“Well, what’s he doing? Why doesn’t he close the place?” John was shaking Helen by the shoulders, trying to wake her up. He released her and ran to the back door.
“I’ve locked it again,” Helen said.
John worked the combination as fast as he could, but he could hardly see it.
“Don’t open it! Do you want them coming this way?” Helen was suddenly alert, dragging John’s hands from the lock.
Then John understood. Ernie was being killed in there, being pecked to death. Helen wanted it. Even if Ernie was screaming, they couldn’t have heard him.
A smile came over Helen’s face. “Yes, he’s in there. I think they will finish him.”
John, not quite hearing over the noise of chickens, had read her lips. His heart was beating fast.
Then Helen slumped, and John caught her. John knew it was too late to save Ernie. He also thought that Ernie was no longer screaming.
Helen straightened up. “Come with me. Let’s watch them,” she said, and drew John feebly, yet with determination, along the side of the barn towards the front doors.
Their slow walk seemed four times as long as it should have been. He gripped Helen’s arm. “Ernie in there?” John asked, feeling as if he were dreaming, or perhaps about to faint.
“In there.” Helen smiled at him again, with her eyes half closed. “I came down and opened the back door, you see—and I went up and woke Ernie. I said, ‘Ernie, something’s wrong in the factory, you’d better come down.’ ” He came down and went in the back door—and I opened the coops with the lever. And then—I pulled the lever that opens the front door. He was—in the middle of the barn then, because I started a fire on the floor.”
“A fire?” Then John noticed a pale curl of smoke rising over the front door.
“Not much to burn in there—just the grain,” Helen said. “And there’s enough for them to eat outdoors, don’t you think?” She gave a laugh.
John pulled her faster towards the front of the barn. There seemed to be not much smoke. Now the whole lawn was covered with chickens, and they were spreading through the white rail fence on to the road, pecking, cackling, screaming, a slow army without direction. It looked as if snow had fallen on the land.
“Head for the house!” John said, kicking at some chickens that were attacking Helen’s ankles.
They went up to John’s room. Helen knelt at the front window, watching. The sun was rising on their left, and now it touched the reddish roof of the metal barn. Gray smoke was curling upward from the horizontal lintel of the front doors. Chickens paused, stood stupidly in the doorway until they were bumped by others from behind. The chickens seemed not so much dazzled by the rising sun—the light was brighter in the barn—as by the openness around them and above them. John had never before seen chickens stretch their necks just to look up at the sky. He knelt beside Helen, his arm around her waist.
“They’re all going to—go away,” John said. He felt curiously paralyzed.
“Let them.”
The fire would not spread to the house. There was no wind, and the barn was a good thirty yards away. John felt quite mad, like Helen, or the chickens, and was astonished by the reasonableness of his thought about the fire’s not spreading.
“It’s all over,” Helen said, as the last, not quite the last chickens wobbled out of the barn. She drew John closer by the front of his pajama jacket.
John kissed her gently, then more firmly on the lips. It was strange, stronger than any kiss he had ever known with a girl, yet curiously without further desire. The kiss seemed only an affirmation that they were both alive. They knelt facing each other, tightly embracing. The cries of the hens ceased to sound ugly, and sounded only excited and puzzled. It was like an orchestra playing, some members stopping, others resuming instruments, making a continuous chord without a tempo. John did not know how long they knelt like that, but at last his knees hurt, and he stood up, pulling Helen up, too. He looked out of the window and said:
“They must be all out. And the fire isn’t any bigger. Shouldn’t we—” But the obligation to look for Ernie seemed far away, not at all pressing on him. It was as if he dreamed this night or this dawn, and Helen’s kiss, the way he had dreamed about flying like Superman in the barn. Were they really Helen’s hands in his now?
