3
Meanwhile all this time across the street walking parallel with them was Zaza Vauriselle who but for a prognathic big almost hydrocephalic’s jaw and six inches less height could have been Vinny Bergerac’s chiseled French Canadian happy smiling brother; he was with the group but for awhile had absented himself to the other sidewalk in the way of one accustomed to walking long distances with gangs, to think, to drive his legs on in a thing of his own, every now and then, too, saying to them, barely heard, comments like “Damn bunch of fools” (in French, gange de baza) or, “Aw look the nice girls coming out that house hey.”
Zaza Vauriselle was the oldest in the gang, had only recently injected himself via Vinny’s invitation, and had made a hit with the rest skeptical or not only because he was such a fantastic fool, capable of any joke, the main joke being, “He’ll do anything Vinny says, anything”; and his added value that he knew all about girls and sex from direct experience. He had the same happy thin features, and handsome like Vinny, but was very short, bowlegged, funny to look at, shifty-eyed, heavy-jawed and snorting through a defective nose; always masturbating in front of the others, about eighteen; yet something curiously innocent and foolish almost angelic though admittedly silly and probably mentally retarded as he was. He too wore a white silk scarf, a dark topcoat, rubbers, no hat, and walked purposefully through the two-inch snow to the dance which had been his idea; somewhere down Lakeview Avenue, in some Centreville house where a party of adults was starting, the boys had gone, from G.J.’s house and Zagg’s house the final meeting place, to fetch Zaza. It made for walking and rosy-faced excitement holiday-proper; nobody had a car till that summer. “On va y’allez let’s go!” Zaza had yelled. Now Zaza Vauriselle made a snowball and threw it at Vinny his champion. “Ey, Vinny, go sit on the ga-dam bowl and shut up before I tear your legs off . . .” Softly, from across the street, with a stupid smile that the others all fondly saw gleaming. G.J. staggered to hear it, whispering, pointing, shushing, “Listen what’s he thinking? . . . Ga-dam Zazay!” and ran across the street and dove on Zaza’s shoulders and drove him into a snowbank as Zaza, unused to rough treatment, yelled in genuine anxiety “Ey! Ey!” and all sartorial in his coat and scarf was swashed in snow; the others rushing up to wrestle him in every direction, and finally they lifted him to their shoulders horizontal and went on down Riverside yelling and bearing their Zaza.
By now they had reached a deep slope of grass behind a wooden fence, near a near-castle made of stone, with towers, that sat high over Riverside Street. Up the grassy slope, white in the night, began a stone wall built up and in against a cliff, with dry pendant remnant vines now hanging in the snow, gleaming ice; up on top of the cliff, three houses. The middle one was G.J.’s. They were just regular old French Canadian two-story wooden tenements, with washlines, porches, long boards, like Frisco tenements enduring in the fog of the North, with brown lights in the kitchens, dim shadows, a vague sight of a religious calendar or an overcoat on a closet door, something sad and homely and useful and to the boys who knew nothing else the abode of very life. G.J.’s house sat, soared, looked over gigantic treetops of Riverside to the city a mile across the river; in his kitchen in blowing wild storms that would obscure vistas and clank the trees to hit the windows, Jack Frost cracking, raging to come in the door beneath the crack as old overshoes gleamed cold and wet in scuffly slush-halls, as people tried to stop a draft with a folded strip of newspaper . . . in great stormy days when there was no school, and no occasion like New Year’s Eve, G.J. with his long legs strode his mother’s linoleum swearing and cursing the day he was born as she an old Greek widow the death of whose husband fifteen years ago left her still in blackest mourning, sat in a rocking chair by the shivering window, with an old Greek bible on her lap, and grieved, and grieved, and grieved. . . . The sight of this house as G.J. rushed with the boys to joys tearing in his brain . . . “Is my mother up?” he wondered—Sometimes she just made long pitiful-to-hear lamentations about the darkness of her life, singing it, as the children heard every word and hung their heads in shame and misery. . . . “Is Reno still home? . . . is she gonna take her to that ga-dam woman for that visit. . . . Oh Lord in Heaven above sometimes I think I was born to worry for that unhappy old mother of mine till the day my boots sink in the ground and there wont be no damn saver to pull me out—the last of the Rigopoulakos, elas spiti Rigopoulakos . . . ka, re,” he cursed and wrung inside his brain in Greek, squeezing his thighs inside his coat till they burned, taking his hands out of his pockets to spread fingers at the others, bringing his tongue out eloquently to clack his teeth, saying “Thou, thou, thou . . . you cant know!” He felt like howling across the snow and over the twenty-foot stone wall high to his house with its dark and tragic windows except for one brown light in the kitchen that said nothing, showed nothing but death, and but indicated that as ever his mother had begun her vigil with an oil lamp, now in the chair later on the little couch by the stove in the kitchen with a pitiful flimsy bedcover when all the time she had a whole bed in her own room. . . . “So dark that room,” grieved G.J., Gus, Yanni to his mother, Yanni sometimes when she chose to call him by his middle name and everybody in the neighborhood could hear her at sad red dusk calling him to pork-chop supper “Yanni . . . Yanni . . .” A Jack o Diamonds of other broken hearts. And Gus turned to his greatest and deepest friend whom he had named Zagg.
