But there was none of that, he thought.
The mind was a sponge. It sucked in and in and in. And never out until the hand of death crushed it in an icy fist and squeezed it dry in an instant.
Don’t fight it. He told himself to relax.
He relaxed. It’s simple, he thought, regimenting his body, wiping away unheeded tears. I need money, that’s all. I must have it. There’s no other point to debate. I need money and I’ll get it from the old man, the old man, the old man, the old man, the old…
* * * *
He got up from the bed and turned on the light.
It was nine thirty. The old man always stayed open late. He’d get there in a while. The shop was usually empty around ten.
He stood up sleepily on the patched rug, watching his shadow sway on the blue striped bedcover as the bulb swung in short choppy arcs overhead. The shadow of the radiator moved back and forth and the shadow of the rose moved on the white towel that was supposed to be a table cloth. The glass shadow seemed to get longer and shorter, longer and shorter.
Wearily he sank down on the bed. It squeaked. Squeak ahead mousie, spoke his slowly awakening brain. He licked his lips. It was such a dry room, such an airless room when there was no breeze coming in. He had to have a drink of water, his throat was parched.
He bent over with a grunt and slipped the shoes over his feet. They are old, those shoes, his mind observed in sleepy abandon. Look at them. They are caked with dirt and there are threads coming out at the seams and the sides are white where the shoes rub together as I walk.
He slanted his feet on their outside edges and looked at the heels. How can I walk so cockeyed, he wondered. The heels were like hills running from inner to outer edge.
He sat there staring at the shoes.
And began to wonder if his plan to rob the old man was just a dream. He had to concentrate very hard before he realized he had made up his mind before he went to sleep and not while he was asleep.
It took a little while for resolve to return. He had to go over all the arguments again in his mind, citing fact after fact that made it irrefutable he must rob the old man and leave town. He was angry with himself for going to sleep and making it necessary for him to stand up again in the court of his mind and argue his case through again in its entirety.
It was a waste of time.
Finally, he stood and walked to the door, opened it and went down to the bathroom. There he ran water from the sink faucet and threw it in his face. He looked up at himself in the mirror and made a face as he realized he’d forgotten his towel.
He pulled paper from the rack. “No waste, “he muttered drowsily. “That a boy, Palmer.”
He felt quietly assured now, somehow, pleased with himself. He watched himself rub his hands with the dry, antiseptic smelling paper and it seemed to him as though his hands were very strong looking and assured. He dried his face and wrinkled up his nostrils at the musty smell of the paper. Then he threw the paper down the toilet.
“That son of a bitch has pissed on the seat again,” he muttered and shook his head, more amused than annoyed, not trying very hard to keep the edges of his mouth from twitching up as he visualized the drunk wavering over the toilet and spraying the floor and walls and toilet seat with his urine.
Everything is set, his mind reported. Tomorrow I’ll be away from it all. And she can go scratch. Ditch delivered by a drab, another phrase dripped appropriately from a corner of his mind.
He ran some water into his palm and drank it. Palm, no waste. The water was warm and it tasted stale. He spit most of it back into the sink. Some of it splattered on the bottom part of the mirror.
He looked.
That’s me.
His eyes were lost in dark circles, his hair a tangled mass of unwashed sallow strands. His hair looked like a dirty blonde plant going berserk, firing up clumps of threadlike shoots in every direction with the utmost abandon. His ears looked like whitish tabs, like scar flesh that had been ripped up and hung off each side of his head.
He looked closely at the blackheads in his nose. Around the puffy flesh of his nostrils the pores were big and black. He pressed out a blackhead between two nails. The blackhead squished out and there were two red lines left on his nose where the nails had dug in. The pore gaped empty.
In the dim light his beard looked more blonde than it was. The hairs were light until they ran over his chin and jaw line where, abruptly, they became black and wiry. He ran his knuckles over the bristle on his chin. It sounded like wood being sandpapered.
As he stood there, idly rubbing, he wondered what he should use for a weapon. He had to have a weapon.
He left the bathroom and went back to his room. There he looked around. He looked at the toothbrush holder, the tube of toothpaste, the peanut butter jar, the knife, the glass, the fountain pen. He could not help chuckling as he spoke quietly, “I know I’ll use the rose, I’ll beat in his skull with it.”
He decided to use his pocket knife. He’d keep it shut and press it against the lining of his pocket. The old man couldn’t tell the difference. And, without effort, came the plan—if he cries out, I’ll press the button on the knife and plunge the long razor blade into his scrawny old throat!
It made him shudder and once more he gripped himself in a vice of forced rage. The bastard! He wants my watch for nine dollars, does he? For nine, lousy, stinking, son of a bitch dollars! The watch my own mother gave me after I served in the war and her dead too! I’ll cut out his fucking heart!!
It was enough. He was ready to go.
He dropped his knife into his coat pocket, a cloud of icy resolution seeming to fall over him. He felt calm and capable. He knew exactly what he was going to do. It was simple mathematics. The old man had money and he wanted it.
Simple.
He jerked down the light bulb string and went out of the room, closing the door behind him. As he pulled the brim of his hat over his forehead, he heard the drunk explode into a frothy bubbling cough.
