Sweet Thursday (10 page)

After Mack left the Palace Flop house (and, incidentally, did not find Doc at home), Hazel sat brooding. Things came through slowly to Hazel. He had heard Mack advance his theory about how Doc would never get his paper written, but the impact of the statement did not strike home until he was alone. It is true that all over Cannery Row the feeling was growing that Doc was not infallible, but the news had not seeped through to Hazel. He knew that Doc was in trouble, but the friendly feeling of contempt had not penetrated. If Hazel had wanted to know the day and hour of the world's demise, he would have gone to Doc and Doc's answer would have been final. Alone he brooded, not about Doc's weakness, but about the treachery of Doc's friends who could question him, who would
dare
to question him.

Hazel beat his hand on the arm of his rocking chair for a while and then he got up and went to Wide Ida's. Eddie was behind the bar, so Hazel had two shots of whisky and paid for a Coke.

He walked between two canneries to the beach. A seagull with a broken wing engaged his kindly interest. He chased it, trying to help it, until it swam to sea and drowned.

Hazel had experienced an earthquake and he searched for the shaker. He walked along the rocks to Pacific Grove Beach, and even the brown young men standing on their hands for the girls did not hold interest. He went up the hill and toured the basement of Holman's Department Store. The floor manager accompanied him, an honor and a precaution few people received. But Hazel didn't even see the shining display of small tools.

You cannot cut the ground from under a man and expect him to act normally. On his way back to Cannery Row, Hazel passed a funeral home where an impressive group was gathering. Ordinarily Hazel would join any kind of celebration with enthusiasm. But now he watched the mounds of gladiolas being carried out and no sense of participation stirred in him. The festive dead would have to be buried without Hazel.

In New Monterey, Hazel walked, not around, but right through a dog fight. All the preceding manifestations would have troubled his friends, but if they had known what Hazel was thinking they would have been horrified.

Thinking is always painful, but in Hazel it was heroic. A picture of the process would make you seasick. A gray, whirling furor of images, memories, words, patterns. It was like a traffic jam at a big intersection with Hazel in the middle trying to get something to move somewhere.

He strolled back to Cannery Row but he did not go to the Palace Flop house. By instinct, he crept under the branches of the black cypress tree in the vacant lot where he had lived for so many years in pre-Palace days. Hazel's thoughts were not complicated. It was just remarkable that he had them at all.

Hazel loved Doc. Doc was in trouble. Somebody was responsible. Who? That it might be a situation rather than a person was beyond his grasp. The person who was hurting Doc must be made to stop it even if he had to be killed. Hazel had nothing against murder. That he hadn't killed anybody was only because he hadn't needed to or wanted to. He tried to recall everything he had heard concerning Doc's frustration, and it was all nebulous, all vague, except for one thing: Mack had said Doc couldn't write his paper. That was the only clear statement that had been made. Mack was the one. If Mack knew about it, he must be responsible for it. This was a matter of sorrow to Hazel, because he liked Mack very much. He hoped he wouldn't have to kill him.

It was getting dark under the cypress tree, too dark to read. Hazel always judged light by whether or not you could read by it, in spite of the fact that he never read anything. The front-porch light of the Bear Flag came on. Western Biological was still dark. Up the hill in the Palace Flop house the kerosene lantern made a dim glow through the windows. Again and again, Hazel tried to turn to sweet thoughtlessness, but it was no use. Mack was responsible. Mack had to do something about it.

Hazel got up and brushed the cypress dirt from his clothes. He walked up past the rusty pipes and the empty boiler, crossed the railroad track, and went up the chicken walk. Behind him, muffled by the canneries, he could hear Cacahuete playing “Stormy Weather” on his trumpet and the sea lions on China Point barking.

In the Palace, Mack and the boys were playing tick-tack-toe with a piece of chalk on the floor. The wining jug was set conveniently near.

“Hi, Hazel,” said Mack. “Draw up.”

“Mack,” Hazel said sadly, “I want you should step outside with me and put up your dukes.”