“Jack,” taking his arm, holding the gang up, “do you see that light burning in my mother’s kitchen window?”
“—I know, Gus—”
“—showing where an old woman this night as all nights when this poor blooder and fubbler tries to go out Zagg and get himself just a little bit of fun in the world”—his eyes tearing—“and not asking so much as that God, in his mercy, munifisessence, whatyoucallit Zagg, should only say ‘Gus, Gus, poor Gus, pray to the angels and to me and I shall see Gus that your poor old mother—”‘
“—Ah Brigash cass mi gass!” cried Zaza Vauriselle, suddenly weirdly apt so much so that Lauzon laughed his high wild giggle and everybody heard but paid no attention because listening to Gus make a real serious speech about his troubles.
“—that only for a moment my soul and heart could rest to see that my mother—Jack she’s just an old woman—your father isnt dead, you dont know what it is to have an old widowed mother who has no old man like your old man Aooway Burp Emil Duluoz come in the house and lift his leg and lay a browsh, it’s comforting, it makes the woman—it makes the child, me, realize, ‘I got an old man, he comes in from work, he’s an ugly old maniac nobody’s gonna give ten cents for’ Zagg but here I am—just two sisters, my brother dead, my oldest sister’s married—you know, Marie—she used to be my mother’s best . . . comforter—when Marie was around I didnt worry like I do now—Oh hell I dont—parade my trouble in front of you guys? Make you realize that my heart is broken . . . that as long as I live I’ll have chains dragging me down to the oceans of sad tears that my feet are wet in already at the thought of my poor old mother in her ga-dam old black dress Zagg that—she waits for me! always waiting for me!” A commotion in the gang. “Ask Zagg! Three o’clock in the morning, we come home, we been shootin the bull maybe at Blezan’s or saw Lucky on the street and exchanged a few greetings” (in his explanations waving a hand he was eager, thick-tongued, eloquent, his almost-olive skin and greenish-yellow eyes and earnest intensity like something in an ancient bazaar or court)—“and here we come, nothing’s happened, but, and it’s not too late, but, and there’s my Ma—There’s my Ma in the window with that light, waiting—asleep. I come in the kitchen I try to sneak, not wake her. She wakes up. ‘Yanni?’ she cries in a little voice like crying. . . . ‘Ya Ma, Yanni—I been out with Jacky Duluoz.’—’Yanni why do you come home so late and worry me to death?’ ‘But Ma it’s late I know but I told you I’d be all right wouldnt go no further than Destouches’ ga-dam candy store,’ and I start to get mad and yell at her at three o’clock
in the morning and she says nothing just satisfied I’m safe and without a sound there she goes in her dark bedroom and goes to sleep and’s up at the cracka ga-dam dawn to make my oatmeal for school. You guys wonder I’m known as the crazy Mouse,” he concluded seriously.
Jack Duluoz put his arm around him and then withdrew it quickly. He tried to smile. Gus was looking at him for confirmation of all his sorrows. “You’re still the greatest right fielder in history,” said Jack.
“And the greatest relief pitcher, Mouso. You ever seen his windup you’d die, zeet?” Lauzon coming to him and taking his arm as they all took up the walk again.
