There was a small town in Western Ohio that David would never forget. He did not know the name of it. In fact, he never saw the town at all. He simply heard a man named Bert urinating against a truck tire at night, but that town and the cheap music drifting out from the all-night hamburger stand were indelible in his mind.
That afternoon they had played in Piqua, and while the Wild Man waited for his pigeon David talked with him. “Of course,” the football player agreed, “love ain’t everything in life. Jus’ half. The other half, seems to me, is workin’. I’ve got a mighty pretty deal cooked up.”
“Like what?” David asked.
“You ever play the stock market?” Jensen asked.
“No.”
“Dave, you ought to look into that! Me! I’m as dumb a guy as ever graduated from Illinois. I come from the real backwoods of Kansas, but I played some mighty good football and a rich alumnus come to me and says, ‘Wild Man, you brought glory to the Illini. I’m gonna reward you!’ So he gave me a thousand-dollar stake and taught me how to play the market.”
“You playing it right now?” David asked.
“Sure! Since I joined up with this outfit I make $980. And if Commonwealth and Southern keeps improvin’, I’ll make a couple of thousand this summer.”
“How do you do it?” David asked.
“I study the papers. Keep my eye on what’s goin’ up and down. It’s really very simple. All you got to know is when to sell.”
“When do you sell?” David inquired. He was interested in Wild Man as a stock operator.
“When I get to my pigeon’s house, like tonight, I say to the mister, ‘Can I use your phone? I’ll pay the charges.’ Then I call a guy in New York and tell him to buy or sell tomorrow. It creates a fine impression.” He laughed pleasantly to himself. “How much dough you think I’m worth right now?” he inquired sharply. David shrugged his shoulders. “Eight thousand smackers! Looks to me like America is a ripe melon jus’ waitin’ for a guy to cut hisse’f a chunk.”
The two actors leaned back and contemplated the endlessly beautiful future. Then the Wild Man added, “If I was a guy mad for money I could of parlayed my roll into fifty, sixty thousand bucks. But that’s too much dough. What a guy needs is half work, half women!”
He had more to say, but a blonde girl of eighteen, accompanied by a sister of fifteen, appeared. Jensen went up to them and they talked together for some moments, each of them looking at David in turn. Jensen came back and said, “How’d you like to shove your feet under some home cookin’?”
David inadvertently looked at the attractive sister. He very much wanted to join her, to feel her near him and to smell the perfume he was sure she must be wearing. “I can’t,” he said.
“Why not?” Jensen demanded.
David was stuck for an answer, and then he saw the Gonoph waddling across the dusty field. Cyril’s car had only then arrived from the previous town and the distressing woman had hurried directly to the tent. “I told her I’d wait,” David said, pointing to the Gonoph.
The Wild Man did not laugh. He sucked in his cheeks and watched Emma Clews pick her way among the rocks of the field. “All women are beautiful,” he said and then made David’s apologies to the two pigeons.
The Gonoph was sweating when she reached David. With dainty pats of a very small handkerchief she daubed away the moisture on her face. “Well,” she announced. “Lord Cyril was on the prowl again last night.”
“Look, Emma!” David cried with sudden force. “Don’t come here and tell me those things.”
The Gonoph kept the handkerchief at her chin and said, “All right! I just keep tabs on him, that’s all.” She began to chuckle, her round shoulders heaving beneath the shawl. “Last night I thought of a very funny thing,” she said. “I saw a movie once about a girls’ school. One little devil tied the teacher’s door shut. It was really a scream!” She rocked back and forth. “Don’t you get it?” she asked.
“Get what?” David asked.
“Sir Cyril!” the pudgy woman cried. “Some night we could tie him in Mona’s room! What a scandal!” She showed her big horse teeth and punched David in the ribs.
To change the subject he asked, “Emma, where’s your mother?
“In Medford, Oregon,” she said instantly.
“What’s she doing way out there?”
“Filling a hole in the ground,” she said abruptly.
David gulped and asked, “How’d she get to Oregon?”