Mack rocked back on his heels. “What!”

“I'm going to beat the holy hell out of you,” said Hazel.

“Why?” Mack asked.

This was just the question Hazel was afraid of. He tried to find a quick, tough answer. “You just step out and you'll find out,” he said.

“Hazel—” Mack stood up. “Hazel baby, what's eating you? Tell me. See if I can't make it right.”

Hazel felt the whole situation leaving his hands. “You can't treat Doc that way,” he said fiercely. “Not Doc!”

“What way am I treating him? I ain't done nothing to Doc, except maybe hustle him a little. But we all done that—even you tried.”

“You said he can't write his paper, that's what you done.”

“Oh, for God's sakes!” said Mack.

“You're yellow then.”

“Okay, I'm yellow. Sometime when I ain't feeling yellow I'll paddywhack you. Sit down. Have a jolt from the jug.”

They babied Hazel and pampered him until his eyes were damp with appreciation. But when Hazel's mind dug in it would not let loose. “You got to help him,” he repeated. “He ain't happy, he just mopes. You got to help him.”

Mack said, “It ain't entirely our fault. Trouble is, Doc lets concealment like a worm in the bud feed on his damask cheek.”

“He sure as hell does,” said Whitey No. 2.

“I ain't going to stand for no excuses,” said Hazel.

Mack studied the problem from every angle. “Hazel's right,” he said at last. “We've been selfish. We never in our lives had such a good friend as Doc, and we're letting him down. Makes me feel ashamed. It's Hazel showed the way. If I was in trouble I wouldn't want Hazel to do no figuring but I sure would like to have him for a friend.”

Hazel ducked his head in embarrassment. In his life so few compliments had come his way that he didn't know how to cope with them.

Mack went on, “I make a solemn move we all stand up and drink a toast to Hazel—a noble, noble soul!”

“Aw, hell, fellas,” said Hazel, and he wiped his eyes on his sleeve.

They stood in a circle around him, Mack and Eddie, Whitey No. 1 and Whitey No. 2, and each one tipped the jug over his elbow and drank to Hazel. Good feeling was running so high they did it again, and were about to do it a third time when Hazel said, “Ain't there something we can drink to so I can get a drink?”

“To Lefty Grove!” said Eddie.

That broke the ice. An era of good feeling set in. They dug up another keg of the private stock Eddie had saved during the war. He started the bung and smelled it delicately.

“I remember this one,” he said. “They was some guys up from South America and they brought in a bottle of absinthe.”

“Perfumes the whole house,” said Mack.

It was like old times, they reminded one another. If Gay were only here—let's drink a toast to good old Gay, our departed friend.

The absinthe had soothed the mixture in the keg and added something sweet and old-fashioned. A courtliness crept into the speech of the dwellers of the Palace Flop house, an old-world courtesy. Everyone vied to be last, not first, at the refilled jug.

“Next dough we get we'll go up to Woolworth's and get some glasses,” said Mack.

“Hell,” said Whitey No. 2, “they'll just get broke. But I see what you mean.”

Somehow they felt they were living in a moment when history pauses and takes stock and changes course. They knew they would look back on this night as a beginning. At such times men feel the nudge toward oratory.

Mack steadied himself against the stove and begged their attention by rapping on the stovepipe. “Gentlemen,” he said, “let us here highly resolve to get Doc's ass out of the sling of despond.”

Eddie said, “Remember we done something like that once and damn near ruined him.”

Mack's golden mood held. “We were younger then,” he said. “This time we're going to think her out and she's going to be foolproof.”

Hazel was so far won back into comradeship that he had relaxed into happy incoherence. “To Lefty Grove!” he said.

Mack opened the oven door and sat on it. “I've give it a lot of thought,” he said. “Lately I done hardly nothing else.”

“You never do hardly nothing else,” said Whitey No. 2.

Mack ignored him. “I got a theory—”

“Aw, shut up!” said Eddie.

“Who you talking to?” said Whitey No. 2.

