“I could do ten while you were doing one,” his father said.
Heat spread into Bruce’s face. Carefully not looking at his father, he sat down again. “All right. You do them and I’ll take over the counter.”
So here he was, in the pool hall he had passionately sworn he would never do a minute’s work in, dispensing Mrs. Morrison’s meat pies and tamales smothered in chili, clumping behind the counter in the waders which all day had been the sign of his temporary freedom. Leaning back between orders, watching the Saturday-night activity of the place, he half understood why he had gone hunting, and why it had seemed essential that he bring his trophies back here.
That somewhat disconcerted understanding was still troubling him when his father came back. The old man had put on a clean apron and brushed his hair. His pouched eyes, brighter and less houndlike than usual, darted along the bar, counting, and across the bright tables, counting again. His eyes met Bruce’s, and both smiled. Both, Bruce thought, were a little astonished.
Later, propped in bed in the room, he put down the magazine he had been reading and stared at the drawn blinds, the sleazy drapes, and asked himself again why he was here. The excuse he used to himself, that he was only waiting for the beginning of the new term before returning to school, was only an excuse. He knew that he stayed because he either couldn’t get away or wouldn’t. He despised the pool hall, hated his father, was contemptuous of the people he lived among. He made no move to be friendly with them, or hadn’t until tonight, and yet he darted around corners to avoid meeting people he really did care about, people who had been his friends for years. Why?
He could not hold his mind to it. Within a minute he found himself reading again, diving deep, and when he made himself quit that, forced himself to look steadily at his father’s bed, his father’s shoes on the floor, his father’s soiled shirts hanging in the open closet, he told himself that all the home he had any more was this shabby room. He couldn’t pretend that by staying he was holding together the fragments of home and family. He couldn’t fool himself that he had any function in his father’s life, or his father in his. He ought to look for a job so that he could at least keep his self-respect until February.
But the very thought of the effort it would take made him sleepy, and he knew what that was, too. Sleep was another evasion, like the torpor and monotony of his life. But he let drowsiness drift over him. Drowsily he pictured his father behind the counter tonight, vigorous and jovial, Mine Host, and he saw that the usual fretful petulance was not in his face.
He pulled off the light and dropped the magazine on the floor. Then he heard the rain, the swish and hiss of traffic in the wet street. He felt sad and alone, and he despised the coldness of his isolation. Nola crept into his mind and he drove her out as he would drive marauding chickens from a vegetable garden. Even brooding about his father was better than that. He thought of the failing body that only months ago had seemed tireless and bull-strong, of the face before it had sagged and grown dewlaps of flesh on the square jaws. He thought of the many failures, the self-deceptions, the schemes that never paid off, the jobs that never worked out, the hopeful starts that had always ended in excuses or flight. He thought of the eyes that had once filled him with fear, but that now could never quite meet, never quite hold, the eyes of his cold son.
Thinking of all this, and remembering when they were a family and when his mother was alive to hold them together, he felt pity, and he cried.
His father’s entrance awakened him. He heard the fumbling at the door, the creak, the quiet click, the footsteps that slid and groped in darkness, the body that bumped into something and halted, getting its bearings. He heard the deep sighing of the other bed as his father sat down on it, his father’s sighing breath as he bent to untie his shoes. Feigning sleep, he lay unmoving, breathing deeply and steadily, but an anguish of fury had leaped up in him, for he smelled the smells his father brought with him: wet wool, stale cigar smoke, liquor, and above all, more penetrating than any, spreading through the room and polluting everything there, the echo of cheap musky perfume.
The control Bruce imposed on his body was an ecstasy. He raged at himself for the weak sympathy to which he had yielded earlier. One good night, he said to himself now, glaring upward. One lively Saturday night at the joint and he can’t contain himself, he has to go top off the evening with his lady friend. How? A drink in some illegal after-hours bar in Plum Alley? A drink in her room? Maybe just a trip to bed, blunt and immediate?
