Morgan's Passing (6 page)

Morgan laid his package down and went behind the counter. He pulled out a copper-toed work boot. Where would one buy such things? They really would be useful, he felt; really very practical. The cowbell jingled again. A fat woman in a fur cape came in, no doubt from one of those new apartment buildings. All down the edge of her cape, small animals' heads hung, gnashing their teeth on their own spindly tails. She set a spike-heeled evening sandal firmly on the counter. “I'd like to know what you're going to do about this,” she said.

“Do?” said Morgan.

“You can see the heel has broken again. It broke right off while I was walking into the club, and you were the people who'd repaired it. I looked like an utter fool, a clod.”

“Well, what can I say?” Morgan asked her. “This shoe is Italian.”

“So?”

“It has hollow heels.”

“It does?”

They both looked at the heel. It wasn't hollow at all.

“Oh, we see a lot of this,” Morgan told her. He stamped out his cigarette and picked up the sandal. “These shoes from Italy, they come with hollow heels so drugs can be smuggled in. So naturally they're weakened. The smugglers pry the heels off, take no care whatsoever; they don't have the slightest feeling for their work. They slam the heels back any old how, sell the shoes to some unsuspecting shop … but of course they'll never be the same. Oh, the stories I could tell you!”

He shook his head. She looked at him narrowly; faint, scratchy lines deepened around her eyes.

“Ah, well,” he said, sighing. “Friday morning, then. Name?”

“Well … Peterson,” she said.

He scrawled it on the back of a receipt, and set it with the sandal in a cubbyhole.

After she was gone, he wrote out instructions for his moccasins:
GOWER. FIX!
Can't live without them
. He put the moccasins next to the sandal, with the instructions rolled inside. Then he trotted on out of the shop, busily lighting another cigarette beneath the shelter of his hat.

On the sidewalk his mother's dog was waiting for him. She had a cocked, hopeful face and two perked ears like tepees. Morgan stopped dead. “Go home,” he told her. She wagged her tail. “Go home. What do you want of me? What have I done?”

Morgan set off toward the bus stop. The dog followed, whining, but Morgan pretended not to hear. He speeded up. The whining continued. He wheeled around and stamped one foot. A man in an overcoat halted and then circled Morgan at a distance. The dog, however, merely cowered, panting and looking expectant. “Why must you drag
after
me like this?” Morgan asked. He made a rush at her, but she stood her ground. Of course he should lead her home himself, but he couldn't face it. He couldn't backtrack all that way, having
started out so speedy and chipper. Instead he turned and took off at a run, holding on to his hat, pounding down the sidewalk with the dog not far behind. The dog began to lose heart. Morgan felt her lose it, though he didn't dare turn to look. He felt her falter and then stop, gazing after him and spasmodically wagging her tail. Morgan clutched his aching chest and stumbled up onto a bus. Puffing and sweating, he rummaged through his pockets for change. The other passengers darted sidelong glances and then looked away again.

They passed more stores and office buildings. They whizzed through a corner of Morgan's old neighborhood, with most of the windows boarded up and trees growing out of caved-in roofs. (It had not done well without him.) Here were the Arbeiter Mattress Factory and Madam Sheba, All Questions Answered and Love Problems Cheerfully Solved. Rowhouses slid by, each more decayed than the one before. Morgan hunkered in his seat, clutching the metal bar in front of him, gazing at the Ace of Spades Sandwich Shop and Fat Boy's Shoeshine. Now he was farther downtown than he had ever lived. He relaxed his grip on the metal bar. He sank into the lives of the scattered people sitting on their stoops: the woman in her nightgown and vinyl jacket nursing a Rolling Rock beer and breathing frost; the two men nudging each other and laughing; the small boy in a grownup's sneakers hugging a soiled white cat. A soothing kind of emptiness began to spread through him. He felt stripped and free, like the vacant windows, frameless, glassless, on the upper floors of Syrenia's Hot Pig Bar-B-Q.