“When she was taking Pop to be buried she saw a poster about Oregon and she said, saving the word, ‘Goddamn if I stay in the stinking East another day.’ She got a job as waitress in Medford, Oregon, and she married a Chinese laundryman and she died. If you ask me, I think the Chinaman poisoned her.”
Dusk came on and Emma got her make-up kit. She said, “It’s fun out here in the evening.” David watched her as she patiently plastered her immense face, and slowly the sensation possessed him that this scene was not taking place in time at all. He was so achingly perceptive to every sight and sound that he had the absolute feeling of being suspended outside the universe. Each sense and nerve in his body rushed messages to his brain and he saw indelibly and forever a circus tent at twilight with a dowdy woman remaking her unhappy face.
“Emma!” he cried impulsively. “Knock ’em dead tonight!”
“And don’t think I haven’t,” she leered. “In my day, that is.” Then her insistent mind galloped back to love and she whispered, “What with all this paint on my kisser you probably can’t see that in my day I was a stunner!” She chuckled to herself and waddled off to dress. As if David had no control over his eyes, they filled with tears and he was vastly confused.
These were the days, the sweet and memorable days, when David hesitated between being a youth and a man, the mystic days whose memory can be the bittersweet seasoning of a life. He was ready to become a man, but he clung obstinately to the impulsive remnants of youth. Wild, lonely, uncontrolled feeling was such a remnant; yet he knew that he was almost a man. He had a full beard, hard and bristly against his razor. He was almost six feet tall, yet when he stood in the wings, waiting to hurry onstage and kiss Mona, his knees trembled like a boy’s. His voice would never again crack in awkward adolescence, but his heart did. He steadied himself against the canvas and mumbled, “Me outside the universe looking on! Hell, I can’t even see myself.”
He would never know what obsessed him that strange evening. Somehow he stumbled through his lines and felt for a moment that he had regained control of himself; but in the deep night, while he waited for Jensen to leave off kissing in the truck, he heard a thin voice calling in the town’s outer darkness: “Hey, Eddie, what say we go fishing tomorrow?” And he peered past the truck and beyond the tent that was dying in the dust. Who was that Eddie? Where were the fishing grounds? And he longed to rush into the darkness, to find that distant voice, and to embrace the night crier.
It was not love of man or woman that he sought that night. He was tormented by the vast uncertainty of youth, the surging time, the violent flowing time of manhood to the heart. He sensed the thoughts as yet untested, the fiery glory of words that rushed to his throat and rattled there unspoken, the vagueness, the urgency, the trembling fears and wild resoluteness of youth! It was all his that night. He would have dared anything, yet he was afraid to walk with Jensen’s pretty pigeon. He would have volunteered to go, on the instant, to Java or Samarkand, yet when the Wild Man pulled the truck up to the hamburger stand in Western Ohio, David was completely incapable of entering the noisy, friendly place.
“I’ll catch some sleep,” he said.
“OK!” Vito cried. “But I’m warning you. I’m eating onions!”
David heard them bang their way into the restaurant. There was a slot machine, and Jensen started to play it for dimes. A waitress kidded him in a brassy voice, and David wished that he were in there, kidding the waitress.
A truck rolled up. The driver got out and sh
outed, “Hey! Bert! Want me to order for you?” The screendoor slammed and David could hear Bert urinating against a tire.
“Two eggs and some coffee cake!” Bert shouted.
“OK!” the driver called back into the night.
Then Vito’s astonishing voice boomed out, “Hiya! Stranger!”
“Hey! Bert!” the driver shouted. “Come in! They’s a guy six feet six says he’ll knock your block off!”
Bert jumped up and down on the driveway and hurried toward the door. Then there was a wild burst of laughter. “Who’n hell’s this?” Bert shouted. “Tom Thumb?”
“None o’ yer guff, pardner!” Vito roared.
David could hear the men slapping backs. Even the dwarf Vito fitted in. He was a man. He knew what he wanted.