His jaws ached from the tight clamping of his teeth, but his orderly breathing went in and out, in and out, while the old man sighed into bed and creaked a little and lay still. The taint of perfume was even stronger. That was what his mother meant, that she could smell her. The sow must slop it on by the cupful. And so cuddly. Such a sugar baby. How’s my old sweetie tonight? It’s been too long since you came to see your baby. I should be real mad at you. The cheek against the lapel, the unreal hair against the collar, one foot coyly lifted, the perfume like poison gas tainting the clothes it touched.
The picture of his mother’s bureau drawers stood in his mind, the careless simple collection of handkerchiefs and gloves and lace collars and cuffs neat among dusty blue sachet packets that gave off a faint fragrance. They were all the scent she had ever used.
My God, he said, how can he stand himself?
After a while his father began to breathe heavily, then to snore. In the little prison of the room his breathing was obscene—loose and bubbling, undisciplined, animal. After quite a time he woke himself with a snort, murmured, and rolled over. With an effort Bruce relaxed his hands, arms, shoulders, head, feet. He let himself sink. He tried to concentrate on his breathing, but his father rolled over on his back again and once more the snoring burst out and died and whiffled and sawed and snorted.
By now, he had resolution in him, or around him, rigid as iron. Tomorrow, for sure, for good, he would break out of this catalepsy. He would go and see Joe. Joe would lend him enough to get him to Minneapolis. Not another day in this hateful city. Not another night in this room.
He yawned, surprising himself. It must be late, two o’clock at least. He ought to get to sleep. But he lay uneasily, his mind tainted with hatred as the air was tainted with perfume. He tried cunningly to elude his mind and go to sleep before it could notice, but no matter how he composed himself for blackness and shut his eyes and breathed regularly, that awareness inside was out again in a half minute, lively as a weasel, and he was helplessly hunted again from hiding place to hiding place.
Eventually he fell back upon an old device.
He went into a big dark room in his mind, a room shadowy with half-seen tables. He groped and found a string above him and pulled, and light fell suddenly in a bright cone from the darker cone of the shade. Below the light lay an expanse of dark green cloth, and this was the only lighted thing in all that darkness. Carefully he gathered bright balls into a wooden triangle, pushing them forward until the apex lay over a round spot on the cloth. Quietly and thoroughly he chalked a cue; the inlaid handle and smooth taper of the shaft were very real to his eyes and hands. He lined up the cue ball, aimed, drew the cue back and forth over the bridge of his left hand. He saw the balls run from the spinning shock of the break, and carom, and come to rest, and he hunted up the yellow One ball and got a shot at it between two others. He had to cut it very fine, but he saw the shot go true, the One angle off cleanly into the side pocket. He saw the cue ball rebound and kiss and stop, and he shot the Two in a straight shot for the left corner pocket, putting drawers on the cue ball to get shape for the Three.
Yellow and blue and red, spotted and striped, he shot pool balls into pockets as deep and black and silent as the cellars of his consciousness. He was not now quarry that his mind chased, but an actor, a doer, a willer, a man in command. By an act of will or of flight he focused his whole awareness on the game he played. His mind undertook it with intense concentration. He took pride in little tw
o-cushion banks, little triumphs of accuracy, small successes of foresight. When he had finished one game and the green cloth was bare, he dug the balls from the bin under the end of the table and racked them up and began another.
Eventually, he knew, nothing would remain in his mind but the clean green cloth traced with running color and bounded by simple problems, and sometime in the middle of an intricately planned combination shot he would pale off into sleep.
At noon, after the rain, the sun seemed very bright. It poured down from a clearing sky, glittered on wet roofs, gleamed in reflection from pavements and sidewalks. On the peaks east of the city there was a purity of snow.
Coming down the hill Bruce noticed the excessive brightness and could not tell whether it was really as it seemed, or whether his plunge out of the dark isolated hole of his life had restored a lost capacity to see. A slavery or a paralysis was ended. He had been for three hours in the company of the best friend whom for weeks he had been avoiding. He had been eyed with concern, he had been warmed by solicitude and generosity. In his pocket he had fifty dollars, enough to get him to Minneapolis, where he could renew the one unterminated possibility of his life. It seemed to him incredible that he had buried himself in dismal hotel and dreary poolroom for so long. He could not understand why he had not, long before this, moved his legs in the direction of Thirteenth East. He perceived that he had been sullen and morbid, and it occurred to him that even Schmeckebier and Edwards and the rest might have found him a difficult companion.
