had the same cold glaze as the eyes that had looked at the old man in the station and seen nothing.
“You look a little ill. Would you like to sit down for a moment?”
“No, really—there’s nothing wrong,” said Ruth absently.
“There’s a doctor on duty in the store.”
Ruth looked away from the mirror. “This is silly of me. I felt unsteady there for just a minute. It’s passed now.” She smiled uncertainly. “Thanks very much. I’ve got to be on my way.”
“A train?”
“No,” said Ruth wearily. “A terribly sick old woman needs my help.”
(illustration credit 8)
WHILE MORTALS SLEEP
If Fred Hackleman and Christmas could have avoided each other, they would have. He was a bachelor, a city editor, and a newspaper genius, and I worked for him as a reporter for three insufferable years. As nearly as I could tell, he and the Spirit of Christmas had as little in common as a farm cat and the Audubon Society.
And he was like a farm cat in a lot of ways. He was solitary, deceptively complacent and lazy, and quick with the sharp claws of his authority and wit.
He was in his middle forties when I worked for him, and he had seemingly lost respect not just for Christmas but for government, matrimony, business, patriotism, and just about any other important institution you could name. The only ideals I ever heard him mention were terse leads, good spelling, accuracy, and speed in reporting the stupidity of mankind.
I can remember only one Christmas during which he radiated, faintly, anything like joy and goodwill. But that was a coincidence. A jailbreak happened to take place on December twenty-fifth.
I can remember another Christmas when he badgered a rewrite girl until she cried, because she’d said in a story that a man had passed on after having been hit by a freight train.
“Did he get up, dust himself off, giggle, and pass on to wherever he was headed before his little misunderstanding with the locomotive?” Hackleman wanted to know.
“No.” She bit her lip. “He died, and—”
“Why didn’t you say so in the first place? He died. After the locomotive, the tender, fifty-eight loaded freight cars and the caboose rolled over him, he died. That we can tell our readers without fear of contradiction. First-rate reporting—he died. Did he go to Heaven? Is that where he passed on to?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“Well, your story says we do know. Did the reporter say he had definite information that the dead man is now in Heaven—or en route? Did you check with the man’s minister to see if he had a ghost of a chance of getting in?”
She burst into tears. “I hope he did!” she said furiously. “I tried to say I hoped he did, and I’m not sorry!” She walked away, blowing her nose, and paused by the door to glare at Hackleman. “Because it’s Christmas!” she cried, and she left the newspaper world forever.
“Christmas?” said Hackleman. He seemed baffled, and looked around the room as though hoping someone would translate the strange word for him. “Christmas.” He walked over to the calendar on the wall, and ran his finger along the dates until he came to the twenty-fifth. “Oh—that’s the one with the red numbers. Huh.”
But the Christmas season I remember best is the last one I spent with Hackleman—the season in which the great crime was committed, the robbery proclaimed by Hackleman, gleefully, as the most infamous crime in the history of the city.
It must have been on about the first of December that I heard him say, as he went over his morning mail, “Goddamn it, how much glory can come to a man in one short lifetime?”
He called me over to his desk. “It isn’t right that all of the honors that pour into these offices every day should be shared only by management,” he said. “It’s to you, the working stiffs, that the honors really belong.”
“That’s very kind of you,” I said uneasily.
“So, in lieu of the raise which you richly deserve, I am going to make you my assistant.”
“Assistant city editor?”
“Bigger than that. My boy, you are now assistant publicity director of the Annual Christmas Outdoor Lighting Contest. Bet you thought I wasn’t even aware of the brilliant, selfless job you’ve been doing for the paper, eh?” He shook my hand. “Well, here’s your answer. Congratulations.”
“Thanks. What do I do?”
“The reason executives die young is that they don’t know how to delegate authority,” said Hackleman. “This should add twenty years to my life, because I hereby delegate to you my full authority as publicity director, just tendered me by the Chamber of Commerce. The door of opportunity is wide open. If your publicity makes this year’s Annual Christmas Outdoor Lighting Contest the biggest, brightest one yet, there’ll be no ceiling on how high you can rise in the world of journalism. Who’s to say you won’t be the next publicity director of National Raisin Week?”
“I’m afraid I’m not very familiar with this particular art form,” I said.
“Nothing to it,” said Hackleman. “The contestants dangle colored electric lights all over the fronts of their houses, and the man whose meter goes around fastest wins. That’s Christmas for you.”