God, this place stinks, he thought as he went down the stilted stairway. It’s lousy and lopsided and it stinks. The air was pungent with the musty stench of heavy dust and old, uncleaned rugs and molding walls and ceilings and stairs. It was like walking down the stairs of an old listing schooner as it slid below the waves. He tried not to breathe through his nose as he trudged down. He could taste the air. He kept moving down, listening to the stairs squeak as he shifted his weight from foot to foot.
He reached the third floor and turned, his palm running over the dusty, splinter-topped bannister.
He looked dully at the three red pails hanging on the wall where the stairwell started down again. The words—For Fire Use Only—were printed on the wall. He thought about a fire in this place. He thought of whores and laborers running naked in the halls screaming. He thought of the drunk lying comatose in his bed while flames ate his flesh away without him even knowing it.
It made him smile.
Vaguely, the thought occurred to him, of setting the house on fire to punish them all. They would be in flames soon enough, he thought, why not hasten the process and make their hell on earth an actual one?
He went down and turned again and started along the second floor, a trudging phantom in brown.
“Aah, shut the hell up, ya fuck!” a high woman howl came clawing through an open transom. He shrugged. The words meant nothing. They could be words of love.
He reached the first floor and went down the hall and out through the doorway into the night.
It was raining.
Raining on Third Avenue. There were dark ghost clouds smoking through the black sky. There was a train rattling over his head on the elevated tracks, the wheels drumming in rhythm. Da-da-da-dum, da-da-da-dum,—Rob the old man, kill the old man, stick in the knife, cut out his heart—da-da-da-dum,—he had no heart Da-da-da…
The brakes squealed and a hundred pigs were stuck and screamed out—Murder!—in the night.
He walked on
and the train started again, the moan of it disappeared and there were only horns and motors and the clicking of heels on wet sidewalk. He tried to locate the sound of his own feet. There was a slight sucking sound where his worn sole pressed down on the wet concrete.
Rain, drizzling, misty rain on Third Avenue.
It sprayed him as he walked. All in brown he was. His hat was brown. It glistened under the street lamps and there was a stain, a beginning puddle on the greasy crown. His coat was huge and heavy and brown. It was a shapeless box of wool on his body. It was as though he walked in a tight-fitting brown coffin, his legs sticking out the bottom and he had decided not to wait for the hearse but to walk to his grave and get a good eternity’s sleep. A coffin-like coat all wool and heavy and threadbare.
He passed bars and bars, bars, bars. They sat leering and secret behind their green and red neon eyes. They chuckled out from behind glass, filled to the gorge with men standing in shoulder to shoulder camaraderie, friends to the end—of the drink. Men drinking and talking and making up dreams and trying to forget and forgetting. Men, word-sprinkling the past with a glamour it never had. Men painting the future with hues it never would have.
And drinking.
He looked in at them and watched them drink. Drink me one, he thought, drink me a long drink of forgetfulness and violence. Tonight I am going to rob. He shivered. And tomorrow I am gone from the lot of you.
And his pants were brown. They were brown and wet and unpressed and the cuffs were caked with dry mud and frayed.
His shirt was brown, khaki brown. And the socks and the shoes were brown. Oh what has become of our little boy brown? He thought it as he came closer to the shop.
Soon he’d be there. Was that why he felt himself trembling as if he were approaching doom? Was that why his stomach was slowly turning and turning, turning and
God damn all weakness!
He screamed it suddenly into his own face, fleck-lipped and furious.
He tensed himself, crying out in fury at his mind—that layer is gone. Fear and conscience and holding back are all undone. They are no more.
He kept himself walking firmly, forcing his feet on, ignoring the mounting desire to turn and flee back to his room. His mind kept him going. The old man is alone, alone with his money in the lead box, with my money in the lead box.
That’s it!
The idea suddenly appealed to him, reasonless or not. He had hocked endless things there. The old man had no right to that money. He would just be taking what was rightfully his. You call that robbery, judge? Well, I’m telling you, if the law calls that robbery then the law is a son of a bitch set up by rich men and userers.
He felt almost convinced. And, convinced or not, his feet kept carrying him toward the shop. Tomorrow, he told himself, I’ll be free of this blight called a city, this infested jungle and its designing denizens, this alien bug heap. Alone. Without memories or regrets. Far from Leo and her acid demanding, far from past and failure. To a new life. On this walk, he thought, I’m dealing in positive terms. It is not like the other one, a futile, maudlin, self-searching. This time he was dealing in actions.
“I’ll do it,” he muttered anxiously, angrily, that he should still have to argue with himself over what seemed the obvious to his mind.
Of course he’d do it. Only a degraded coward would stop.
He passed a barbershop and saw the still pole, no longer spinning out its never ending streamers of color.
He passed a cleaning store and the words—Pressed While U Wait— settled on his mind, then slid away.
He passed a spaghetti house, a grocery store, a fish restaurant, and bars, bars and bars. “Drink,” he changed slowly under his breath to forget where he was going, “Drink.” Without ever changing pitch. “Drink, drink, drink, drink…”
The shadow of the el made the street a latticed cave. The elevated tracks stood on great rusty legs like an endless giant centipede curling its body through the dark city and carrying the city’s people on its back.
