“But I sometimes think,” he said, “what if a guy came in here with a gun and saw me at this desk? If he said ‘Stick ‘em up!’ do you think he’d wait until I explained that my arms were paralyzed? He’d let me have it. He’d think I was reaching in a drawer or pushing a signal button, and that would be the finish of Einhorn. Just have a look at the holdup statistics and then tell me I’m dreaming up trouble. What I ought to do is have a sign up above my head saying ‘Cripple.’ But I wouldn’t like to be seeing that on the wall all the time. I just hope the Brink’s Express and Pinkerton Protective labels all over the place will keep them away.”
He often abandoned himself to ideas of death, and notwithstanding that he was advanced in so many ways, his Death was still the old one in shriveled mummy longjohns; the same Death that beautiful maidens failed to see in their mirrors because the mirrors were filled with their white breasts, with the blue light of old German rivers, with cities beyond the window checkered like their own floors. This Death was a cheating old rascal with bones showing in buckskin fringes, not a gentle Sir Cedric Hardwicke greeting young boys from the branches of an apple tree in a play I once saw. Einhorn had no kind familiar thoughts of him, but superstitions about this frightful snatcher, and he only played the Thanatopsis stoic but always maneuvered to beat this other—Death!—who had already gained so much on him.
Who maybe was the only real god he had.
Often I thought that in his heart Einhorn had completely surrendered to this fear. But when you believed you had tracked Einhorn through his acts and doings and were about to capture him, you found yourself not in the center of a labyrinth but on a wide boulevard; and here he came from a new direction—a governor in a limousine, with state troopers around him, dominant and necessary, everybody’s lover, whose death was only one element, and a remote one, of his privacy.
* FDR in one of his Fireside Chats made a deep impression on the nation by saying, “N.B.”—which means Nota Bene.
Chapter 6
WHAT DID I, out of all this, want for myself? I couldn’t have told you. My brother Simon wasn’t much my senior, and he and others at our age already had got the idea there was a life to lead and had chosen their directions, while I was circling yet. And Einhorn, what services he needed of me he pretty well knew, but what I was to get from him wasn’t at all clear. I know I longed very much, but I didn’t understand for what.
Before vice and shortcoming, admitted in the weariness of maturity, common enough and boring to make an extended showing of, there are, or are supposed to be, silken, unconscious, nature-painted times, like the pastoral of Sicilian shepherd lovers, or lions you can chase away with stones and golden snakes who scatter from their knots into the fissures of Eryx. Early scenes of life, I mean; for each separate person too, everyone beginning with Eden and passing through trammels, pains, distortions, and death into the darkness out of which, it is hinted, we may hope to enter permanently into the beginning again. There is horror of grayness, of the death-forerunning pinch, of scandalous mouth or of fear-eyes, and of whatever is caused by no recollection of happiness and no expectation of it either. But when there is no shepherd-Sicily, no free-hand nature-painting, but deep city vexation instead, and you are forced early into deep city aims, not sent in your ephod before Eli to start service in the temple, nor set on a horse by your weeping sisters to go and study Greek in Bogotá, but land in a poolroom—what can that lead to of the highest? And what happiness or misery-antidote can it offer instead of pipes and sheep or musical, milk-drinking innocence, or even merely nature walks with a pasty instructor in goggles, or fiddle lessons? Friends, human pals, men and brethren, there is no brief, digest, or shorthand way to say where it leads. Crusoe, alone with nature, under heaven, had a busy, complicated time of it with the unhuman itself, and I am in a crowd that yields results with much more difficulty and reluctance and am part of it myself.
