Going Down Fast (10 page)

When neither of them answered Shirley folded her arms and said not loud but passionately, “Harlan, you can't go around plastering those things all over people's property. You'll get in trouble, and you're bound to upset people.”

“If this neighborhood doesn't wake up they're none of them going to have any property to worry about,” Harlan said. “Come on, Rowley.”

The job made them silly. They got very quick. They hit trees and buildings as they went at finally about two minutes a poster.

“‘The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold!'” Harlan declaimed, looking back at the street. “You think anybody's going to pay attention? Think anybody's going to come Tuesday night?”

“Why not?” He said back:

When you hear this wolf howling, howling at every woman I see
,

When you hear this wolf howling, howling at every woman I see
,

Yeah, I'm only howling, well, well for what belong to me …

I learned that off a Champion Jack Dupree record.”

“Why you might've been a good blues man if you had a little of the blood. And a voice.”

“Guess who I got a date playing backup for?”

“What you get paid for that?”

“Standard union rate. I'd do it for nothing. He's good.”

Harlan stepped back to admire, saw that the poster was crooked, shrugged. “They wouldn't let you do it for nothing.”

“I'm crying.… Remember Jack Winder?”

“Small guy, played lousy jazz guitar.”

“I ran into Jack the other day in the Loop. Will that hold?”

“Half of them be ripped down before tonight. What's become of the old fire-eater?”

“Working for his uncle. Office job. Married. Couple kids.”

Harlan grinned. “Baby, don't say that like a fatal disease. Some of us like that, some of us think that's living.”

“Remember when the FBI pressured his girl into giving them lists of everybody came and went in his pad?—and he was a mixer, he gave big parties. When she confessed, lot of people got a bad chill. Everybody was scared in those days.”

Harlan made a sour face. “We were all against the reds but we'd never for sure seen one—like the tales uncles tell you about timber wolves when you know there are things on two legs in the city much scarier. When I was fifteen I felt obliged to cut anybody who looked at me too long, and I guess I was meaner than any ordinary gray wolf.”

Rowley thrust out his finger. “Just observing. The older you get, the tougher you were. By the time you're fifty with your first granddaughter and a beer belly down to your knees, you'll be claiming you were a numbers runner at age ten.”

“Beer belly, ha. Speak for yourself, baby.” Harlan poked Rowley in the midriff. “I was a mean kid, but I loved my mother.” Nailing up the last poster he made a sign of the cross.

“
Oh why don't you work

Like other men do?

How in hell can I work

When there's no work to do?

Hallelujah! I'm a bum

Hallelujah! Bum again!

Hallelujah! Give us a handout

To revive us again!
”

Rowley was waiting for a can of chili to heat while he wrote his reviews for the local folksheet. He had an open box of hard catfood and everytime he finished a sentence he reached in and tossed a little rabbit turd for Yente to chase and crack between his teeth. If he took too long on a sentence Yente would come and nudge his foot.

He got the cat last winter. He was cutting through an alley taking a shortcut to Annie's when he saw something move in a garbage can outside the barred back door of a store. He was startled to come on a rat in daylight. Then some sudden curiosity made him question that faint noise. Cautiously he lifted the lid. Among the spoiled celery and moldy copper green oranges three kittens were bedded, tiny and wet and dabbled with the harsh green ooze of rotting spinach. He thought they were dead. Gingerly he touched them and immediately one began mewing, butting his hand for milk, while another stirred. The third was cold. In high anger he began kicking on the door, found it open and charged into the stockroom of a grocery.

“Get those dirty things out of here,” the manager said when contact was made. “I don't know nothing about them. What are you doing snooping in garbagecans? I'll call the cops.”

He ended up carrying the two live kittens to Anna's. He was disgusted to find himself involved in warming milk and shopping for pablum. One kitten died that evening, but the one who had butted his hand thrived. Then Anna's landlady announced she did not allow pets.