He passed the lost legions of Third Avenue.
I’m not one of you, he thought, no, not ever. He almost wished one of them would stop him and ask him for money just to prove he wasn’t one of them.
He kept thinking of it in order to forget where he was going.
Was it possible, he wondered, that they all knew him and saw him and, in their silent aloofness, called him brother?
He was sorry he’d thought of it. The idea caused a hot sinking sensation in his stomach and loins as though someone were pouring rich, scalding coffee into his stomach and it was running into his arteries and veins.
He walked on past never ending ranks of empty men, staring and stumbling, asking for pennies, plunging black-nailed hands into trash cans. Not alive, he thought, not alive at all.
An old man stopped in front of him.
They looked at each other.
The old man had yellow, stained teeth. He wore an old tattered grey overcoat that was too small for him and was torn off the right shoulder. The greasy black of a suitcoat sleeve extended down his right wrist and over the top of his hand.
The man bore himself like a prince. He might have been a nobleman approaching a fellow.
He ran a trembling, filthy hand over his long and greasy black hair. You’re going to lie, Erick thought as the old man spoke.
“Sir,” said the man in a fine, proud voice, “Could you help me out, sir?” As though it were really something laughable, a delicately amusing trifle between wealthy comrades, “You see sir, I meant to get a haircut but I find myself a nickel short.”
He inhaled the old man’s fetid breath and smelled whiskey and all the odor of unclean things. I find myself a nickel short. It was so ludicrous that he felt impelled to laugh out loud and pound the man on the back for making such a good joke.
“Could you help me out?” asked the old man. There was a break in his voice, “I need it badly, sir.”
Erick felt himself tighten.
You give away the game, old fool! He wanted to scream into the man’s lost face. You show the truth in all its bald horror, you turn over the stone, throw up the filth and the stench and the maggots crawling. Get away from me, you are out of the club!
“I’m sorry,” he said flatly, “I haven’t any change.”
He always said that automatically. That’s what his mother used to say to “panhandlers.” Most of the time, in his case, it was true.
The old man bowed a little, instantly regaining the pain-taught pride and poise of a truly degenerated man.
“I thank you, sir,” he said, “I thank you.”
He put his right hand on his right lapel like some casual orator and passed by grandly. The separated.
The old man had said thank you, he thought. They always said thank you. They were always gentleman, proud in their emptiness. They were always well-mannered skeletons. Why was it that only the doomed were gentlemen? And they were doomed. Doomed and dead before death. That would be a book he would never write someday.
Dead Before Death by Erick Linstrom.
He passed a bearded man in a grease-hardened dark suit. The man was selling chestnuts. The fat-laden, reeking smoke gushed from the wagon top and filled Erick’s nostrils and made his eyes water. It made him cough, a hollow, fretful cough like that of an old lady with incurable consumption who wastes away in elegant poise.
He halted abruptly.
Everything was caught up in the shock.
There it was across the street. The shop.
He shuddered violently and was suddenly conscious of the rain spattering heavily on his hat. He held up his hands and saw that they were wet too but not with rain. His throat contracted. Abruptly, the plan seemed ridiculously conceived, impossible to execute. There was the shop. Could he actually go in there and rob?
Imagining was easy. One could grow used to any idea, could adapt oneself to accept the most vile, the most hideous of mental suggestions. But to actually carry it forth into
physical terms; that was something else. There he was in full view of the shop and the entire plan seemed new again as if he had just stopped there accidentally and it had suddenly occurred to him to rob the old man. He tried to reinforce his already established arguments but they seemed hollow and unconvincing.
Across the street he saw the scissors and the drafting instruments and the binoculars and the telescopes.
His feet moved unguided. He crossed over and stood by the right hand window. There were the rings and under each a neatly printed card—Unredeemed Pledges.
Unredeemed.
Slowly, in calculated rhythm, he began to drive back the needed rage. Under the coat, his chest moved more quickly with self-tensed breaths.
And who, he asked himself, were all the men who had come to the old usurer and groveled before his dried-up body, holding out beloved things to his white, liver-spotted hands, smelling the breath from his unclean mouth?
Unredeemed. He incensed his brain with the double meaning of the word.
Lost forever. Death spot for souls. Burial ground for honor. He trembled. And it was not forced. Why hang rings and watches there! raged his unbridled mind. Why not have the men themselves hanging head down on biers of blue and maroon velvet?
He must take advantage quickly before the rage abated. In his judging mind he knew that.
Closing a tight shaking hand over the knife, he edged over to the door.
The shop was empty.
The sight of it made his heart jolt as his hands shook violently in his pockets as if he were now irrevocably committed. As if circumstances were playing their role and he had now perforce to play his.
He saw the old man in the back, checking the ledger.
He had on a black coat sweater. His shirt was a light violet, striped with dark purple stripes and he had a red, spotted tie pulled into a finger-thin knot under his Adam’s apple. His skin was like leather under the fluorescent tube; like old, greased and well-kept leather.