* * *
As a dutiful assistant public
ity director, I boned up on the history of the event, and learned that the contest had been held every year, except for the war years, since 1938. The first winner won with a two-story Santa Claus, outlined in lights on the front of his house. The next winner had a great pair of plywood bells, outlined in lights and hung from the eaves, which swung back and forth while a loudspeaker concealed in the shrubbery went ding-dong.
And so it went: each winner bettered the winner of the year before, until no entrant had a prayer of winning without the help of an electrical engineer, and the Power and Light Company had every bit of its equipment dangerously overloaded on the night of the judging, Christmas Eve.
As I said, Hackleman wanted nothing to do with it. But, unfortunately for Hackleman, the publisher of the paper had just been elected president of the Chamber of Commerce, and he was annoyed to learn that one of his employees was squirming out of a civic duty.
The publisher rarely appeared in the city room, but his visits were always memorable—particularly the visit he made two weeks before Christmas to educate Hackleman on his twofold role in the community.
“Hackleman,” he said, “every man on this staff is not only a newspaper man, he’s an active citizen.”
“I vote,” said Hackleman. “I pay my taxes.”
“And there it stops,” said the publisher reproachfully. “For ten years you’ve been city editor, and for ten years you’ve been ducking the civic duties that come to a man in such a position—foisting them off on the nearest reporter.” He pointed at me. “It’s a slap in the face of the community, sending out kids like this to do work that most citizens would consider a great honor.”
“I haven’t got time,” said Hackleman sullenly.
“Make the time. Nobody asks you to spend eighteen hours a day in the office. That’s your idea. It isn’t necessary. Get out with your fellow men once in a while, Hackleman, especially now. It’s the Christmas season, man. Get behind this contest and—”
“What’s Christmas to me?” said Hackleman. “I’m not a religious man and I’m not a family man, and eggnog gives me gastritis, so the hell with Christmas.”
The publisher was stunned. “The hell with Christmas?” he said, hollowly, hoarsely.
“Certainly,” said Hackleman.
“Hackleman,” said the publisher evenly, “I order you to take part in running the contest—to get into the swing of Christmas. It’ll do you good.”
“I quit,” said Hackleman, “and I don’t think that will do you much good.”
And Hackleman was right. His quitting did the paper no good. It was a disaster, for in many ways he was the paper. However, there was no wailing or gnashing of teeth in the paper’s executive offices—only a calm, patient wistfulness. Hackleman had quit before, but had never managed to stay away from the paper for more than twenty-four hours. His whole life was the paper, and his talking of quitting it was like a trout’s talking of quitting a mountain stream to get a job clerking in a five-and-ten.
Setting a new record for an absence from the paper, Hackleman returned to his desk twenty-seven hours after quitting. He was slightly drunk and surly, and looked no one in the eye.
As I passed his desk, quietly and respectfully, he mumbled something to me.
“Beg your pardon?” I said.
“I said Merry Christmas,” said Hackleman.
“And a Merry Christmas to you.”
“Well, sir,” he said, “it won’t be long now, will it, until old soup-for-brains with the long white beard will come a-jingling over our housetops with goodies for us all.”
“No—guess not.”
“A man who whips little reindeer is capable of anything,” said Hackleman. “Yes—I suppose.”
“Bring me up to date, will you, kid? What’s this goddamn contest all about?”
The committee that was supposed to be running the contest was top-heavy with local celebrities who were too busy and important to do a lick of work on the contest—the mayor, the president of a big manufacturing company, and the chairman of the Real Estate Board. Hackleman kept me on as his assistant, and it was up to us and some small fry from the Chamber of Commerce to do the spadework.
Every night we went out to look at entries, and there were thousands of them. We were trying to make a list of the twenty best displays from which the committee would choose a winner on Christmas Eve. The Chamber of Commerce underlings scouted the south side of town, while Hackleman and I scouted the north.
It should have been pleasant. The weather was crisp, not bitter; the stars were out every night, bright, hard, and cold against a black velvet sky. Snow, while cleared from the streets, lay on yards and rooftops, making all the world seem soft and clean; and our car radio sang Christmas carols.
But it wasn’t pleasant, because Hackleman talked most of the time, making a bitter indictment against Christmas.
One time, I was listening to a broadcast of a children’s choir singing “Silent Night,” and was as close to heaven as I could get without being pure and dead. Hackleman suddenly changed stations to fill the car with the clangor of a jazz band.