“What do I want with a cat?” he asked her. “Isn't there some agency you call and they come and get them?”

“And gas them. You shouldn't pick things out of garbage cans if you mean to throw them back!” Her fine, dark, dogmatic air. He took Yente home.

He sang at Yente,

“
Oh Dunderbeck, oh Dunderbeck

how could you be so mean

to ever have invented

the sausage meat machine?

Now all the rats and pussycats

will never more be seen
.

They'll all be ground to sausage meat

in Dunderbeck's machine
.”

Herb from the station was throwing a party and later he might drop by. He was learning a blues off the newfound Black Jack record, and he looked forward to sitting down after supper to work it through.

“
She gave the crank

a hell of a yank
,

and Dunderbeck was meat!
”

Someone knocked.

“Evening, honey.” Caroline was carrying a bag. He had carefully said nothing about tonight. That ended the chili because she unpacked steak, beer, and frozen frenchfries.

“Another Care package. Do I look starved?”

She tittered happily. Coming up behind she put her warm arms around his neck. “Don't you like me to make supper for you? You just won't admit it.”

She made him feel brutish, forever shaking free and growling at the hundred and two gifts she tried to dump on his head. If he sat still she would tie bows all over him. “Look, I did my own shopping. You don't have to haul in supplies like this was Hudson Bay.”

“Don't you like steak? I know you—you just open an old can. Go right ahead and work as if I wasn't here, and I'll call you when everything's ready.”

She began ostentatiously tiptoeing about setting down pans with many “Oh dears” and “Shhhs” to herself.

“Look, don't go shushing around. Live!” So she began singing “I gave my love a cherry.” The last two reviews he wrote were high in acid. She had a soft contralto and her parents had bought her singing lessons. But learning a song she learned the singer's style till she was a whole sampler of other singers' feelings. All a bit slicked up.

He smelled the smoke before he heard the crackling because he had been trying not hear anything. He swung around just as she yanked the broiler open. At once the burning steak set fire to the potholder in her hand. She shrieked.

“Drop it!” he shouted.

She let it fall and he stamped the flames out. He shut off the broiler, pulled out the steak, cut off the charred fat, put the boiler back two notches lower and relit the oven. “Like this,” he said mildly. He was ready to sit down and laugh except that she looked crushed. He tousled her blond hair, wavy and lush reaching just to her shoulders. He had told her once she had 1940's hair. Soft to touch, it tangled about his hand and followed after: Caroline all right.

Peering into the cupboard she asked, “Where're those salad tongs?”

“Don't know.” he relented then. “Think I saw them in the front closet.”

“The front closet!” She went to look and came back with the tongs. “How'd they get there? I used them in the kitchen just last week.”

“No idea.” He shrugged. “Maybe the cat dragged them in.”

She seemed satisfied although she continued to talk to the tongs as she made the salad, wondering how they'd learned to walk. She had indeed turned them up out of a drawer on Wednesday. They were Anna's and after Caroline went off to that coffee box where she “worked,” he'd decided to take them over and give them back. Why not? It had been a few weeks and all that shouting around ought to look pretty silly. Meanwhile his little bit of strange had turned into his daily wonderbread.

He had gone over after ten. He didn't know her new teaching schedule but her latest possible class would get her home by then. Her apartment had been dark, however, and his knocking roused no one. Funny. He'd checked the time in Woody's bar across the street where he stopped for a beer, and it was ten thirty. He'd fallen into an argument about Cuba. When he left he glanced up at her windows, still dark. He had wondered, briefly. He wondered now, sealing the envelope on his reviews.

All their friends must be fussing about her, telling her what a shit he'd been. One thing he was sure of: she wasn't with a man. Not yet. Smiling he recalled their duel in the early days. She could turn from a woman to a blockhouse in nothing flat. No, she was out with the gang from the department. Then he saw that Caroline was returning his smile, her eyes shimmery. Caught off stride he went over and put his arms around her. In a way he had been relieved that Annie was out that night, in a way.