She slumped again, and plainly she wanted to sit on the carpet, so he left her and pulled on his blue jeans over his pajama pants. He went down and entered the barn cautiously by the front door. The smoke made the interior hazy, but when he bent low, he could see fifty or more chickens pecking at what he knew must be Ernie on the floor. Bodies of chickens overcome by smoke lay on the floor, like little white puffs of smoke themselves, and some live chickens were pecking at these, going for the eyes. John moved towards Ernie. He thought he had braced himself, but he hadn’t braced himself enough for what he saw: a fallen column of blood and bone to which a few tatters of pajama cloth still clung. John ran out again, very fast, because he had breathed once, and the smoke had nearly got him.
In his room, Helen was humming and drumming on the windowsill, gazing out at the chickens left on the lawn. The hens were trying to scratch in the grass, and were staggering, falling on their sides, but mostly falling backwards, because they were used to shuffling to prevent themselves from falling forward.
“Look!” Helen said, laughing so, there were tears in her eyes. “They don’t know what grass is! But they like it!”
John cleared his throat and said, “What’re you going to say?—What’ll we say?”
“Oh—say.” Helen seemed not at all disturbed by the question. “Well—that Ernie heard something and went down and—he wasn’t completely sober, you know. And—maybe he pulled a couple of wrong levers.—Don’t you think so?”
Notes from a
Respectable Cockroach
I have moved.
I used to live at the Hotel Duke on a corner of Washington Square. My family has lived there for generations, and I mean at least two or three hundred generations. But no more for me. The place has degenerated. I’ve heard my great-great-great—go back as far as you like, she was still alive when I spoke to her—talk about the good old days when people arrived in horse-drawn carriages with suitcases that smelled of leather, people who had breakfast in bed and dropped a few crumbs for us on the carpet. Not purposely, of course, because we knew our place then, too, and our place was in the bathroom corners or down in the kitchen. Now we can walk all over the carpets with comparative impunity, because the clients of the Hotel Duke are too stoned blind to see us, or they haven’t the energy to step on us if they did see us—or they just laugh.
The Hotel Duke has now a tattered green awning extending to the curb, so full of holes it wouldn’t protect anyone from the rain. You go up four cement steps into a dingy lobby that smells of pot smoke, stale whiskey, and is insufficiently lighted. After all, the clientele now doesn’t necessarily want to see who else is staying here. People reel into each other in the lobby, and might thereby strike up an acquaintance, but more often it’s an unpleasant exchange of words that results. To the left in the lobby is an even darker hole called Dr. Toomuch’s Dance Floor. They charge two dollars admission, payable at the inside-the-lobby door. Juke box music. Puke box customers. Egad!
The hotel has six floors, and I usually take the elevator, or the lift as people say lately, imitating the English. Why climb those grimy cement air shafts, or creep up staircase after staircase, when I can leap the mere half-inch gap between floor and lift and whisk myself safely into the corner beside the operator at the controls? I can tell each floor by its smell. Fifth floor, that’s a disinfectant smell since more than a year, because a shoot-up occurred and there was lots of blood-and-guts spilt smack in front of the lift. Second floor boasts a worn-out carpet, so the odor is dusty, faintly mingled with urine. Third floor stinks of sauerkr
aut (somebody must have dropped a glass jar of it, the floor is tile here) and so it goes. If I want out on the third, for instance, and the elevator doesn’t stop there, I just wait for the next trip, and sooner or later I make it.