“I don't know,” said Eddie innocently, “but if the shoe fits—”

“I got a theory, if you ain't too pie-eyed to listen,” said Mack. When he had them quiet he went on, “When you hear my theory you might get kind of violent. I want you to sleep on it before you talk. I think Doc needs a wife.”

“What!”

“Well, hell, he don't have to marry her,” said Mack. “You know what I mean…” If the absinthe had not given them tolerance he might have had a series of fights right then. “Kindly do not interrupt,” he said. “I will now review the dame situation in the U.S. You take a look at divorces and the reasons for them and you can only think one thing: the only guy that shouldn't have nothing to do with picking out a wife is the guy that's going to marry her. That's a fact. It's a fact that if he's left alone a guy practically always marries the wrong kind of dame.”

“Play it safe and don't marry nobody,” said Whitey No. 2.

“There's some guys can't operate that way,” said Mack.

“Are you suggesting we turn Doc, our true friend, in?”

“I asked you not to shoot off your face until you slept on it,” said Mack with dignity.

Hazel tugged at his sleeve. “Ain't you joking, Mack?”

“No,” said Mack, “I ain't joking.”

“If anything bad come to Doc, you know what I'd do to you?” Hazel asked.

“Yes,” said Mack. “I think I do—and I think I'd have it coming.”

Hazel's bed was a four-poster on which the bedposts were two-by-fours topped by a quilt. He had built it from memory of a moving picture. When the Palace Flop house was quiet at last, Hazel lay in his bed and looked up at the log-cabin pattern of his canopy. His mind was whirling. He wished there were some simpler way to help Doc than by the major operation Mack had suggested. Once he got up and looked out the door and saw that the green shaded light was on in the laboratory.

“The poor bastard,” he whispered.

He didn't sleep well and his dreams were shaped liked mushrooms.

Joe Elegant was a pale young man with bangs. He smoked foreign cigarettes in a long ebony holder and he cooked for the Bear Flag. The girls said he made the best popovers in the world, and he could give a massage that would shake the kinks out of a Saturday night when the fleet was in. He sneered most of the time, and except at mealtime kept to himself in his little lean-to behind the Bear Flag, from which the rattle of his typewriter could be heard late at night.

One morning soon after she had come Suzy was having her coffee while Joe Elegant cleared the table of crumbs from earlier breakfasts.

“You make good coffee,” Suzy said.

“Thank you.”

“You don't look like a guy who would work here.”

“It's temporary, I assure you.”

“I got a wonderful recipe for gumbo. Want me to give it to you?”

“Fauna designs the meals.”

“You ain't very friendly.”

“Why should I be?”

He was passing behind her. Suzy reached up, hooked her fingers in his shirt collar, twisted and yanked his face down level with her own. “Listen you,” she began, and she scowled into his popping eyes. “Oh, the hell with it,” said Suzy and released him.

Joe Elegant stepped back and massaged his throat and smoothed his shirt.

“Sorry,” said Suzy.

“It's quite all right.”

“What makes you so mean?”

“You said it. I don't belong here.”

“Where do you belong?”

“I don't think you'd understand.”

“You too good for the place?”

“Let's say I'm different.”

“No kidding!” said Suzy.

“I'm writing a novel.”

“You are? What about? I love novels.”

“You wouldn't like this one.”

“Why not?”

“You wouldn't understand it.”

“Then what good is it?”

“It isn't intended for the mass.”

“I'm the mass, huh? I guess you got something there. I bet you could write a pretty nice hunk of stuff.”

Joe Elegant swallowed and his face twitched convulsively. “Sometime I'll read you some of it.”

“Say, that would be nice. But you said I couldn't understand it.”

“I'll explain it as I go along.”

“I'd like that. There's one whole hell of a lot I don't understand.”

“Do you like brownies?” he asked.

“I love them.”

“I'll make you some. Maybe you'll come to my apartment some afternoon. I could give you a cup of tea.”

“Say, you're a nice fella! Got any more coffee?”

“I'll make a fresh pot.”