They set out to see a new Italian flick, but since the line reached the corner, they went to Woody's instead. Though the bar was crowded too deep, he saw nobody he felt like drinking with. They night was freakishly warm, one of the last good nights when you could walk at leisure without your nose breaking off. A loose nostalgic wanting filled him but he could not fix on an object. The first girls in his first car with fuzzy sweaters and sharp elbows, sticking their gum to the dash before necking? Then he would have gone for Caroline. She was wearing a sad, cheated look, but at the meeting of their eyes she perked up and took his hand beside the pitcher. Green made her face fresh and pinky. Sometimes she looked pretty enough to startle him, a radiance that belonged to paper, not to flesh.

He was not often nostalgic, yet he felt it like a warm tide of dark beer pulling his mind under. For what? the oreboats? ought to get more exercise, get Harlan to take up handball … on the bum? student politics in the peace union? early days at the station when the electric company was threatening to shut off their power? He missed something he'd had. He had done what he wanted then as now. His mood puzzled him and he was frowning when he looked toward the door and saw old Leon plowing through the mob, talking all the time over his shoulder.

He felt a wave of relief. That was what he wanted, someone he'd known through years and changes. Leon's gaze met his then, and a fierce blank hostility lit his pale eyes. Leon looked from him to Caroline with his face tight as leather. Turning he hissed something. A girl behind stepped sideways to peer around him. Then Rowley understood: Anna. “Or did you expect me to amuse myself with Leon?”

He read at once Leon's stare, the two of them turning up in Woody's on Saturday night so wrapped up in each other they almost walked over him. He understood, yet he did not believe it. Like a nincompoop he sat staring while they turned around hurriedly and went straight out.

“That was Anna What's-her-name with Leon, wasn't it? They acted too embarrassed, really,” Caroline said.

Leon, for Christsake. He'd never fathomed Leon's success with women. He'd seen Joye with a black eye and another time Leon had knocked her down. He'd always had girls on the side, easy lays like Caroline maybe, but still a married man had to go out of his way for things a single man tripped over. Leon had fathered a kid the court wouldn't let him near. This was the guy Anna couldn't wait to start mixing it up with. Always losing jobs or quitting in disgust, he never worked at anything, never found anything he thought worthy. Even the films he made were kind of daydreams.

“Come on, let's split.” He stalked out and she came hurrying behind. Driving home he asked, “What's so attractive about Leon? Not what you'd call a goodlooking guy.”

“I don't know, I'm sure,” Caroline said. “Are you jealous about her, still?”

He was irritated enough to say, “I'm not supposed to know you were Leon's girl?”

“I was terribly young. You know.”

They'd just got in bed when the phone rang. He reached across her to answer it. “Rowley.”

“
Sam
.” She laughed. “Trying to get you all day. Going from one payphone to another clinking my quarters. Hey, give me my big brother, I'd say, and the phone would answer, nobody like that here.”

“I was out trying to find an old blues singer nobody's seen since 'forty-five.”

“But you're going to find him and make him rich and famous.”

“Maybe I can get him a recording date anyhow.” Good to hear her voice, low and chesty and bubbling. “How's school going, Sam? How come no letters?”

“My anthropology is great, but lit class is a bore. Rowley, I need money.”

“What for? Didn't you get your allowance?”

“I need thirty dollars.”

“You need clothes or what?”

“I'm coming to Chicago in two weeks for the weekend. I'll explain all then.”

“Okay, come ahead and explain and I'll round up the money then.”

“Slob, I need the money to get there.”

“By chartered plane?”

“Someone's coming with me.”

“Who can't pay their own busfare?”

“Let me talk to Anna. Is she there?”

“Don't change the subject.”

“I'm not! I have to talk to Anna. I need her advice.”

“What is this? No, you can't talk to her, she isn't here.”

“Then give me her number and I'll call you back. Can I call collect?”