I was at the Hotel Duke when the U.S. Census forms came in in 1970. What a laugh. Everybody got a form, and everybody was laughing. Most of the people here probably haven’t any homes to begin with, and the census was asking, “How many rooms in your house?” and “How many bathrooms have you?” and “How many children?” and so forth. And what is your wife’s age? People think that roaches can’t understand English, or whatever is the going lingo in their vicinity. People think roaches understand only a suddenly turned-on light, which means “Scram!” When you’ve been around as long as we have, which is long before the Mayflower got here, you dig the going yak. So I was able to appreciate many a comment on the U.S. Census, which none of the cruds at the Duke bothered filling out. It was amusing to think of myself filling it out—and why not? I was more of a resident by hereditary seat than any of the human beasts in the hotel. I am (though I am not Franz Kafka in disguise) a cockroach, and I do not know my wife’s age or for that matter how many wives I have. Last week I had seven, in a manner of speaking, but how many of these have been stepped on? As for children, they’re beyond count, a boast I’ve heard my two-legged neighbors make also, but when it comes to the count, if the count is what they want (the more the merrier, I assume), I will bet on myself. Only last week I recall two egg capsules about to be delivered from two of my wives, both on the third (sauerkraut) floor. Good God, I was in a hurry myself, off in pursuit—I blush to mention it—of food which I had smelled and which I estimated to be at a distance of one hundred yards. Cheese-flavored potato chips, I thought. I did not like to say “Hello” and “Good-bye” so quickly to my wives, but my need was perhaps as great as theirs, and where would they be, or rather our race be, if I could not keep my strength up? A moment later I saw a third wife crunched under a cowboy boot (the hippies here affect Western gear even if they are from Brooklyn), though at least she wasn’t laying an egg at that time, only hurrying along like me, in an opposite direction. Hail and farewell!—though, alas, I am sure she did not even see me. I may never again see my parturient wives, those two, though perhaps I saw some of our offspring before I left the Duke. Who knows?
When I see some of the people here, I count myself lucky to be a cockroach. I’m at least healthier, and in a small way I clean up garbage. Which brings me to the point. There used to be garbage in the form of breadcrumbs, an occasional leftover canapé from a champagne party in a room. The present clientele of the Hotel Duke doesn’t eat. They either take dope or drink booze. I’ve only heard about the good old days from my great-great-great-great-grandmothers and -fathers. But I believe them. They said you could jump into a shoe, for instance, outside the door, and be taken into a room along with the tray by a servant at eight in the morning, and thus breakfast on croissant crumbs. Even the shoe-polishing days are gone, because if anybody put shoes outside his room these days, they’d not only not be polished, they’d be stolen. Nowadays it’s all you can hope for that these hairy, buckskin-fringed monsters and their see-through girls will take a bath once in a while and leave a few drops of water in the tub for me to drink. It’s dangerous drinking out of a toilet, and at my age I won’t do it.
However, I wish to speak of my newfound fortune. I’d just about had enough last week, what with another young wife squashed before my eyes by a lurching step (she had been keeping out of the normal path, I remember), and a moronic roomful of junkies licking up—I mean this—food from the floor as a kind of game. Young men and women, naked, pretending to be handless for some insane reason, trying to eat their sandwiches like dogs, strewing them all over the floor, then writhing about together amid salami, pickles and mayonnaise. Plenty of food this time, but unsafe to dart among those rolling bodies. Worse than feet. But to see sandwiches at all was exceptional. There’s no restaurant anymore, but half the rooms in the Hotel Duke are “apartments,” meaning that they have refrigerators and small stoves. But the main thing people have in the way of food is tinned tomato juice for vodka Bloody Marys. Nobody even fries an egg. For one thing, the hotel does not furnish skillets, pans, can openers or even a single knife or fork: they’d be pinched. And none of these charmers is going to go out and buy so much as a pot to heat soup in. So the pickings is slim, as they say. And that isn’t the worst of the “service” department here. Most of the windows don’t shut tightly, the beds look like lumpy hammocks, straight chairs are falling apart at the joints, and the so-called armchairs, maybe one to a room, can inflict injury by releasing a spring in a tender place. Basins are often clogged, and toilets either don’t flush or keep flushing maniacally. And robberies! I’ve witnessed a few. A maid gives the passkey and someone’s in, absconding with suitcase contents under an arm, in pockets, or in a pillowcase disguised as dirty laundry.
Anyway, about a week ago I was in a temporarily vacant room at the Duke, scrounging about for a crumb or a bit of water, when in walked a black bellhop with a suitcase that smelled of leather. He was followed by a gentleman who smelled of aftershave lotion, plus of course tobacco, that’s normal. He unpacked, put some papers out on the writing table, tried the hot water and muttered something to himself, jiggled the running toilet, tested the shower which shot all over the bathroom floor, and then he rang up the desk. I could understand most of what he was saying. He was essentially saying that at the price he was paying per day, this and that might be improved, and could he change his room, perhaps?