“Wha’d you do that for?” I said.
“They’re running it into the ground,” said Hackleman peevishly. “We’ve heard it eight times already tonight. They sell Christmas the way they sell cigarettes—just keep hammering away at the same old line over and over again. I’ve got Christmas coming out of my ears.”
“They’re not selling it,” I said. “They’re just happy about it.”
“Just another form of department store advertising.”
I twisted the dial back to the station carrying the children’s choir. “If you don’t mind, I’d enjoy hearing this to the end,” I said. “Then you can change it again.”
“Sleee-eeep in heav-en-ly peace,” piped the small, sweet voices. And then the announcer broke in. “This fifteen-minute interlude of Christmas favorites,” he said, “has been brought to you by Bullard Brothers Department Store, which is open until ten o’clock every evening except Sunday. Don’t wait until the last minute to do your Christmas shopping. Avoid the rush.”
“There!” said Hackleman triumphantly.
“That’s a side issue,” I said. “The main thing is that the Savior was born on Christmas.”
“Wrong again,” said Hackleman. “Nobody knows when he was born. There’s nothing in the Bible to tell you. Not a word.”
“You’re the last man I’d come to for an expert opinion on the Bible,” I said heatedly.
“I memorized it when I was a kid,” said Hackleman. “Every night I had to learn a new verse. If I missed a word, by God, the old man knocked my block off.”
“Oh?” This was an unexpected turn of events—unexpected because part of Hackleman’s impressiveness lay in his keeping to himself, in his never talking about his past or about what he did or thought when he wasn’t at work. Now he was talking about his childhood, and showing me for the first time an emotion more profound than impatience and cynicism.
“I didn’t miss a single Sunday School session for ten years,” said Hackleman. “Rain or shine, sick or well, I was there.”
“Devout, eh?”
“Scared stiff of my old man’s belt.”
“Is he still alive—your father?”
“I don’t know,” said Hackleman without interest. “I ran away when I was fifteen, and never went back.”
“And your mother?”
“Died when I was a year old.”
“Sorry.”
“Who the hell asked you to be sorry?”
We were pulling up before the last house we planned to look at that night. It was a salmon-pink mansion with a spike fence, iron flamingos, and five television aerials—combining in one monster the worst features of Spanish architecture, electronics, and sudden wealth. There was no Christmas lighting display that we could see—only ordinary lights inside the house.
We knocked on the door, to make sure we’d found the right place, and were told b
y a butler that there was indeed a lighting display, on the other side of the house, and that he would have to ask the master for permission to turn it on.
A moment later, the master appeared, fat and hairy, and with two prominent upper front teeth—looking like a groundhog in a crimson dressing gown.
“Mr. Fleetwood, sir,” said the butler to his master, “these gentlemen here—”
The master waved his man to silence. “How have you been, Hackleman?” he said. “It’s rather late to be calling, but my door is always open to old friends.”
“Gribbon,” said Hackleman incredulously, “Leu Gribbon. How long have you been living here?”
“The name is Fleetwood now, Hackleman—J. Sprague Fleetwood, and I’m strictly legitimate. There was a story the last time we met, but there isn’t one tonight. I’ve been out for a year, living quietly and decently.”
“Mad Dog Gribbon has been out for a year, and I didn’t know it?” said Hackleman.
“Don’t look at me,” I said. “I cover the School Board and the Fire Department.”
“I’ve paid my debt to society,” said Gribbon.
Hackleman toyed with the visor of a suit of armor guarding the entrance into the baronial living room. “Looks to me like you paid your debt to society two cents on the dollar,” he said.
“Investments,” said Gribbon, “legitimate investments in the stock market.”
“How’d your broker get the bloodstains out of your money to find out what the denominations were?” said Hackleman.
“If you’re going to abuse my hospitality with rudeness, Hackleman, I’ll have you thrown out,” said Gribbon. “Now, what do you want?”
“They wish to see the lighting display, sir,” said the butler.
Hackleman looked very sheepish when this mission was announced. “Yeah,” he mumbled, “we’re on a damn fool committee.”
“I thought the judging was to take place Christmas Eve,” said Gribbon. “I didn’t plan to turn it on until then—as a pleasant surprise for the community.”
“A mustard gas generator?” said Hackleman.
While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction Page 10