But David was still a youth. He had an agonizing desire to join the noisy crowd in the restaurant, but he could not move. He pulled the covers about his face so that he might seem asleep when Vito returned. But he could not sleep. He lay face up and thought: “Some time! In a book! I’ll write this all just the way it happened. A truck will roll up. There’ll be a … A squeal? No! ‘The wheels crunched to a stop on the pinched gravel.’ Two men’ll get out, and one’ll cry, ‘Hey! Bert!’ ” He mulled the words and whispered them to the roof of the truck, but they tore back at him, savagely, the words of men drinking beer together in an all-night restaurant.
After an hour of singing, Vito and Jensen returned to the truck. The dwarf was drunk and had to be lifted into bed. “Ssssh!” Vito whispered to Jensen. “The kid’s asleep.” Then he began to cry. “Poor kid! No fun!”
“Don’t you worry about the kid!” Jensen muttered. “He’ll be OK when he begins to feel his oats.”
David’s confusion was abated somewhat when Wild Man Jensen set out to find a pigeon forty-one inches high. The unusual quest began one afternoon in Indiana. The Wild Man was leaning upon a guy rope, watching the dwarf Vito wrap marionettes and place them between blankets.
“Vito?” he drawled. “You ever go with women?”
The dwarf blushed furiously, all the way down his neck. “Not much,” he said.
Jensen shrugged his shoulders at David and continued, “Where does a guy your size find a pigeon to play with?”
Vito blushed again and wrapped up his dolls. “You ain’t answered my question, Vito,” the Wild Man insisted. “You meet many girls your size?”
The dwarf turned away, but he had no desire to end the conversation. He was delighted with the amiable way in which Jensen—and to a lesser degree, David—treated his infirmity. To them he was merely a little man. He liked the way they spoke, without embarrassment, of his size.
“As I pointed out, you crummy little dwarf,” Jensen pursued. “You ain’t answered my question. Where do you find girls, Vito? When you want a little refined lovin’?”
“Oh,” Vito said seriously, sitting on the packed box, “every town of any size has at least one little girl. Somewhere. Of course,” he added hastily, “she might not be my age. Or she might be taller than I am.” He spoke eagerly, bubbling with words. “You understand, I wouldn’t care if she was a little bit taller.”
Jensen stopped swinging on the rope. “You mean to tell me,” he asked slowly, “that maybe we passed some little girls right this very summer?”
“Oh, sure!” Vito said eagerly, pulling his knees up under him. “There was one in West Chester. A blonde. I’d say she was about forty-five inches.”
“How high are you, Vito?” David asked.
“Forty-three,” he lied. “And there was a girl in Du Bois, too. She was about forty inches. She was a blonde, too.”
“How do you know all this?” Jensen asked.
“Well,” the dwarf said, “I sort of look.” There was a long silence and Jensen snapped the rope. Then Vito continued. “I sort of keep watching,” he said.
“What you mean,” Jensen cried, “is that you stand on the stage and gawk. So that’s why you keep starin’ at the audience! I’ll be damned!” He snapped the rope again. “Tell me, Vito. How can you spot a little woman, say from jus’ a little girl?”
“You can tell,” Vito replied.
Jensen bit his lips. “You mean to say that already this summer we passed a couple of little girls? Girls your own size?” He kicked the dust angrily. “Why, Goddamnit to hell and little blazes! Why didn’t you tell me? This makes me pretty mad, Vito. You’re a pretty stupid guy.”
The two men looked at each other for more than a minute and Jensen began to smile. “I could probably have gotten you four or five dates!” he said. “How would you like that, you midget?”
“I’d like it,” Vito said.
“Well, by God!” Jensen swore. “It’s in the bag! If they’s a little girl within a hundred miles of any tent, you got a date with her! That’s a bet!” The Wild Man walked up and down in great excitement, as if it were a date for himself that was under discussion. Sudden he slapped his leg and cried, “Dave! Vito! We’ll go into town right now!”
He herded his two friends into the truck and they stopped at a mean restaurant where he ordered veal fricassee. It was so bad he sent it back. “Western omelette with lots of onions!” he snapped. Then he put his arm on Vito’s shoulder. “How’s your beef stew?” he asked.
“Not so good,” Vito admitted.
“Douse it with ketchup!” he advised. He grabbed a ketchup bottle and drowned the offensive stew. “That any better?” He dipped his own fork into the mess and came up with a chunk of meat. “My God, Vito!” he stormed. “You can’t eat that! Another western!” he bellowed.