His father, too. The fury of the night before had gone, though he knew that he would not again bend toward sympathy. He would never think of his father without smelling that perfume. Let him have it. If that was what he wanted—after what he had had!—let him have it. They could part without an open quarrel, but without affection. They would part right now, within an hour.
From the alley where he parked, two grimy stairways led down into the cellars. One went to the furnace room, the other to the pool hall. The iron railings were blockaded with ash cans. Descent into Avernus. He went down the left-hand stair.
The door was locked. He knocked, and after some time knocked again. Finally someone pulled on the door from inside. It stuck, and was yanked irritably inward. His father stood there in shirt sleeves, a cigar in his mouth.
“Oh,” he said. “I was wondering what had become of you.”
The basement air was foul and heavy, dense with the reek from the toilet. Bruce saw as he stepped inside that at the front end only the night light behind the bar was on, but that light was coming from Schmeckebier’s door at this end, too, the two weak illuminations diffusing in the shadowy room, leaving the middle in almost absolute darkness. It was the appropriate time, the proper place. The stink of the prison was persuasively concentrated. He drew his lungs full with a kind of passion, and said, “I just came down to …”
“Who is dot?” Schmeckebier called out. He came to his door, wrapped to the armpits in a bar apron, with a spoon in his hand, and he bent, peering out into the gloom like a disturbed dwarf from an underhill cave. “Harry? Who? Oh, Bwuce. Shust in time, shust in time. It is not long now.” His lower lip waggled, and he sucked it up.
“What’s not long?” Bruce said.
“Vot?” Schmeckebier said, and thrust out his big head. “You forgot about it?”
“I must have. What?”
“The duck feed,” his father said impatiently.
They stood staring at one another in the dusk. The right moment was gone. With a twitch of the shoulder Bruce let it go. He would wait a while, pick his time. Schmeckebier went back inside, and as he walked past the door Bruce saw through the doorway the lumpy bed, the big chair with a blanket spread over it, the rolltop desk littered with pots and pans, the green and white enamel of the range. The rich smell of roasting came out and mingled oddly with the chemical stink of toilet disinfectant.
“Are we going to eat in there?”
His father snorted. “How could we eat in there? Old Maxie lived in the ghetto too damn long. My God, I never saw such a boar’s nest.”
“Vot’s duh matter? Vot’s duh matter?” Schmeckebier said. With his lip jutting, he stooped to look into the oven, and Harry Mason went shaking his head up between the tables to the counter. Bruce, following him, saw the three places set up on the bar, the three glasses of tomato juice, the platter of olives and celery. His father reached with a shaker and shook a little salt into each glass of tomato juice.
“All the fixings. Soon as Max gets those birds out of the oven we can take her on.”
Now it would be easy to say, “As soon as we eat I’ll be shoving off.” He opened his mouth to say it, but was interrupted again, this time by a light tapping on the glass door beyond Sciutti’s shop. He swung around and saw duskily beyond the glass the smooth blond hair, the even smile.
“It’s Billy,” he said. “Shall I let him in?”
“Sure,” his father said. “Tell him to come in and have a duck with us.”
But Billy Hammond shook his head, was shaking his head as he came through the door. “No, thanks, I just ate. I’m full of chow mein. This is a family dinner, anyway. You go on ahead.”
“Got plenty,” Harry Mason said, and made a motion to set up another plate.
“Who is dot?” Schmeckebier bawled from the back. “Who come in? Is dot Billy Hammond? Set him up a blate.”
“By God, his nose sticks as far into things as his lip,” Harry Mason said. Still holding the plate, he roared back, “Catch up with the parade, for Christ sake, or else tend to your cooking.” Chuckling, he worked his eyebrows at Bruce and Billy.