“Oh,” said Gus, “it’s all a big . . . topcoat sale. You cant read it all. Fuggit! I say, I say to you gentlemen, fuggit—I aint never gonna say another word but reach for my oteens of champagne silver biddies, what do you call—big huge decanters of whisky and brew—slup—slip—the whole world is gonna go down my hole before G.J. Rigopoulos says quits!”
They all cheered wildly; and reached the big intersection of Pawtucketville, the corner of Riverside and Moody, swirling with excited snow across the arc lamp and on the yellow bus and all the people shouting hellos from sidewalk to sidewalk.
4
Down Riverside and to the right Scotty Boldieu lived with his own mother, in a wooden tenement, third floor, you went up there via some outside wooden steps that had the quality of steps in dreams as they rose from ten-foot bushes a jungle of them in the field below and took you swaying up the ladder of flimsy porches with strange-faced French Canadian ladies looking down yelling to other ladies “Aayoo Madame Belanger a tu ton wash finished?” Scotty had a room to himself where he spent many hours studiously writing down the summer baseball team averages in red ink in infinitestimal figures and small letters; or just sat in the brown kitchen with the Sun and read the sports page. There was a little brother. There was a dead father there too. It had been some big-fisted man with a grim countenance, whose trudgings to work in the morning were like the departure of the Golem across the fogs and seas of his duty. Scotty, G.J., Zagg, Lauzon, Vinny all played an important part in a summer baseball team, a winter basketball team, and an invincible autumn football team.
Lauzon lived back down Riverside Street in the direction they were coming from, down the hill from the Greek candy store at the edge of the sandbank’s desert of sand, on a rosy street, among bungalows. Tall strange Lauzon’s father was a tall strange milkman. His tall strange kid brother prayed and made novenas at the church with all the other kids his age doing their Confirmation. At Christmas the Lauzons had a Christmas tree, and gifts; G.J. Rigopoulos had a tree too but something sick, scraggly, forever defeated shone from it in his dark window; Scotty Boldieu’s mother put up a tree in a linoleumed parlor with the gravity of an undertaker, by vases. In the big Zara house trees, gifts, window wreaths, confetti . . . his being a typical large French Canadian home.
Vinny Bergerac lived across the river, on Moody Street, in the slums. Jacky Zagg Duluoz lived just a stone’s throw from the intersection where they had now stopped. The intersection had a traffic light, it illuminated the snow rosy red, wreathy green. Wooden tenements on both corners had most of their windows shining with red and blue lights; an air of festivity puffed out of their chimneys; people were below in the tar courts talking echoey chatters under clotheslines in the snowfall.
Jacky Duluoz’s home was in a tenement several doorways up, on another corner, where the Pawtucketville center-store area seemed always to buzz the most, right at the lunchcart, across the street from the bowling alley, poolhall, at the bus stop, near the big meat market, with an empty lot on both sides of the street where kids played their gray games in brown weeds of winter dusk when the moon is just starting to show with a refined, distant, unseen paleness as if it had been frozen and also smeared with slate. He lived with his mother, father and sister; had a room of his own, with the fourth-floor windows staring on seas of rooftops and the glitter of winter nights when home lights brownly wave beneath the neater whiter blaze of stars—those stars that in the North, in the clear nights, all hang frozen tears by the billions, with January Milky Ways like silver taffy, veils of frost in the stillness, huge blinked, throbbing to the slow beat of time and universal blood. In the Duluoz home the kitchen window looked down on bright wild street scenes; inside, the bright light showed much food, cheer, apples and oranges in bowls on white tablecloths, clean ironing boards leaned behind varnished doors, cupboards, little plates of popcorn left over from last night. In the gray afternoons Jacky Duluoz rushed home, sweating in November and December, to sit in the gloom at the kitchen table, devouring, over a chess book, whole boxes of Ritz crackers with peanut butter smeared. In the evening his big father Emil came home and sat in the dark by the radio, coughing. Through the kitchen door in the hall he rushed down pell-mell to find his friends, using the front stairs down the front rooms of the tenement only with parents and company and for sadder more formal runs—The back stairs were so dim, dusty, strange, as if loose-plastered, some day he would remember them in rueful dreams of rust and loss . . . dreams when G.J.’s shadow would fall across a piece of broken leg like pottery in the street, like modern paintings in their keen screaming lostness. . . . No idea in 1939 that the world would turn mad.