“What’s the matter with the stew?” the proprietor demanded.
“It’s lousy!” Jensen replied.
There was a waitress standing by the water cooler. For some time she had been studying Vito. She felt sorry for the poor little man and tears came into her eyes. “Hey! You!” Jensen cried.
“Me?” the girl asked.
“Yes! You!” Jensen insisted. The girl walked along the boards behind the counter. They creaked.
“What do you want?” she asked, keeping her eyes away from Vito.
“Are there any little girls in this town?” Jensen asked.
The waitress was shocked and bit her lip. “I mean any pretty little dwarf girls?” Jensen pursued. The waitress burst into tears and ran back to the manager. He grabbed one of the western sandwiches and hurried back along the boards.
“What’s the idea of insulting my waitress?” he cried belligerently.
“I was jus’ askin’,” Jensen snarled, “if they might be a little dwarf girl livin’ around here anywhere. Some little pigeon about his size!” He slapped Vito affectionately on the shoulder.
The manager licked his dry lips and looked away from Vito. “No,” he said hoarsely. “We don’t have any dwarfs in this town.”
“You sure ain’t got any beef stew, either!” Jensen snorted. He caught the plate of stew and ketchup and dumped it on the western sandwich. Then he wrapped his arm about Vito. “Come on,” he muttered. “Let’s get to hell out of here.”
In the street the Wild Man scratched his hairy chest and looked about him. Houses were beginning to show lights. The lawns were summer-green, and here and there a tree had begun to drop its leaves. “Vito!” Jensen cried. “Strike me dead, but I’m findin’ you a couple of little pigeons about forty inches high. You watch!”
From town to town as the Chautauqua tents moved westward, the Wild Man inquired if there were any little girls who hadn’t grown up. The answer was always no. This infuriated Jensen, for Vito swore that in the early weeks he had seen at least three. Finally, in Western Indiana, the Wild Man met a boy who knew of such a girl. She lived on a farm, eighteen miles out in the country. She was a blonde and used to be the angel in Christmas pageants. She could play the piano, too.
“Vito!” Jensen cried, trembling with excitement. “You stay right here!” He jumped into the truck. No one ever knew what he said at the farm, but an h
our and a half later he returned with his own customary date on the front seat. And on the seat near the door sat a little girl.
Jensen got out first. His girl followed him. Then he called in a low voice, “Hey! Vito!” The dwarf came slowly from the dressing room, where he had been waiting. He was nervous and licked his lips.
Then from the truck the Wild Man handed down a nineteen-year-old dwarf, forty-three inches tall. She was dressed in blue and very neat. Unlike Vito, her face was slightly pinched, but she had a bouncing little step and a charming smile. “This is Grace,” Jensen said.
That was the first of the terrible moments in which David shared. From town to town Jensen found five such little girls. They came to the tent. They were breathing hard beneath their white dresses or their blue dresses, and Vito was always sweating. They would look at each other, the little people, and it was not like the meeting of ordinary people. No, not at all! For in an entire county—or in a dozen counties—there might be only one man to whom such a dwarf might look for love. And now this stranger had come, this little actor of whom Jensen had told such fabulous stories! Out of all the world, only a handful of men! And here was one of them, here in the dusty tent.
The little pigeons were pleased with Vito. They stayed to see the play. Sometimes they had him to their homes for dinner. They played music or laughed at his jokes. But everything was deadly serious. The night was short. The truck rolled on so soon! Wild Man Jensen might say that every town had a girl whom he could love. But the little people knew better.
Once, after Vito and the Wild Man had visited the home of a little girl, they rode together on the front seat. Vito was excited and had no desire for sleep. David heard them talking seriously in the night.
“Vito?” Jensen asked. “You ever kiss them little pigeons?”
There was an embarrassed silence. Jensen repeated his question and the dwarf admitted that he never did. Jensen snorted. “Why the hell you think I spend my time lookin’ ’em up? You mean to swear to me, honest to God, you ain’t never had one of ’em undressed?”