Schmeckebier had disappeared, but now his squat figure blotted the doorway again. “Vot? Vot you say?”
“Vot?” Mason said. “Vot? Vot? Vot? Vot does it matter vot I said? Get the hell back to your kitchen.”
He was in a high humor. The effect of last night must still be with him. He was still playing Mine Jovial Host. He looked at the two of them and laughed so naturally that Bruce almost joined him. “I think old Maxie’s head is full of duck dressing,” he said, leaning on the counter. “I ever tell you about the time we came back from Reno together? We stopped off in the desert to look at a mine, and got lost on a little dirt road, so we had to camp. I was trying to figure out where we were, and started looking for stars, but it was clouded over, hard to locate anything. So I ask old Maxie if he can see the Big Dipper anywhere. He thinks about that for maybe ten minutes with his lip stuck out and then he says, ‘I t’ink it’s in duh vater bucket.’ ”
He did the grating gutturals of Schmeckebier’s speech so accurately that Bruce smiled in spite of himself. The old man made another motion with the plate toward Billy Hammond. “Better sit down and have one with us.”
“Thanks,” Billy said. His eyes had the ingenuous liquid softness of a young girl’s. “Thanks, I really did just eat. You go on, I’ll shoot a little pool if it’s all right.”
Now came Schmeckebier with a big platter held in both hands. He bore it smoking through the gloom of the pool hall and up the steps to the counter, and Harry Mason took it from him there and with a flourish speared one after another three tight-skinned brown ducks and slid them onto the plates set side by side for the feast. The one frugal light from the backbar shone on them as they sat down. Bruce looked over his shoulder to see Billy Hammond pull the cord and flood a table with a sharp-edged cone of brilliance. Deliberately, already absorbed, he chalked a cue. His lips pursed, and he whistled, and whistling, bent to take aim.
Lined up in a row, they were not placed for conversation, but Harry Mason kept attempting it, leaning forward over his plate to speak to Schmeckebier or Bruce. He filled his mouth with duck and dressing and chewed, shaking his head with pleasure, and snapped off a bite of celery with a crack like a breaking stick. When his mouth was clear he said to Schmeckebier, “Ah, das schmecht gut, hey, Maxie?”
“Ja,” Schmeckebier said, and sucked grease off his lip, and only th
en turned in surprise. “Say, you speak German?”
“Sure I speak German,” Mason said. “I worked three weeks once with an old squarehead brickmason that taught me the whole language. He taught me about sehr gut and nicht wahr and besser I bleiben right hier, and he always had his Frau make me up a lunch full of kalter Aufschnitt and gemixte Pickeln. I know all about German.”
Schmeckebier stared, grunted, and went back to his eating. He had already stripped the meat from the bones and was gnawing on the carcass.
“Anyway,” Mason said, “es schmecht goddamn good.” He got up and went around the counter and drew a mug of coffee from the urn. “Bruce?”
“Please.”
His father drew another. “Max?”
Schmeckebier shook his head, his mouth too full for talk. For a second or two, after he had set out two little jugs of cream, Mason stood watching Billy Hammond as he moved quietly around the one lighted table, whistling. “Look at that sucker. I bet he doesn’t even know where he is.”
By the time he got back around to his stool, he had returned to German. “Schmeckebier,” he said. “What’s that mean?”
“Uh?”
“What’s your name mean? Tastes beer? Likes beer?”
Schmeckebier rolled his shoulders and shook his head. The sounds he made eating were like sounds from a sty. Bruce was half sickened, sitting next to him. He wished the old man would let the conversation drop, but apparently a feast called for chatter.
“That’s a hell of a name, you know it?” he said, and already he was up and around the end of the counter again. “You couldn’t get into any church with a handle like that.” His eyes fastened on the big drooping greasy lip, and he grinned. “Schmeckeduck, that ought to be your name. ‘What’s German for duck? Vogel? Old Maxie Schmeckevogel. How about number two?”
Schmeckebier shoved his plate forward, and Mason forked out a duck from the steam table. He waited with his eyebrows lifted, and then forked out another. Bruce did not take a second.