I lurked in my corner, thirsty, hungry, but interested, knowing also that I would be stepped on by this same gentleman if I made an appearance on the carpet. I well knew that I would be on his list of complaints if he saw me. The old French window blew open (it was a gusty day) and his papers went in all the four corners. He had to close the window by propping the back of a straight chair against it, and then he gathered his papers, cursing.
“Washington Square!—Henry James would turn in his grave!”
I remember those words, uttered at the same time as he slapped his forehead as if to hit a mosquito.
A bellhop in the threadbare maroon livery of the establishment arrived stoned and fiddled with the window to no avail. The window leaked cold air, made a terrible rattle, and everything, even a cigarette pack, had to be anchored down or it would have blown off a table or whatever. The bellhop in looking at the shower managed to drench himself, and then he said he would send for “the engineer.” The engineer at the Hotel Duke is a joke on his own, which I won’t go into. He didn’t turn up that day, I think because the bellhop made the final bad impression, and the gentleman picked up the telephone and said:
“Can you send someone sober, if possible, to carry my suitcases down? . . . Oh, keep the money, I’m checking out. And get me a taxi, please.”
That was when I made up my mind. As the gentleman was packing, I mentally kissed good-bye to all my wives, brothers, sisters, cousins, children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and then climbed aboard the beautiful suitcase that smelled of leather. I crawled into a pocket in the lid, and made myself snug in the folds of a plastic bag, fragrant of shaving soap and the aftershave lotion, where I would not be squashed even when the lid was closed.
Half an hour later, I found myself in a warmer room where the carpet was thick and not dusty-smelling. The gentleman has breakfast in bed in the mornings at 7:30. In the corridor, I can get all sorts of things from trays left on the floor outside the doors—even remnants of scrambled eggs, and certainly plenty of marmalade and butter on rolls. Had a narrow squeak yesterday when a white-jacketed waiter chased me thirty yards down the hall, stomping with both feet but missing me every time. I’m nimble yet, and life at the Hotel Duke taught me plenty!
I’ve already cased the kitchen, going and coming by lift, of course. Lots of pickings in the kitchen,
but unfortunately they fumigate once a week. I met four possible wives, all a bit sickly from the fumes, but determined to stick it out in the kitchen. For me, it’s upstairs. No competition, and plenty of breakfast trays and sometimes midnight snacks. Maybe I’m an old bachelor now, but there’s life in me yet if a possible wife comes along. Meanwhile I consider myself a lot better than those bipeds in the Hotel Duke, whom I’ve seen eating stuff I wouldn’t touch—or mention. They do it on bets. Bets! All life is a gamble, isn’t it? So why bet?
Eddie and
the Monkey Robberies
Eddie’s job was to open doors. Formerly, he had been cup-shaker for a record-player named Hank, a young man who hadn’t been able to subsidize his poetry writing sufficiently by tootling, and it had been difficult to keep Eddie in the face of complaining landlords, so Hank had passed Eddie on to a girlfriend called Rose, to whom he had just said good-bye, and had taken a job. And Rose knew Jane, and Jane was an ex-convict, which was why Eddie was now opening doors of strange houses.
Being a young and clever Capuchin, Eddie had learned his new job quickly, and often approached doors gaily waltzing and swinging himself from any nearby object, such as a newel post or the back of a straight chair, towards his goal: the knob of a Yale lock, a button that undid a bolt, maybe a chain and bolt also. His nimble fingers flew, undoing everything, or experimenting until they could.
Thus he would admit the husky blonde woman called Jane, whose ring or knock he had usually already heard. Sometimes Eddie had the door open when Jane was still climbing the front steps or walking up the front path, her reticule in hand. Eddie would have got in through a window. Jane always paused for a moment on the threshold, and mumbled something, as if addressing someone standing in the house. Then she would come in and close the door.
Ka-bloom! This particular house was a solid one, and had a pleasant smell to Eddie, for there was a big cluster of yellow roses in a vase in the downstairs hall.