Eventually it dawned on him, the fucking radio of course, he pushed it away from the wall.
It was a small radio in a big cabinet. Under the tubes and behind the black paper speaker was a cigar box. In the box a .32-caliber pistol. He had never handled a gun before. It was heavy, felt loaded smelled oiled and sufficient. He put it back closed the box.
Wedged in the space between the tube chassis and the cabinet one of those cardboard accordion files with a string tie. This he lifted out. He pushed the radio back against the wall.
“Sandy!”
He sat on the floor. She knelt next to him. He watched her hands, she withdrew a marriage license a white paper scroll, she unrolled it holding it with both hands to her face as if she were near-sighted. She withdrew newspaper cutout coupons, a pack of them, the kind people saved for premiums, she withdrew the baby’s birth certificate, she withdrew a wedding photo of Mr. and Mrs. Lyle James all dressed up smiling on the steps of a clapboard church. He had to let her cry over that one in her silent way palming the tears as they flowed. She withdrew a leather drawstring purse, he thought the deliberation of her movements would drive him out of his mind, she untied the string widened the mouth of the purse and shook out several shiny bright medals with ribbons.
“Was Red in the war?”
“Nossir.”
“Stupid of me to ask.”
She withdrew a printed policy of the Tennessee Mutual Life Insurance Policy. Its face value was a thousand dollars. That would have to do.
“Aren’t there people who cash these things right away? Wills, IOUs, stuff like that?”
“Factors,” Clara said.
“Yeah, factors. I bet I could get sixty, seventy cents on the dollar. This is as good as cash.”
“It’s not yours,” Clara said.
“I didn’t say it was. Would you mind coming into the other room a minute?”
Clara followed him into the Jameses’ bedroom. He closed the door. “I don’t know,” he said, “maybe you want to see your old sweetheart again. Have a few laughs.”
“Is that what you think?”
“I don’t know what I think. But if we don’t move our ass out of here we’re finished.”
“Maybe so, but that’s our problem, not hers.”
“If we are all tending to our own problems,” he said, “we can walk out this minute. We’ll let the fifteen-year-old widow shift for herself. Is that what you want?”
“You’re hurting my arm!”
“Why do I have to explain these things!”
“Let go of me. It was your idea, big boy. I didn’t tell you to move to this shithole.”
He went back to the parlor.
“Sandy, I’m prepared to take you back to Tennessee. I mean we’re all finished in Jacksontown, I assume you understand that. You will spend Christmas with your family at your ancestral home. I am proposing we join forces, you and Clara and me, pool what we have and help each other. And I give you my word I will make good on every penny of the whole thousand.”
The kid was silent. He waited. He realized this meant yes. “Okay,” he said, “it’s settled. We have a lot to do. He has to be buried. What are we going to do about that?” He looked at Clara. “Hey, Sandy, I bet you didn’t know we had an expert among us.”
The briefest bewilderment on Clara’s face, what had she done wrong, did he blame his broken arm on her, his stitches? His mind was functioning now, he had calmed down, he was the old Joe of Paterson working things out. But one nick of this gem of a mind flashed the spectral light of treachery.
She smiled appreciatively almost shyly, with a dip of her head, a curl at the corner of her lips, her eyes sparkled, she had it, she knew it before he did, the secret wish, the resolution.
“Ah want the best,” Sandy James said.
“Why not?” said Clara. She knelt down next to Sandy and put her arm around her. She tilted her head till their heads touched. “You’ll have the best,” Clara murmured. She looked up at him. “In Jacksontown it won’t cost that much.”
While Clara was on the phone I asked Sandy James how she felt about her furniture.
“It’s all paid,” she said.
“So much the better. I could get it appraised and you’d make a clear profit.”
She clutched her baby and looked around the parlor. Her eyes were large. “Wherever I live I’m gonna need a chair and table. I’m gonna need a bed to sleep in.”
“Okay, okay, I’m just asking, is all. I’ll figure something out.”