3

T
he downtown branch of Cullen Hardware was so old and dark and filthy, so thick with smells, so narrow and creaking, that Morgan often felt he was not so much entering it as
plunging
in, head first, leaving just his bootsoles visible on the rim. There was a raised platform at the rear, underneath the rafters, for his office: a scarred oak desk, files, a maroon plush settee, and a steep black Woodstock typewriter whose ribbons he had to wind by hand. This used to be Bonny's grandfather's office. This store was Grandfather Cullen's very first establishment. Now there were branches everywhere, of course. Nearly every shopping mall within a fifty-mile radius had a Cullen Hardware. But they were all slick and modern; this was the only real one. Sometimes Bonny's Uncle Ollie would come in and threaten to close it down. “Call this a store?” he would say. “Call this a paying proposition?” He would glare around him at the bulky wooden shelves, where the Black & Decker power tools looked foolish beside the old-fashioned bins of nails. He would scowl at the rusty window grilles, which had been twisted out of shape by several different burglars. Morgan would just smile, anxiously tugging his beard, for he knew that he tended to irk Uncle Ollie and he was better off saying nothing at all. Then Uncle Ollie would storm out again and Morgan would go back to his office, relieved, humming beneath his breath. Not that closing this branch down would have left him unemployed; for Bonny's sake, the Cullens would feel bound to find him something else.
But here he had more scope. He had half a dozen projects under way in his office—lumber stacked against the stairs, a ball-peen hammer in his
OUT
basket. He knew of a good place to eat not far off. He had friends just a few blocks over. His one clerk, Butkins, did nearly all the work, even if he wasn't so interesting to talk to.

Once, a few years back, Morgan had had a girl clerk named Marie. She was a very young, round-faced redhead who always wore a loose gray smock to protect her clothes from the dust. Morgan started pretending she was his wife. It wasn't that he found her all that appealing; but he slowly built this scene in his mind where she and he were the owners of a small-town Ma-and-Pa hardware store. They'd been childhood sweethearts, maybe. Mentally, he aged her. He would have liked her to have white hair. He started wearing a wrinkled gray jacket and gray work trousers; he thought of himself as “Pa Hardware.” The funny thing was, sometimes he could be looking right at her but daydreaming her from scratch, as if she weren't there. Then one afternoon he was standing on the ladder putting some shelves in order and she was handing him boxes of extension cords, and he happened to lean down and kiss her on the cheek. He said, “You look tired, Ma. Maybe you ought to take a little nap.” The girl had gasped but said nothing. The next day she didn't show up for work, and she never came again. Her gray smock still hung in the stockroom. Occasionally, when he passed it, Morgan felt sad all over again for the days when he had been Pa Hardware.

But now he had this Butkins, this efficient, colorless young fellow already setting out a new display of Rubbermaid products in the window. “Morning,” Morgan told him. He went on up to his office. He took off his parka, hung it on the coat tree, and sat down in the cracked leather swivel chair behind his desk. Supposedly, he would be dealing with the paperwork now-typing up orders, filing invoices. Instead he opened the center drawer and pulled out his bird-feeder plans. He
was building the feeder for Bonny. Next Tuesday was their anniversary. They had been married for nineteen years; good God. He unrolled the plans and studied them, running a nicotine-stained finger across the angles of various levels and compartments. The feeder hung by a post in which he would drill four suet holes—or peanut-butter holes, for Bonny claimed that suet caused cholesterol problems. Morgan smiled to himself. Bonny was a little crazy on this subject of birds, he thought. He weighted the plans flat with a stapler and a pack of drill bits, and went to find a good plank to begin on.

For most of the morning he sawed and sanded and hummed, occasionally pausing to push back his hat and wipe his face on his sleeve. His office stairs made a fine sawhorse. At the front of the store a trickle of shoppers chose their single purchases: a mousetrap, a furnace filter, a can of roach spray. Morgan hummed the “W.P.A. Blues” and chiseled a new point on his pencil.