Dingbat, too, for a short while, had his effect on me, speaking of deep city aims. He thought there was a lot he could teach me that even his brother couldn’t. I learned about Dingbat that he was full of the thought of justifying himself before the Commissioner and Einhorn and aimed to produce a success, one that was characteristic of him. He swore he would, that it was in him to make a fortune and a reputation, and he wanted to glitter as a promoter, announced on the radio among the personalities that pass through the ring before the main event, his specs like diamonds. Now and then he got a fighter to manage, somebody mesmerizable. And at this time he became the manager of a heavyweight. At last, he said, he had a good one. Nails Nagel. Dingbat had had middles and welters, but a good heavyweight fighter was the biggest dough of all, provided he was championship material, which, Dingbat declared—cried out in his sincerest ready-for-battle assertion—Nails was. Nails sometimes allowed himself to think so too; at heart probably not, or he would have thrown himself full time into it and stopped going back to his job in the auto-wrecking yard. He was both slow and spasmodic in the way he used the grime-crowned hands that ended his rugged white arms, lashed with extra reinforcements of sinew at the joints. His dull and black jaw was similarly reinforced, and it backed stiffly down on his shaven throat to shelter from punches; the top of his head was surrounded by a cap and the visor stuck forward over lair-hidden eyes. Hurt, decent manhood, meaning no wrong or harm, a horsehair coil or ragged ball of slob virility, that was what he made you feel. He was very strong and an angel about taking punishment; also his big white flanky body moved fast enough, for a heavy’s. What he didn’t have was ring wit. He depended on Dingbat to tell him what to do, suffered himself to be run, and he couldn’t differ effectively because his tongue, among missing teeth, was very slow, and the poolroom wisecrackers said, “Change to light oil; she won’t turn over in this weather.” He was miscast as a fighter, the chicken-woman’s son. His mother had worked for years in a poultry-shop back, plucking hens and geese, a burlap-dressed woman who couldn’t close her mouth over her teeth. She made good dough, and Nails still took more from her than he ever earned. He was in a racket he only had a strong apparent capacity for.
However, he was cuckoo about being admired as a fighter, and he was unbelievably happy one time when Dingbat brought him along to stand by while he, Dingbat, gave a talk to a boys’ club in a basement on Division Street, invited by a poolroom buddy who was sponsor. It went something like this: both Dingbat and Nails in their best clothes, black suede shoes and wearing spotless, eye-cramming fedoras and key chains. “Boys, the first thing you got to understand is how important it is to live clean, train hard, get plenty of milk and vegetables, and sleep with open windows. Take a fighter like my boy here”—happily grinning Nails, toughly sending them his blessings—“on the road, makes no difference where, Nagel works up a full sweat at least once a day. Then, hot shower, cold shower, and a fast rub. He gets the body poisons out of his pores, and the only time he gets to smoke is when I give him a cigar after a vict’ry. I was reading where Tex Rickard wrote the other day in the Post, that before the Willard fight, when it was a hundred in the shade out there in Ohio, Dempsey was trained so fine that when he took a nap before the event, in his underwear, they were crisp and there wasn’t a drop of sweat on him. Boys, I want to tell you, that’s wonderful! That’s one of the worth-while ways to be. So take my advice and don’t play with your dummy. I can’t tell you how important that is. Leave it alone. Not just if you want to be an athlete, and there’s few things that’s finer, but even if you got other ambitions, that’s the first way to go wrong. So hands off; it’ll make your brains fuzzy. And don’t play gidgy with your little girl friends. It don’t do you or them any good. Take it from me, I’m giving it to you straight because I don’t believe in shady stuff and hanky-panky. The hot little punks I see around the street—just pass them by. If you got to have a girl friend, and I don’t see why not, there’s plenty of honest kids to choose from, the kind who’d never grab you by the fly or let you stick around till one a.m. mushing with them on the st
eps”—and on and on, with his glare of sincerity to the membership on camp chairs.
Being a manager was perfect for Dingbat. And it was just what he needed, to make speeches (his brother was a lodge and banquet orator), and to drag Nails out of his room in the morning for road work in the park, and to coax, coach, neigh, and brandish around and dispute the use of equipment in Trafton’s gym, always angrily on his rights over tapes and punching bags in the liniment-groggy, flickety-rope-time, tin-locker-clashing, Loop-darkened rooms and the Polish, Italian, Negro thump-muscled, sweat-glittering training-labor, where the smart crowd of owners and percentage-figurers was. When he had gotten Nails into condition he took him on the road, out West by bus, with money borrowed from Einhorn, but wired from Salt Lake City where they landed broke, and they came back hungry and white. Nails had won two fights in six, and it was hard going among the gibes in the poolroom.