An hour and a half later I had everyone packed. I called a Yellow Cab and by the time it pulled up I had both women and the baby and the bags out on the sidewalk.
Nobody was watching. No car followed us. I took us back to the rooming house Clara and I had stayed in when we first hit town. I rented two rooms adjoining. I got everyone settled.
“Do you mind telling me what you’re doing?” Clara said.
“Not at all. I’m going to the factor. Then I’m going to pick up my back pay. Then I’m going to sec what I can do about a truck for all that shit of theirs.”
“You better slow down. You don’t look so good.”
“I can imagine.”
“You can’t leave town before the funeral.”
“I understand that. But we’ll get a good night’s sleep. You don’t object to a good night’s sleep, do you?”
“She doesn’t know what hit her yet. You’re not giving her the chance.”
“I’ll leave that to you.”
We stand on either side of Sandy James, who holds her baby. I hunch into my khaki greatcoat. It is buttoned over my cast and I have pinned the sleeve. The grave has been dug through the snow and through the ice and, with scalloped shovel marks, into the frozen earth. I study the crystal formations of the grave walls. I imagine lying there forever, as he is about to do.
The stones around us lean at all angles as if bent to the weight of the snow banked against them. The graveyard is in a desolate outlying section of town. It is on a rise that commands a view of the adjoining streets, one filled with the blank wall of a warehouse, the other fronting a lumberyard. A traffic light at the intersection. Over the racks and open sheds of the lumberyard I can see to the tracks and signals and swing gates of the Indiana Central.
The Baptist preacher is garrulous, Southern, like the fellow in the coffin. He speaks of God’s peppers. An image comes into my mind of a green field of pepper plants and I wonder at the eccentricity of all the glories of God’s fecund earth to speak of peppers.
I look from the corner of my eye at Sandy James. She stares into the grave. I see the tracks of her tears on her cheeks. I see the corneal profile of her green eyes. The baby comes into view, leaning forward in curiosity, her arms wave over the grave, cheeks puffing their steam of baby breath.
I cannot see Clara, the mother and baby block my view of Clara.
I shift my weight from one leg to the other. A dozen or so union men are standing behind us. They hold their caps. There are others too. The reporter who questioned me in the hospital, his ferret face under a brim hat, his plaid Mackinaw.
Two green-and-white police sedans and a police motorcycle and sidecar are parked in front of the warehouse across the street from the entrance to the graveyard. The cops sit on their fenders and smoke cigarettes.
A cream-colored La Salle with whitewall tires turns the corner and slowly cruises past the cops and out of my line of vision. I hear a motor cut off, the wrench of a handbrake.
“Do not question God’s peppers,” says the preacher.
I’m trying to think. What are all these people doing here? All night I sat in a chair by the door with a heavy pistol in my lap and I tried to think. I tried to lift my head and open my eyes, shake off the exhaustion of my bones to think.
Now I do have a thought. It is really very foolish. It is that these people—the union men, the cops, the reporter—they’re all staying. I mean this is where they live, Jacksontown, Hoosier Heart of the N
ation, it’s their home, it’s where they make their lives. The reason this preacher twangs on and on is because he too lives here. He’s in no hurry, why should he be?
All of them, it’s a big thing this funeral, an event. I look at the landscape, nothing is moving, even the sky looks fixed, residential.
I shiver, a chill ripples through me. I feel their entirety of interest and attention as some kind of muscling force. Some large proprietary claim in the presence of these people displaces me.
I am dispossessed.
I square my shoulders and stare straight ahead. It seems important not to reveal from my expression or my posture that I understand this. I know what it is now. It is the whispering return to my body of my derelict soul. Oh, my derelict soul of the great depression! What’s happening to me—I feel guilty! Guilty of what? I don’t know, I can’t even imagine!