Then Butkins went to an early lunch, leaving Morgan in charge. Morgan had to rise and dust off his knees, regretfully, and wait on a man in coveralls who wanted to buy a Hide-a-Key. “What for?” Morgan asked. “Why spend good money on a little tin box? Do you see the price on this thing?”

“Well, but last week I locked the keys inside my car, don't you know, and I was thinking how maybe I could hide an extra key beneath the—”

“Look,” said Morgan. “All you do is take a piece of dental floss, waxed. Surely you have dental floss. Thread your extra key on it, double it for strength, tie it to your radiator grille and let the key hang down inside. Simple! Costs you nothing.”

“Well, but this here Hide-a-Key—”

“Are you not standing in the presence of a man whose wife perpetually mislays his car keys for him?” Morgan asked.

The man glanced around him.

“Me
, I mean. She loses all I own,” Morgan said, “and I've never had a Hide-a-Key in my life.”

“Well, still,” the man said doggedly, “I think I'll just go on ahead with this here.”

“What is it?” Morgan asked. “You don't have dental floss? Never mind! I tell you what I'll do: you come back this same time tomorrow, I'll have a piece for you from home. Free, no charge. A gift. All right? I'll bring you in a yard or two.”

“For Christ's sake,” said the man, “will you let me buy one cruddy Hide-a-Key?”

Morgan flung his hands up. “Of course!” he said. “Be my guest! Waste your money! Fill your life with junk!” He stabbed the cash-register keys. “A dollar twenty-nine,” he said.

“It's
my
dollar twenty-nine, I'll waste it however I like,” said the man, pressing the money into Morgan's palm. “Maniac.”

“Junkie!”

The man rushed off, clutching his Hide-a-Key. Morgan muttered to himself and slammed the cash register shut.

When Butkins came back, Morgan was free to go to lunch. He went to the No Jive Café; he liked their pickles. All the other customers were black, though, and they wouldn't talk to him. They seemed to spend their mealtimes passing tiny wads of money to the counterman, and then mumbling and looking off sideways under lowered lids. Meanwhile Morgan slouched over his plate and chewed happily on a pickle. It really was a wonderful pickle. The garlic was so strong it almost fizzed. But you only got one to a plate, alongside your sandwich. He'd asked time and time again for an extra, but they always said no; he'd have to order another hamburger that he didn't even want.

After he finished eating, he thought he'd take a walk. He had a regular pattern of places he liked to visit. He zipped his parka and set off. The day had not warmed up much; the passers-by had pinched, teary faces. Morgan
was glad of his beard. He turned up his collar and held it close and proceeded almost at a run, squinting against the wind.

First to Potter, the used-instrument dealer, but Potter had someone with him—a gawky, plain young woman trying out a violin. “Father Morgan!” Potter cried. “Miss Miller, meet Father Morgan, the street priest of Baltimore. How's it going? How're your addicts? Come in and have some tea!”

But customers here were rare, and Morgan didn't want to interrupt. “No, no,” he said, holding up a hand. “I must be on my way. Blessings!” and he backed out the door.

He cut through an alley and came out on Marianna Street. An exotic woman with a torrent of black hair stood beside a hot-dog cart. Her make-up was stupendous—a coppery glaze on her skin, a flaring red slash of a mouth, and mascara so heavily applied that each eyelash seemed strung with black beads. Now that it was winter, she was wrapped in old coats and sweaters, but Morgan knew from warmer seasons that underneath she wore a red lace dress and an armload of chipped, flaking, gold-tone bracelets.
“Zosem pas!”
he called out to her.

“Well, hey!” she said. She spoke extra brightly, exaggerating her lip movements. “How you today? Get a letter from home?”

Morgan smiled humbly and looked perplexed.

“Letter!” she shouted. She wrote on her palm with an imaginary pencil. “You get a letter?”

“Ah!” said Morgan, suddenly realizing. He shook his head.
“Pok,”
he said sadly.
“Kun salomen baso.”
The corners of his mouth turned down; he scuffed a boot against the wheel of her cart.