But Dingbat was out of the fight racket for a while; it was at the time of the great jailbreak at Joliet, and he was a corporal in the National Guard called in by the governor. He was around at once in his khakis and corded campaign hat, not hiding the worry that he might be in the patrol that cornered Tommy O’Connor or Larry the Aviator or Bugsy Gonzalez whom he admired.
“Fall in a ditch, stupid, and stay there,” Einhorn said to him. “But the state troopers will have them rounded up before you’re on the train, and the worst you’ll have is a crowded ride and beans to eat.”
The Commissioner, whose health hadn’t been good lately, called from bed, “Let’s see you, Cholly Chaplin, before you leave,” and when Dingbat, looking wronged, and leg-bound in the deforming breeches, stood up to him, he said, colossally amused, “Ee-dyot!”—Dingbat drawn up in a consumption of misunderstood feelings. Mrs. Einhorn was frightened by the uniform and wept, hanging on Lollie Fewter’s neck. Dingbat was bivouacked around Joliet in rainy weather for a few days and came back leaner, blacker, ground into tiredness, with provoked eyes squinty from fatigue. But he took up with Nails immediately. He had gotten him a match in Muskegon, Michigan. Einhorn sent me along to get the lowdown on what happened to Dingbat and Nagel in the sticks. He said, “Augie, I owe you a holiday. If your friend Klein, whom I don’t trust too much, will pinch-hit for you here a couple of afternoons, you can go and have an excursion. Maybe it’ll give Nagel confidence to have somebody in his corner. Dingbat cracks the whip over him too much and gets him down. Maybe a cheerful third party—sursum corda. How good’s your Latin, kid?” Einhorn was happy as the devil with his idea; when what he wanted coincided with a good deed, it made his emotions warm. He called his father and said, “Dad, give Augie here ten bucks. He’s going on a trip for me”—thus to show that his generosity had an obstacle to pass. The Commissioner gladly gave, being openhanded and bland about any amount; in parting with dough he was exemplary.
Dingbat was glad I was coming, and he made a speech to all, with that animal effrontery of his whenever he was in charge. “All right, fellas; we’ve got to click this time …” Poor Nails, he didn’t look good in the Wasps AC mulberry jacket bagging over his muscles, and his togs in the bag hung down to his bowed giant gams as heavy as plumber’s tools. An immense face like raked garden soil in need of water. And in this porous dryness, a pair of whity eyes fearing the worst, and a punch-formed nose.
The worst, for that day, had already happened to somebody else; one of the Aiello brothers had been found shot to death in his roadster. There was a big spread on it in the Examiner; we read it in the pier-bound trolley, and Nails thought he had played softball once against this Aiello. He was downcast. But it was still very early, right after dawn, when the slum distances of the morning streets were hollow, with only a white drop of sun on the brinks of buildings. When we walked down the pier to the City of Saugatuck and came out of the shed, suddenly the town gloom ended in a flaming blue teeter of fresh water, from the black shore-ends down into the golden whiteness eastward. The white-leaded decks had just been washed down and were sparkling with colors of water in a Gulf of Mexico warmth, and the gulls let the air currents carry them around. Dingbat was finally happy. He got Nails to do his road work around the ship before the decks became too crowded. Eight hours on the water without exercise and he’d be too stiff to fight that night. So Nails threw himself into a trot, smiling; he was a changed man in this swift-water sunshine and the gulls dropping almost from a standstill to the surface for pieces of bread. He unpacked a few jabs from the top of his chest, ginger, technical, and dangerous, and Dingbat, in stripes like a locust’s leg, advised him to put more shoulder into them. They were pretty convinced they were sailing to a victory. The two of them went into the rosy carpeting of the lounge for coffee. I stayed on deck in joy of the sun, the colors, up in the hay odors from the hatch where there were the horses of a yokel-circuit circus; it sent my blood happy to sit there in the blue and warm, with the slow air coming up against me from my feet in pretty much frazzled gym shoes, large-sized, lettered in india ink, up my jeans, and my head with plenty of hair to cushion it against the bulkhead.