Finally the twanging ends and with great satisfaction in the holiness of his calling, he closes his Bible, turns his face upon me and I nod and shake his hand. The ten-dollar bill folded in my palm passes to his. He murmurs something to the widow and for no additional charge grazes the baby’s cheek with the tips of his theistic fingers. Then he’s gone. Clara moves around in front of Sandy and hugs her and turns her away from the gravedigger, who with his shovel propped against his hip is spitting on his hands getting ready to go to work.
We walk slowly to the gate, a hand taps me on the shoulder. “Paterson?”
I turn. The heavyset man with the blue knit cap the expert on hell. Behind him three or four others.
“We don’t want to disturb Mrs. James at this time. We have made up a pot.” He puts a folded wad of bills into my hand. “The boys from the local.”
I must have looked shocked. He moves close to me.
“Do you think, Paterson,” he says in my ear, “that we would be so stupid as to permit ourselves to be overheard threatening a man in public not ten minutes before we meant to jump him in a dark alley?”
“What?”
“Use your brains, lad. I’m sorry for the beating you took, but if it was us you’d be in the grave beside him.”
He moves off, I find Sandy and Clara, I hold Sandy’s arm, I feel her bewilderment of sorrow. Faces appear, condolences drift in the cold air flutter for a moment fall.
They knew my name.
They thought it matters to me who killed him.
Clara catches sight of the cream-colored La Salle. She frowns and turns away with an involuntary glance back uphill to the grave. The color in her cheeks, the thin skin she has for the cold, the blue translucence of the eyelids, the tears in the corners of her eyes.
We are through the gate, walking on pavement. I’m between the two women. I hold their arms. It is becoming more difficult to move forward. Several bulky policemen, awkward, they don’t seem to know what to do with themselves.
“Pardon me.” A man tips his hat to Sandy. “Mr. Paterson, I wonder if you’d mind.” I can’t hear him.
“What?” There seems to be some problem. It is some misunderstanding, it’s becoming difficult to move forward, we’re in a crowd, it banks higher and higher against our progress.
“What?” I hear my own voice. “What questions? I already answered questions.”
“We just want to talk to you a few minutes, clear up some things.”
I look behind me—we’re completely hemmed in now, cops in front, the working stiffs behind us, the reporter at the edge of things his chin upraised. Everyone is terribly interested.
“I’m sorry,” I say truthfully, “there’s no time.”
I hear laughter.
“I’m responsible for these ladies, I can’t leave them alone here.”
It is explained that they will come down to the station house with me. They can wait for me where it’s warm. I am reasoned with. Just a few minutes. Sorry for the inconvenience. Clara and Sandy are being led to one police car, I to another. Just as the door opens for me I balk. “Clara!” I try to turn around, call her. I have changed my mind. I want to put her and Sandy in a cab. I want them to wait at the rooming house.
“Don’t make it hard,” a cop says.
My good arm is twisted behind my back I am bent forward at the waist the muffling of blue bulk a stick is brought up smartly between my legs I’m pushed into the car. I have the terrible sickness. I’m aware of people scattering as the police car makes a careening U-turn and picks up speed. A siren. I’m thrown against the back seat against the door we veer around the corner the cop next to me pushes me away with the tips of his fingers. “Relax, sonny,” he says. “Enjoy the ride.”