On the intersection itself a surprising number of people were passing throwing remarks across the snow. Billy Artaud was striding by at his tremendous pace, short, long-legged, arms swinging, bright teeth shining; he was the second baseman on the team; in the past few months had matured suddenly and was already rushing off to see his steady girl for the New Year’s parties in downtown movies.
“There’s Billy Artaud! Hooray for the Dracut Tigers!” yelled Vinny but Billy flowed right along, he was late, he saw them.
“Ah you guys whattaya doin?—here it is almost ten o’clock and you’re still fiddlin and faddlin down the road when you gonna grow up, me I’ve got a girl so long you suckers”—Billy Artaud was known also as “Whattaguy”—“Whattaguy with snow all over his coat that Gus Rigopoulos!” he cried, waving his hand contemptuously. “Throw him to the hot night bird!” he cried, disappearing down the long street alongside Textile Institute and fields of snow to Moody Street Bridge and the downtown lights of town, toward which a lot of other people walked and many cars rolled with their chains crunching softly, their red taillights making beautiful Christmas glows in the snow.
“And here comes Iddyboy!” they all yelled with glee as out of the gloom appeared the great figure of Joe Bissonnette who the moment he saw them turned his shoulders into huge bulking phantoms around his sunken and outthrust chin and came forward on padding cat feet. “Here comes the big Marine!”
“OO!” greeted Joe, still holding himself rigidly inside his “Marine” pose, copied off the hulks and bulks of big sea dogs in Charles Bickford films of the Thirties, the cartoons of big Fagans with bull shoulders, the enormous beast who used to chase Charlie Chaplin with a morphine needle, but modern, with a pea cap down over the eye and the fists clenched, the lips curled puffy to show great crooked-bit teeth fleering to fight and maul.
Out of the gang stepped Jacky Duluoz in the identical pose, hunched to bull and his face twisted and eyes popping, fists clenched; they came up against each other’s noses breathing hard to hold the act, almost teeth to teeth; they’d spent countless freezing winter nights walking back from the fights and wrestling matches and movies of boyhood like this, side by side, below zero weather their mouths blowing balloons, so that people saw them with a sense of disbelief that in the dark they couldnt check, Iddyboy Joe and Zagg the two big Marines coming up the street to throw saloons to the wind. Some Melvillean dream of whaling-town streets in the New England night . . . Once Gus Rigopoulos had held complete sway and power over the soul of Iddyboy, who was a big-hearted simple stud with the power of two grown men; would dance like a witch doctor in front of him, eyes popping, in summer parks, Iddyboy in
his good nature pretending to slaver at the mouth unless he actually did and do his bidding completely like a zombie, and turn on Zagg, at Gus’s orders, and chase him howling like a rhinoceros bull through the jungles of the adolescent screamers in afterdark lots; a long-standing joke in the gang that Mighty Ibbyboy’d murder at G.J.’s bidding. But now they had subsided a little; Iddyboy had a girl, was on his way to see her, “Rita’s her name,” he told them, “you dont know her she is a nice girl, up there,” pointing, telling them in his simple way, a big red-cheeked robust French Canadian paisan son of a large raucous family two blocks away. On his head too the snow had piled in a little hosanna’d crown . . . his well-combed, sleek hair, his big self-satisfied healthy face full and rich above the dark scarf and great warm coat of New England winter. “Eeedyboy!” he repeated, looking at everybody significantly, and starting off. “I see you—”
“Lookat him go, fuggen Iddyboy, d’javer see him walk home from school weekdays—”
“Hey Mouse no kiddin hear what Jack’s sayin? The first guy out of high school every day, the cellar doors open, the bell’s just rung, everybody went back to home room, here comes Iddyboy, man number one, just like a dream he flies out walking long and with big lumberjack steps he cuts over the grass, the sidewalk, the canal bridge, right by the lunchcart, the tracks, the city hall, now here comes the first high school regular kid out the cellar door, Jimmy McFee, Joe Rigas, me, the fast ones, out we come a hundred yards behind Iddyboy—”