When we were well out on the warm, unsalty water Dingbat walked out of the salon with two young women, friends of Isabel or Janice, whom he had met there, both in tennis whites and ribboned-up hair, starting on vacation, to run and straight-arm high-bounders on the tennis lawn of a Saugatuck resort and canoe their nice busts on the idle shore water. He pointed out the departing sights with his hat, his outstanding hair getting a chance to live in the sun and evaporate its perfumes—what was there better for a rising young fight manager than to stroll in his white shoes and with yachtsman’s furl to his pants on a sweet morning indulgent to human hopes and be the cavalier to girls? Nails stayed in the salon, trying to win a prize on a machine called the Claw, a little derrick in a glass case filled with cameras, fountain pens, and flashlights embedded in a hill of chickenfeed candy. For a nickel you could maneuver it by two gadgets, one that aimed and another that gripped the claw. He had nothing to show for fifty cents except a handful of waxy candy. He wanted a camera for his mother.
So he shared the candy with me, on deck, and then declared that he had strained his eyes at the machine and felt dizzy, but it was the motion and the water bursting smoothly at the bow that got him, and when we were in close to the Michigan shore and its groundswell he turned death-nosed, white as a polyp, even in his deepest wrinkles. While he vomited, Dingbat supported him fiercely from the back—his boy, he’d see him through hell—and pleaded with an unhidable bitterness of disappointment, “Oh, man, hold up, for Chrissakes!” But Nails went on heaving and tearing air into his chest, his hair lapping down over his cold face and land-longing eyes. When we touched Saugatuck we didn’t dare tell him that we were hours yet from Muskegon. Dingbat took him below to lie down. Nails could feel secure only in a few streets of all the world.
At Muskegon we led him off, yellow and flabby, down the planks of the pier where there wasn’t enough motion over the sand of the bottom to camouflage the perch from the afternoon anglers. We went to the YMCA and washed him, got a meal of roast beef, and then went to the gym. Though he complained of a headache and wanted to lie down, Dingbat forced him through his paces. “If I let you, you’ll only lie there and feel sorry for yourself, and you won’t be able to fight worth a damn tonight. I know what you need. Augie’ll go over and get a pack of aspirins. You go on and start running off the meal.” I got back with the pills, and Nails, white and crampy from his ten laps of the blind, airless room, sat and panted under the basketball standards, and Dingbat rubbed his chest and tried to pump him with confidence but only gave him more anguish, not knowing how to raise hopes without threats. “Man, where’s your will power, where’s your reserves!”
It was no use. Already sunset, and the bout an hour away, we sat out in the square, but there was a fresh-water depth smell there, and Nails was queasy and sagged with a hinging head on the bench. “Well, come on,” Dingbat said. “We’ll do the best we can.”
The fight was in the L
ions’ Club. Nails was in the second event against a man named Prince Jaworski, a drill-operator from the Brunswick plant who got all the encouragement of the crowd, especially as Nails shambled and covered from him or held him in clinches, looking frightened to death in the dry borax sparkle of the ring and gawping out into the ringside faces and the strident blood yells. Jaworski padded after him with wider swings. He had both height and reach on poor Nails, and, I estimate, was about five years younger. Dingbat was frantic with anger at the boos and shouted at Nails when he came to the corner, “If you don’t hit him at least once this round I’m gonna walk out and leave you here alone.” “I told you we shoulda taken the train,” said Nails, “but you were going to save four bucks.” He listened, however, to the noise against him, startled in the eyes, and plunged out with more spirit the second round, carrying the fight to Jaworski, reckless, with slum motions of deadliness in his giant white knots. But in the third round he was hit where he could least stand a blow, in the belly, and he went deadweight flat, counted out in a terror of roars and barks, accusations of dive-taking and fixed fight, with Dingbat mounted on the first rope and flapping his hat at the referee, who made a headstall of his hands and covered his ears. Nails came doubled out of the ring, dead-eyed in the white electric brilliance and with a wet moss of whiskers on the stony sponge of his cheeks. I helped him dress and took him back to the YMCA, where I got him into bed and locked him in the room, then waited in the street for Dingbat so that he wouldn’t go and kick at his door. But he was too glum and droopy for that. He and I took a walk together and bought lard-fried potatoes at a street wagon, and then turned in.