At a certain point Railroad Street made a ninety-degree curve and you could leave it, cut across an empty lot, and reach it again a block closer to home. The lot was filled with rubble, bricks, rusted sled runners, pieces of baby carriage, garbage a feast for Saint Garbage remnants of chimneys and basement foundations and all of it covered with snow. I was thinking it was the place to be, the place to be, I stumbled along drunk, to tell the truth, drunk on two glasses of rye through this moonscape of white shit. I heard the distant bell of the trolley and saw over a tenement roof the flash of its power line like the explosion of a star. I fell and fell again, cutting my knee on something sharp, getting a sockful of snow, but Red James jaunted along smoothly he even sang one of his songs the funeral dirge of the Southern mountains, hearing the whistle blow nine hundred miles, the condemned man in prison the betrayed lover the orphaned child everyone across the night suffering loss and failed love and time run out raising his head to hear the whistle blow through the valleys of the cold mountains. And then I was down again, hard this time and I shook my head to find myself on all fours I hadn’t fallen. I heard something terrible, a grunt of punched-out breath, snapped bone, a man retching. I tried to stand I was flattened by a great weight, a violent steam-rolling weight pressing my face in the snow my forehead slashes on something sharp at my eye the snow turning wet and black the weight is gone, I scramble to my knees, breathing that is tearful, a desperate exertion, a mass of bodies tumbled past me I heard Red scream and hurtled myself against this mass of black movement butting it with my head taking purchase like a wrestler grabbing a leg a sleeve a back. Everything fell on me and I felt going down my arm twisted the wrong way I heard it break. This seemed to me worth a moment’s contemplation. I lay still and even found a small space in the snow to spit out blood. I lay there under the murder. The intimacy of the shifting weights, the texture of their coats on my face, sobbing rages, one vehement crunch and I heard, we all heard, the unmistakable wail of a dead man. Then a hissing gurgling sound. Then no sound. After which, silence from us all and the night coming back in this silence, the weight lifted from me by degrees I look up portions of the night sky reappear suffused in the milk light of the moon I hear something sibilant, hoarse, it is my own breath, the wind brushing past my ears, I hear hitting hitting but it is the heart pounding in my chest.
He was heavier than he looked, I dragged him one-handed by the collar he kept snagging on things at the edge of the lot I found the right terrain, pulled him to the top of a flat rock and then sitting on the incline below it and easing him over my shoulder and sliding down in a sitting position to the sidewalk and standing up with the full heft of him in a fireman’s carry on my good side, I took us to the curb under the streetlight to wait for someone passing by.
The police chief nods. It’s cold in this room. I sit shivering in my coat. There’s a clock on the wall, like the clocks in grade school. The minute hand leaps forward from one line to the next.
The chief is not cold. He sits at his desk in a short-sleeved shirt. Arms like trees. His wrist watch appears to be imbedded in the flesh. His badge, pinned to his shirt pocket, pulls the material to a point. He’s enormous but with an oddly handsome unlined face prominent jawline straight nose. He is a freak who has managed to make himself a full life out of being born and raised in Jacksontown. I try to look as if this is not my opinion. He goes back to readin
g his file.
I have been very cooperative. Even though they did that to me I have told my story as completely and accurately as I can.
I hear the minute hand move on the clock.
We’re in some room on the ground floor that looks into the courtyard. A couple of cops are standing around out there. The window has bars.
I don’t even ask to smoke. I show no impatience. I don’t want to give them anything to work on, if I don’t seem to be in a hurry they’ll be quicker to let me go.
A cream-white La Salle with whitewall tires pulls up in the courtyard just outside the window. The driver holds open the rear door and the man who gets out immediately has the attention of the cops. He wears a dark overcoat with a fur collar. A pearl-gray fedora. They seem to know him, they come over, they seem eager to shake his hand. He says something and one of the cops moves out of my view.
“Are you deaf, son?”
“What?”
“I said where are you from?”
“I’m from Paterson. Paterson, New Jersey.”
“Like your name.”
“Yeah.”
He nods. “I see. What was your last job?”
“What? I rousted for a carnival.”
“Whereabouts.”
“Uh, upstate New York. New England.”
“What carnival?”
“What?”
“What was the name of it?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember the name?”
“No.”
“Well, how long did you work for them?”
“I don’t know. Listen, is this going to take much longer?”
“It’s up to you. You worked at this carnival?”
“Yeah. A couple of months. It was a summer job. Some lousy carnival.”
“And before that?”
The man in the courtyard sees something. He removes one gray kidskin glove, takes off his hat. He’s a short man, dark-complected, his black hair shines, shows the tracks of the comb. He is shaking his head, he seems genuinely relieved, he raises his arm, lets it fall. His eyes are large, dark, glistening, with long black lashes, they are shockingly feminine eyes.